The Soviet Union

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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 19, 2022 3:32 pm

New reflections on the dramatic changes that have taken place in the USSR

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Foreword SP

We bring to your attention an article by Chen Zhihua, a leading researcher at the Institute of World History of the CASS, to get acquainted with the official position of the CPC on the issue of the reasons for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.

20 years have passed since the collapse of the world's first socialist country - the USSR and the death of the communist party - the CPSU. In connection with this date, the Publishing House of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) published a collection entitled "Keep your vigilance - reflections on the collapse of the CPSU: 20 years later." Compiled under the direction and general editorship of CASS Vice President Li Shenmin, this edition of nearly half a million characters is the result of deep research and development by the China Social Science Foundation (SPSS) and CASC. The Qualification Board of the FONK assessed this work as "a contribution to historical science, which has an important long-term value for the guidelines for the development of the cause of socialism throughout the world and the building of proletarian parties."

This book has 8 chapters. The introduction reveals the theme and the main ideology of the entire publication so deeply that it can claim to be an independent theoretical work. Based on a large number of facts and statistics, it has been proven that the collapse of the USSR and the liquidation of the CPSU have become a real historical tragedy. The collapse of the USSR not only caused incredible damage to the peoples of the former Soviet Union, but also created an unfavorable situation for the world socialist movement, which led to its decline. The introduction clearly reveals a number of significant reasons for the death of the CPSU and the collapse of the USSR, among which the main and decisive role was played by the degeneration of the CPSU, which was then in power. It is explained that the reason for the collapse of the USSR and the liquidation of the CPSU is not the problem of the "Stalinist model", but the betrayal by the leadership of the USSR, headed by M.

The whole book is built on this pivotal thought formulated in the introduction. The book outlines and systematizes the main stages in the process of the degeneration of the CPSU.

Firstly , the main political line of the CPSU is explained, the real results of this line and the course of the country worked out on its basis are shown. This fact was put forward as the main argument, which proves that the CPSU collapsed only because of the gradual departure from Marxism, which ended in its betrayal.

Secondly , using the example of the CPSU, it is shown that ideological work in the party is of the utmost importance and it must be carried out by truly devoted followers of Marxism.

Thirdly , the issue of party discipline in the CPSU was studied. This part of the study deals with party discipline and ethics based on the nature and goals of the party itself; the problems that appeared in the deep essence of the CPSU, the problems that manifested themselves in matters of connection with the people and devotion to the cause of serving the people, were revealed.

And, finally , the issues of democratic centralism, personnel policy, mechanisms of party discipline and party control that existed in the CPSU are considered.

It is these four elements that demonstrate the ideological, political and organizational path of the CPSU.

Further, the characteristics and assessments of all the top leaders of the CPSU are given according to the following parameters: Marxist education, devotion to the cause of socialism and communism, and business qualities in leadership positions. In conclusion, an analysis is given of the theoretical and practical steps taken by the CPSU to counteract the policy of "peaceful evolution" promoted by the West. This last part reveals the importance of the totality of the mentioned external factors in the development of the party, it also explains the influence of foreign policy factors on the internal processes in the party.

The book uses elements of various theoretical studies and puts forward its own, special point of view. At the same time, explanations are given on historical and modern approaches to the problems that are formulated in the following 3 paragraphs.

(1) The question of the "Stalinist model", or the so-called question of the Soviet socialist model . In the book, it is considered as a question that is both positive and negative. First of all, the political and economic system and specific mechanisms of governance are considered separately. Although these two parts are inseparable, they are essentially different. The political and economic system determines the direction of development, and it was he who characterized the socialist essence of the USSR, which is undeniable. But management mechanisms are a specific tool for the implementation of a particular system, they must adapt to changing conditions and be constantly reformed.

Further, in the 30-40s of the 20th century, at the initial stage of building the Soviet socialist model, this model corresponded to the domestic and foreign political situation and successfully met the requirements for the development of production forces. This model objectively reflected the innovative nature of the socialist transformations of that time. Without this, industrialization, victory in the Great Patriotic War and rapid post-war reconstruction would not have been possible. Of course, this model was not without flaws, but they were insignificant against the backdrop of major achievements. Therefore, we cannot completely reject this model. However, since the beginning of the 1950s, the flaws of this model began to appear and worsen. The leadership of the CPSU not only failed to correct the policy and carry out reforms in time, but, on the contrary, began to carry out such reforms, which ultimately led to the rejection of socialism. Thus, the CPSU and the USSR embarked on the path of inevitable disintegration.

(2) The question of the main causes of the deaths of the CPSU and the USSR . This book believes that the main reason is the gradual deviation from the line of Marxism and its final betrayal - this happened, starting with the grouping of N. Khrushchev and ending with the team of M. Gorbachev. The most destructive role was played by Gorbachev's "perestroika", which proclaimed "democratic socialism with a human face" as its slogan. This policy was based on concepts such as "democratization", "glasnost", a multi-party system, full-scale privatization and historical nihilism. All this is not only direct, but also the main reasons for the collapse of the CPSU and the USSR.

(3) The question of the inevitability of abrupt change . Based on this analysis, this book believes that the collapse was not an irreversible process. If the CPSU had remained true to Marxism and creatively developed it, taking into account modern conditions and changes in internal and external factors, making adjustments to the system of government of the USSR, then the disintegration of the country could well have been avoided. The idea is also expressed that the collapse of the CPSU is not the defeat of Marxism and the collapse of the most advanced detachment of the proletariat, but only the defeat of the CPSU itself, which betrayed Marxism, socialism and the interests of the people. We can state that the party, which has already acquired the form of a social democratic party, has collapsed, that this was the fall of a party of a bourgeois persuasion.

This book believes that the emergence and development of bourgeois ideology within the CPSU, its rebirth have deep economic and class reasons. The history of the collapse of the CPSU and the USSR is a special page in the history of the class struggle. If at the initial stage of its emergence, the privileged stratum of the leadership of the CPSU was just a small group of top leaders who were mired in corruption and enjoying all the benefits available, a group of people who were only interested in maintaining the status quo and who no longer needed reforms, then later from they formed a certain social stratum, which began to use its power for personal gain and sought to create such production relations and relations in the sphere of exchange that would satisfy the interests of this particular stratum, thus embarking on the path of betrayal of the rank and file members of the party and the people as a whole, on the path of betrayal of Marxism-Leninism and the idea of ​​socialism. This became the materialized force and driving force that led to the collapse of the CPSU and the USSR.

The book also emphasizes that historical materialism, while emphasizing that the creator of history is the people, at the same time does not deny the role of the individual in history. Analyzing the role of the leadership of the CPSU in different historical epochs, we cannot help thinking about the personality of those who are at the helm of the party, those who make decisions on the fateful issues of the party and the country. The leader often plays a key role. The study of theory and history is not conducted for the sake of theoretical disputes or nostalgic memories. This is done to draw lessons from the past for the sake of the present and the future. All the issues mentioned in the book and the conclusions drawn can be very useful for the socialist countries and the ruling communist parties, especially for the CCP, which is engaged in building socialism with Chinese characteristics.

https://prorivists.org/inf_china_counte ... tion_ussr/

On the tasks of the People's Commissariat of Justice in the context of the new economic policy

Foreword SP

The letter of Lenin from 1922 offered below requires a detailed analysis by every thinking reader. In an extremely concise and businesslike form, it reveals the most important concepts of the state, law, coercion, and provides illustrations of Lenin's exactingness towards personnel and attentiveness to the political moment. The document is especially useful in the process of studying the relationship between the objective and the subjective in politics.

T. Kursky!

The activities of the People's Commissariat of Justice, apparently, are not yet at all adapted to the new economic policy.

Previously, the combat detachments of the Soviet authorities were mainly the People's Commissariat of War and the Cheka. Now a particularly combat role falls to the lot of the NKJUST; Unfortunately, there is no understanding of this on the part of the leaders and main figures of the NKJUST.

Strengthening repression against political enemies of the Soviet power and agents of the bourgeoisie ( especially the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries); carrying out this repression by revolutionary tribunals and people's courts in the most rapid and revolutionary expedient manner; obligatory delivery of a number of exemplary(by the speed and strength of repression; by explaining to the masses, through the courts and through the press, their meaning) of the processes in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kharkov and several other important centers; influence on people's judges and members of revolutionary tribunals through the party in the sense of improving the activities of courts and strengthening repression; - all this must be carried out systematically, stubbornly, persistently, with obligatory reporting (the most concise, in the telegraphic style, but businesslike and accurate, with obligatory statistics on how the NKJUST punishes and how it learns to punish that “communist” bastard that prevails in our country, which knows how to scribble and put on airs, but does not know how to work).

No less important is the combat role of the NKJUST in the field of the New Economic Policy, and even more outrageous is the weakness and drowsiness of the NKJUST in this area. There is no understanding that we have recognized and will continue to recognize only state capitalism, and the state is us, we class-conscious workers, we communists. Therefore, those communists who have not understood their task to limit, curb, control, catch in the act of crime, punish imposingly any capitalism that goes beyond the framework of state capitalism, as we understand the concept and tasks of the state , must be recognized as unfit for hell .

It is precisely the NKJUST, precisely the People's Courts, that have a particularly combative and especially responsible task here. You can't see her understanding. There is noise in the newspapers about the abuses of the NEP. These abuses are endless.

And where is the noise about exemplary trials against scoundrels abusing the New Economic Policy? There is no such noise, because these processes do not exist. The NKJust "forgot" that this is its business, that it is the duty of the NKJust to fail to pull up, shake up, shake up the People's Courts and teach them to punish mercilessly, up to execution, and quickly for abuses of the New Economic Policy. He is responsible for this. Not a drop of live work on the part of the NKJUST in this area is visible, because it does not exist.

The educational value of the courts is enormous. Where do we care about this? Where is the account of real results? This is not, and this is the ABC of all legal work.

The same alphabet - triple punishment for the communists against the punishment for non-party people. And the same carelessness of the NKJUST. Under the tsar, prosecutors were driven and raised according to the percentage of cases they won. We adopted the worst from tsarist Russia, bureaucracy and Oblomovism, from which we are literally suffocating, but we have not been able to adopt the clever . Each member of the collegium of the People's Commissariat of Justice, each figure in this department should be evaluated according to their track record, after the inquiry: how many communists did you throw in jail three times more severely than non-party ones for those misconduct? how many bureaucrats have you put in jail for bureaucracy and red tape? how many merchants for abuse of NEPdid you bring you under execution or under another, not a toy (as in Moscow, under the nose of the NKJUST usually happens) punishment? Can't answer this question? - that means you are a prankster who should be driven out of the party for "combat talk" and for "compromising."

New civil legislation is being prepared. NKJust "goes with the flow"; I see it. And he must fight against the current. Not to adopt (or rather, not to be fooled by the stupid and bourgeois old lawyers who adopt) the old, bourgeois concept of civil law, but to create a new one. Not to succumb to the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, which "by virtue of its position" is drawing the line of "adaptation to Europe", but to fight against this line, to develop a new civil law, a new attitude towards "private" contracts, etc. We do not recognize anything “private”, for us everything in the field of economy is public law , and not private. We allow only state capitalism,and the state is - we, as mentioned above. Hence - to expand the use of state intervention in "private-law" relations; expand the power of the state to cancel "private" contracts; apply not corpus juris romani to "civil legal relations", but our revolutionary legal consciousness ; show systematically, stubbornly, persistently on a number of exemplary processes, how this should be done with mind and energy; through the party to defame and expel those members of the revolutionary tribunals and people's judges who do not learn this and do not want to understand this.

Before Genoa (and before the whole world), the NKJUST will be completely disgraced if it does not immediately shake itself up and take up with all its energy the transition to combat work, to new rails.

I suggest that you 1) read my letter to all members of the board of the NKJUST; 2) also - at a meeting of 100 - 200 people exclusively communists, practically working in the field of civil, criminal and state law; 3) to forbid, under pain of party responsibility, to talk about it (about this letter), because it is stupid to show our strategy to the enemies; 4) to ensure that a few communists, employees of the court and the NKJUST, who are in complete agreement with the spirit of this letter, come out on these topics with a number of articles in the press and with a number of public abstracts; 5) to distribute among all members of the collegium (and, if possible, also among other prominent communists working under the department of the NKJUST) responsibility : a) for the departments of the new civil legislation ( especially and most important), b) also criminal, c) also state and political (less topical), d) for staging and conducting exemplary, high-profile, educational processes in the above centers , e) for business, and not paper control over people's courts and revolutionaries, so that they were able to actually intensify repression against the political enemies of the Soviet authorities (NKJUST will be the first to be blamed if this repression does not intensify) and against the abuses of the NEP . Trade, make a profit, we will allow you to do this, but we will triple your duty to be honest, to give truthful and accurate reports, to reckon not only with the letter, but also with the spirit of our communist legislation, not to allow a shadowdeviations from our laws—this is what the main commandment of the NKJUST should be in relation to the NEP . If the NKJUST fails to ensure that our capitalism is “well-trained”, “decent”, if the NKJUST does not prove by a number of exemplary trials that it knows how to catch a violation of this rule and punish with a not shamefully stupid, “communist-stupid” fine 100-200 million, but by execution —then the NKJUST is useless to hell, and then I will consider it my duty to press the Central Committee for a complete replacement of the responsible workers of the NKJUST.

I ask you to inform me of the distribution of this work among all members of the collegium of the NKJust as soon as possible so that I can see with complete accuracy who exactly (except the people's commissar, who is responsible for everything) is responsible for such and such departments of civil law (and then criminal, etc.). etc.) and for conducting exemplary trials (each member of the collegium must prove himself in setting up and conducting several exemplary trials), and for business control over revolutionary tribunals and people's courts, and judicial investigators, etc. such and such a province or such and such a section of Moscow.

It is not the division of "departments" and not bureaucratic lulling in this, but the personal responsibility of each communist who is a member of the collegium for such and such lively revolutionary work - this is what the people's commissar is obliged to strive for and prove that he knows how to achieve this.

https://prorivists.org/doc_lenin_pcj-1922/


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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 22, 2022 3:02 pm

On the issues of agrarian policy in the USSR

Foreword SP
Stalin's speech presented below is a useful historical document of the USSR and an important theoretical document of Marxist science. Stalin popularly explains the essence of collectivization and gives a living example of diamatic criticism of harmful economic distortions. One point should be noted. In his speech, Stalin speaks in passing about the re-education of petty-bourgeois psychology, about the education of the socialist worker, mainly through the creation of a material and technical base, conditions for life. It is clear that all conditions of life are primary. Today, however, it has also become vividly clear that practical conditions alone cannot be enough, that these conditions alone are not capable of developing or defending people with bourgeois thinking. Stalin's speech is a concrete historical document, and in 1929 the emphasis is placed more than correctly. But the reader, armed with the Stalinist theory of the increasing role of the subjective factor as communism is built, is obliged to interpret this moment creatively, that is, to understand not literally that an increase in labor productivity by itself outlives the old foundations and habits in a person.


Stalin, Pravda No. 309, December 29, 1929

Comrades! The basic fact of our social and economic life at the present moment, a fact that attracts everyone's attention, is the colossal growth of the collective-farm movement.

A characteristic feature of the current collective-farm movement is that not only separate groups of poor peasants are joining the collective farms, as has been the case up to now, but the mass of the middle peasants have also joined the collective farms. This means that this collective-farm movement has been transformed from a movement of individual groups and strata of working peasants into a movement of millions and millions of the main masses of the peasantry. This, by the way, should explain the colossal fact that the collective-farm movement, which has assumed the character of a mighty, growing anti-kulak avalanche, sweeps away the resistance of the kulak in its path, breaks the kulaks, and paves the way for extensive socialist construction in the countryside.

But if we have reason to be proud of the practical successes of socialist construction, then the same cannot be said about the successes of our theoretical work in the field of economics in general, in the field of agriculture in particular. Moreover, it must be admitted that theoretical thought has not kept up with our practical successes, that we have a certain gap between practical successes and the development of theoretical thought. Meanwhile, it is essential that theoretical work not only keep pace with practical work, but also outstrip it, arming our practitioners in their struggle for the victory of socialism.

I will not expand here on the meaning of theory. You know it well enough. It is known that theory, if it is really a theory, gives practitioners the power of orientation, clarity of perspective, confidence in work, faith in the victory of our cause. All this has, and cannot but have, enormous significance in the cause of our socialist construction. The trouble is that we are beginning to limp precisely in this area, in the area of ​​theoretical development of questions of our economy.

How else can we explain the fact that in our socio-political life various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois theories on questions of our economy are still in circulation? How can one explain that these theories and theorists have not yet met with a due rebuff? How, then, is it to be explained that a number of the fundamental propositions of Marxist-Leninist political economy, which are the surest antidote against bourgeois and petty-bourgeois theories, are beginning to be forgotten, are not popularized in our press, are not for some reason brought to the fore? Is it difficult to understand that without an irreconcilable struggle against bourgeois theories on the basis of Marxist-Leninist theory it is impossible to achieve complete victory over class enemies?

The new practice gives rise to a new approach to the problems of the economy in transition. The question of NEP, of classes, of the pace of construction, of the bond, of the policy of the Party is now being posed in a new way. In order not to lag behind practice, it is necessary now to study all these problems from the point of view of the new situation. Without this, it is impossible to overcome the bourgeois theories that litter the heads of our practitioners. Without this, it is impossible to uproot these theories, which are acquiring the strength of prejudices. For only in the fight against bourgeois prejudices can the positions of Marxism-Leninism be strengthened in theory.

Let me pass on to a characterization of at least some of these bourgeois prejudices, called theories, and demonstrate their inconsistency in order to elucidate some of the key problems of our construction.

I. Theory of "equilibrium"
You know, of course, that the so-called "balance" theory of the sectors of our national economy is still in circulation among the Communists. This theory, of course, has nothing in common with Marxism. However, this very theory is being propagated by a number of persons from the camp of Right deviators.

According to this theory, it is assumed that we have, first of all, a socialist sector - this is a kind of box - and, in addition, we have a non-socialist sector, if you like, a capitalist sector - this is another box. Both of these boxes lie on different rails and roll peacefully forward without touching each other. It is known from geometry that parallel lines do not converge. However, the authors of this remarkable theory think that someday these parallels will converge, and when they converge, we will have socialism. At the same time, this theory loses sight of the fact that classes stand behind the so-called "boxes", and the movement of these "boxes" takes place in the order of a fierce class struggle, a struggle not for life, but for death, a struggle according to the principle of "who wins".

It is not difficult to understand that this theory has nothing in common with Leninism. It is not difficult to understand that this theory objectively aims to defend the position of the individual peasant economy, arm the kulak elements with "new" theoretical weapons in their struggle against the collective farms, and discredit the positions of the collective farms.

However, this theory is still in circulation in our press. And it cannot be said that it met with a serious rebuff, much less a crushing rebuff, from our theoreticians. How else can this inconsistency be explained, if not by the backwardness of our theoretical thought?

Meanwhile, one has only to extract the theory of reproduction from the treasury of Marxism and oppose it to the theory of the equilibrium of sectors, so that not a trace of this latter theory remains. Indeed, the Marxist theory of reproduction teaches that modern society cannot develop without accumulating from year to year, and it is impossible to accumulate without expanded reproduction year after year. This is clear and understandable. Our large-scale centralized socialist industry is developing according to the Marxist theory of expanded reproduction, for it grows every year in volume, has its own accumulations, and is advancing by leaps and bounds.

But our large-scale industry does not exhaust the national economy. On the contrary, small-scale peasant farming still predominates in our national economy. Can it be said that our small-peasant economy is developing according to the principle of expanded reproduction? No, you can't say that. Our small-peasant economy not only does not, in its mass, carry out expanded reproduction every year, but, on the contrary, it very rarely has the opportunity to carry out even simple reproduction. Is it possible to move our socialized industry further at an accelerated pace, having such an agricultural base as small-peasant farming, incapable of expanded reproduction and, moreover, representing the predominant force in our national economy? No.different foundations - on the basis of the largest and most united socialist industry and on the basis of the most fragmented and backward small-scale peasant economy? No. This must someday end in the complete collapse of the entire national economy.

Where is the exit? The way out is to enlarge agriculture, to make it capable of accumulation, of expanded reproduction, and in this way to transform the agricultural base of the national economy.

But how to enlarge it?

There are two ways to do this. There is a capitalist path , consisting in the enlargement of agriculture by planting capitalism in it, a path leading to the impoverishment of the peasantry and to the development of capitalist enterprises in agriculture. This path is rejected by us as a path incompatible with the Soviet economy.

There is another path, the socialist path , which consists in planting collective farms and state farms in agriculture, a path leading to the amalgamation of small-peasant farms into large-scale collective farms, armed with technology and science and having the opportunity to develop further, since these farms can carry out expanded reproduction.

Therefore, the question stands as follows: either one path or another, either back - to capitalism, or forward - to socialism. There is no third way and there cannot be.

The theory of "equilibrium" is an attempt to outline a third way. And precisely because it is designed for a third (non-existent) path, it is utopian, anti-Marxist.

So, it was only necessary to oppose Marx's theory of reproduction to the theory of "balance" of sectors, so that not a trace of this latter theory would remain.

Why is this not being done by our Marxist agrarians? Who needs it so that the ridiculous theory of "equilibrium" is in circulation in our press, and the Marxist theory of reproduction lies under a bushel?

II. The theory of "spontaneity" in socialist construction
Let us pass to the second prejudice in political economy, to the second theory of the bourgeois type. I have in mind the theory of "spontaneity" in the cause of socialist construction, a theory that has nothing in common with Marxism, but is zealously preached by our comrades from the right camp.

The authors of this theory state approximately the following. We had capitalism, industry developed on a capitalist basis, and the countryside followed the capitalist city spontaneously, by itself, transforming itself in the image and likeness of the capitalist city. If this is how things happened under capitalism, why can't the same thing happen under the Soviet economy? Why can't the countryside, the small-peasant economy, follow the path of gravity after the socialist city, spontaneously transforming itself in the image and likeness of the socialist city? On this basis, the authors of this theory argue that the countryside can follow the socialist city by itself. Hence the question: is it worth it for us to get excited about the formation of state farms and collective farms, is it worth it for us to break spears if the countryside can follow the socialist city anyway?

Here is another theory for you, which objectively aims to give a new weapon into the hands of the capitalist elements in the countryside in their struggle against the collective farms.

The anti-Marxist essence of this theory is beyond doubt.

Isn't it strange that our theoreticians still haven't bothered to clear up this strange theory that clogs the heads of our practical collective farmers?

There is no doubt that the leading role of the socialist city in relation to the small-peasant individualist countryside is great and invaluable. This is precisely what the transforming role of industry in relation to agriculture is based on. But is this factor sufficient for the small-peasant countryside to follow the city by itself in the cause of socialist construction? No, not enough.

Under capitalism, the countryside spontaneously followed the city, because the capitalist economy of the city and the small-scale individual economy of the peasant are basically the same type of economy. Of course, small-peasant commodity economy is not yet capitalist economy. But it is fundamentally the same type as the capitalist economy, since it relies on private ownership of the means of production. Lenin is a thousand times right when, in his notes on Bukharin's book on The Economy in Transition, he speaks of the " commodity-capitalist tendency of the peasantry" as opposed to the " socialist tendency of the proletariat" (Lenin's italics. - I. St. ). This is precisely what explains that "small productiongives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie constantly, daily, hourly, spontaneously and on a mass scale” ( Lenin ).

Can it be said that small-scale peasant farming is basically the same as socialist production in the city? Obviously, this cannot be said without breaking with Marxism. Otherwise, Lenin would not have said that "as long as we live in a small-peasant country, there is a stronger economic basis for capitalism in Russia than for communism."

Consequently, the theory of "spontaneity" in the matter of socialist construction is a rotten, anti-Leninist theory.

Therefore, in order for the small-peasant countryside to follow the socialist city, it is also necessary, among other things, to plant large socialist farms in the countryside in the form of state farms and collective farms, as the bases of socialism, capable of leading the bulk of the peasantry at the head of the socialist city.

Consequently, the theory of "spontaneity" in socialist construction is an anti-Marxist theory. The socialist city can lead the small-peasant countryside only by planting collective farms and state farms in the countryside and transforming the countryside in a new, socialist way.

It is strange that the anti-Marxist theory of “spontaneity” in socialist construction has not yet met with the due rebuff from our agrarian theoreticians.

III. The theory of "stability" of small-scale peasant farming
Let us pass to the third prejudice in political economy, to the theory of the "stability" of small-peasant economy. Everyone knows the objections of bourgeois political economy to the well-known thesis of Marxism about the advantages of large-scale farming over small farming, which supposedly has force only in industry, but has no application in agriculture. Social-democratic theorists like David and Hertz, who preached this theory, tried to “rely” on the fact that the small peasant is hardy, patient, ready to take on any hardships in order to defend his piece of land, which, in view of this, in In the struggle against large-scale farming in agriculture, small-peasant farming is showing stability.

It is not difficult to understand that such “stability” is worse than any instability. It is not difficult to understand that this anti-Marxist theory has only one aim: the praise and strengthening of the capitalist order, which is ruining the millions of small peasants. And it is precisely because it has such an aim that it is precisely for this reason that the Marxists were able to smash this theory so easily.

But that's not the point now. The fact is that our practice, our reality, provides new arguments against this theory, and our theoreticians, in a strange way, do not want or cannot use this new weapon against the enemies of the working class. I have in mind the practice of abolishing private ownership of land, the practice of nationalizing land in our country, the practice that frees the small peasant from his slavish attachment to his patch of land and thereby facilitates the transition from small peasant farming to large -scale , collective farming.

Indeed, what has bound, binds, and will still bind the small peasant in Western Europe to his small commodity economy? First and foremost, the existence of one's own piece of land, the existence of private ownership of land. He saved up money for years in order to buy a piece of land, he bought it and, understandably, he does not want to part with it, preferring to endure all and all hardships, preferring to fall into savagery, into poverty, if only to defend his piece of land - the basis of his individual economy.

Is it possible to say that this factor in its current form continues to operate in our country, under the conditions of the Soviet order? No, you can't say. It is impossible to say, since we do not have private ownership of land. And precisely because we do not have private ownership of land, we also do not have that slavish commitment of the peasant to a piece of land that exists in the West. And this circumstance cannot help facilitating the transition of small-peasant farming to collective farms.

That is one of the reasons why the large farms in the countryside, the collective farms in the countryside, succeed so easily in our country, under the conditions of the nationalization of the land, of their superiority over the small peasant economy.

That is where the great revolutionary significance of the Soviet agrarian laws, which abolished absolute rent, abolished private ownership of land and established the nationalization of land.

But it follows from this that we have at our disposal a new argument against the bourgeois economists who proclaim the stability of small-peasant economy in its struggle against large-scale economy.

Why is this new argument not used to a sufficient extent by our agrarian theoreticians in their struggle against any and all bourgeois theories?

In carrying out the nationalization of the land, we proceeded, among other things, from the theoretical premises given in the third volume of Capital, in Marx's well-known book The Theories of Surplus Value, and in Lenin's agrarian writings, which represent the richest treasury of theoretical thought. I have in mind the theory of ground rent in general, the theory of absolute ground rent in particular. It is now clear that the theoretical propositions of these works have been brilliantly confirmed by the practice of our socialist construction in town and country.

It is only incomprehensible why the anti-scientific theories of "Soviet" economists like the Chayanovs should be freely circulated in our press, and the brilliant works of Marx-Engels-Lenin on the theory of land rent and absolute land rent should not be popularized and brought to the fore, should they lie under a bushel?

You must remember Engels' well-known pamphlet The Peasant Question. You remember, of course, how cautiously Engels approached the question of transferring the small peasants to the path of comradely farming, to the path of collective farming. Let me quote the relevant passage from Engels' pamphlet:

“We are resolutely on the side of the small peasant; we will do everything possible to make it easier for him to live, to facilitate his transition to partnership, in case he decides to do so, in the same case, if he is not yet in a position to make this decision, we will try to provide him with as much as possible time to think about it on your own piece ”(my italics. - I. St. ).

You see how cautiously Engels approaches the question of transferring individual peasant farming to the rails of collectivism. How can we explain this seemingly exaggerated prudence of Engels? What was his starting point? Obviously, he proceeded from the existence of private ownership of land, from the fact that the peasant has "his own piece" of land, with which he, the peasant, will find it difficult to part. Such is the peasantry in the West. Such is the peasantry in the capitalist countries, where there is private ownership of land. Clearly, great care is needed here.

Can we say that we, in the USSR, have the same situation? No, you can't say that. It is impossible, because we do not have private ownership of the land, which chains the peasant to his individual farm. It is impossible, because we have the nationalization of the land, which facilitates the transition of the individual peasant to the rails of collectivism.

This is one of the reasons for the relative ease and speed with which the collective-farm movement has been developing in our country lately.

It is regrettable that our agrarian theoreticians have not yet attempted to reveal with due clarity this difference between the position of the peasant in our country and in the West. Meanwhile, such work would be of the greatest importance not only for us Soviet workers, but also for the Communists of all countries. For it is not a matter of indifference to the proletarian revolution in the capitalist countries whether socialism will have to be built there from the very first days of the taking of power by the proletariat on the basis of the nationalization of the land or without such a basis.

In my recent speech in the press (The Year of the Great Change) I developed the well-known arguments for the superiority of large-scale farming over small-scale farming, having in mind large state farms. There is no need to prove that all these arguments apply wholly and completely to the collective farms, as to large economic units. I am speaking not only of the developed collective farms, which have a machine and tractor base, but also of the primary collective farms, representing, so to speak, the manufacturing period of collective farm construction and relying on peasant implements. I have in mind those primary collective farms which are now being set up in areas of total collectivization and which are based on the simple addition of peasant implements of production.

Take, for example, the collective farms in the Khopra region in the former Don region. From the point of view of technology, these collective farms do not seem to differ from the small peasant economy (there are few machines, few tractors). Meanwhile, the simple addition of peasant tools in the bowels of the collective farms gave such an effect that our practitioners could not even dream of. What was this effect? The fact that the transition to the collective farms led to the expansion of the sown area by 30, 40 and 50%. How to explain this "dizzying" effect? The fact that the peasants, being powerless in the conditions of individual labor, turned into the greatest force, laying down their tools and uniting in collective farms. The fact that the peasants got the opportunity to cultivate abandoned lands and virgin lands that are difficult to cultivate under conditions of individual labor. The fact that the peasants got the opportunity to take the virgin lands into their own hands. those that it turned out to be possible to use wastelands, separate patches, boundaries, etc. etc.

The question of cultivating abandoned lands and virgin lands is of tremendous importance for our agriculture. You know that the agrarian question served as the axis of the revolutionary movement in Russia in the old days. You know that one of the aims of the agrarian movement was the destruction of the shortage of land. Many thought at that time that this shortage of land was absolute, i. that in Russia there are no more free lands suitable for cultivation. What actually turned out? Now it is quite clear that there were and remain tens of millions of hectares of free land in the USSR, but the peasant had no opportunity to cultivate them with his miserable tools. And precisely because the peasant did not have the opportunity to cultivate virgin lands and abandoned lands, that is why he was drawn to the “soft lands”, to the lands that belonged to the landowners, to the lands convenient for processing by the forces of peasant inventory in conditions of individual labor. This was the basis of "small land". It is not surprising, therefore, that our Grain Trust, armed with tractors, is now in a position to put into operation twenty million million hectares of free land that is not occupied by the peasants and cannot be cultivated by means of individual labor using the small-peasant implements.

The significance of the collective-farm movement in all its phases, both in its primary phase and in the more developed phase, when it is armed with tractors, consists, among other things, in the fact that the peasants now have the opportunity to put abandoned lands and virgin lands into action. This is the secret of the enormous expansion of the sown area as the peasants switch over to collective labour. This is one of the foundations of the superiority of collective farms over individual peasant farming.

Needless to say, the superiority of the collective farms over the individual peasant economy will become even more indisputable when our machine and tractor stations and columns come to the aid of the primary collective farms in areas of complete collectivization, when the collective farms themselves get the opportunity to concentrate tractors and combine harvesters in their hands.

IV. City and village
There is a prejudice cultivated by bourgeois economists about the so-called "scissors", which must be declared a merciless war, like all other bourgeois theories, which, unfortunately, are spreading in the Soviet press. I have in mind the theory that the October Revolution supposedly gave the peasantry less than the February Revolution, that the October Revolution, in fact, gave the peasantry nothing.

This prejudice was glared at one time in our press by one of the "Soviet" economists. True, he, this "Soviet" economist, subsequently abandoned his theory. ( Voice : “Who is this?”) This is Groman. But this theory was taken up by the Trotskyite-Zinoviev opposition and used against the Party. Moreover, there is no reason to assert that it is not in circulation even at the present time in the circles of the "Soviet" public.

This is a very important question, comrades. It touches upon the problem of the relationship between the city and the countryside. It touches upon the problem of destroying the antithesis between town and country. He touches on the most pressing issue of "scissors". I think, therefore, that it is worth tackling this strange theory.

Is it true that the peasants got nothing from the October Revolution? Let's turn to the facts.

I have in my hands the well-known table of the well-known statistician Comrade Nemchinov, published in my article "On the Grain Front." This table shows that in pre-revolutionary times the landowners "produced" no less than 600,000,000 poods of grain. Consequently, the landlords were then the holders of 600 million pounds of grain.

According to this table, the kulaks then "produced" 1,900,000,000 poods of grain. This is a very large force, which was then owned by the fists.

The poor and middle peasants, according to the same table, produced 2,500,000,000 poods of grain.

Such is the picture of the situation in the old countryside, the countryside before the October Revolution.

What changes took place in the countryside after October? I take numbers from the same table. Take, for example, 1927. How much did the landowners produce this year ? It is clear that they did not produce anything and could not produce anything, because the landowners were destroyed by the October Revolution. You will understand that this should have been a great relief to the peasantry, for the peasants have freed themselves from the yoke of the landlords. This, of course, is a big gain for the peasantry as a result of the October Revolution.

How many kulaks were produced in 1927? 600 million poods of grain instead of 1900 million poods. Consequently, the kulaks have been weakened more than threefold since the October Revolution. You will understand that this could not but alleviate the situation of the poor and middle peasants.

And how much did the poor and middle peasants produce in 1927 ? 4 billion poods instead of 2500 million poods. Consequently, after the October Revolution, the poor and middle peasants began to produce 1.5 billion poods of grain more than in pre-revolutionary times.

Here are the facts that show that the poor and middle peasants gained colossally from the October Revolution.

This is what the October Revolution gave to the poor and middle peasants.

How can one then assert that the October Revolution gave the peasants nothing?

But that's not all, comrades. The October Revolution abolished private ownership of land, abolished the purchase and sale of land, and established the nationalization of land. What does it mean? This means that the peasant, in order to produce grain, now does not need at all to buy land. Previously, he accumulated funds for years in order to acquire land, got into debt, went into bondage, just to buy land. The cost of buying land, of course, fell on the cost of producing bread. Now the peasant does not need it. Now he can produce bread without buying land. Consequently, the hundreds of millions of rubles that the peasants spent on buying land now remain in the pockets of the peasants. Does this make the peasants easier or not? Obviously that makes it easier.

Further. Until recently, the peasant was forced to dig the earth with old implements in the order of individual labor. Everyone knows that individual labor, armed with old, now useless, instruments of production, does not give the gain necessary for living tolerably well, systematically improving one's material position, developing one's culture, and entering the broad road of socialist construction. Now, after the intensified development of the collective-farm movement, the peasants have the opportunity to combine their labor with the labor of their neighbors, to unite in a collective farm, to reclaim the virgin lands, to use the abandoned land, to receive a machine and a tractor, and in this way to double, if not triple, the productivity of their labor. What does it mean? This means that the peasant now has the opportunity, thanks to the association in collective farms, to produce much more than before, with the same input of labor. This means, therefore, that the production of grain is becoming much cheaper than it was until recently. This means, finally, that with stable prices, the peasant can get much more for grain than he has received up to now.

After all this, how can one assert that the October Revolution did not bring any gain to the peasantry?

Isn't it clear that people who tell such a fable are obviously lying against the Party, against the Soviet government? But what follows from all this?

From this it follows that the question of the "scissors", the question of the liquidation of the "scissors" must now be posed in a new way. It follows from this that if the collective-farm movement continues to grow at its current pace, the "scissors" will be destroyed in the near future. It follows from this that the question of relations between city and countryside is emerging on new ground, that the antithesis between city and countryside will be eroded at an accelerated pace.

This circumstance, comrades, is of the greatest importance for our entire construction work. It transforms the psychology of the peasant and turns him towards the city. It creates the ground for the destruction of the antithesis between town and country. It creates the ground for the slogan of the party "face to the countryside" to be supplemented by the slogan of the peasant-collective farmers "face to the city".

And there is nothing surprising in this, for the peasant now receives from the city a machine, a tractor, an agronomist, an organizer, and, finally, direct help in the struggle and overcoming the kulaks. The peasant of the old type, with his brutal distrust of the city as a robber, recedes into the background. He is replaced by a new peasant, a collective farmer, looking at the city with the hope of receiving real production assistance from there. The peasant of the old type, who is afraid of sinking into the poor and only stealthily rises to the position of a kulak (they can be deprived of the right to vote!), is being replaced by a new peasant who has a new perspective - to go to the collective farm and get out of poverty and darkness onto the wide road of economic and cultural upsurge.

This is how things turn out, comrades.

It is all the more vexing, comrades, that our agrarian theorists have not taken every measure to decongest and root out all and sundry bourgeois theories that are trying to discredit the gains of the October Revolution and the growing collective-farm movement.

V. On the nature of collective farms
Collective farms, as a type of economy, are one of the forms of socialist economy. There can be no doubt about this.

One of the speakers spoke here and debunked the collective farms. He assured that collective farms, as economic organizations, had nothing in common with the socialist form of economy. I must say, comrades, that such a characterization of the collective farms is completely wrong. There can be no doubt that this characteristic has nothing to do with reality.

What determines the type of farm? Obviously, the relations of people in the production process. What else can define the type of economy? But does the collective farm have a class of people who own the means of production and a class of people who are deprived of these means of production? Does the collective farm have a class of exploiters and a class of the exploited? Doesn't the collective farm represent the socialization of the main instruments of production on state-owned land? What grounds are there for asserting that collective farms, as a type of economy, do not represent one of the forms of socialist economy?

Of course, there are contradictions in the collective farms. Of course, in the collective farms there are individualistic and even kulak survivals which have not yet disappeared, but which must necessarily disappear in the course of time, as the collective farms become stronger, as they become more mechanized. But is it possible to deny that collective farms as a whole, taken with their contradictions and shortcomings, collective farms, as an economic fact, represent in the main a new path for the development of the countryside, the path of the socialist development of the countryside as opposed to the kulak, capitalistways of development? Can it be denied that the collective farms (I am talking about collective farms, and not pseudo-collective farms) under our conditions represent the base and center of socialist construction in the countryside, which have grown up in desperate struggles with capitalist elements?

Is it not clear that the attempts of some comrades to discredit the collective farms and declare them a bourgeois form of economy are without any basis?

In 1923 we did not yet have a mass collective-farm movement. Lenin in his pamphlet "On Cooperation" had in mind all types of cooperation, both its lower forms (supply and marketing) and its higher ones (collective-farm form). What did he say then about cooperation, about cooperative enterprises? Here is one quote from Lenin’s pamphlet “On Cooperation”:
“Under our existing system, cooperative enterprises differ from private capitalist enterprises as collective enterprises, but they do not differ (italics mine. - I. St. ) from socialist enterprises if they are based on land, with means of production belonging to the state, i.e., to the working class.”

Consequently, Lenin takes cooperative enterprises not in their own right, but in connection with our existing system, in connection with the fact that they function on land owned by the state, in a country where the means of production belong to the state, and considering them in this order , Lenin argues that cooperative enterprises do not differ from socialist enterprises.

That is what Lenin says about cooperative enterprises in general.

Is it not clear that the same can be said with greater justification about the collective farms of our period?

This, by the way, explains why Lenin considers the "simple growth of cooperation" under our conditions to be "identical with the growth of socialism."

You see that, in debunking the collective farms, the above-mentioned orator made a gross mistake against Leninism.

From this mistake follows his other mistake - about the class struggle in the collective farms. The speaker described the class struggle in the collective farms so colorfully that one might think that the class struggle in the collective farms does not differ from the class struggle outside the collective farms. Moreover, one might think that it becomes even more bitter there. However, not only the speaker mentioned is sinful in this matter. Chatter about the class struggle, squeaking and squealing about the class struggle in the collective farms are now a characteristic feature of all our "Left" screamers. Moreover, the most comical thing about this squeak is that these squeakers "see" the class struggle where it is absent or almost non-existent, but they do not see it where it exists and overflows.

Are there elements of class struggle in the collective farms? Yes there is. There cannot but be elements of the class struggle in the collective farms if survivals of individualistic or even kulak psychology still exist there, if there is still some inequality in material conditions. Can it be said that the class struggle in the collective farms is equivalent to the class struggle outside the collective farms? No. That is precisely the mistake of our "Left" phrasemongers, that they do not see this difference.

What does the class struggle mean outside the collective farms, before the formation of collective farms? This means a struggle against the kulak, who owns the tools and means of production and enslaves the poor with the help of these tools and means of production. This struggle is a life-and-death struggle.

And what does the class struggle on the basis of collective farms mean? This means, first of all, that the kulak has been defeated and deprived of the tools and means of production. It means, secondly, that the poor and middle peasants are united in collective farms, on the basis of the socialization of the basic instruments and means of production. This means, finally, that it is a matter of a struggle between members of the collective farms, some of whom have not yet freed themselves from individualistic and kulak survivals and are trying to use some inequality in the collective farms to their own advantage, while others want to expel these survivals and this inequality from the collective farms. Is it not clear that only the blind cannot see the difference between the class struggle on the basis of the collective farms and the class struggle outside the collective farms?

It would be a mistake to think that if collective farms are given, then everything necessary for building socialism is given. It would be all the more mistaken to think that the members of the collective farms have already turned into socialists. No, a lot of work will still have to be done to remake the collective farmer, straighten out his individualistic psychology and turn him into a real worker in socialist society. And this will be done the sooner the sooner the collective farms are mechanized, the sooner they are tractorized. But this in no way detracts from the great importance of the collective farms as a lever for the socialist transformation of the countryside. The great significance of the collective farms lies precisely in the fact that they represent the main base for the use of machines and tractors in agriculture, that they constitute the main base for reshaping the peasant, for reshaping his psychology in the spirit of socialism.

“The task of transforming the small farmer, of transforming his entire psychology and skills, is a matter that requires generations. Only the material base, technology, the use of tractors and machines in agriculture on a mass scale, electrification on a mass scale can resolve this issue in relation to the small farmer, improve, so to speak, his entire psychology.

Who can deny that the collective farms are precisely that form of socialist economy through which alone the many millions of small individual peasantry can join the large-scale economy with its machines and tractors as levers of economic progress, as levers for the socialist development of agriculture?

All this has been forgotten by our "Left" phrase-mongers.

Forgot about it and our speaker.

VI. Class shifts and a turn in party politics
Finally, there is the question of class shifts in the country and the offensive of socialism against the capitalist elements in the countryside.

A characteristic feature of the work of our party over the past year is that we, as a party, as Soviet power:
a) launched an offensive along the entire front against the capitalist elements in the countryside,
b) this offensive has given and continues to give, as you know, very tangible positive results .

What does it mean? This means that we have moved from a policy of limiting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks to a policy of liquidating the kulaks as a class. This means that we have made and are continuing to make one of the decisive turns in our entire policy.

Until recently, the party stood in the position of limiting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks. It is known that this policy was proclaimed at the Eighth Party Congress. It, this very policy, was proclaimed anew with the introduction of NEP and at the Eleventh Congress of our Party. Everyone remembers Lenin's well-known letter on Preobrazhensky's theses (1922), where he again returns to the question of the necessity of pursuing such a policy. It was finally confirmed by the Fifteenth Congress of our Party. We carried it out until recently.

Was this policy correct? Yes, she was definitely right then. Could we have undertaken such an offensive against the kulaks five or three years ago? Could we then count on the success of such an offensive? No, they couldn't. This would be the most dangerous adventurism. That would be the most dangerous offensive game. For we would certainly have failed at this, and if we had failed, we would have strengthened the position of the kulaks. Why? Because we did not yet have those strongholds in the countryside, in the form of a wide network of state farms and collective farms, on which we could base ourselves in a decisive offensive against the kulaks. Because we did not then have the opportunity to replace the capitalist production of the kulak with the socialist production of the collective and state farms.

In 1926-1927, the Zinoviev-Trotskyist opposition vigorously imposed on the party a policy of an immediate offensive against the kulaks. The Party did not embark on this dangerous adventure, for it knew that serious people could not afford to play the offensive. An offensive against the kulaks is a serious matter. It must not be confused with a declamation against the kulaks. Nor should it be confused with the policy of scratching the kulaks, which the Zinoviev-Trotskyite opposition was strenuously imposing on the Party. To attack the kulaks means to break the kulaks and liquidate them as a class. Outside of these goals, an offensive is declamation, scratching, idle talk, anything but a real Bolshevik offensive. To attack the kulaks means to prepare for the task and to strike at the kulaks, but to strike at them in such a way that they can no longer rise to their feet. This is what we Bolsheviks call a real offensive. Could we have launched such an offensive five years or three years ago with the expectation of success? No, they couldn't.

In fact, in 1927 the kulak produced more than 600 million poods of grain, and sold about 130 million poods of this amount in non-village exchange. This is a rather serious force that cannot be ignored. And how much did our collective farms and state farms produce then? About 80 million poods, of which about 35 million poods (marketable bread) were taken to the market. Judge for yourselves, could we then replace kulak production and kulak marketable grain with the production and marketable grain of our collective farms and state farms? Clearly they couldn't.

What does it mean under such conditions to undertake a decisive offensive against the kulaks? This means for sure breaking loose, strengthening the positions of the kulaks and being left without bread. That is why we could not and should not have undertaken then a decisive offensive against the kulaks, in spite of the adventurist declamations of the Zinoviev-Trotskyist opposition.

Well, what about now? How is it now? Now we have a sufficient material base in order to strike at the kulaks, break their resistance, liquidate them as a class, and replaceits production by the production of collective farms and state farms. It is known that in 1929 the production of grain on collective farms and state farms amounted to at least 400 million poods (200 million poods less than the gross output of the kulak economy in 1927). It is known, furthermore, that in 1929 the collective and state farms produced more than 130 million poods of marketable grain (that is, more than the kulak in 1927). It is known, finally, that in 1930 the gross grain output of the collective farms and state farms will amount to at least 900 million poods (i.e., more than the gross output of the kulak in 1927), and they will produce marketable grain of at least 400 million poods (i.e., e. incomparably more than the fist in 1927).

That is how things stand with us now, comrades.

This is the shift that has taken place in our country's economy.

Now we have, as you see, the material base for replacing kulak production with production from collective farms and state farms. That is why our decisive offensive against the kulaks is now having undoubted success.

This is how one must attack the kulaks, if one speaks of a real and decisive offensive, and not confine oneself to empty declamations against the kulaks.

That is why we have lately gone over from a policy of limiting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks to a policy of liquidating the kulaks as a class .

Well, what about the policy of dispossession, is it possible to allow dispossession in areas of complete collectivization? - ask from equal sides. Funny question! Dekulakization could not be tolerated as long as we stood on the point of view of limiting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks, as long as we were unable to launch a decisive offensive against the kulaks, as long as we were unable to replace kulak production with the production of collective farms and state farms. Then the policy of inadmissibility of dispossession was necessary and correct. And now? Now it's a different matter. Now we are in a position to launch a decisive offensive against the kulaks, to break their resistance, to liquidate them as a class, and to replace their production with the production of collective farms and state farms. Now the dispossession of kulaks is carried out by the masses of the poor and middle peasants themselves, carrying out complete collectivization. Now dispossession of kulaks in areas of complete collectivization is no longer a simple administrative measure. Dispossession of kulaks is now an integral part of the formation and development of collective farms. Therefore, it is ridiculous and frivolous to talk now about dekulakization. When you take off your head, you don't cry for your hair.

Another question seems no less ridiculous: is it possible to let a kulak into the collective farm. Of course, you can not let him into the collective farm. It is impossible, since he is a sworn enemy of the collective farm movement.

VII. conclusions
These, comrades, are the six key questions that cannot be overlooked in the theoretical work of our Marxist agrarians.

The significance of these questions lies primarily in the fact that their Marxist elaboration makes it possible to root out all and sundry bourgeois theories that are sometimes propagated—to our shame—by our own communist comrades and clog the minds of our practitioners. And these theories should have been uprooted and thrown away long ago. For only in a merciless struggle against these and similar theories can the theoretical thought of Marxist agrarians grow and become stronger.

The significance of these questions lies, finally, in the fact that they give a new face to the old problems of the economy in transition.

The question of NEP, of classes, of collective farms, of the economy of the transitional period, is now being posed in a new way.

It is necessary to expose the mistake of those who understand the NEP as a retreat, and only as a retreat. As a matter of fact, even when introducing the New Economic Policy, Lenin said that the NEP was not exhausted by retreat, that at the same time it meant preparation for a new decisive offensive against the capitalist elements in town and country.

It is necessary to expose the mistake of those who think that the NEP is needed only for the connection between town and country. We do not need any connection between the city and the countryside. We need a link that ensures the victory of socialism. And if we adhere to the NEP, it is because it serves the cause of socialism. And when it ceases to serve the cause of socialism, we will cast it to hell. Lenin said that the NEP was introduced in earnest and for a long time. But he never said that the NEP was introduced forever.

We must also raise the question of popularizing the Marxist theory of reproduction. We must work out the question of a scheme for constructing a balance sheet for our national economy. What the CSO published in 1926 in the form of a balance of the national economy is not a balance, but a game of numbers. The interpretation of Bazarov and Groman of the problem of the balance of the national economy is also inappropriate. The revolutionary Marxists must work out a scheme for balancing the national economy of the USSR if they want to work on the problems of the economy of the transitional period at all.

It would be good if our Marxist-economists would single out a special group of workers to work out the problems of the economy of the transitional period in their new formulation at the present stage of development.

https://prorivists.org/stalin_agricultural_policy

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 31, 2022 3:11 pm

Ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev dies at 91
By CHANG JUN in San Francisco | China Daily Global | Updated: 2022-08-31 05:11


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File photo of former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev. [Photo/Xinhua]

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, has died at 91, Russian media reported Tuesday.

The Central Clinical Hospital, where Gorbachev had been admitted earlier for treatment, confirmed his death in a statement by saying that he died Tuesday evening after a long, serious illness.

World leaders mourned Gorbachev's death. Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed deep condolences, reported Russia's RIA Novosti news agency on Wednesday.

"In the morning, he (President Putin) will send a telegram of condolences to Gorbachev's family and friends," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a statement on Tuesday calling Gorbachev "a one-of-a kind statesman who changed the course of history".

Guterres said the world had lost a "towering global leader, committed multilateralist, and tireless advocate for peace".

The Reagan Foundation and Institute in a statement Tuesday said it "mourns the loss of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a man who once was a political adversary of Ronald Reagan's who ended up becoming a friend".

Born in March 1931 to a poverty-stricken farmer's family in Stavropol, Gorbachev ascended to the Kremlin in 1985 as the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the age of 54.

In March 1990, he became president, and aimed to tackle a series of internal and international problems.

On Dec 25, 1991, Gorbachev appeared on national television to announce his resignation. The Soviet Union was officially dissolved and broken into independent states — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine, in addition to Russia.

Gorbachev had been active in the public arena since stepping down from his political post. He wrote his memoir, appeared in interviews and regularly commented on topics such as disarmament.

In a January 2021 interview with the RIA Novosti news agency, Gorbachev reiterated that Russia and the United States should extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which the two nations signed in 2010 to stipulate limits to nuclear warheads and strategic delivery systems by both nations and to adjust their nuclear doctrines.

Russia and the United States should shift to a no-first-use nuclear policy rather than the current one based on limitations, Gorbachev had said.

According to Russia's Tass news agency, Gorbachev was survived by a daughter Irina, and two granddaughters. He will be buried at Moscow's Novodevichy cemetery next to his wife Raisa, who died of leukemia in 1999.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 75118.html

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Putin expresses his condolences on the death of Mikhail Gorbachevachev, the last president of the USSR, dies at the age of 91 after suffering from a complex disease. [/b]

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Published August 31, 2022 (48 minutes ago)

President Putin viewed former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev as a politician and statesman with enormous impact on world history.

Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his condolences on Wednesday to the relatives of former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who died the day before at the age of 91, through an official letter.

According to the letter, Putin expressed regret over the death of the last president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), calling him a politician and statesman with a huge impact on world history.

“He led our country in a period of difficult and dramatic changes, of great economic, social and foreign challenges. He deeply understood that reforms were needed and sought to offer his own solutions to pressing problems,” the Russian president wrote.


He also emphasized the humanitarian, charitable and educational role that he developed during the last years of his life.

For his part, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, believed that Gorbachev was an extraordinary person, even though criticism of his historic performance hangs over him.


“He is known and remembered all over the world. He sincerely wanted to believe that the Cold War would end and that there would be an eternal romantic period between the new Soviet Union, the world and the collective West,” Peskov said.

Mikhail Gorbachev, creator of perestroika, will be buried near his wife in the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow, after suffering a complex illness that kept him away from public life.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/presiden ... -0008.html

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Fuck, Gorbachev, fuck Putin and the oligarchs he rode in on. Gorby was not the 'cause' of the dissolution of the Soviet Union but he was the headsman.

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Gorbachev joined the attack on Kherson
August 30, 23:26

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And great news at the end of the "Ukrainian triumphs" near Kherson. Gorbachev died. So to speak, I decided to actively join the "pulling attack."

Earth glassy bastard. What is happening now in Ukraine, and not only in Ukraine, is his doing.
There is only a slight feeling of regret that he did not live to see the trial. And so, in 2022, all carrion died - Gorbachev, Kravchuk, Shushkevich ...

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7832370.html

"Earth glassy bastard"...wonder how a human would translate the Russian?

harvest year
August 31, 0:19

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May 3, 2022 - Shushkevich died
May 10, 2022 - Kravchuk died
June 19, 2022 - Burbulis died
July 31, 2022 - Bakatin died
August 30, 2022 - Gorbachev died.

2022 is not over yet...

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7832730.html

Google Translator

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Grave dancing is encouraged.

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Thu Sep 01, 2022 1:51 pm

Keep dancing.

Gorbachev: Darling of the West, despised at home & worldwide
Richard BeckerAugust 31, 2022 281 4 minutes read
Download PDF flyer https://flyer-generator.herokuapp.com/? ... sts/108793

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics whose policies led to the devastating collapse of his country and the global socialist camp, died on August 30, 2022.

Gorbachev’s reign, which lasted from 1985-91, ended with the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, the withdrawal of vital aid to and trade with countries and movements fighting imperialism worldwide, the breakup of the Soviet state into 15 separate countries, and the opening of them to unprecedented exploitation and corruption. Essential social rights to employment, housing, health care, education, maternal leave and more disappeared virtually overnight.

Even as he was aspiring to the office of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the West was taking note. After they met in London in 1984, Gorbachev was complemented by Margaret Thatcher, the ultra-reactionary British prime minister, who said, “we like him … we can do business together.”

President Ronald Reagan, who infamously labeled the Soviet Union “the evil empire,” at the same time joined in the courting of Gorbachev, who always appeared ready for the embrace of even the most ardent anti-communists.

In 1990, he was rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize for “ending the Cold War” – by surrendering to imperialist demands and dismantling the European socialist bloc. A few years later he would be granted space for his foundation on the grounds of the Presidio former army base in San Francisco.

Perestroika & Glasnost

While Soviet economic growth had slowed to 2% annually when Gorbachev took over, it was not suffering from either unemployment or inflation. In the late 1980s, that all changed dramatically.

Gorbachev’s economic reforms known as “perestroika” were intended to use market competition as a way to end or radically diminish the Soviet government’s obligations to the working class. Market forces rather than the enshrined legal rights of the working class would determine employment patterns.

This section of the Soviet bureaucracy represented by Gorbachev identified socialist property relations and the Soviet Union’s isolation from the world economy as the central obstacles impeding the country from sharing in the fruits of the revolution in technology that was sweeping the world in the last quarter of the 20th century. Gorbachev and the Soviet “reformers” believed that only by ending the Cold War and liquidating centralized economic planning would U.S. imperialism accept the Soviet Union’s entry into the rapidly accelerating model of a global economy.

Instead, the reforms set forces into motion inside and outside of the Soviet Communist Party who were completely bourgeois and pro-imperialist in their orientation. The pre-existing Soviet political system had driven them underground or into the Communist Party itself. Unchecked, the reforms led to runaway inflation and extreme economic dislocation.

Along with perestroika, Gorbachev and his supporters in the CPSU leadership promoted “glasnost,” the Russian word for openness. It was accompanied by a purge of communists and their replacement with anti-communist and pro-capitalist elements, especially in the mass media. An internal culture war against the USSR and communism raged, leading to the disorientation of large parts of the party and general population who looked to the CPSU and other state institutions for guidance.

Policies reducing assistance to the less-developed republics and the promotion of anti-communist elements led to the resurgence of national conflicts in many areas.

A most undemocratic end

In the midst of spreading economic and political chaos, the government called for a referendum on whether or not to maintain the Soviet Union in March 1991. The most reactionary forces, led by a former top leader of the Communist Party Boris Yeltsin, hoped that the referendum would advance the cause of breaking up the USSR. But instead, more than 70% of the vote supported retaining the USSR.

In August 1991, an attempt was made by communists in the party leadership to halt the disintegration and retain the socialist system, but were defeated. Gorbachev then resigned, ceding power to Yeltsin who immediately declared the CPSU illegal.

Despite the overwhelming support to retain the USSR, in December 1991 the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus met secretly and declared that the union would be dissolved on December 25, 1991.

What followed the end of the Soviet Union was a prolonged period of indescribable suffering for the great majority of a population that had long been accustomed to having their basic needs met. Unemployment, unheard of in the Soviet Union until 1990, skyrocketed to 10 percent by 1995. The poverty rate was near 20 percent in 2004, according to World Bank figures. The real purchasing power provided by the Russian minimum wage sunk dramatically, as Yeltsin dismantled longstanding price controls on basic goods. By 1997, the real average income of working-class families was 25 to 30 percent of what it was in 1990. That year, a U.N. agency announced that 100 million people had sunk below the poverty line in Russia.

Between 1990 and 1994, the country’s death rate increased an astounding 40 percent. Male life expectancy fell from 63.8 years to 57.7, and among women, from 74.3 years to 71.3—a phenomenon unprecedented during peacetime in modern history.

The sell-off of the resources and property that belonged to the people at fire sale prices created a tiny class of super-rich capitalists.

Gorbachev is being fondly remembered by the global elite, but in his homeland it’s a different story. In the 1996 presidential election, he received less than 1% of the vote and was reviled wherever he campaigned.

https://www.liberationnews.org/gorbache ... rationnews

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Putin snubs funeral of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
Ivana Kottasová
By Ivana Kottasová and Anna Chernova, CNN
Updated 8:55 AM EDT, Thu September 1, 2022

Mikhail Gorbachev, last Soviet Union president, dead at age 91
CNN

Vladimir Putin will not attend the funeral of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Kremlin said Thursday, in a snub of the former Soviet leader with whom the Russian President had a fraught relationship.

Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said “Putin’s work schedule will not allow him to take part in the farewell ceremony for Gorbachev on September 3,” adding that the Russian President visited the Central Clinical Hospital today to pay his respects to Gorbachev, laying flowers by the coffin.

A farewell ceremony for Gorbachev, which will be open to the public, is due to take place on Saturday, followed by the funeral later on the same day at Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/01/europe/s ... index.html

Why, the ungrateful cur! Without Gorby's treachery Putin might still be a middle level apparatchik. But say what you will, Putin is a competent politician and recognizes that the Russian people despise Gorbachev and what he did. Splitting the difference by making an appearance with the stiff but not gracing his presence at the 'semi-state' funeral is finesse.

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China and Gorbachev
August 31, 22:23

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China and Gorbachev

What signal will the funeral ceremony of M.S. send to China? Gorbachev in Moscow

Instead of the formidable Soviet Union, which surrounded China with its bases and tank armies from Afghanistan and Mongolia to Vietnam and strongly influenced the economy of the PRC, Gorbachev left Yeltsin's Russia torn by contradictions to China: thanks to Gorbachev, it was China that became that global platform for convergence with the West, and not like this conceived, Russia. China got investments, joint ventures, technology while the US and NATO were busy absorbing the Soviet legacy. But why don't they put up monuments to Gorbachev in China, don't circulate books by his authorship, and don't invite him to speak at leading think tanks?

Why did experts from the Chinese state-owned Global Times say that Gorbachev “pleased the West and ruined the country and the party,” while the Chinese Foreign Ministry got away with the event with a short remark “China appreciates Gorbachev’s positive contribution to the normalization of Soviet-Chinese relations”?

Perhaps the fact is that the Secretary General of the CPSU performed an act of unprecedented Russian generosity during the period of student protests and maximum political instability on Tiananmen Square, essentially supporting the Democratizing Secretary General, who was later called the “Chinese Gorbachev” and removed a month after his visit Soviet ally:

“I remember that our meetings took place against the backdrop of thousands of speeches on Tiananmen Square,” recalls Gorbachev, “and Zhao Ziyang received these speeches with attention and concern. It seems to me that among the entire leadership of China, he was closest to these people and in his spirit was inclined towards democracy.”

Zhao de facto led the country to regime change, and only parts of the People's Liberation Army of China saved China from collapse. Until now, this is a figure that is perceived in society even more polar than Gorbachev in Russia.

What message might Gorbachev's funeral in Moscow send to China? I think it's pretty obvious.
The winner of the political battle between the army and people from the New Democratic Youth Union of China (now the Komsomol) took advantage of the fruits of the demilitarization of the border and the normalization of relations - the next Secretary General Jiang Zemin, the last, apart from Elizabeth II, a living witness to the era of collapse. And it was not the Soviet-Chinese border treaty that went down in history, but the treaty signed by V. Putin and Jiang Zemin in 2001.

Building current relations with Chinese President Xi Jinping, one cannot ignore his personal attitude towards Gorbachev and the collapse of the USSR. Xi Jinping keeps China from the fate of the USSR, including from separatism in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet - the figure of Gorbachev, I am sure, is unambiguous for him.

Not the least important touch to the portrait of the first and last president of the Union will be his visit to Taiwan in 1994: the former president of the USSR contributed to the legitimization of the independence of the island - he met with the head of the island, Lee Tenghui, and spoke in the legislature of the island. And yet, as they add, he arrived with 15 suitcases of luggage, and left with 30. Such visits are not forgotten in China.

(c) N. Vavilov

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7834631.html

Dmitry Nazarenko on Gorbachev's death.
August 31, 19:44

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Dmitry Nazarenko on Gorbachev's death.

One less anti-Stalinist ...

Despite the efforts of bourgeois propaganda, Gorbachev, who was supposed to sit down for treason even in Perestroika, will remain in history as a traitor to a great country. The disoriented, confused and intimidated population of the USSR, which found itself on the edge of the market abyss thanks to the titanic efforts of the "best German", if not in the mind, but in the heart, understood that the collapse of the Union would lead society to an inevitable catastrophe. It understood then, and partly understands it today, due to the fact that what is happening now in the territory of the former USSR is also the result of this person’s activity.

“I regret that we were not able to bring the perestroika to the end ...”

The bashful position of domestic capital, the hypocritical reviews of individual politicians in the service of the ruling class, this, they say, a great reformer, but unfortunately he made many mistakes, is very vulnerable. Firstly, you need to answer for mistakes, and secondly, if it is human nature to err, then a fool should insist on a mistake.

But despite the official assessment of the role of Gorbachev in the history of the country - in 1996, "dear" Mikhail Sergeevich put forward his candidacy for the presidential elections in the Russian Federation and scored 0.51%, the ruling class pretends that the death of a Jew is a national tragedy. The high mortality of the Russian population, against the backdrop of smoldering and flaring armed conflicts, rising prices, tariffs, fines and taxes, terrorism and other crime - this is a national tragedy. And the death of a man who "gave people hope" is a reason for those who are grateful to him for the destroyed USSR to declare their commitment to universal human values.

Why do they love Gorbachev? For the collapse of the USSR. And why do they hate it? Yes, for the same.

Many people know that the dead are either good or nothing but the truth, and it is that despite party cards, Gorbachev and Co. were not communists, but enemies of the communists - capitulators in front of the muzzle of world capital. And the mere fact that he was praised by many European and American dignitaries is enough to imagine how much harm he brought to the country of the Soviets. When hundreds of thousands of people died during the destruction of the USSR. When millions turned out to be impoverished refugees and internally displaced persons. It was at his suggestion and with his direct participation that the world's first country of working people was destroyed, for the freedom and independence of which millions of compatriots died during the Second World War. It is because of him that the bloody redistribution of Soviet property began and continues, the bacchanalia of nationalism, religious obscurantism, wars and conflicts, broken destinies of millions of people.

Of course, not only Gorbachev betrayed and sold the USSR. He had a whole team of "like-minded people", each pursuing their own selfish interests, and it is significant that the gravediggers of the Soviet Union, traitors to communism, kneeling before capital, die without the slightest twinge of conscience. The epochal nonentity did the same - Gorbachev, who did not admit mistakes until the last day, continuing to claim that he did everything right.

Gorbi will undoubtedly go down in history, surpassing Judas and Herostratus in terms of meanness. His name is a symbol of betrayal, stupidity and irresponsibility. And the more the bourgeois dictatorship mourns for the scoundrel, the more laudatory articles the corrupt hacks of capital harp, the easier it is for the communists to carry on their propaganda.

D. Nazarenko

https://t.me/prorivists/4451 - zinc
Picture from "Dead End"

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7834129.html

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'Red' added.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Fri Sep 02, 2022 2:34 pm

In case we haven't been clear...

Mikhail Gorbachev died
August 31, 2022 Struggle - La Lucha
Mikhail Gorbachev died on August 30. His legacy?

Under Gorbachev, the Soviet economy fell into recession as the government began to dismantle the planned economy. Under Gorbachev, socialist industry was dismantled.

Russia’s GDP dropped by 40%. Real wages were halved. Poverty ballooned from 2.2 million in 1987-88 to 66 million in 1993-95. Millions died under the brutal regime of privatization and shock therapy. Half a million women were trafficked into sexual slavery. Life expectancy fell to 57 years.

Gorbachev and what followed are now remembered as perhaps the worst period in Russia’s 1,000-year history. This was the greatest economic disaster any country has seen in modern times, in war or peace.

Following is the introduction to “Perestroika: A Marxist Critique” by Marxist leader Sam Marcy, first published in 1990. It gives crucial background to the destructive legacy of Gorbachev.

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Introduction

This book deals with a critique of perestroika (the Gorbachev restructuring reforms), written from the vantage point of the world struggle for socialism. It is impossible to analyze such a vast social and political phenomenon as perestroika solely on the basis of the exigencies of the USSR alone. It can only be understood in the context of the contemporary world struggle and more particularly the struggle of the working class and oppressed peoples everywhere against capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression.

There is no way to properly discuss the situation of the USSR without continual reference to its relations with the capitalist countries. It is no secret that, ever since the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution, the USSR has endured the unmitigated enmity, indeed the morbid hatred, of all the imperialist powers and their reactionary servitors of all stripes. Yet the USSR has been able to maintain itself and to grow strong, notwithstanding the most formidable historical objective conditions standing in its way. At the core of the world struggle lies the fact that we are dealing with two diametrically opposed social systems, each of which rests on a different class base.

Much of the material in this book first began appearing in July 1987 as a series of articles on the Soviet economic reforms.1 For some time, we proceeded cautiously in our evaluation of the scope and character of the reforms. We didn’t want to rush to judgment or present an analysis based on preconceived notions of what would happen.

Can Marxists in the U.S. of all places forget that much of the supposedly constructive criticism of the Soviet Union has in fact been in tune with bourgeois efforts to defame the USSR and socialism itself? A progressive audience in particular is reluctant to listen to criticism of the USSR out of consideration for the enormous objective difficulties it has encountered in its long and arduous struggle against capitalist encirclement and the attempts to hinder the construction of a socialist society through economic and political strangulation.

The objective of the reforms, as it was stated very early in the Gorbachev administration, was to modernize and streamline the Soviet economy through the introduction of new management techniques and technology in use elsewhere in the world, particularly in the highly developed imperialist countries. Through perestroika and the political opening known as glasnost, the new Soviet leadership also promised to tackle social privileges and inequities which had accumulated over the years. But as time went on, it became evident that there was much more to the modernization program than restructuring industry and reequipping the technological infrastructure of the USSR in order to move forward and perfect socialist construction. The enthusiasm evoked in the beginning over the expectation that new techniques would lead to an improvement in working conditions, labor productivity, and the availability of consumer goods has now, four years into the reforms, given way to skepticism and even mass anger. The most forceful evidence of this was given by the Soviet coal miners, who showed what they thought of the Gorbachev administration’s performance by striking en masse. (See Articles 22 and 23.) And no wonder there is such widespread anger among the workers. Instead of perestroika’s promised increase in the material wellbeing of the masses, we have the familiar phenomenon of austerity, so rampant in capitalist society.

As our later articles show, what has emerged is a wholesale retreat from socialist goals in the area of social and economic relations. This retreat went along with the introduction of private cooperatives, the weakening of central planning, concessions to imperialist investors interested in joint ventures and other openings to the Soviet market, and erratic and ill-disguised steps leading away from collective and state farms and toward the privatization of agriculture.

This is what explains the effusive praise for Gorbachev that has come from the imperialist camp, especially from those well-known as arch-foes of the labor movement and social progress. When Margaret Thatcher pronounced her verdict – “I like him” – after Gorbachev’s first visit to London, it might have been taken as a judgment by an individual imperialist politician. But since then the triumphal receptions arranged for him in Washington and Bonn have made it clear that the collective opinion of the imperialist bourgeoisie heartily welcomes the shift in Soviet policies represented by the Gorbachev leadership. This is in striking contrast to the attitude of the countries oppressed by imperialism, which have been able to muster only the most subdued support for Gorbachev, when they haven’t been silent altogether.

The reader will find that our analysis of the reforms has required us to examine them not only as legal abstractions, as pronouncements on economic policy by officials and government bodies, but as specific developments, of a social and political as well as economic character, whose details reveal the direction in which they have been moving. Thus, in the series of articles appearing in Part II of this book, we paid a great deal of attention to the national question. An upsurge of severe national conflicts swept through many areas of the USSR soon after the reforms were introduced. At the time of these struggles in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, as well as the Baltic states (which must be treated separately), we showed how they were inextricably connected to the social consequences of the economic reforms. However, the Gorbachev leadership attributed them to the machinations of local authorities resistant to perestroika, making light of what can only be seen as a most ominous phenomenon fraught with dangers for the future of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Without repeating here our analysis of these events, which appears later in this book, we do want to draw the reader’s attention to comments in the youth paper Komsomolskaya Pravda regarding widespread fighting in Kazakhstan in June 1989 which appears to have caused some loss of life. We feel that this brief extract fully confirms our view of the problem, which is that the consequences of the reforms fall most heavily on those areas of the USSR which were less developed at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution but which – until the reforms – had been advancing due to a broad “affirmative action” program made possible by the revolutionary internationalism of the Bolshevik Revolution and later by nationwide centralized planning. (The attitude of the imperialist bourgeoisie towards these attempts by earlier Soviet governments to raise the level of the less developed republics has been, of course, just as hostile as it is to affirmative action here.)

According to the youth paper, the fighting in the Kazakh city of Novyy Uzen, near the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, began when young people at a dance, many of them unemployed, began arguing about various economic shortages and then set off through the town, turning over newsstands and setting fire to cars. “The young people were demanding an end to all rationing systems and to close down cooperatives, which, in their view, are the main culprits in the rise in prices and the shortages of foodstuffs,” said Komsomolskaya Pravda.2 “Special discontent was expressed about unequal social positions and salaries,” the report said.

The cooperatives are a direct product of the reforms. They are new, privately owned ventures that have netted big profits for a growing number of entrepreneurs at a time when there is increasing resentment from the mass of the population over the ill effects of rising prices and unemployment, both recent phenomena in the USSR.

There is another development which we believe illustrates the direction in which the reforms are moving. That is the way in which these economic changes translate into politics. They have brought about a significant shift in the political weight of the different class groups in Soviet society, most importantly the proletariat.

As we have reiterated throughout this book, glasnost or the new policy of openness is unassailable as against reliance on arbitrary methods and repression. These latter run against the grain of the spirit of Bolshevik debate in the resolution of political issues, which had been the norm during Lenin’s lifetime. In those early years, even during the worst days of the Civil War and imperialist intervention, the widest latitude was afforded for political discussion and debate. It was really only when the bourgeoisie resorted to terror that this was modified. The revival of socialist democracy, even on a limited level, has quite exploded the view long popular in the West that the USSR was a hopelessly self-perpetuating totalitarian society.

However, it must be acknowledged that at this time the political opening has favored and been taken advantage of by the more privileged sectors, many of whom lean in a bourgeois direction. The accompanying chart (page xiv) compares the composition of the newly elected Supreme Soviet in 1989 to that of 1984. The most striking change occurred in the percentage of deputies who are workers, collective farmers and office employees. This dropped from 45.9% of the 1984 Supreme Soviet to only 23.1% of the same body in 1989! The chart was published in Izvestia on May 6, 1989, along with an accompanying article which shows that while the workers have been set back, they are not taking it lying down: “There are slightly [!] fewer worker- and peasant-Deputies in the Congress than there were in the 1984 Supreme Soviet. `The workers have now realized that they were deceived,’ a district Party committee secretary said at a meeting of the Bureau of the Odessa Province Party Committee (Sovetskaya kultura, April 18, 1989), and he is far from alone in trying to sharpen the feeling among rank-and-file working people that they have been socially wounded and to direct this feeling against the intelligentsia, which allegedly took advantage of the `free play of forces’ for its own interests.” 3

At the time of the Russian Revolution, although the proletariat was only a minority of the population, it played the leading dynamic role in reshaping society, in alliance with the peasantry. Its political weight was expressed through the Communist Party and the Soviets, where its influence was enormous. Even later, in the time of the great purges, the growing numerical strength and political weight of the workers was reflected in the composition of the Soviets. Until this recent election, as the Izvestia article acknowledges, the nominations to the Supreme Soviet were ” `in accordance with a schedule of allocations’ that retained the sex, age-group, social, occupational, Party, etc., structure of the entire Supreme Soviet in proportion that the architects of that Supreme Soviet considered the most suitable and that more or less correlated (although, needless to say, did not coincide) with the makeup of the country’s active population.” 4 Even this was abandoned, however, at Gorbachev’s relentless urging. In the elections for the 19th Party Conference of June-July 1988 and in the 1989 Supreme Soviet elections, he vehemently stressed that the quotas should be dropped and only those who supported perestroika should be elected. Thus everyone with any kind of criticism, suggestion, demand or new idea must frame it within the terms of perestroika.

What does the phrase “in accordance with a schedule of allocations” mean? It is a truncated and watered-down version of what was often said hundreds of times in the early Leninist period, i.e., that the class character of the Soviet workers’ state had to be reflected in its representative institutions. The weight of the proletariat as the only class consistently socialist to the end, as well as the relative weight of its peasant allies, had to be fully reflected in the representative institutions if it was to exercise its class dictatorship in a world still dominated by imperialism abroad. That’s what Lenin meant by a Paris Commune-type state, which he so comprehensively analyzed in his “The State and Revolution.” 5 The Paris Commune of 1870-71, the most democratic form of the state ever achieved, was to be the model for the Soviet state. Engels, in his introduction to “The Civil War in France,” asked rhetorically, “Do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat.” 6

Now, however, when the workers have become an absolute majority in the USSR, there is a substantial decline in their political weight and an increase in the number of bourgeois intellectuals and administrators in the Supreme Soviet, as the chart clearly shows. The current orientation is toward a bourgeois parliament, and away from the Paris Commune-type state. Clearly, the expectation that glasnost will open the way for greater socialist democracy in the true sense, that is, the participation of the masses in running the affairs of society, has yet to be realized (but will happen, as we show later).

The class character of the Soviet Union
The Gorbachev reforms rely so much on capitalist market mechanisms to stimulate the economy of the USSR that all this has inevitably raised once again the question of how to understand the social character of the Soviet Union. This is a subject that has preoccupied both friend and foe of the Russian Revolution, and has provoked commentary from the pedantic to the inane both inside and outside the USSR.

There have been at least three schools of thought on this question. Take, for instance, one of the earliest stalwarts, Winston Churchill, the illustrious prime minister of the British empire. No ivory-tower think-tank analyst was he. Churchill’s claim to fame as a political analyst rested mainly on his career as a cunning practitioner of the art of imperialist diplomacy. His analyses are given far more weight in bourgeois circles than those of any professor precisely because he seemed to combine both theory and practice. During the Second World War in particular, every word he uttered in public seemed to the bourgeoisie like so many pearls of wisdom. Even before the war, when some imperialists looked askance at his advocacy of “collective security” among the great powers, that is, an anti-fascist coalition against Germany and Italy that included the Soviet Union, his views were generally considered profound.

Bearing all this in mind, what are we to make of Churchill’s October 1939 speech in which he described the Soviet Union as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”?7 What was he trying to say about the USSR, and what was there in the given historical context that infused it with supreme importance?

An enigma, a riddle, a mystery. Roget’s Thesaurus tells us that these three terms are used fairly synonymously. Any one would well serve the purpose. What was Churchill trying to do by putting all three together without further explanation? Were this said by anybody else, it would have been regarded as tautological rubbish, lacking any glimmer of a sociological appraisal of the USSR. Indeed, what we have here is a bourgeois statesman squirming and attempting to exude profundity, but offering no clue as to the social character of the USSR.

At the time of his speech, Churchill had accumulated nearly 40 years of experience in imperialist diplomacy, 20 of them in venomous struggle against the Soviet Union. As British secretary of state for war and air (1919-1921), he had organized a coalition of 14 capitalist countries to invade the Soviet Union and try to overthrow the Bolshevik government.

To understand Churchill’s statement, one has to remember its historical context. For several years Britain, France and the United States had promoted the concept of collective security with the USSR against the Axis powers. Indeed, the Soviet Union was the leading and original proponent of this strategy. It had so vigorously promoted the concept of collective security against fascism that it would seem the policy was carved in granite. It was beginning to be regarded as a permanent feature of Soviet diplomacy.

Thus, when the Conservative Prime Minister of Britain, Neville Chamberlain, and Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, a bourgeois Radical Socialist representing France, decided to make a pact with Hitler and Mussolini in Munich in late September 1938, it seemed that the USSR had no choice but to accept it. By this diplomatic maneuver, Chamberlain and Daladier hoped to direct the aggressive thrust of Nazi Germany to the East, that is, into an attack on the Soviet Union, thus gaining breathing time for themselves. But the Soviet Union needed the breathing space for itself, and was less solicitous of its erstwhile democratic allies than had been expected. And so on August 22, 1939, the Soviet Union turned around and itself signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in order to gain time – essentially what the imperialist allies had wanted themselves. Ten days later World War II began. All of this is vitally important in understanding Churchill’s tautological nonsense in the face of an enormous international development.

But while Churchill’s analysis was faulty at best, his class attitude, his class loyalty, and that of all the imperialist politicians was unambiguous. It was mortal hatred of the Soviet Union and all the revolutionary movements, as well as of the working class at home and the hundreds of millions of oppressed who suffered the yoke of colonialism. He and his class unfailingly knew which side they were on. He showed it very clearly when as chancellor of the exchequer (1924-1929) he lowered the workers’ standard of living, and then, when the trade unions responded with the first and only great general strike in Britain in 1926, his rabid editorials in the British Gazette led the government assault that broke the strike.

While it might have been difficult for Churchill to arrive at a sociological appraisal, that never prevented him from taking a class position on the Soviet Union, on the British general strike, and above all on British colonialism. The bourgeoisie always know where they stand when it comes to the practical, day-to-day struggle. Their class bias in relationship to the socialist countries is merely an extension in foreign affairs of their position in the domain of domestic politics.

In the U.S., this can be seen without fail whenever there is a strike. There hasn’t been one instance where the capitalist class, as represented by its press, has ever taken the side of the workers against the bosses, or urged the bosses to agree to the demands of the workers. Literally not one. Occasionally they profess a treacherous neutrality, urging moderation on both sides, or they will criticize a particular company at a particular time, but never do they cross class lines, never do they go to the extent of actually supporting the workers against the bosses. The only strikes they have ever supported have been in Poland, and then they did it to weaken socialist construction, not to help the workers.

There is a second school of thought on the character of the Soviet state that goes by various names, but is best known as “bureaucratic collectivism,” a term that originated among some adherents to the broad leftist opposition to Stalin, notably Bruno Rizzi and Ciliga, and was eventually taken up in the U.S. by Max Shachtman. According to this view, the political power of the government, Party and managerial bureaucracy completely pervaded all avenues of Soviet society, allowing no movement in the direction of socialist democracy. The bureaucracy as they saw it had become a new ruling class in relation to the means of production. The followers of this view saw in the victories of the Chinese Revolution and others that followed merely confirmation of the tendency for bureaucratic collectivism to ultimately cover the face of the globe.

This political tendency began to disintegrate when the imperialist Allies adopted a posture of goodwill toward the USSR during World War II. However, once the Cold War began it was revived in the works of the Yugoslav ex-communist, Milovan Djilas, who wrote The New Class.

The recent trends in the direction of democratization in the USSR, even though limited as yet and without the independent participation of the working class in the political struggle, certainly invalidate the bureaucratic collectivist view. The prospect for proceeding to genuine proletarian democracy seems far more probable than any backsliding toward what the proponents of bureaucratic collectivism envisioned.

Bureaucratic collectivism saw as fundamental to the Soviet system those elements that in fact are part of the superstructure. Superstructural elements may in a given situation bolster or hamper the structure, as the case may be, but they are strictly derivative in character. Sometimes they serve as palliatives for reviving a decomposing social structure. At other times, they may be encrustations which paralyze a live and growing structure. In a broad and general way, history indicates that ultimately every new social structure which arises out of the needs of development of the productive forces will in time bring into correspondence its superstructure, or, failing that, will overthrow it.

Finally there is the Orwellian school, which contemplated a future in which humanity would be swallowed up by a totalitarian machine from which there can be no exit. George Orwell’s first satirical novel on this subject, Animal Farm, was written in 1946, the year of Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech and the beginning of the Cold War. His gloomy outlook projecting a universal totalitarian regime was taken further in 1984, written in 1948. It was taken up as the portrait of the future by writers, politicians and bourgeois publicists of all sorts, as well as economists and sociologists. Now, 40 years later, when all the capitalist media have been full of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit meetings, followed by the Bush-Gorbachev meetings, and have been showering applause on the new hero of peaceful coexistence, one can clearly see that the Orwellian view was a product of the Cold War and had little to do with the evolution of the USSR or an appraisal of its internal dynamics.

Today these views have generally been replaced by a new bourgeois theory that the USSR will inevitably yield to capitalist restoration. This outlook is a product of the present historical conjuncture just as much as the Orwellian view was a product of the Cold War period. Neither is an independent, dispassionate conclusion based upon a study of the internal dynamics of the Soviet Union as a new historical social formation. The current view of the USSR is being pushed by bourgeois economists and sociologists with a vigor and enthusiasm comparable to the critical acclaim accorded the Orwellian view during the period of the Cold War.

By now there have been scores of bourgeois studies of the Soviet reforms. Some give them high praise. Some may profess to show their shortcomings, but all, without exception, start with the built-in bias that a centralized, planned economy is invalid, economically inefficient and unworkable. Therefore, a return to the capitalist market is not only desirable but inevitable. Without this sacred predisposition, no analysis of the Soviet reforms is acceptable to the capitalist class. There are no studies whatsoever from the bourgeois side to show that a planned socialist economy is ever possible or desirable. Such a viewpoint must first be excluded before beginning any kind of analysis. This is true for all the “Sovietologists” – the Gerry Houghs, the Marshall Goldmans, the Ed Hewetts and other analysts of their ilk in capitalist academia.

The way the capitalist class explains the Gorbachev reforms, they are all but carved in stone. It would seem there’s no road open except to move further and faster until the full restoration of capitalism. This we believe to be wholly unfounded, both on the basis of historical evidence as well as on the inherent possibilities for a socialist regeneration which flow from the class structure of the Soviet Union.

The problem with so many bourgeois analysts of the Soviet Union is their utter inability to really and truly come to grips with the social character of the USSR as a brand-new, dynamic social system. Invariably they view it mechanically, often statically, but not dialectically. Lenin explained “the essence of dialectics” as “the splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts.”8 What the bourgeois analysts fail to see in the USSR is precisely this contradiction, between the revolutionary social structure of the USSR and its superstructure, which is all too frequently at variance with its class basis. There is a continuing struggle between structure and superstructure, now open, now hidden, often violent.

This contradiction has its origin in the fact that the legacy of czarism left the USSR with extremely low productive forces which were incapable of affording the USSR a socialist character immediately after the war. To a large extent, this has persisted for close to 70 years. Now, however, that the Soviet Union has achieved the rank of second only to the United States in its total productive forces, the contradiction which holds back its development is the urgent need to upgrade the social relations, to move forward in communizing the social relations especially in areas of the economy which have not sufficiently advanced from bourgeois forms. This cannot be resolved on the basis of a retreat to anachronistic, capitalist reforms that suit some privileged groupings.

History teaches us that no new society, no new social system ever vanishes without fully exhausting its possibilities. Furthermore, no new social system ever emerges without the ground being fully prepared for it. It is often said that the USSR might not have emerged as a revolutionary new social formation without the conjuncture of the imperialist war. It had always been affirmed that the Russian Revolution occurred as a break in the weakest link in the imperialist chain. But the fact that it has survived for over 70 years and has not been reabsorbed into the imperialist system, and that moreover the Russian Revolution has been followed by socialist revolutions in China, Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, Albania, Ethiopia and elsewhere – all this demonstrates that a new social system has emerged from the old. It thereby proves not only the inevitability of socialism but its viability as well, especially when one considers the continuing unparalleled historic struggle between the two systems.

That each of the succeeding governing groups of the USSR has been unable to achieve the stability, the correspondence between base and superstructure, which capitalism developed after several centuries (and then only among the very richest capitalist powers with immense overseas colonies), attests to the severe birth pangs which a newly emerged society must go through and upon whose body politic the birthmarks of the old society continue to persist.

The Soviet Union is a contradictory social phenomenon. An attempt to unravel it would show that this phenomenon has a revolutionary class structure, in that it overthrew the landlords, bankers and industrialists, but has had a superstructure, for most of the time the USSR has existed, which is relatively at variance with its class structure. The still fragile class structure is vulnerable in the face of the global capitalist economy.

In bourgeois society, the governing groups can change many times, from monarchists to fascists, from democrats to military dictators, but because the capitalist system is based upon the automatic forces of the capitalist market and private property, the system continues with its superprofits and with its poverty. The fact that one clique of administrators is ousted and another takes its place may somewhat retard capitalist development at one time or accelerate it at another, but the system continues under the domination of the same ruling class. For instance, when Donald Regan, a multi-millionaire from Wall Street, was forced to resign his post as Ronald Reagan’s White House chief of staff, he did not thereby cease to be a capitalist and owner of millions of dollars in cash, stocks and bonds. He did not lose his membership in the capitalist class, he merely lost his office in the governing group. Needless to say, the same was true of Nelson Rockefeller after his tenure as vice president.

It is otherwise with the Soviet government. From the point of view of administration, the Soviet state is in the hands of a vast bureaucracy. But the ownership of the means of production, meaning the bulk of the wealth of the country including its natural resources, is legally and unambiguously in the hands of the people – the working class, who make up the overwhelming majority of the population. Those in the governing group are merely the administrators of the state and state property. If Politburo members Gorbachev, Ligachev or Yakovlev were to lose their posts, they would not take with them the departments or ministries they headed. They have pensions due and even may have accumulated personal funds, but they do not own a part of the state as such. The ownership of the means of production in the hands of the working class is truly the most significant sociological factor in the appraisal of the USSR as a workers’ state, or socialist state as it is called in deference to the aspirations of the people.

Even the Gorbachev reforms, which tend to erode the power of the working class, would have to go a long, long way in order to invalidate the ownership of the means of production by the working class.

When capitalism established its class dictatorship, it not only assimilated the experiences of previous exploiting societies but also integrated some of the social strata of the previous ruling classes, even at the cost of serious concessions to them. These helped the new ruling bourgeoisie to exercise its class dictatorship over the exploited workers and oppressed peoples. Capitalism was not born full-blown. It took centuries of development to achieve a degree of stability as against the insurgent masses. But finally it could afford to have two or three different governing or warring groups expressed in political parties which managed the affairs of the bourgeois state. That is what bourgeois democracy has meant in the epoch of the bourgeoisie. In Britain, Holland, Belgium, France and also Japan, this democracy and stability, however precarious, was achieved by the super-exploitation of the hundreds of millions of colonial peoples, allowing some of the super-profits to reach the upper echelons of the working class in the metropolitan countries, the so-called labor aristocracy.

The bourgeois scholars of today are incapable of facing up to the real problems of historical appraisal, that is, charting the course of social evolution. Human history shows a universal sequence from communal life to slavery, then feudalism, then capitalism. They won’t dare deny that capitalism is the product of social evolution, but they want to stop there. They exclude even the possibility that capitalism is being replaced by a new social system which inevitably brings with it the ownership of the means of production by society, beginning with ownership in the hands of the working class.

The retreat by the Soviet leadership into bourgeois norms and capitalist innovations will unquestionably fail. They will become a danger to the social foundations of the USSR; the base (the workers’ state) will rebel against the superstructure (the political and economic bureaucracy) to bring the superstructure into conformity with its needs. We can already see evidence of this forthcoming development in what happened in China, where the reforms went as far as they could. The government in June 1989 had to say bluntly, “Thus far and no further.” A forceable solution was the only viable course.

   The lesson of China is of tremendous importance. The bourgeoisie can’t get over it. Not all their sanctions, all their bulldozing can change what happened. It’s the most significant lesson that has come out of the socialist camp in the last 30 years. It is too early to tell how far the new course in China will or can go, given the new effort at economic strangulation by the imperialist bourgeoisie. But it is impossible that this will not have reverberations in the USSR, and it is particularly important in the light of the renewal of normal relations between these two great socialist countries.

References
1. From July 1987 until August 1989, 23 articles on the Soviet reforms appeared in Workers World newspaper. This previously published material makes up Part II of this book.

2. Komsomolskaya Pravda of June 18, 1989, as quoted in the Washington Post of June 20, 1989.

3. “The Choice Has Been Made,” Izvestia, May 6, 1989, translated and excerpted in The Current Digest of the Soviet Press (Columbus, Ohio), Vol. 41, no. 18, p. 5.

4. Ibid.

5. V.I. Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), Vol. 25, pp. 381-492.

6. Frederick Engels, introduction to Karl Marx’s “The Civil War in France,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), Vol. 2, p. 189.

7. Winston Churchill, “A World Broadcast” October 1, 1939 Winston Churchill War Speeches, 1939-45 Compiled by Charles Eade. (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1951), pp. 108-12.

8. V.I. Lenin, “On the Question of Dialectics,” Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), Vol. 38, p. 357.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... chev-died/

*************

Russian CWP, On the Death of General Secretary Gorbachev
9/1/22 2:58 PM
Russia, Russian Communist Workers' Party Ru Europe Communist and workers' parties
Gorbachev is gone, the disease remains



Interview with the Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCRP, the head of the ROT FRONT Viktor Tyulkin on the death of the last General Secretary of the ruling CPSU, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Cor. : Viktor Arkadievich, M.S. Gorbachev died on August 30 at the age of 92. Estimates of his personality today, and probably for a long time, will divide our society. One thing is certain - his example confirms the role of the individual in history. With what sign - people evaluate it. You are probably the only person in the RCRP who personally met and communicated with Gorbachev, so we ask you to rate him and characterize him as a person.

VT: I met, one might say, faced live, five times. The RKWP gave a political assessment of Gorbachev and his policy back in 1991. There is nothing to add here - renegade, betrayal of the cause of the working people, degeneration. And as a person, I can characterize him as an insincere, crafty and even deceitful person.

Cor. : Are you from the experience of personal communication or is it an assessment of all his activities?

V.T.: Of course, primarily based on political assessment, but also from the experience of communication. Personally, Gorbachev promised me, witnessed by several people, to remain a communist until the end of his days!It happened on April 4, 1990, at a meeting of representatives of the regions in the Central Committee of the CPSU, where the question of the advisability of creating a Russian Communist Party within the CPSU was discussed. I noted in my speech that the point is not so much in the organizational formation of the RCP, but in the policy pursued and the processes of the degeneration of the party. He said that according to the estimates of the Communist Initiative Movement, the CPSU is losing the quality of a party of the working class and is turning into a social democratic party at best. Gorbachev made a few remarks, and during the break he came up to me and continued the conversation, declaring that I was mistaken. It was here that he assured me and the comrades who surrounded us that, they say, do not doubt that he will remain a communist until the end of his days!

Cor. : Didn't stay?

VT: Not only did he not stay. Subsequently, in his speeches, he agreed to the point that, it turns out, all his life he went precisely to the "destruction of communism in the USSR . " That is, Gorbachev completed his formation as a person as an outspoken anti-communist. And, I would add, hanger-on of the West.

Cor. : Do you believe that he was a conscious fighter against communism and managed to destroy the CPSU and the Union?

VT: No, of course not. It was he who, having suffered a fiasco, tried to put on the mask of an ideological fighter. Actually, it's just a simple fixture. He adjusted to the circumstances, and when they got out of control, he simply chickened out, surrendered everything and betrayed everyone. Not a fighter, not that person. He received, to put it bluntly, bribes in the form of various Western bonuses. Krokhobor. Suffice it to recall his earnings by advertising the American network of pizzerias Pizza Hut. In 2010, Time listed the ad as one of the "Most Infamous Celebrity Videos".

After the collapse of the USSR, Gorbachev lived by trying to present himself as a world-class leader who was not understood and supported. And he wanted the best .

Cor. : Yeah cool! Would a world without communism look better? The year 2000 has already come a long time ago, but where is the general prosperity?

V.T.: A world without communism, i.e. without the USSR and the socialist camp, we have today. For those wars that swept through the republics of the USSR (Sumgait, Karabakh, Transnistria, Tajikistan, Georgia, Abkhazia, Chechnya, Ossetia, ... today Donbass and Ukraine), one can safely thank Mikhail Sergeevich. His personal acquaintance with the West today continues in the bloody confrontation between the collective West and Russia in Ukraine.

Cor. : But they didn’t understand Gorbachev, and didn’t they support the people or Yeltsin and his team, with whom Gorbachev was constantly fighting for leadership?

V.T.: By and large, Yeltsin and Gorbachev are kindred spirits of the class. Note that Gorbachev presents himself as a fighter against communism and bows before the West. And Boris Yeltsin, after the completion of the Belovezhskaya deal and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, spoke before the US Congress with a loyal speech: “ I have the high honor to speak here in the Congress of a great and free country. The communist idol, which sowed social strife, enmity and unparalleled cruelty everywhere on earth, which instilled fear in the human community, collapsed. Crashed forever. I am here to assure you that on our earth we will not let him rise again.” So despite their personal dislike, Gorbachev and Yeltsin worked in pairs.

Cor. : And the people did not support, did not appreciate?

VT: The people appreciated it. If we remember, Gorbachev participated in the presidential elections in the Russian Federation in 1996. He received the support of 0.5% of those who voted. So, remembering the well-known situation, you can call him, "Misha half a percent."

Corr.: Today's leadership, Putin personally, are fundamentally different from Gorbachev, do they suffer from his weaknesses?

VT: I wouldn't say so. They are more united by a common idea - decommunization . Gorbachev and Yeltsin showed what they were capable of, now Putin promised to show real decommunization . Accordingly, all together they brought the Russian people to the current state, incl. to this war with Ukraine. Capitalism ordered? Got.

Corr.: Gorbachev is most guilty of the tragedy of the people and the collapse of the Union? If not for him, would socialism and the Union have survived?

VT: Gorbachev is a very bad person, but I wouldn't put the question that way. Besides Gorbachev, there were 20 million party members. Where are they? The disease of rebirth struck the bulk of the members of the once glorious party. Gorbachev left, but the disease of Gorbachevism remained in the communist movement today. And not only in Russia, but also in the world. The disease of conciliation, opportunism, careerism, neglect of theory, narcissism, arrogance. The lesson from Gorbachev should be well learned by all communists.

The conversation was recorded by Dmitry Volgin Leningrad August 31, 2022

http://solidnet.org/article/Russian-CWP--00010/

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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Thu Sep 22, 2022 2:30 pm

On the essence of the peasantry and the policy of Soviet power in the countryside
No. 01/53, I.2021

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In studying the history of the USSR, the question of the essence of the peasantry plays a crucial role. Especially valuable is a correct understanding of the relations between the working class and the peasantry during the period of collectivization.

One of the dominant ones is the point of view based on the value approach. The state bought grain from the collective farms at allegedly low prices, thereby “pumping out” the value from the countryside.

Those who have a positive attitude towards Soviet power recognize this attitude as progressive, since the purpose of this "imbalance" is the development of society, the strengthening of the country's defense capability, and the growth of industry.

Those who have a negative attitude toward Soviet power recognize this attitude as exploitation, thereby "proving" that communists are no better than capitalists and landowners.

The fact is that methodologically it is incorrect to resolve this issue in this way, hence the wrong conclusions. Take, for example, the fact that in return for bread the peasants received not only and not so much money or industrial products, but also all the benefits of culture and communism . They are invaluable in terms of money in principle. The operation of the law of value in the first phase of communism is indisputable, but this does not mean that the question of the relationship between the working class and the peasantry in the USSR should be viewed through the prism of value and market categories.

Stalin called the relations of the working class and the peasantry of the USSR a bond and friendship , their union was a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the Soviet government was called the worker-peasant government. These facts, by the way, express the relations of classes. Therefore, the category through which relations between the working class and the peasantry of the USSR should be considered is the dictatorship of the proletariat .

However, positive declarations are not enough to exhaust the depth of the issue.

In the early stages, the attitude towards the peasantry was a major problem for Russia, especially during the formation of the proletarian party. And if you pay attention to the works of village writers such as Astafiev, Zalygin, Rasputin, it will not be an exaggeration to say that their compassionate, tearful lamentations about the village played a major role in the cause of ... the collapse of the USSR , the destruction of collective farms and state farms, the extinction of the population and themselves villages.

Peasant, tiller - a category of feudal Russia. After 1861, the scientific definition of the peasant class is the petty bourgeoisie , whose main feature is the striving, the struggle to become a large, diversified bourgeoisie. Nothing else constitutes the essence of this class. Even in the United States, only those "farms" that employ at least 40 employees, plus seasonal ones, are now keeping afloat in agriculture.

Therefore, for Stalin, the main thing was to find methods for eliminating petty-bourgeoisness in the psyche of a food producer, which is mortally dangerous for the cause of building communism . The surplus appropriation was accepted by this class when Kolchak and Denikin hanged, shot, and flogged millions, first of all, of the “peasants” of Russia, i.e. members of the petty bourgeoisie. So they showed the "revolutionary spirit" caused by the mortal threat of the restoration of the old order, going over to the side of the Reds in some places or observing neutrality, but feeding the Bolsheviks. As soon as the white threat was over, they did not hesitate to take up the sawn-off shotguns and tried to take the Bolsheviks by the throat.

A Marxist cannot relate to people who call themselves peasants except as a petty bourgeoisie with big, brutal pretensions—such is the essence of an illiterate tiller if he succeeds. By the way, they perfectly ruined their masters, nobles. So the peasant is not at all a pastoral type and not only a "sower and keeper", but a class of people: a forced community member and a potential world-eater rolled into one .

And since it was necessary to feed the city, therefore Lenin competently and quickly changed his policy, and, as he wrote later, for the first time in his history a peasant, i.e. the petty bourgeoisie of the countryside has lived better than the proletarians of the city. However, the well-being of all peasants is not the need of the entire peasantry; petty bourgeoisie. Therefore, naturally, part of the rural petty bourgeoisie began to grow rich at the expense of the ruin of another part of the rural petty bourgeoisie. Due to this circumstance, the labor intensity of the laborers increased, and from year to year this made it possible for the Soviet government to collect more and more grain in the form of a tax and thereby feed the working class, which was fulfilling the plans of the CPSU (b): GOELRO and the five-year industrialization plan.

Everything else is a trifle, unworthy of attention, which is thrown up by anti-communists in order to somehow discredit the communist line of the Bolsheviks. As soon as the first hundred thousand tractors were made, it was decided to continue the offensive against the big and small bourgeoisie of the village, relying on the dictatorship of the working class and farm laborers, who were bred by the kulaks, i.e. the big bourgeoisie of the countryside and the kulaks. Therefore, dispossession occurred quickly and irresistibly. And the Tambov uprising is a mediocre attempt by the rural bourgeoisie to overthrow Soviet power in one province by force, a burp of the White Guard, and nothing special. We can say that this ended the entire civil war in Russia.

The lack of agriculture in tsarist Russia, the lack of proper development of agricultural science in it for some time did not allow the CPSU (b) to organize production exclusively in the form of state farms, where the life of agricultural producers would not differ significantly from the life of urban workers. The issue of training Soviet administrative personnel in the countryside, machine operators, etc., was resolved as soon as they were ready. And the collective farms, as a backward form of production, gradually became obsolete.

Some difficulties in comprehending the agrarian policy of the CPSU(b) arise only if the theoretician, publicist ceases to use the expression petty bourgeoisie, and uses the archaic word "peasant" in the old fashioned way. If a party suddenly begins to care about the petty bourgeoisie, if it begins to look for ways to reliably support this class of individualists and egoists in price formation and other things, then such a party is preparing a furious, illiterate gravedigger for itself, which was clearly manifested in 1991. The dream of idiots has come true: the collective farms have collapsed, the state farms have been strangled, and what does the modern petty bourgeoisie have in the countryside? Basically stupid, exhausting work of intimidated, disenfranchised "farmers" and their children, as in the village of Kushchevskaya.

Anti-communists brazenly parasitize on the expression "destruction of the petty bourgeoisie as a class." In fact, it was never about the destruction of people, but only about the transfer of living people to another system of values ​​and production relations, which did not allow rural minorities to ride on the neck of the majority, which directly produces material values.

As for the market for collective farm products, it was allowed not because of the low purchase prices of the state, but in connection with the petty-bourgeois thinking of the peasants, who turned out to be incapable of any other motivation for labor, except for the ruble. They say that the purchase prices for collective-farm products were unfair, they were a form of exploitation by the city of the countryside. No one will ever be able to establish any kind of stable order in the market in matters of pricing and retrospectively correct Stalin's policy, show how and what should have been done. The market is like an arena for dumb-headed gladiators who only think of one thing, how to deceive a buyer, not feed him, and also how to ruin a neighbor.

Is thirty years of rising prices on the grocery market proof of the desire of the petty bourgeoisie of Russia to better feed customers? Such is the petty bourgeoisie, which anti-communists call, for example, peasants, in order to complicate the understanding of the essence of this class and force the communists to "calculate" the cost of collective farm products, worry about the low incomes of individuals, seek a fair pricing and taxation policy, instead of developing agricultural technology, state farms, agricultural complexes .

The policy of the Communist Party in all spheres of the expanded reproduction of society must be such as to optimally approach the time when no one could be called a petty bourgeois, i.e. a peasant, an ordinary farmer, so that everyone feels like a Human and lives like a Human, so that all people are happy, regardless of the type of work and place of residence .

People who hesitate on these issues should re-read Virgin Soil Upturned, The Eternal Call, Shadows Disappear at Noon.

From the point of view of the outcome of the victory of the USSR in the war against world fascism, the entire policy of the times of Lenin and Stalin was ideal .

EDITORIAL , based on correspondence with V.A. Podguzov
02/01/2021

https://prorivists.org/53_peasants/

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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Fri Sep 30, 2022 3:30 pm

<snip>

III.The reason for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR
Thus, the following has been established or is self-evidently recognized above.

Firstly , that the USSR arose, grew stronger and won many victories as a state of immature, lower communism. Soviet society was in the first phase of communism. The essence of this stage consists in the construction of, in fact, complete, mature communism, in the struggle of communism with the aggressive remnants of exploitative formations, in the competition of communism with capitalism by realizing the superiority of the new production relations of communism over the commodity-money archaism, in the displacement of spontaneity by consciousness, scientific character.

Secondly , that the factor, that is, the cause, of the communist revolution is Bolshevism as a scientific trend of political thought and political action that organizes the revolutionary subject - the working class - under the conditions of the necessary maturation of all objective prerequisites: the level of development of the productive forces and the degree of their concentration. The final, state-monopoly phase of capitalism is the complete material preparation for the transition to communism, that is, the necessary maturation of the objective prerequisites.

Thirdly , that in the historical period of transition from capitalism to full communism, the role of subjective processes rises to a decisive one.

Fourthly , that many historical processes in the USSR after Stalin's death pointed to the development of Soviet society away from science, away from communism, back to capitalism, therefore, communism after 1953 in the USSR objectively lost in the class struggle that unfolded in all spheres of society, including the party itself.

one.Permanent Circumstances
At the same time, many historical facts that point to the creeping process of preparations for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR were born, in a sense, by two significant objective circumstances.

The first is the external enemy, the capitalist encirclement. The struggle of the world oligarchy against communism in the USSR took place in thousands of different forms: from intervention and armed rebellion to economic and individual terror.

The second is the internal enemy, fragments of the exploiting classes, remnants of the past, the petty-bourgeois composition of the population, and so on.

However, here it is necessary to understand that the struggle of world capitalism against communism in the USSR never weakened and was a resultant objective factor.

And the internal enemy, although it aggravated the forms of its struggle, but as a general cultural development of the population, the broad masses of working people, to an ever lesser extent, had an inhibitory effect on the building of communism.

The vulgar pseudo-Marxist schematism that is observed in left-wing propaganda says this: the former peasant country was unable to build communism because of its sinful past, they say, Khrushchev is an expression of the class bourgeois line of the small owner. And this is where the whole explanation of the reasons for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR ends. Loud, short and extremely dull.

At a certain stage in the development of the inner-party struggle, Stalin called the Bukharinites agents of the kulaks. But this did not mean that the kulaks had gathered for a kulak congress and issued directives to Bukharin, or, as was depicted in the cartoons: when the leaders of the opposition spoke, a kulak sat under the podium and prompted. One must correctly understand the logic of the class struggle. The mechanics of the formation of a class position can be indirect to an extreme degree. And, by the way, the Bukharinites were in fact a bunch of spies, murderers and wreckers, groveling before foreign countries - this is a reflection not only of their class position, but also quite specificforms of struggle, indicating the mechanics of the formation of their class affiliation. Therefore, the theory and practice of supporting the kulaks by the Bukharin group was in fact a completely insignificant intermediate purely external link in the consistent implementation of the goals of international capital to destroy communism in the USSR.

Petty-bourgeoisism in the 1920s was much stronger than in the 1950s, but communism did not collapse from this, and its strength from the beginning of the 1930s, on the contrary, was actively growing.

The influence of the petty-bourgeoisness factor is also emphasized by the left by such a historical fact that on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, many real communists gave their lives for the freedom of the Motherland and the peoples of the world. There is no doubt that this is indeed the case. However, at the same time, it must also be recognized that this fact did not have any visible effect until 1953. Moreover, the post-war years, along with the war won, most clearly show the advantages of communism, in this case: a record recovery of the economy and the highest rates of development of society, both economic and cultural. This allows us to conclude that the reference to the military losses of the communists as a significant factor in the issue under consideration is untenable.

Thus, the class struggle of the world oligarchy and the significant petty-bourgeoisness of the population were circumstances constantly acting as a force that hindered communism . Since the history of the USSR is essentially two lines - ascending, victorious , from 1917 to the mid-1950s and descending, defeatist , until the final bankruptcy of the CPSU and the collapse of the USSR, therefore, the reasons should not lie in the scope of the above circumstances.

2.The scope of finding the cause
Summarizing all of the above, on the basis of the Leninist-Stalinist theoretical and practical heritage, when clarifying the reasons for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, first of all, it is necessary to recognize the primacy of politics over the economy in the era of transition from capitalism to mature communism .

In private property societies, economic factors take precedence, the formation of which occurs spontaneously, regardless of the will of people. People, in this case, not understanding the essence of the application of productive forces to the substances of nature, enter into production relations blindly. It follows that these relations are formed with a significant participation of primitive social instincts, reflexes, and material interests. The resulting social conflict at the dawn of the centuries brought to life a systematic need for violence, that is, for a state that by force maintains social order. At the same time, various forms of ideological domination, justifications for private property, exploitation and violence took root.

Moreover, it is precisely capitalist production, the highest type of exploitative production, which has competition as its law, that has become strongly dependent on the development of science. And with the accumulation of applied knowledge, the prerequisites were formed for the final establishment of scientific truths in the field of social science, primarily in the field of knowledge of production relations. Thus arose the scientific theory of building communism—a society in which production relations for the first time would fully meet the objective requirements of the productive forces.

Some dogmatists will object that the productive forces of the epoch of slavery correspond objectively to the production relations of slaveholding, and also of feudalism. It turns out that if these objectors are put today in the conditions of a natural economy, given to them the tools of labor of the heyday of Rome and classical slaves in addition, then they will not establish relations of production based on scientific ideas about the most rational use of all factors of production, including, for example, , will not free the slaves and raise their level of education, but will embark on slavery with delight. As if pieces of wood and pieces of iron forbid them to use collectivist, harmonious, conflict-free production relations.

The law of the obligatory correspondence of production relations to the level of development of the productive forces actually operates in two phases: spontaneously objective and scientific. Prior to communism, this correspondence manifests itself in the form of catastrophes of the destruction of the old production relations and the old societies based on them, due to the impossibility of using new tools of labor, the impossibility of using the old means and methods of exploitation. Thus, there is a revolutionary breakdown and a change from one formation to another. Consequently, in this phase the objective correspondence of production relations to the level of development of the productive forces manifests itself exclusively in the form of an objective inconsistency with the former forms of production relations .

For seven thousand years, objective reality has "showed" mankind that the form of private property relations does not generally correspond to the social nature of the reproduction of society. In its origin it is animal, but in its manifestation it is an animal atavism. But mankind stubbornly turns a blind eye to this, and every major “kick” from the productive forces invents an ever more sophisticated form of the same private property relation, trying to deceive the objective laws of production and put off in time the inevitable annihilation of these relations. We perceive this process of changing production relations as a great progress, but in thousands of years, it will be considered a shameful and unnecessary delay in the development of humanity emerging from the bosom of nature.

The primacy of politics over economics during the period of transition from capitalism to communism was also claimed by the founders of Marxism.

Thus, Engels wrote:

“If Barthes believes that we have denied any reciprocal influence of political, etc., reflections of the economic movement on this movement itself, then he is simply fighting with windmills. He should look only at Marx's 18 Brumaire, where it is almost only about the special role played by political struggle and events, of course, within the framework of their general dependence on economic conditions; or look at Capital, for example, the section on the working day, which shows the decisive effect of legislation, which is, after all, a political act, or the section on the history of the bourgeoisie. Why then are we fighting for the political dictatorship of the proletariat if political power is economically powerless? Violence (that is, state power) is also an economic force!” (Letter to K. Schmidt, October 27, 1890).

Developing precisely this position, based on revolutionary practice, Lenin, smashing Trotsky and Bukharin, explained to the parties that

“politics cannot but have primacy over economics, to forget this means to forget the ABC of Marxism” (“Once again about trade unions, about the current situation and about the mistakes of comrades Trotsky and Bukharin”).

It follows from this that the sphere of finding the cause of the restoration of capitalism in the USSR is the sphere of functioning of the institution of political power of the dictatorship of the proletariat .

The leader of the state of the dictatorship of the working class, the leader in the system of the dictatorship of the working class, is the party and only the party. The Party is the guiding force of the dictatorship of the working class. Lenin there:

"The party, so to speak, absorbs the vanguard of the proletariat, and this vanguard implements the dictatorship of the proletariat."

If the party loses its prestige, loses the opportunity to give guidance on every important political, economic and cultural issue, then the system of working-class dictatorship collapses. Therefore, the power of various "people's presidents" who, with varying degrees of success, direct the apparatus of the bourgeois state for the benefit of the people, are only elements of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Stalin explained the chain of connection of the party, class, masses:

“The dictatorship of the proletariat consists of the directives of the party, plus the implementation of these directives by the mass organizations of the proletariat, plus their implementation by the population. Here we are dealing, as you see, with a whole series of transitions and intermediate stages, which constitute a far from unimportant moment in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Between the guiding instructions of the Party and their implementation lie, therefore, the will and actions of those led, the will and actions of the class, its readiness (or unwillingness) to support such instructions, its ability (or inability) to carry out these instructions, its ability (or inability) to carry out them exactly as the situation demands. It hardly needs to be proved that a party that has assumed leadership cannot but take into account the will, the state, the level of consciousness of those who are led, cannot ignore the will,

As can be seen, the society of the first phase of communism, or at least the most active part of this society, is a single organism welded together by the dictatorship of the working class .

It is clear that in this case it would be the height of absurdity to look for the reasons for the restoration of capitalism in the basis. It is also clear that bad leadership leads to a loss of credibility by the party and may ultimately bring about the collapse of the dictatorship of the working class. However, the history of the bankruptcy of the CPSU showed that the institution of power in the USSR, apparently due to the old perception, was very strong even with such parsley as Gorbachev. The authority of the CPSU, despite all the blatant wrecking activities of Khrushchev and the Khrushchevites, Andropov and his fosterlings, including Gorbachev, still remained on top. The system of state power stood firmly by force of habit . To destroy the USSR, the leadership of the CPSU had to create a class of Sovburs by its own decisions of the party and remove itself from power .

Therefore, if we consider politics as the sphere of finding the cause, that is, the activity of the party as the leading force of the dictatorship of the working class, then it goes without saying that in relation to politics, to strategic goals, tactics and daily work, the party theory is primary, science is Marxism .

Communism arose as a science of society, gave the goals of the class struggle in the form of a Marxist program, gave a form of organization, gave a method of taking into account concrete historical conditions, which connected the organization, initially consisting entirely of intellectuals, with the masses. Therefore, the entire communist policy, the entire practice of the dictatorship of the working class, if it wants to be victorious, is a product of Marxist theory, is a product of the working out of a general line by Marxist theoreticians.

Socio-historical practice has unambiguously proved that

"Marx's teaching is omnipotent because it is true."

However, at the same time, history has shown that Marxism is omnipotent only when it is correctly learned by at least one person in the leadership of the party, and the majority of its members strictly obey party discipline .

So the correct question looks like this:

“In order to develop an answer to the question about the specific reasons for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, it is necessary to identify, first of all, THEORETICAL causes of the POLITICAL crisis of the Soviet system, which entailed ECONOMIC transformations of a capitalist nature. With a different approach, the facts of economic life look like "fell from the sky"" - V.A. Podguzov (" Methodology of the study of the causes of the restoration of capitalism in the USSR ").

If we exclude the possibility of a military defeat due to military or political mistakes, then we should not talk about any objective reasons for the collapse of the USSR. Stalin at the 17th Congress:

“We must understand that the strength and prestige of our Party, Soviet, economic and all other organizations and their leaders have grown to an unprecedented degree. And precisely because their strength and authority have grown to an unprecedented degree, everything or almost everything now depends on their work. The reference to so-called objective conditions has no justification. After the correctness of the party's political line has been confirmed by the experience of a number of years, and the readiness of the workers and peasants to support this line is no longer in doubt, the role of the so-called objective conditions has been reduced to a minimum, while the role of our organizations and their leaders has become decisive, exclusive. What does it mean? This means that from now on nine-tenths of the responsibility for our breakthroughs and shortcomings in our work lies not with “objective” conditions, but with ourselves, and only with us.”

At the same time, the theoretical causes of the political crisis of the dictatorship of the working class, one way or another, are closely connected with the principles of the organizational structure of the party, with the quality of personnel. Lenin pointed out:

“It is impossible to distinguish exactly which issue is political and which is organizational. Any political issue can be organizational, and vice versa… It is impossible to mechanically separate the political from the organizational. Politics is conducted through people, and if other people write papers, then nothing will come of it ... It is impossible to separate organizational questions from politics ”(Speech at the 11th Party Congress).

There were no objective internal reasons for the extinction of communism in the USSR .

3.Problems of the class struggle within the communist party
Lenin taught:

“The dictatorship of the proletariat is the most ferocious, sharpest, most merciless war of the new class against a more powerful enemy, against the bourgeoisie, whose resistance is multiplied tenfold by its overthrow (at least in one country) and whose might consists not only in the strength of international capital, but in the strength and stability international relations of the bourgeoisie, but also in the force of habit "(" Childhood disease of "leftism" in communism).

If we compare the statements of Lenin, Stalin and their associates about the intra-party struggle, about factionalism, about opportunism with the positions of the post-Stalinist professors, then the difference in approach to the question of the class struggle, primarily the class struggle within the party, will clearly come out.

For example, Stalin, following Lenin, pointed out that imposing a discussion on the party is one of the forms of class struggle:

“The struggle of the opposition bloc against the ‘regime’ in the party, having nothing in common with the organizational principles of Leninism, can only lead to undermining the unity of the party, to weakening the dictatorship of the proletariat and to unleashing anti-proletarian forces in the country, trying to weaken and destroy the dictatorship.

One of the means of disintegrating party discipline and intensifying the struggle within the party, the opposition bloc chose the method of an all-Union discussion, which he tried to impose (a discussion) in October of this year” (“On the Opposition Bloc”).

And further:

“At every turn in the development of the class struggle, at every intensification of the struggle and intensification of difficulties, the difference in views, in the skills and in the moods of the various sections of the proletariat must inevitably manifest itself in the form of certain disagreements in the party, and the pressure of the bourgeoisie and its ideology must inevitably sharpen these differences, giving them an outlet in the form of a struggle within the proletarian party” (“Once More on the Social-Democratic Deviation in Our Party”).

Thus, opportunist Party members, embarking on the path of opposition, try to rely onon those sections of the party masses and the proletariat itself, which seem to them the most promising in periods of political upheavals and intensification of the class struggle from the point of view of enticing them to their side against the general line of the party. And thus the objective conditions, influencing the consciousness of the masses of the proletariat and the party masses, have an influence, in fact, on the political platform of the opposition. But this is only one way in which the class nature of the position of the intra-party faction is manifested. No less important is also the enormous force of habit, selfishness, survivals of the capitalist spirituality of the members of the opposition themselves. They consciously and purely psychologically aspire to the heights of power and glory. Giant ambitions, huge aplomb, lack of conscience and lack of knowledge of Marxism - this is a portrait of a typical active opportunist.

Lenin wrote about Trotsky:

“Trotsky is very fond of giving, ‘with a learned air of a connoisseur’, with pompous and sonorous phrases, flattering explanations for Trotsky of historical phenomena ... Right, reading such things [Trotsky’s articles], one involuntarily asks oneself whether such voices are heard from a lunatic asylum? ... Trotsky is trying to disorganize the movement and cause a split ... Trotsky therefore avoids facts and specific instructions because they mercilessly refute all his angry exclamations and pompous phrases. Of course, it is very easy to strike a pose and say: "a crude sectarian caricature" - it is very easy. It is also not difficult to add even harsher, even more pompous words about "emancipation from conservative factionalism." But isn't it really cheap? Is this weapon taken from the arsenal of that era, when did Trotsky shine in front of the high school students? … The old members of the Marxist movement in Russia know the figure of Trotsky well, and it is not worth talking about him for them. But the younger working-class generation does not know her, and one has to speak, for she is a typical figure for all those five groups abroad who, in fact, also vacillate between the liquidators and the party” (“On the Violation of Unity Covered by Cries of Unity”).

Needless to say, that in this Leninist characterization of Trotsky of the 1914 model, one can see the psychotypes of all Jews?

People on the left often do not understand that power in a class society is not only a form of violence of one class over another, but also a form of exaltation over society as a whole. Persons who are authorized to exercise power stand as ifover society, over even the class in whose interests they received their powers. Power cannot, in the strict sense, either belong directly to the masses, or be exercised directly by the masses themselves. Even if we are talking about the "masses" of a small bourgeois class. Let the reader imagine a comical situation in which state power would belong to the entire class of the bourgeoisie, not in the person of an authorized body, but in the literal sense of each individual entrepreneur. This does not happen and cannot be by definition of political power. This is a ridiculous fantasy.

Political power is always a state that, in terms of its functions, rises above society, including, in a certain sense, above the class to which it objectively relates. Power cannot exist without the support of a class, cannot but express the interests of this or that economically antagonistic class, but it cannot exist as an attribute of its class in the sense of being “smeared” among its members. Power is an anti-rational political superstructure, which is a simple cudgel for violence against people. Power is no different from the usual instrument of violence. And the instrument of violence is a separate "thing" in the hands of the rapist, and not this rapist himself.

Of course, any absolutism of an authorized or self-appointed dictator operates exclusively within the framework of the will of the ruling class, which, for the exploiting classes, in turn, is shaped not so much by consciousness or theories as by the rigid framework of material interests within the framework of private property relations. Der Konig absolut, wenn er unseren Willen tut - the king is autocratic as long as he does our will.

If the arbitrariness of an authorized or self-appointed person, for example, the president, suddenly leads to a deterioration in the economic situation of a critical number of "respectable people", then he will have a hard time. But this fact is often realized by petty tyrants who have seized power after violating the boundaries of this will of the ruling class, during palace coups, military conspiracies, impeachments, resignations or contract executions.

Because of this specificity, power seekers aspire to high positions, parliamentary status and other high places in the social hierarchy. Often they are not so much interested in pursuing any political line as purely psychologically enjoying their high position. These primitive atavisms of animal dominance play their well-known, generally insignificant, but still significant role in the political struggle for power. And thus they play a certain role, also as a source of opportunist and renegade movements in communism.. And considering that the will of the working class, which has taken state power, rises from the dictate of material interests to a certain theoretical formulation, aspirations for social progress in the form of communism, then the degree of freedom of authorized persons is significantly expanding.

The dictatorship of the working class is possible in general only as a product of the class's unprecedented confidence in its vanguard, its state, and especially the top of this state . If such a society carries out the construction of communism properly, then this trust develops into a conscious understanding of necessity . If such a society is marking time, then the party sooner or later loses the trust, support and system of the dictatorship of the working class, despite all its armed forces, special services, and so on, is destroyed at once and the bourgeoisie, supporters of private property, seizes power.

If we take the official theory of the CPSU after the death of Stalin, then in it the question of the purity of the ranks of the party, on the one hand, has become a purely historical question, they say, once upon a time we had opportunism, and then it didn’t. On the other hand, the question of the purity of the party's ranks has turned into unbridled moralizing on the basis of the god-building of the "moral code of the builder of communism" adopted at the 22nd Party Congress. Party cells, having undeservedly hoisted over themselves the banner of the mind, honor and conscience of the era, with a gleam in their eyes sorted out minor everyday issues, mired in a swamp of petty squabbles, the cult of petty-bourgeois ambitions and permanent squabbles. And the last thing that interested the members of the CPSU was Marxism, the class struggle and the building of communism. The theoretical front, in this case, was whollyat the mercy of the accursed academicians, who under Stalin were shpuned along this front in every more or less major issue.

The Leninist-Stalinist principles of conducting the theoretical form of the class struggle lie in the fact that the party leadership and, in fact, the leaders of the party themselves serve as the guiding force . And Khrushchev and Brezhnev gave the program of the CPSU to "outsourcing", not to mention the daily scientific and theoretical work that paves the way for political practice. Khrushchev boasted that more than a hundred scientists worked on the third program of the CPSU for three years. Read: more than a hundred Liebermans.

Stalin himself prepared a theoretical model of communism in the work "Economic problems of socialism in the USSR." After that, the decision of the XIX Congress was adopted:

"one. Consider it necessary and timely to rework the existing program of the party.

2. When reworking the program, be guided by the main provisions of Comrade Stalin's work "Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR."

Consequently, neither the Academicians, nor even the Mitins and Kuusinens and Pospelovs, namely, Stalin wrote the party program, having a comradely exchange of opinions with his closest associates. Lenin also wrote the party program.

A careful study of the draft program, prepared by decision of the February Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1947, allows us to see a sharp contrast with Stalin's work "The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR." And this despite the leading role in the project of such a respected Marxist as Zhdanov. Consequently, the opportunism of the third program of the CPSU was not introduced into the party, and even in the ranks of its command staff, from outside, it budded there under Stalin. And even the closest associates misunderstood some fundamental theoretical points. Another question is that the Marxist insight and genius of the leader, his tireless personal theoretical and practical work did not allow the party to overgrow with the mugs of opportunism.

Further. In the late Soviet version of Marxist theory, the main enemy of communism is declared to be completely abstract imperialists, mostly located overseas. The glossing over of the class struggle within the country, the complete denial of the class struggle within the Party, were in themselves the greatest ideological diversions of Trotskyism .

Thus, it should be recognized that the problem of the class struggle within the party is a key link in the study of the causes of the restoration of capitalism in the USSR. Stupidity, theoretical weakness, lack of conscience, betrayal are so closely intermingled in the history of opportunism and renegacy that they sometimes constitute such an explosive mixture of unscrupulousness that does not make it possible to accurately identify the ultimate motives of scoundrels.

Continued following post.
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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Fri Sep 30, 2022 3:34 pm

(Continued from previous post)

four.The roots of opportunism in anthroposociogenesis
Predation is the relationship of organisms in which the predator uses the prey as food. Slavery, serfdom and hired labor are quite correctly called softened forms of cannibalism. Only a predator-exploiter consumes not the flesh of its victims, but the time of their life, thus turning people into a primitive source of their well-being and their idleness.

Parasitism - the relationship of organisms in which the parasite does not kill its host, but for a long time uses it as a habitat and food source. Parasites include viruses, pathogenic bacteria, fungi, protozoa, parasitic worms, and entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs, unlike wolves, worms or bedbugs, enter into both these types of interaction with the proletariat simultaneously in the form of private property relations.

Opportunism in this case is rooted in the natural ability of an organism from the category of victims to adapt to the objective conditions of predatory-parasitic relationships.

As you know, at a certain stage of development, living matter arises from inanimate matter, which is much more complex and capable of special forms of movement in the form of a response to its environment. If in the material world of inanimate substances the force of action gives rise to a counteraction that is equal in strength and opposite in direction directly and instantly, then in the organic world, as it were, indirectly and through more complex forms of interaction.

Under the pressure of external conditions, any organism accumulates its internal forces of resistance not only for direct "repulsion", but also changing itself, thereby reducing the load of external conditions, adapting to them. In inanimate material nature, an analogue of adaptation in a sense is the opposition of certain substances to external pressure, for example, in the form of an increase in their density. If you hit a piece of metal with the same deforming force, then it “compensates” for the lack of internal counterforce by changing its structure in the form of an increase in density. Thus, after a few blows, the impact force and the reaction force are equalized and the deformation will stop.

In a living organism, approximately the same thing happens, only at a much higher level, and is called the body's response to an external stimulus. Plants reflect the conditions of their habitat in a primitive form of irritability. Animals, unlike plants, move independently, therefore they gradually put together complex organic apparatuses of vital activity for this function - the respiratory, digestive, circulatory and, finally, the nervous systems. As a result, the form of reflection also changed to a more complex one - reflex. Here there is already not simple irritability, but the well-known dynamics of unconditioned and conditioned reflexes, which is based on the transmission of stereotyped reactions by inheritance. Thus, memorization, a direct approach to higher nervous activity, becomes the condition for the stable existence of a highly developed animal.

Memorization as a form of mental activity gives rise to the opposite with the need to act contrary to the established habit in atypical situations. This is a repetition at a new dialectical round of development of the folding of unconditioned reflexes through the acquisition and development of conditioned ones. As a result, the free orientation of the animal in space and in the material conditions of its habitat appears.

On the basis of this higher mental activity, in some species a higher form of collective life activity arose—herding. Herding gave man collectivity, and higher mental activity gave the possibility of labor. So, the great apes gradually developed dexterous hands, upright posture, including for the release of the vocal cords, and thus communication in the form of articulate speech. As a result, man created tools that gave a surplus product. The reproduction of human society has become, almost independently of external natural conditions, steadily expanded.

The transformation of nature is also a peculiar way of adapting man to his environment, but purely social. At the same time, it is clear that the former forms of adaptation, including the survival instinct, continue to play a certain role in the human psyche.

The establishment of private property relations with the development of the productive forces proves that animal atavisms are still very influential in human society. On this basis, in the conditions of the emerging extreme conflict of society, the psychology of adaptation is born .

The natural property of man - the universal property of living beings to adapt to the prevailing environmental conditions - thus manifests itself in two ways: consciously - as labor, "adaptation" through the transformation of nature, and unconsciously - as submission to nature and the prevailing social conditions.

But passively adapting to the conditions of class oppression does not mean being an opportunist. The class division of society is objective, and everyone who lives in such a society is forced to reckon with this, and therefore adapt. But when a special taste is manifested in this process, when a person moves from a passive need to adapt to an active game according to the prevailing "rules" in order to improve his position or rise above others, then personality traits are added that make a person prone to opportunism.

Accompanying opportunism, as a form of political practice, is ignorance. When an active person, including one who has been driven to the brink, does not know what it would be scientifically correct to oppose to the domination of the bourgeoisie, he objectively either slides into adaptation or falls into a desperate individualistic attack “on the system”.

Summarizing what has been said above about the mechanism of adaptation, it must be admitted that the opportunist is a kind of scavenger, sang along with the bourgeoisie, a filthy bourgeois rump .

V.A. Diapers:

“The presence of a ruling class of entrepreneurs inevitably gives rise to a layer of people who adapt to this objective reality. In turn, the presence of people who adapt to the existence of the bourgeois class makes the life of the bourgeoisie more stable and secure. A symbiosis typical of the animal world arises, similar to the symbiosis of predators and scavengers of various kinds, up to and including those busy picking out rotting food debris from the crocodile's mouth and only therefore not eaten by the crocodile.

Therefore, the dialectic of the relationship between victory and defeat in the struggle against opportunism is as follows: it is impossible to defeat opportunism without defeating the bourgeoisie, and at the same time, it is impossible to defeat the bourgeoisie without defeating opportunism. Moreover, the victory over opportunism is, in relation to the victory over the bourgeoisie, a necessary condition. Necessary but not sufficient. A sufficient condition for eradicating opportunism forever is the victory over the bourgeoisie itself. As long as the bourgeoisie exists, opportunism is inevitable. Therefore, giving a definition of opportunism, I argue that in its generic affiliation it is a kind of atavism, in its essence it is a form of social mimicry, adaptation, adaptation, in content it is a product of ignorance, both graduated and slum.

In order to defeat the bourgeoisie, in order to stop being a cash cow in the hands of others, it is necessary to surpass the exploiters in mental development. There is no other means of getting rid of opportunism, that is, of the most disguised form of servility, than enriching one's memory with the knowledge of all those riches that mankind has developed - does not exist!

Either the proletarian, with the help of the Communist Party, will surpass the bourgeoisie in understanding the laws of social development, or he will continue to “progress” in his servility.



Unfortunately, in most cases the opportunism of the proletariat is regarded by many as an unfortunate, temporary and not very significant misunderstanding. Meanwhile, real history and the present state of the former socialist system show that in the unity and struggle of the two opposites—revolutionary and opportunistic—in the psychology of the proletariat, opportunism, animal opportunism, temporarily again took over.

It is easy to imagine how productive the process of combating opportunism in the communist parties would have been if the syndrome of venality had not been embedded in the deepest properties of the proletariat. Opportunism within the communist parties parasitizes and develops on the opportunism of the proletariat itself, but at the same time, party opportunism is an important condition for the stability and strengthening of opportunism among the proletarians” (“ On Some Methodological Problems of Analyzing the Nature of Opportunism ”).

There is no doubt that the motivation of an opportunist is of great interest from the point of view of the struggle against opportunism.

The complex of personal qualities of a person who is conducive to opportunism and turning into an enemy of the revolution can be characterized as a symbiosis of swagger and double-dealing .

It is known that absolutely negative and absolutely positive character traits do not exist. An overlap of beneficial qualities at first glance will give a completely ugly result, and vice versa. Thus, a Marxist needs a certain balance, observance of measure. The basic moral principles that rule out opportunism are absolute sincerity with oneself and one's comrades, heroic devotion to the cause, conscientiousness and merciless self-criticism. These are those personality traits prepared by diamatics, the configuration of which does not violate the necessary limits of measure.

The opportunist, on the other hand, is a jelly-like creature who serves the cause of the counter-revolution, as it were, due to circumstances, due to mental weakness. But every opportunist, being unexposed for a long time, in the conditions of the intensification of the class struggle, turns into an aggressive enemy of communism. He is beginning to mobilize all his forces and means in his struggle against the Party and communism. The logic of factional struggle is stronger than the will of individuals.

5.The opportunistic degeneration of the party leadership is the reason for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR
So, when identifying the reasons for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, it is extremely insufficient to enumerate the economic and even political reforms of the CPSU, which ultimately prepared the very revolution of the bourgeoisie. A careful examination of the activities of Khrushchev, Kosygin, Andropov, Gorbachev and Yakovlev allows us to conclude that they put into practice the trial and error method. And all their practice is some kind of trial that ended in crushing failures for the country.

As for the period of the direct destruction of the USSR, even this task was not carried out by the wrecking leadership of the CPSU as brilliantly as Yakovlev recalled in the preface to The Black Book of Communism.

But in the end, to destroy is not to build, so the Gorbachevites were able to remove the CPSU from power, thereby removing the demoralized working class from power. Thus, the Sovburs, crystallized from shadow workers, "red directors", "Komsomol members" and party apparatchiks, with their class appetites, became a real alternative to Soviet power.

The perestroika did not proclaim anything cunning. They undermined the political hegemony of the working class with their reforms and their propaganda.

Certainly such reforms and such statements could not have been made in the 1950s or 1960s, but the Soviet society of the 1980s was already demoralized enough to believe in the most clumsy propaganda of "pluralism" or the free market.

Therefore, Khrushchev's influence on the collapse of the USSR is associated more with the discrediting of Marxism, with the ideological and theoretical undermining of the authority of Marxism, the scientific solidity of the theory and practice of Marxism, than with the transfer of MTS equipment to collective farms or even the reform of 1957.

It should be noted that all Khrushchev's sabotage was carried out within the framework of a single propaganda process - “the debunking of the personality cult of I.V. Stalin." Khrushchev thus "plowed" public consciousness, party ethics, turned the already ideologically frail intelligentsia upside down, undermined the authority of communism and the unity of the world's communist parties. But this was still not enough for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.

And in the 1980s, Soviet society was already sufficiently corrupted by anti-Marxism and petty-bourgeois ideology. Gorbachev's propaganda pearls, even now, under Putin, are striking in their clumsiness.

Adviser to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU on Economics Aganbegyan said:

“Housing is not part of the market right now. I live in a large four-room apartment and pay only 20 rubles a month for it. I got this apartment from the state. When I die, my son will have it. All this is free. At the same time, there is a severe shortage of housing, and there are people living in appalling conditions. My daughter lives in a two-room apartment with a family of four. She can't get on the housing improvement waiting list because there are too many who have worse housing conditions than hers. So she's not supposed to. I have money and I am her father. I want to buy her the best apartment so that my grandson can live in better conditions. But this is impossible. You can get an apartment for free. But money can't. And this is not only the case for apartments. I want a plot of land near Moscow. I have money to pay for it. But I can't buy land. I can get this site for free. But they may not give it to me. I have a Volvo, a good car. But there is no garage. I can't buy a garage. Nobody builds them and so on. People are willing to buy things like cars, land, better housing. But the government won't let them spend their money."

From the draft platform of the Central Committee of the CPSU for the XXVIII Congress:

“The deep roots of the crisis… false ideas about socialism, dictatorship carried out by the party-state elite on behalf of the proletariat… Let us recall the clarity of the party’s ideas in 1917: land to the peasants, power to the Soviets, factories to the workers. Why not fulfill these slogans today. After all, they are also relevant, with only a small difference - property must be taken from our administrative-party-bureaucratic team and transferred to the people, people, individuals.

Gorbachev:

“The market makes it possible to objectively and to some extent without the intervention of the bureaucracy measure the labor contribution of each producer ... outside the market economy it is impossible to implement the principle of distribution according to work ... The spirit of free enterprise must be encouraged in every possible way in society. It would seem obvious things, but with what tortuous paths and with what delay we come to an understanding of these truths!

“Go through deep revolutionary reforms, not through confrontation, not through a new version of civil war. Enough of the confrontation between whites and reds, blacks and blues. We are one country, one society, and within the framework of political pluralism, comparing programs in the face of the people, we must find answers that would meet the fundamental interests of the country and move it forward.



Put an end to the very principle of class dictatorship, finally close the seventy-year split in our society. To tear out the roots of a deep civil conflict, to create constitutional mechanisms in which relations between social strata and people are clarified not with the help of massacre and bloodshed, but through politics.”

Can you imagine such cheap vulgarity in the 1950s or 1960s?

The very fact that the legal ban on the CPSU took place with the consent of the General Secretary, the entire composition of the Politburo, the Central Committee, and with the complete inactivity of local organizations , suggests that the reason for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR lies in the class defeat within the leadership of the CPSU. Essentially, it's a betrayal.

But what is the reason that the enemies of the people have settled right in the leadership of the CPSU?

After Stalin's death, the CPSU forgot what opportunism is, they forgot the objective law of revolutionary struggle about the irreconcilability of ideologies . Factionalism was thus considered to be some insignificant discrepancy in the understanding of Marxism, an originality of views.

And the CPSU forgot about opportunism solely because the CPSU itself went headlong into the swamp of this very opportunism.

The propaganda apparatus of the CPSU (b) and the quality of personnel has always been not up to par. Lenin wrote that there was no real "Soviet, socialist", cultural apparatus, or rather

“the elements of such an apparatus are ridiculously few, and we must remember that to create it ... we need to spend many, many, many years” (“Better less, but better”).

Lenin pointed out that at least half of the communists do not know how to fight, and many simply interfere with the struggle for communism.

Stalin said that the party activists do not own the theory of Marxism, they are trying to solve the problems facing the country in a directive, to take it in a swoop and agility.

The result of the personnel state of the Stalinist party can be estimated from the 19th Congress. In his report on the work of the Central Committee, Malenkov pointed out that

“In many Party organizations there is an underestimation of ideological work, as a result of which this work lags behind the tasks of the Party, and in a number of organizations it is in a neglected state. Ideological work is the primary duty of the Party, and underestimation of this work can cause irreparable harm to the interests of the Party and the state. We must always remember that any weakening of the influence of socialist ideology means a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology.

... The underestimation of ideological work is largely the result of the fact that some of our leading cadres do not work to raise their consciousness, do not replenish their knowledge in the field of Marxism-Leninism, do not enrich themselves with the historical experience of the party. And without this, it is impossible to become full-fledged mature leaders. He who lags behind in ideological and political terms, lives by memorized formulas and does not feel the new, he is not able to correctly understand the internal and external situation, cannot and is not worthy to be at the head of the movement, life sooner or later will write him off. Only such a leader can rise to the height of the tasks of our Party, who constantly works on himself, creatively masters Marxism-Leninism, develops and improves in himself the qualities of a leader of the Leninist-Stalinist type.

... The task of Party organizations is to decisively put an end to the harmful underestimation of ideological work, to intensify this work in all links of the Party and the state, to untiringly expose all manifestations of ideology alien to Marxism. It is necessary to develop and improve socialist culture, science, literature, art, to direct all means of ideological and political influence, our propaganda, agitation, the press, to improve the ideological preparation of the communists, to increase the political vigilance and consciousness of the workers, peasants and intelligentsia. All our cadres, all without exception, must work to raise their ideological level, to master the rich political experience of the Party, so as not to lag behind life and stand at the height of the Party's tasks. Necessary,

It can be seen that already in 1952 there was no mention of opportunism. The struggle is being waged, as it were, against bourgeois ideology, which, of course, is formally correct, but expressed too vaguely. From the newspaper publications of the 19th Congress that have come down to us, we can conclude that the leadership of the party recognized serious gaps in the Marxist training of cadres, including commanders.

The post-Stalin period of the existence of the CPSU showed that if the Marxist party, in the conditions of a capitalist environment, does not work hard enough to educate leaders of the Leninist-Stalinist level and cut in its environment, then the construction of communism stalls and, ultimately, the party degrades and collapses .

The Lenin-Stalin victorious period showed that the subjective factor of the revolution can be considered mature if the party is headed by a leader who knows Marxism and skillfully applies Marxism in organizational practice .

Of course, a more stable factor is the presence of a scientific center, consisting of comrades, approximately equal to each other in intellectual power and high moral qualities. However, the vileness of capitalist life, the scum of the grafted class culture significantly hinder the development of conditions for the productive education of real communists.

Historical practice has shown that the wide circulation and even the wide development of the study of Marxist works turned out to be categorically insufficient .

For example, the ingenious book "A Short Course", created by Stalin taking into account specific historical propaganda tasks, was published more than 300 times in 67 languages ​​with a total circulation of almost 43 million copies. Based on the study of the "Short Course", circle work was launched with a powerful impetus, in which non-party people were also massively involved. Thus, in the 1930s and 1940s, all more or less mature supporters of Soviet power at least read the Short Course, and many studied it in good faith under the supervision and instruction of party propagandists. And indeed, no matter what copy of this book you pick up, you can immediately see that the pages were read out for holes, many have characteristic pencil marks and marginalia.

A similar situation was with the main works of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Moreover, Stalin’s article, “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR”, read out and approved by the party as the guiding article, is directly opposed in its content to the main theses of the XXII Congress, the third program of the CPSU, and in key places even the famous textbook by Ostrovityanova, Shepilov and others of 1954.

The conviction of a true Marxist in this or that theoretical proposition does not depend on party directives, opportunist programs, textbooks, articles, and the like. Consequently, there were catastrophically few people in the USSR who really understood Marxism on the basis of studying the works of the classics. The CPSU accepted with a bang both the brilliant Marxist truths of Lenin and Stalin, and opportunism, periodically turning into the idiocy of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Gorbachev.

Stalin only in the post-war years began to build a system for training party cadres at a level of higher requirements than during the NEP years. The low level of diamatic training of party cadres in the conditions of constant time pressure of economic tasks has become the basis for the growth of opportunism, since there is no way to cross the ideologies of antagonistic classes, Marxism and all varieties of anti-scientific positions.

The discussions unleashed by the Trotskyists after the death of Lenin and the opportunistic turn of the Communist Party after the death of Stalin proved that literally everything is decided by the presence of a competent leader, determines the direction of the development of the party, and after it the class, the state and the whole society. Of course, Lenin and Stalin had loyal comrades-in-arms who rallied around them and thus increased their strength tenfold. Stalin himself was a reliable collaborator of Lenin.

Supporters of the Stalinist course lost to Khrushchev after the death of the leader due to the fact that they all clashed with each other on a philistine, intriguing level. But if in such clashes Lenin and Stalin defeated the opportunists by the fact that in scientific terms they were head and shoulders above their competitors, including Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin, and because of this they were also head and shoulders above them in organizational matters, because they knew how to convince the majority.

Lenin and Stalin at first sought to convince the minority, to create in advance, and not at the congress or plenum itself, a narrow circle of real like-minded people, to equip them with a deep understanding of the essence of political problems, to train bright orators, bright publicists in the press, to help them gain authority among the masses, and then they began to fight for the majority at plenums and congresses. And in fact, even this enlightened majority was a minority in relation to the entire population, and therefore propaganda had to be backed up legally, organizationally, politically, and most importantly, with practical results. For example, the New Economic Policy at first in gold pieces, since the middle peasants did not understand another language, collectivization - with tractors and MTS, and so on.

However, in certain cases, no genius can save against a mediocre pack that has penetrated the party solely for the sake of a career or satisfying its lust for power.

Thus, the reason for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR was the incompetence of the members of the CPSU, especially in its leadership, in matters of practical construction of communism . In this historical situation, the factor of opportunism counteracted the factor of diamatic competence in the person of the leader. While Stalin was alive, the prerequisite for the restoration of capitalism was suppressed, and communism was being built in the USSR; after Stalin's death, neither a leader nor a competent center was found, so the opportunism factor first established itself, strengthened, and then won.

The headless, brainless CPSU held on out of habit, at the will of the working class, but the agents of imperialism shook its power, and thus capitalism in the USSR was restored. Economic reforms and, in general, all changes in the basis of the USSR served as a means of undermining the political power of the working class , as well as endless ideological sabotage .

And democratic centralism was a way of multiplying and spreading opportunism within the party , a way of capturing the leadership of the CPSU .

Lenin and Stalin, in the organizational structure of the party, applied a scientific approach to personnel and organization, therefore they pursued the principle of the most severe scientific centralism .

Khrushchev, Mikoyan and others, after Stalin's death, revised the established practice, rejected the Leninist-Stalinist theoretical legacy on the issue of organizational building, and proclaimed party democracy. It is by voting for each other that the opportunists seize the leadership of all organizations .

The opportunism that has seized the leadership of the CPSU must be presented from two sides. First , in terms of theoretical content, it is tailism, economism, vulgar economic determinism . Because it is precisely in the theoretical formulation of the stages passed, in the denial of the aggressiveness of communism, in flirting with the form of existence of capitalism, that is, money, that the opportunistic adaptation of the practice of the working class in the interests of the bourgeoisie is rooted. Roughly speaking, the cultivation of proletarianism, that is, the condition of people as an appendage of capital, in all forms, constitutes opportunism in its content.

Secondly , in its motivation and in the formation of an ideological constitution, it is consistent anti-Stalinism .

If you trace the movement of Trotsky's political thought, he almost always speaks in such a way as to seem as original as possible. His pre-October position could be characterized as consistent anti-Leninism, but without adhering to Menshevism in words. In the period up to 1924, on all important issues, Trotsky always said the opposite of Lenin, and actively factioned. During the mid-1920s, Trotsky opposed Stalin and other ideological centers, and after Stalin's victory over all opponents in the theoretical struggle, Trotsky now takes a position strictly opposite to Stalin. In many respects this line of absolute ideological lack of principle is characteristic of any opportunism. To be against —this is the "ideological" basis of opportunism in the presence of a truly Marxist position.

The Khrushchevites and Gorbachevites, for the most part, were motivated precisely as fierce opponents of Stalin, they acted out of banal revenge. Just as thousands of specialist wreckers, former landlords and kulaks derailed trains, blew them up, broke them down, smashed them for completely worthless dirty reasons, so a mature opportunist in power is a synonym for a dirty trickster, a capricious dirty man, a bastard .

Moreover, during the period of Stalin's life, it was the Khrushchevites who, in hysterical fits, praised the leader, secretly, of course, hating him with all the wrinkled folds of their soul no less than Novodvorskaya and Radzinsky, which was also a kind of sabotage. It was the anti-Stalinist actors who set the tone for excessive tasteless pathos, playing on the base feelings of the crowd.

In addition, the organizational structure of the party played an important role in the theme of the maturation of the cause, since democracy is an expression of spontaneity, and therefore a stronghold of opportunism.

The chronology of the descending line of communism in the USSR is as follows. After Stalin's death, the enemies of communism, masquerading as communists, established themselves in the leadership of the party through democratic centralism. Stalin's comrades-in-arms, the Marxists, lost to Khrushchev and his group due to the fact that they all clashed with each other on a philistine, intriguing level.

Further, the Khrushchevites revised Marxism with Stalin's personality cult theory, the party's theory of the collective mind, the tactics of building communism by 1980, the communist moral code and other opportunist acts, and turned the daily government policy into a subversive undermining of the economic and ideological foundations of communist construction. The Khrushchevites deliberately split the world communist movement in order to weaken it.

Therefore, during the period of Khrushchevism, the Trotskyists who made their way into the leadership of the party shook the power of the party, the economic and political development of the USSR and the countries of the Warsaw Pact was directed along a false anti-scientific path, the international communist movement was undermined and split; during the leadership of the party by Brezhnev, these processes were slowed down; during the period of Andropov-Gorbachev, a conscious, meaningful active ideological and socio-economic preparation was carried out for the restoration of capitalism by sexots and renegades. In short, the work of Trotsky-Zinoviev-Bukharin-Khrushchev to mature the prerequisites for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR was continued.

But at the same time, all these actions were carried out, firstly , within the framework of the will and consciousness of the working class of the USSR at every historical moment, and secondly , despite the fact that the economic system of the first phase of communism was not replaced by a capitalist one. Thus, the party and the state, by their class nature, remained communist, but their policy, that is, the development of ways and means, was carried out unscientifically, incorrectly, to the detriment of the real goal of building a communist society, and in the second half of the 1980s was completely aimed at destroying the country .

However, the process of revolution and the process of counter-revolution proceed according to the diamatic law of negation of negation. A political upheaval, whether revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, takes place all at once,and the objective and subjective prerequisites for it are formed by all historical development over a relatively long time. The moment of the destruction of the Soviet working class is the political moment of its transformation into a class of proletarians, that is, the moment of changing the essence of production relations, primarily between the working people themselves. Moreover, one should not confuse the moment of legal fixation of the fact of a political coup with the moment of its real occurrence. For example, "voucherization" only legalized the destruction of the working class. After the voucherization, the combined owners of all the country's means of production became de jure owners exclusively of their labor force. But in order to step into capitalism, so that from the scattered facts of social injustice,political dictatorship . And it installs instantly.

Sovburs and imperialist agents, including having made their way into the CPSU, organized a series of civil wars and mass pogroms in the 1980s, but were unable to sway the Soviet people to more than the construction of "market socialism". Moreover, it was not only in the USSR. Neither in 1956 in Hungary, nor in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, nor in 1981 in Poland, nor in 1989 in China did the bourgeoisie succeed in establishing capitalism because they failed in political coups. Until 1991, in the USSR, troops were still used against the democrats, but half-heartedly and bashfully. Only having managed to organize a provocation under the name of the GKChP, the bourgeoisie, almost overnight, took away political power from the CPSU. After that, the power structures already dispersed left-wing demonstrations, and in October 1993 they carried out a mass execution in the center of Moscow, thereby proving thatin August 1991 the capital suddenly came to political power . Then the bourgeoisie finally shook up the administrative apparatus, established its own state with an appropriate legal framework. This is how the restoration of capitalism in the USSR took place.

Identification of the reasons for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR makes it possible to develop a Marxist program that takes into account this negative experience in order, firstly , to protect the communist revolution from such defeats, secondly , to correct the theory of building communism as a whole, and thirdly , to rehabilitate the communists before the masses and the most start folding a batch of a new type. The latter question is the subject of the theory of scientific centralism .

A. Redin
14/03/2018 (fifth edition of 01/09/2019)

https://prorivists.org/reason_of_counterrevolution/

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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Tue Oct 18, 2022 3:12 pm

Kick 'em when they're down and keep on dancin'...

GORBACHEV AND THE SOVIET COLLAPSE
Posted by Roger Keeran | Oct 17, 2022

Gorbachev and the Soviet Collapse
October 10, 2022

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This is a modified version of a presentation by Roger Keeran to the Institute for the Critical Study of Society of the Niebyl-Proctor Library, September 25, 2022. -THE EDITORS.


I would like to thank you for this invitation, my second invitation to speak to your group.

I would first like to acknowledge my co-author Joe Jamison. Joe deserves the credit for coming up with the idea to write a book on the Soviet collapse. This has led to 20 years of collaboration. We have spoken together in France, Greece, and Cuba. We continue to collaborate on the website Marxism-Leninism Today. It has been 20 years of work and friendship.

I will divide my comments on Gorbachev and the Soviet Collapse into three parts.

First, I will make some preliminary observations on Gorbachev’s death.

Second, I will summarize our view of Gorbachev’s role in the Soviet collapse that we presented in Socialism Betrayed.

Finally, I will deal with one of the most intriguing questions about Gorbachev: when and why did he turn against Marxism-Leninism and become a social-democrat?

Gorbachev’s Death

Mikhail Gorbachev died on August 30 at the age of 91. According to the British Independent on September 3, he was laid to rest, in the presence of hundreds of Russian mourners. In an interesting contrast, a few years ago in France I saw a film on the funeral of Enrico Berlinguer, the leader of the Italian Communist Party. When Berlinguer died in 1984, after a life of standing steadfastly for the working class, the Italian party and his Marxist-Leninist principles, there were not hundreds but over a million Italian mourners at his funeral, the largest funeral ever in Italy.

Of course, Gorbachev was not without his mourners and eulogists, but they were not the Russian workers, the former citizens of the Soviet Union, or the workers of the world. They were not the Afghans who were left at the tender mercy of the American military and Muslim fundamentalists after Gorbachev abandoned them. They were not the Cubans whose lives were thrown into the misery of the so-called Special Period, after Gorbachev ended some billions of dollars a year in sugar and oil subsidies. They were not the Russian soldiers or Ukrainians who were dying in a war that never would have occurred had the Soviet Union persisted. Those shedding tears were the bankers, journalists and other apologists of imperialism. The western press was filled with fawning obituaries. Reading them one could hardly keep from choking on their effrontery and hypocrisy.

James A. Baker III, Secretary of State under George Bush, said: “The free world will be forever grateful to him,” a man with “an upbeat attitude that buoyed everyone, “a very courageous leader who was an inspiring advocate of more freedom.” In a similar vein, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, wrote: Gorbachev “possessed both the idealism and political skill to generate something in the world…exceedingly rare: a sense of decency and promise.”

The greatest common denominator of Gorbachev’s purported accomplishments was, in the words of James Baker, “the pivotal role he played in the peaceful end of the Cold War.”

To be generous, it is true the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the U.S. ended, but only because the Soviet Union ended. Gorbachev hardly ushered in a more peaceful world. Indeed, the reverse is true. The so-called end of the Cold War not only failed to lead to any reduction in nuclear arms, but it emboldened United States imperialists to engage in new hot wars in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, and Libya and to expand NATO in a way that provoked the current conflict in the Ukraine. We might add, it also emboldened the United States to initiate a new Cold War against China.

After Gorbachev, is the world safer from nuclear war? Not according to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. Speaking on August 5, three weeks before Gorbachev died, Guterres said: that a new arms race is picking up speed, almost 13,000 nuclear weapons currently existed in arsenals around the world. “Crises with grave nuclear undertones are spreading fast — from the Middle East to the Korean peninsula, to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine… Humanity is playing with a loaded gun.”

In all of the mainstream reflections on Gorbachev’s life, there are three striking images that you will not find.

The first image has to do with Najibullah who was the General Secretary of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. This was the party that tried to revolutionize Afghanistan. It brought economic growth of 24 percent a year to a country mired in feudalism and tribalism. It brought education to a country that was 90 percent illiterate. Indeed, the civil war of the warlords against the People’s Democratic Party began with their assassination of the teachers of girls. (See Phillip Bonosky, Afghanistan: Washington’s Secret War which recounts these accomplishments.)

The Soviet Union steadfastly supported the Afghan government. The Soviets, however, resisted sending troops until 1979. Then, after three requests by the Afghan government and after the CIA began to aid the Muslim fundamentalists in what became the largest CIA operation in the world, the Soviet Union sent troops. (Zbigniew Brzezinksi, President Carter’s National Security Advisor said, “We knowingly increased the probability that they [the Soviets] would [intervene].” One could say the same thing about the Ukraine. The American expansion of NATO and plan to incorporate the Ukraine knowingly increased the probability of a Russian intervention.)

One of Gorbachev’s first foreign policy moves was to stop blaming imperialism for the conflict in Afghanistan and to signal his desire to withdraw. Gorbachev soon reversed the policies of Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, who had viewed Afghan aid as an expression of international solidarity. Sarah Mendelson, a historian of the war points out that Gorbachev’s decision was not caused by battlefield retreats or opposition to the war at home. It was, as one says in chess, an unforced error caused by Gorbachev’s desire to conciliate the United States.

Within a few years, the Soviets had withdrawn, and the Najibullah government was overthrown by the Taliban. Najibullah and others took refuge in the UN offices in Kabul. On the night of September 22, 1996. The Taliban abducted him from UN custody, castrated him, tortured him to death, and dragged his corpse behind a truck through the streets of Kabul. They then hanged his body from a lamp post outside the presidential palace.

This image of Gorbachev’s reign did not make it into the obits.

The second image you will not see relates to Cuba. The Soviet Union supported Cuba since the revolution. Khrushchev stood with Cuba during the missile crisis. And the Soviet Union had given Cuba about $5 billion a year in cheap oil and other necessities to counteract the American blockade. Gorbachev ended this exercise in internationalism and plunged Cuba into economic misery in what Cuba calls the “Special Period.” Between 1990 and 1993 Cuba’s Gross National Product fell 50 percent.

Two decades later in 2014, Joe and I visited Manual Yepe, one of the leaders of the Cuban Revolution, and his wife Marta, both of whom were responsible for getting our book on the Soviet Union published in Cuba. Marta, who taught at the University of Havana, said it was striking how she could always tell which of her students were children during the Special Period. Because of the malnutrition during the Special Period, the children of this period grew up stunted, a fact that remained obvious about them as young adults.

This image too did not make it into the obits.

The third image to which I draw your attention is of Gorbachev himself.

In 1996, six years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, gangster capitalists and foreign investors were pillaging the factories and mines that Russian workers had built over 70 years. The country’s economy collapsed by 50 percent. Incomes plunged. Life expectancy declined to what it was under the czar. Russia underwent what historian Stephen F. Cohen called an “unprecedented de-modernization.” This year 1996 Gorbachev ran for president of Russia. Everywhere Gorbachev campaigned Russians heckled and reviled him. In the election, Gorbachev received .5 percent of the vote. Boris Yeltsin got 36 percent of the vote, and the Communist Gennady Zyuganov got 33 percent.

At the same time, Gorbachev, the erstwhile self-proclaimed Leninist, made a television commercial for Pizza Hut, a gig for which he was reportedly payed $1 million.

The images of Gorbachev of being heckled and of Gorbachev munching an American pizza did not make it into his eulogies.

Gorbachev and the Soviet Collapse

Let me explain the view of Gorbachev and the Soviet collapse that we develop in the book, Socialism Betrayed. I will just summarize the main argument without adducing all of the facts and details that we use to support the argument. These are all available in the book.

Gorbachev’s policies were the proximate cause of abandonment of socialism in the Soviet Union and all that it had accomplished, but neither Gorbachev nor the Soviet collapse were inevitable. The Soviet Union was not in crisis in 1985 when Gorbachev came to power.

Except for the years of the Civil War and the Second World War, the Soviet economy had grown every year at a faster rate than the United States. This remained true until the late 1980s The Soviet Union showed none of the earmarks of a society in crisis. There was no unemployed or inflation. There were no strikes, mass demonstrations of protest, or riots. Surveys at the time showed that the Soviet people were as happy with their system as Americans were with theirs.

By any measure Soviet socialism was a resounding success for working people. It had made dramatic gains in raising wages, improving education and health care, and advancing the rights of women and national minorities. As the United Nations noted, the citizens of the Soviet Union read more books, magazines and journals, and attended more concerts, plays, movies, and art exhibitions than any other people on earth. Michael Parenti said it simply: The Soviet Union made “a dramatic improvement in the living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.”

The Soviet Union had problems.

The Soviet Union was hardly a socialist utopia. It had problems. There were complaints about the quantity and quality of consumer goods. There was a large black market and the corruption of some officials. Economic growth continued, but the rate of growth was slackening. There were gross inefficiencies and a lack of labor discipline. The Soviet Union was slow in utilizing in production the latest developments in computer technology. Plus, the Soviet Union was in the throes of a new Cold War (started by President Jimmy Carter) that forced the Soviets to divert billions of rubles into the military. Finally, there was a kind of ideological and political stagnation symbolized by the three leaders who had preceded Gorbachev. All were all old, enfeebled and died in office.

These problems while chronic were not critical. Moreover, the Soviet Union was well-positioned to deal with them, when it acquired a new leader, Yuri Andropov, upon the death of Brezhnev. Andropov was an intelligent, experienced and dedicated Communist. He was well-aware of the problems and advanced policies to address them. He undertook initiatives to reduce tension with the West, to promote new energetic leaders, to increase labor discipline, and promote the diffusion of technological innovation. Andropov had everything going for him as a leader except time. Eighteen months after assuming office, he died of kidney failure.

Gorbachev became General Secretary of the CPSU in March 1985. Gorbachev followed Andropov’s lead at the start but soon changed course.

By late 1985, Gorbachev began to abandon of basic Marxist-Leninist ideas: dialectical materialism, class struggle and the leading role of the Communist Party. He replaced them with a social-democratic approach that saw the solution of socialism’s problems by making one-sided concessions to imperialism and injecting capitalist ideas, namely private enterprise and the market, into socialism.

Gorbachev’s two main policies glasnost and perestroika amounted to taking two old Communist ideas and injecting them with new social democratic content. Glasnost that originally meant more openness on the part of the Communist Party, turned into a policy of open attacks on the Communist Party. Perestroika that originally meant restructuring to produce greater efficiency and labor discipline turned into dismantling centralized planning and promoting private enterprise.

Gorbachev did not fall from the sky. He was the product of political and economic conditions that preceded him.

First, he represented a continuation of social democratic thinking in the CPSU which was previously manifested by Nikolai Bukharin and Nikita Khrushchev. The essence of this approach was that one could advance socialism by reducing the role of the Communist Party and by introducing into socialism ideas from capitalism workplace autonomy, market mechanisms, and private property.

Secondly, reflected the class interest of a growing petty bourgeoisie rooted in the expanding sector of the second, or private, economy, a sector that existed along with the first, or socialized economy. Under Soviet socialism most private economic activity was forbidden. Farmers were permitted to have small plots and some craftsmen and professional were permitted to do some side work. This changed after Stalin’s death. Under Khrushchev more private economic activity was allowed and a black market of illegal private activity developed. In the ensuing years both increased, particularly the black market that by the 1980s reached every nook and cranny of Soviet society, involved millions of people as consumers and sellers, and accounted for a growing percentage of all economic activity. The black market created big problems. It involved stealing time and money from state enterprises. And because it was illegal, it could exist only by corrupting officials. Most importantly, it created a growing social basis for right wing values and ideology.

In short, Gorbachev as a political phenomenon was a product of historic rightwing tendencies in the Party and the new petty bourgeois basis for these ideas in the social class linked to the second economy.

Why did Gorbachev turn toward social democratic policies in late 1985 and 1986?

There are three possible explanations: 1. a leftwing or ultra-leftwing explanation, 2. a rightwing or social democratic explanation, and 3. a Marxist-Leninist explanation.

The left-wing or ultra-left-wing explanation was the Gorbachev was always (or at least for a long time) a social-democrat. He simply disguised his real views and objectives until he had the power and opportunity to implement them, and then he did so in a duplicitous way by claiming he was returning to Lenin. An extreme variation of this explanation views Gorbachev as an agent of the CIA.

The problem is this. As Xi Jinping has said, a Marxist explanation of anything must begin with the facts. And the facts are simply not there to support this first theory.

The two staunchest and most respected Communist leaders at the time were Yuri Andropov and Yegor Ligachev.

Andropov had known Gorbachev for years as both were from Stavrapol. Andropov had brought Gorbachev to Moscow and promoted Gorbachev to the Central Committee. Andropov, who was himself in charge of ideology before becoming General Secretary, never expressed the slightest suspicion that Gorbachev was a social democratic.

Similarly, Ligachev who for many years was the Party leader in Novosibirsk, and who was Organizational Secretary or second in command after Gorbachev never thought he was a secret social democrat. Ligachev held Gorbachev responsible for destroying the Soviet Union and regretted ever having supported him, nonetheless he never said he thought Gorbachev was acting on some pre-conceived social democratic plan.

The only Communist who comes close to accepting this explanation was Erich Honecker, the last leader of the German Democratic Republic. In his memoirs written in prison after being incarcerated by the new anti-Communist leaders of Germany, Honecker wrote: “The new group of leaders around Gorbachev in March 1985, Shevardnadze, Yakolev, and Yeltsin, who came to the top of the state and the Soviet party, already had a goal, which we clearly recognize today, to ‘change the system.'” “That the first steps in this direction were accomplished in the name of Lenin, the founder of Soviet power, and their faithfulness to him, changes nothing. In his memoirs, Shevardnadze reports that he met with Gorbachev in the fall of 1984 and that in the course of a walk along the Black Sea, they agreed that it was necessary to ‘change the whole system.'” (Erich Honecker, Carnets de Prison first published in 1995, in French in 2009)

Thus, even Honecker who believed Gorbachev and those around him “had a goal” to “change the whole system,” even before they had power, does not indicate what this goal was or what this change was to be.

The right-wing or social-democratic explanation of why Gorbachev changed was that he had no choice, that he met such resistance from other leaders of the Communist Party as well as from vested interests in the bureaucracy and enterprises, that he had no choice but to weaken Party and weaken centralized planning.

The problem with this explanation is that the facts do not support it. Gorbachev faced no opposition for the first two years. Gorbachev’s initial reforms were greeted enthusiastically by Soviet Communists and Communists abroad. Even Boris Yeltsin who would become Gorbachev’s wily critic the right, and Yegor Ligachev who would become his most fierce critic on the left, supported Gorbachev’s reforms at the beginning. They did not begin to oppose Gorbachev until after he had already made moves to weaken the party, turn over the media to anti-Communists like Yakolev, and open the floodgates to anti-party criticism.

The third explanation of why Gorbachev changed was that Gorbachev was not a strong leader with a firm grasp of Marxism-Leninism, and thus he was not able to resist the pressure that was coming from the right-wing of the Party like Yakolev, Yeltsin, and Schevardnadze, as well as from those petty bourgeois elements profiting off the second economy, as well as from the capitalist world that cheered his every right-wing move.

No one has studied the collapse of the Soviet Union more closely than the Chinese Communist Party. General Secretary Xi Jinping summed up the Party thinking in 2013, which dovetails with our own written years before:

“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin was to wreak chaos in Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism. It caused Party organizations at all levels to have barely any function whatsoever. It robbed the Party of its leadership of the military. In the end the CPSU–as great a Party as it was–scattered like a flock of frightened beasts….This is the lesson from the past!”

This was Gorbachev’s problem. He either did not understand Marxism-Leninism or was not committed to Marxist-Leninist ideas.

To raise the notion of “universal human values” over class values and to make unilateral concessions to imperialism as Gorbachev and did in Afghanistan, Cuba and with Reagan’s so-called “zero option” proposal, betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding of dialectics and class struggle at the international level. One-sided capitulation was not class struggle.

To attack the authority of the Communist Party was a fundamental betrayal of the Leninist of the central and leading role of a vanguard party.

To attack Stalin and Lenin was either simple-minded or opportunistic betrayal.

To attack central planning and state ownership was to undermine the two economic pillars of socialism.

Gorbachev was not a leader of deep ideological background or rich experience. Aside from throwing around some occasional quotes from Lenin, his writing and speeches never showed any knowledge or study of Marxism. His entire political life before Moscow was spent as the leader of Stavropol, a province of spas and resorts. One historian compared his background to being the mayor of Las Vegas. His travel was confined to western countries, and he had not even traveled to other parts of the Soviet Union.

One can appreciate how shallow was Gorbachev’s resume by comparing his life to Andropov’s. Andropov had worked closely with three of the great Communist leader, Otto Kuusinen, leader of the Finnish Party, V. I. Molotov, for many years the second leader under Stalin, and Michael Suslov, for many years the leader of ideology. Gorbachev had no such mentors.

Andropov’s career was studded by occasions that demanded great courage, calmness, and tough-mindedness. During the Second World War he fought with partisans in Finland. For years, he was ambassador to Hungary including during the rebellion of 1956. During the 1960’s as head of the KGB, he was in charge of suppressing and justifying the suppression of intellectuals like Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He also was in charge of fighting corruption which among other things led to replacing the entire party leadership and government of Azerbaijan and investigating for corruption Brezhnev’s daughter and son-in-law. Gorbachev was tempered in no such fires.

Two final thoughts on Gorbachev

As disturbing and depressing as Gorbachev’s betrayal was, it is important to learn from it.

One thing to learn is that in the history of revolutionary socialism, Gorbachev’s betrayal was not unique. What was exceptional was that he was the head of state, went so far, and was not stopped.

There have been other notable betrayals. Georgy Piatakov, Nikolai Bukharin, and Leon Trotsky all had a grounding in Marxism, had strong revolutionary credentials and held responsible positions of leadership. All had helped make the Bolshevik revolution, and yet all betrayed the revolution. Nikita Khrushchev did much harm to the revolution by his wholesale rejection of much Soviet history and by his ill-conceived efforts to emulate capitalism, but he never abandoned socialist internationalism, attacked the Communist Party or contemplated the economic and political changes that Gorbachev embraced.

American Communists have suffered their own betrayals. Jay Lovestone was national secretary of the Party in 1927 when he began developing a revisionist ideas, including the idea of American exceptionalism, that United States was an exception to worldwide trend of growing class conflict. After his expulsion, he became an open anti-Communist, worked with David Dubinsky to oust Communists from the labor movement, and ended up working with the CIA as an expert on Communism. Earl Browder, the leader of the CPUSA during its heyday of the 1930s, turned to the right in the 1940s and temporarily liquidated the party. Sam Webb was the leader of the Party after Gus Hall. He moved to the right, abolished much of the Party apparatus, abandoned fundamental ideas, and eventually quit the Party and joined the Democratic Party.

It is clear that the greatest and most persistent danger of betrayal has come from the right, that is right opportunism and social democracy. Stalin said it clearly in 1928: “the Right deviation…a tendency on the part of a section of the Communists to depart from the revolutionary line of Marxism in the direction of Social-Democracy.” This will be true as long as capitalism dominates much of the world, because the capitalists not only have tremendous economic and military power but also have tremendous ideological power. Moreover, as Lenin pointed out this rightwing tendency will remain under socialism as long as small, private production exists. Lenin said, the strength of capitalism likes “in the strength of small production. For, unfortunately, very, very much of small production still remains in the world, and small production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie, continuously, daily, hourly, and on a mass scale.”

M. Molotov, the last surviving Bolshevik saw this. In his memoirs published the same year Gorbachev became General Secretary, Molotov said: “A struggle still lies ahead for the party. Khrushchev was no accident. We are primarily a peasant country, and the right wing is powerful. Where’s the guarantee to prevent them from getting the upper hand? The anti-Stalinists in all probability will come to power in the near future, and they are most likely to be Bukharinists.”

Molotov was indeed prescient. And he drives home one of the main lessons of the Gorbachev experience, the importance for Communists to value ideology and to be alert to the right danger that always exists. Molotov’s prescience brings me to my last observation about Gorbachev.

Recently, I read a 750-page book by a group of Italian leftists on Piatakov and Trotsky’s work to undermine the Soviet Union in the 1930s. These writers quoted Stalin as saying that a key quality of those who wished to lead the working class was the ability to see the future. Stalin had this quality to an uncommon degree, as was evident by his predictions that a war with Germany was coming and that the Soviets must prepare by quickly collectivizing agriculture and industrializing the country. To an astounding degree, Gorbachev lacked this ability to see ahead. It is very unlikely that Gorbachev wanted or foresaw the disaster that his policies would produce. It is very unlikely that Gorbachev wanted or foresaw that they would result in him being a socialist without socialism, a Communist without a party, and a president without a country. It is very unlikely that Gorbachev wanted or foresaw that he would end of being rejected and reviled by most of his countrymen

Gorbachev’s myopia may have been a personal tragedy for him, but it was a catastrophe for Communists, workers, and the oppressed of the world, and we are still paying the price for his myopia.

https://mltoday.com/gorbachev-and-the-soviet-collapse/
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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Thu Oct 27, 2022 2:25 pm

100 years of victory over foreign intervention in Russia
October 27, 16:36

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To the 100th anniversary of the liberation of the Soviet country from foreign invaders

Even before the start of the October Revolution, plans for the division of Russia began to be developed in the United States and Great Britain. In his memoirs and works of fiction based on personal experience, the famous English writer and British intelligence officer William Somerset Maugham described in detail how he was sent to Russia in the late summer of 1917 to plot to prevent the Bolsheviks from coming to power. Although, according to Maugham, “time was running out”, the British intelligence officer did not go to Petrograd through the North Sea and Scandinavia (which would have taken several days), but passed through the USA, the Pacific Ocean and Japan, and then through the Russian Far East, Siberia, the Urals . On the way, Maugham was accompanied by four leaders of the Czechoslovak military corps, created in Russia in 1915 from among the prisoners of war of the Austro-Hungarian army. Considering,

After the failure of the British intelligence plot to stop the October Revolution, at a meeting of representatives of the Entente countries held in Iasi in early November 1917, representatives of the Czechoslovak corps were instructed to act as a "military-police force to restore order in Russia." For cover, the leaders of the corps expressed their readiness to help the Soviets fight against the German intervention. But after the signing of the Brest Treaty, they began to ask the Soviet government to send them to France to take part in the battles on the Western Front.

The Soviet side agreed to satisfy this request. For unclear reasons, it was decided to take the corps out of Russia not through the Barents or Caspian Sea, but through Siberia, and then by sea to Western Europe. The route along the Trans-Siberian Railway was determined in an agreement between the leadership of the corps and the Soviet authorities, signed on March 26, 1918. The Soviet government demanded the disarmament of the corps, although it recognized that soldiers could have a small amount of weapons for personal safety.

The movement of echelons and disputes over weapons among the Czechs and Slovaks were closely monitored by the Western powers. In April and May 1918, secret meetings of representatives of the Entente countries were held in Moscow. In May 1918, the US ambassador to Russia, David Francis, wrote to his son in the US: "At present, I am plotting ... to disrupt the disarmament of 40,000 or more Czechoslovak soldiers whom the Soviet government has offered to surrender their weapons." By this time, the Czechoslovak corps was divided into four groups: Penza, Chelyabinsk, Siberian (it was in echelons on the Trans-Siberian road from Kurgan to Irkutsk) and the Far East (already arrived in the Vladivostok region). They say that the immediate reason for the armed action of the Czechoslovak legionnaires was their clash with former Hungarian prisoners of war. But obviously that the rebellion had been carefully prepared in advance. On May 25, immediately after the start of the rebellion, the legionnaires captured Novo-Nikolaevsk (Novosibirsk). On May 26, they took Chelyabinsk, then Tomsk, Penza, Syzran. In June, the rebels captured Kurgan, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk. On June 29, the White Czechs entered Vladivostok, which by that time had been captured by foreign invaders from various countries. By that time, the Entente Council declared the Czechoslovak Corps part of its armed forces.

The capture of large cities and the establishment of the power of armed detachments from the small peoples of Central Europe over the multimillion population of the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia were explained by the fact that in the vast expanses of Russia, the Czechoslovak army at that time could not meet worthy resistance. After the collapse of the tsarist army, which began in February 1917, in the ranks of the Red Army, which had just begun to be created in the spring of 1918, there were only 119 thousand people to protect one sixth of the globe. It is not surprising why in a matter of weeks 50,000 Czechoslovak legionnaires took control of the vast territories of Siberia and the Far East.

The rebellion of the Czechoslovak corps contributed to the unleashing of a full-scale civil war in Russia. In all regions through which the Trans-Siberian Railway passed, armed formations of the counter-revolutionary underground acted. Anti-Soviet detachments overthrew the Soviet government, executed its leaders, and threw its supporters into prison. Everywhere in Siberia, in the Far East and the Urals, counter-revolutionaries began to restore the pre-Soviet order.

A significant contribution to the "restoring order" was made by the soldiers of the Czechoslovak corps, who called themselves "legionnaires". Immediately after the capture of Samara, they set up an open-air concentration camp. Thousands of residents of Samara were herded into a field fenced with barbed wire a few kilometers from the city. There they were forced to spend day and night in the open air. They were starved and beaten. Following the capture of any city, detachments of White Czechs were sent to the surrounding villages, who robbed and ruined peasant farms. Legionnaires were especially atrocious in the Far East, where many peaceful villagers were shot by them. Peasant houses were looted and burned.

If the interventionists who captured the north of European Russia and the Far East did not disdain to rob warehouses with hemp, flax, tow and wool, then the legionnaires rushed to the much richer booty located in Kazan. Back in 1915, after the start of the offensive of the German and Austrian troops and their occupation of Poland, Lithuania, part of Latvia, the tsarist government decided to evacuate the gold reserves of the empire into the interior of the country. Most of it was transported to Kazan, where gold and other valuables were placed in the cellars of the local branch of the State Bank.

After the capture of Samara by Czechoslovak soldiers on June 8, 1918, they created the so-called Committee of members of the Constituent Assembly "Komuch". In his diary, a representative of Komuch, Lebedev, wrote that “among the motives” that determined the task of capturing Kazan, “it is also important that in Kazan there is a gold reserve of the State Bank evacuated to it.”

Legionnaires enlisted the support of the Serbian battalion stationed in Kazan. These Serbs were former prisoners of war of the Austro-Hungarian and German armies, then liberated by Russian troops during the First World War. The leadership of the battalion was subordinate to the Serbian military mission, located in Arkhangelsk.

As the detachments of the Czechoslovak corps approached Kazan, the Soviet government ordered the country's gold reserves to be taken out of the city. However, on June 27, in the midst of preparations for the evacuation, Commander-in-Chief of the Eastern Front M.A. Muravyov summoned the manager of the Kazan branch of the State Bank, Marina, and demanded to stop preparations for the export of gold, as this, they say, provokes panic. Although the evacuation of the gold reserves began after Muravyov's open speech against the Soviet regime, the vast majority of it remained in the cellars of the Kazan Bank when detachments of legionnaires broke into the city.

On August 5, parts of the Czechoslovak corps, the Serbian battalion and the White Guard detachments captured the Kazan branch of the State Bank. However, the advance of the Red Army on Kazan forced the robbers to transport the gold and other valuables they had seized to Samara. Since the offensive of the Reds continued, from Samara the gold reserve in five railway echelons, guarded by legionnaires, was transported to Ufa. Surprisingly, the cargo quickly melted as it moved east. When the gold reserve was again evacuated to Omsk in October 1918, it was no longer located in five, but in two railway echelons. Later on, gold and other valuables continued to disappear. There is evidence that these valuables floated to the banks of Western countries. After the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic, the Legio Bank was established in Prague. It was no secret to anyone

Although the legionnaires were driven out of Kazan and Samara by the end of 1918, the Soviet government controlled only a quarter of the territory of the RSFSR. The severance of economic ties between the center of the Soviet Republic and many regions placed its economy in a most difficult situation. By the autumn of 1918, out of 9,774 enterprises in 33 provinces of the RSFSR, 3,686 were inactive. The decline in industrial production led to a sharp decrease in the supply of urban goods to the villages, which in turn destroyed agricultural production. From November 1917 to August 1, 1918, food organizations in 26 provinces of the republic procured only one tenth of the necessary bread. Even lower was the level of potato harvesting. The supply of meat and fats was negligible. The lack of food was exacerbated by speculation: for every pood of bread,

After 15 years, I.V. Stalin recalled “some facts from the life of workers in 1918, when for weeks they did not give the workers a single piece of bread, not to mention meat and other foodstuffs. The best times were then those days when it was possible to give the workers an eighth pound of black bread, and then half with cake. Chronic malnutrition reduced people's resistance, and the disappearance of medicines and the collapse of the health system contributed to the spread of mass epidemics of typhus, cholera, "Spanish" (viral flu) and other diseases that killed millions of lives.

Without hiding his satisfaction with the state of affairs in Russia, the British Ambassador to France, Lord Bertie, wrote in his diary on December 6, 1918: “No more Russia! She fell apart." After listing a number of states created by the interventionists on the territory of Russia, the lord remarked: "The rest can go to hell and stew in its own juice." However, the members of the British government, led by Lloyd George, who gathered on the evening of November 11, 1918 at 10 Downing Street for a solemn meal on the occasion of the end of the war, did not share Bertie's arrogant complacency. While Londoners were shouting outside the windows of the government building, jubilant at the victorious end of the war, the royal ministers were in a depressed mood. War Secretary Churchill, a participant in this meeting, later recalled: he and his colleagues realized that plundered, hungry and torn to pieces Russia has become a threat to the British Empire. The example of a country in which the principles of social and national equality were actually implemented became contagious for millions of the oppressed in the empire. From the beginning of 1918, a campaign of civil disobedience to the colonial authorities began in British India. The movement for national liberation embraced all parts of the empire. London's attempts to suppress the uprising in the most ancient British colony - Ireland failed, and soon the independence of Ireland was proclaimed in Dublin.

England was also ready to follow the example of Soviet power. Back in the summer of 1917, a conference of workers' and socialist organizations was held in Leeds under the slogan "Follow the example of Russia." Its participants decided to create Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. The cause of the Soviets was ready to imitate all over the world. The workers of Seattle, in their address to the workers of Soviet Russia in December 1917, wrote: "Your struggle is essentially our struggle." On February 1, 1918, an uprising of sailors of the Austro-Hungarian fleet was raised in the Adriatic port of Kotor. It was suppressed after 3 days. One of the participants in the uprising at the trial said: “What happened in Russia raised us to the uprising. A new sun has risen there, which will shine ... for all the peoples of the globe, and it will bring peace and justice to them. Those gathered at 10 Downing Street knew

The British ministers realized that the withdrawal of German troops and their allies from the lands they occupied in Russia would lead to the restoration of Soviet power there. Therefore, at a meeting on November 11, Churchill set the task: "Germany must be invited to help us in the liberation of Russia ... Peace with the German people, war against the Bolsheviks."

Soon the Entente Council demanded from the German military authorities not to leave the Baltic states, Belarus and Ukraine occupied by them. However, such an order was difficult to carry out. The German soldiers who were in the Baltics rioted, demanding their return to Germany. Only a part of the German units fulfilled the requirements of the Entente. Then the Western governments began to hastily transfer their forces to the lands occupied by the troops of the Central Powers.

After the withdrawal of Turkish troops from Baku on November 17, 1918, British troops arrived there. They entered Batumi on December 15, and on December 25 - in Tiflis. At the same time, the invasion of the Entente troops into the Baltic began. On December 1, 1918, a British squadron under the command of Admiral Sinclair arrived in Liepaja. On December 18, British warships entered the port of Riga. On December 12, the English squadron arrived in Tallinn. American troops arrived in Lithuania.

But even before the arrival of the Entente troops and as a significant part of the German troops left the Baltic states, Soviet power was restored in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The Red Armies of the Baltic Soviet republics had to wage heavy battles against the British, American and German troops that had entered the service of the Entente, as well as against the anti-Soviet local formations newly created by the invaders. In this unequal struggle, the interventionists and their accomplices prevailed and the Soviet power was again overthrown in the Baltic states, and its supporters were subjected to executions or repressions.

In order to prevent the restoration of Soviet power in Ukraine, in the Crimea and in the North Caucasus, the Entente countries launched an intervention in these regions. At the end of November 1918, the Anglo-French squadron entered Novorossiysk. Anglo-French landings were landed in Odessa and Sevastopol. The invaders captured the Crimea. By the end of January 1919, the Entente troops reached the Tiraspol-Nikolaev-Kherson-Crimea line. Since February, Petlyura's troops began to help the interventionists. By mid-February 1919, about 100,000 Entente troops from France, Great Britain, Germany, Greece, Poland, Serbia, and Romania were stationed in southern Russia.

However, unlike the Baltics, here the interventionists could not hold out for long. On March 10, the Red Army took Kherson, on March 14 - Nikolaev, on April 6 - Odessa, on April 29 - Sevastopol. It became clear to the leaders of the Entente countries that with the help of their troops, even with the help of their recent enemies from Germany, they would not be able to defeat Soviet Russia. Therefore, the Western powers stepped up support for the armed formations of the Russian counter-revolution. During the winter of 1918-1919, the Entente countries increased the supply of arms to the White Guard armies. Western countries sent 300,000 rifles, 558 artillery pieces, 160 million rounds of ammunition, as well as lots of uniforms and equipment at the disposal of Denikin's Volunteer Army, numbering 250,000 people. Conversing with Savinkov at the map of Russia, Churchill pointed to the flags indicating the positions of Denikin's army, and remarked:

The "Supreme Ruler of Russia" Kolchak received about 600 thousand rifles, 600 guns and a large supply of uniforms from the Entente countries. Kolchak paid for the supply of weapons with gold, which the legionnaires had not yet managed to plunder, the Czechoslovak Corps was considered the most reliable formation of Kolchak's troops, until the day when they handed over the "supreme ruler" to the red partisans along with the remnants of Russia's gold reserves.

In May 1919, the commander of the Northern Corps, General Yudenich, launched his attack on Petrograd with the support of the 1st Estonian division and the English squadron under the command of Admiral Cowen. At the same time, Bulak-Bulakhovich's detachment launched an offensive against Gdov, and the 2nd Estonian division advanced west of Pskov. In the Petrozavodsk-Olonets direction, white detachments became more active, in which, in addition to the former tsarist officers, Finns, British, Canadians, Serbs, and Poles fought. The white generals, who announced the struggle for "great, united and indivisible Russia", continued the work of foreign interventionists with their participation and their comprehensive assistance.

The Entente countries were actively armed by the Polish government of Pilsudski, whose troops occupied a significant part of Belarus in 1919, and in the spring of 1920 invaded Soviet Ukraine. Arming Piłsudski's armies, France supplied Poland with 1,494 artillery pieces, 350 aircraft, 2,800 machine guns, and 327,000 rifles. Military advisers from France led the operations of the Polish armies.

The Japanese invaders stayed the longest on Soviet soil. Even after the defeat of Kolchak, they, with the support of the counter-revolutionary troops of Semyonov and Kappel, continued the occupation of Transbaikalia, the Amur Region and Primorye. During their occupation of these regions, the Japanese invaders removed from them about 650 thousand cubic meters of timber, fish worth 5 million rubles, and many other products, and stole more than 2,000 railway cars, 250 river and sea vessels, plundered the gold reserves of many banks. The actions of the Japanese military were particularly cruel. One example of this kind was the massacre of Japanese interventionists with members of the Revolutionary Military Council of Primorye, headed by S.G. Lazo. After being tortured, they were burned in a locomotive firebox.

The victory of the Red Army over its enemies meant not only the triumph of the ideas of the socialist revolution, but also the salvation of the great country from the unthinkable torments that foreign invaders and their accomplices in Russia brought to its population.

When in early 1918 it became clear that Russia was under attack by the armies of all the major countries of the world, few in the country considered it possible to defeat them. Although the "left communists" headed by N.I. Bukharin opposed the signing of the Brest peace and put forward the slogan of a "revolutionary war" against Germany and its allies, they did not hide the fact that such a war would be lost. They believed that the peasants, who made up the bulk of the population of Russia, would not resist the invaders until the invaders began to rob them. Speaking at the 7th Congress of the RCP(b) in March 1918, Bukharin asserted: “The peasants will be drawn into the struggle when they hear, see, know that their land, boots, grain are taken away from them ... Our only salvation lies in that the masses learn by experience, in the course of the struggle itself, what is the German invasion, when cows and boots will be taken away from the peasants, when workers will be forced to work for 14 hours, when they will be taken to Germany, when an iron ring is inserted into the nostrils, then, believe me, comrades, then we will get a real holy war ". The “left communists” expected that during the “holy war” the invaders would suffer huge losses, and this would cause indignation in the countries that sent the interventionists. The indignation of the masses will develop into a revolutionary explosion in the countries of Western Europe, and then into a world revolution.

Rebuking Bukharin and other "Left Communists" at that party congress, Lenin called their hopes for a world revolution faith in fairy tales and condemned Communists who believe in fairy tales. Unlike Bukharin and others, Lenin believed in the consciousness of the Russian working class and advanced peasantry. Shortly before the congress, on February 21, 1918, Lenin put forward the slogan "The socialist fatherland is in danger!". In an article published the next day in Pravda, he wrote: “The sacred duty of the workers and peasants of Russia is the selfless defense of the Republic of Soviets against the hordes of bourgeois-imperialist Germany ... Long live the socialist fatherland!”

Lenin's call was answered by tens of thousands of volunteers who joined the ranks of the Red Army, which began to be created a few days ago. Subsequently, hundreds of thousands joined the Red Army, which defended the socialist fatherland from foreign invaders and their hirelings. Many of the workers and peasants to whom Lenin addressed understood that "defending the socialist fatherland" meant preserving the gains of the October Revolution, which its enemies wanted to destroy. However, there were many who, not having become supporters of socialist reforms, did not want their fatherland to be under the heel of foreign masters and their local servants. Up to half of all officers of the tsarist army joined the ranks of the Red Army.

In a similar way, many people who were not in the ranks of the RCP (b) and even far from understanding political problems stood up in defense of the Soviet country. Explaining the reasons why the peasants of the Russian Far East rose to fight against foreign invaders, the historian Fyodor Nesterov pointed out that at first the peasants had nothing against the newcomers, since their incomes even slightly increased under the invaders, who were ready, without bargaining, to buy sable skins and other taiga beasts. However, it soon became clear to them that the interventionists did not consider the locals to be people. Evidence that “last week an American sailor in the port shot a Russian boy, that several Japanese, in front of everyone in broad daylight, beat a decrepit old Korean man to death with rifle butts, that local residents must now, when a foreign military man enters the tram,

Thoughts that “we are not slaves, we are not slaves” became part of the popular consciousness even before Soviet schoolchildren began to read these phrases in the first primers published after the October Revolution. The peasants of the Far East went in masses to the partisan detachments led by the Bolsheviks. By the beginning of 1920, these detachments had liberated 2/3 of the territory of the Far East. Similar considerations forced the peasants of other occupied regions of Russia, as well as Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states to rise up to fight against foreign invaders.

An external factor also contributed to the failure of the interventionists. Although the hopes of the “left communists” for a world revolution proved to be illusory, and the Soviet revolutions in Hungary, Bavaria and Slovakia were quickly suppressed, the intervention and assistance of the Entente to the white armies aroused resistance among many people in foreign countries. Despite the fact that the losses suffered by the American interventionists were not so large (the American interventionists in the North lost 110 people killed in battle and 70 died of disease), the demands of ordinary Americans to stop hostilities in Russia intensified every day. On May 22, 1919, Rep. Mason, speaking to Congress, spoke of the daily deluge of letters from voters demanding the withdrawal of troops from Russia. On May 20, 1919, Wisconsin Senator and future U.S. presidential candidate La Follette introduced a resolution to the Senate that was approved by the Wisconsin Legislature. It called for the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Russia. On September 5, 1919, the influential Senator Borah declared in the Senate: “Mr. President, we are not at war with Russia. Congress did not declare war against the Russian people. The people of the United States do not want to go to war with Russia." Under the influence of such speeches in the summer of 1919, the withdrawal of American interventionist troops from the north of Russia began. By April 1920, American troops were also withdrawn from the Far East.

Powerful protests against the intervention took place in Great Britain. Mass rallies gathered there under the slogan "Hands off Russia!". The trade unions demanded the withdrawal of British troops from the Soviet country and threatened to boycott the sending of military supplies for white generals. Rebellious moods also grew among the British soldiers who participated in the campaigns of the Entente. In a secret circular, Minister of War W. Churchill asked: "Are soldiers' councils being created in the army?"

There was a mutiny on the warships of the French interventionists in the South of Ukraine. On April 19, 1919, the sailors of the French battleships Jean Bar, France, Mirabeau, Justis, and Vergniaud demanded that they be sent home. Then the mutiny spread to the cruisers "Waldeck Russo" and "Brune", as well as to the destroyers "Fonokonno" and "Mamluk". The French government was forced to withdraw its warships from Russia.

The defeat of the White armies, supplied by the Entente, forced the leadership of the Western powers to temporarily abandon plans for the immediate overthrow of Soviet power and begin to carry out social reforms in their countries in order to prevent revolutions like the one that occurred in Russia. Soon the Entente Council lifted the economic blockade of Soviet Russia, and then the leading countries of Western Europe began to restore trade and diplomatic relations with the Soviet country.

The expulsion of foreign invaders from our country took place two months before the signing of the Treaty on the Formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The victory of the Soviet people over the invaders from the leading countries of the world and their mercenaries became convincing evidence of the power of the ideas of the October Revolution. Noting the superiority of the principles of the new social organization, the Declaration on the Formation of the USSR, published in Pravda on December 30, 1922, emphasized that "only thanks to" them "the Soviet republics managed to repel the attacks of the imperialists of the whole world, internal and external." Although the Japanese invaders still held Northern Sakhalin in their hands until 1925, and foreign agents supported the Basmachi atrocities in Central Asia,

https://gazeta-pravda.ru/issue/120-3132 ... vie120-22/ - zinc

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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