Boris Yeltsin, the chief architect of capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR, and his partner in crime Mikhail Gorbachev seem now to be firmly in the saddle. But it is a saddle mounted on a cow. They are going nowhere.
Economic decline and social and political disintegration is absolutely inevitable. The imperialists of the world know this. No amount of hurried state visits by John Major, the Thatcherite British prime minister, will in any way persuade George Bush to quickly open U.S. imperialism's treasuries to the USSR.
What the Gorbachev regime has been doing over the last five years in its effort to decentralize socialist planning in the USSR is like breaking up giant ocean liners in an attempt to create small rowboats. It's an ideal of the petty bourgeois merchant and shopkeeper.
Decentralization has brought one economic disaster after another. The attempt to break up the mines and sell them to investors from abroad is the worst example of reactionary utopianism. It's even worse with the oil industry, which is wholly integrated, as are iron and steel and the military-industrial complex.
Now the Gorbachev-Yeltsin team is in the unhappy position of trying to recentralize the economy. But find it impossible to do so except on the existing socialist basis. The private, bourgeois sector is unable to become a viable factor in the economy.
The absurdity of chopping up the socialist sector while at the same time wildly promising the masses a higher living standard is bound to bring the real criminal conspirators to grief.
Before it is possible to come to grips with the current struggle in the USSR — the struggle between those who are for socialism and those who want to restore capitalism — it is necessary to get some understanding of the difference between a social revolution and a political revolution (or counterrevolution).
A political revolution can involve the mobilization of large masses of people in support of the transfer of power from one group to another. If this transfer is carried out by only a small grouping, especially involving violence and unconstitutional means, it would constitute a palace coup.
But whether or not masses of people are involved, a political revolution leaves the economic, financial and social authority in the hands of the same ruling class. It does not fundamentally alter the relationship between the basic social classes: the possessing, exploiting class versus the exploited. The real power, the ownership of the means of production, remains in the hands of those who wielded it before — in modern times, the bankers, industrialists, and landlords.
There have been many political revolutions. Much rarer is a social revolution.
A social revolution transfers power from one class to another. If power is transferred away from the bankers, industrialists, and landlords to the workers and the peasants, the mass of the people, then it is a proletarian socialist revolution.
The first and classic example of this was the Paris Commune of 1871, which lasted only a few months and was drowned in blood by the armed might of the ruling class.
The first successful proletarian socialist revolution occurred in October 1917 in Russia. The state the workers erected has survived until now because of untold sacrifices by the masses, who endured civil war, imperialist intervention, cold war, and threats of nuclear annihilation, not to speak of economic blockade and capitalist encirclement all these years.
This state of the workers and peasants has undergone formidable changes, both political and social, and has suffered a number of distortions and deformations. The question is whether this state will in the current crisis hold onto the possibility of regaining its fundamental socialist features.
The working class and the oppressed peoples of the world, numbering in the billions, have a great stake in this contest. Its outcome could decide the future of the class struggle for years to come.
Anyone reading the headlines in the major bourgeois newspapers at this time could draw only one conclusion: that it's all over for socialism and communism in the USSR.
As for Workers World, although for the last five years we have forecast a great many of the disastrous economic, social and political developments now taking place in the USSR, we do not share the fatalism the capitalist press so assiduously cultivates. The capitalist class is celebrating much too soon. The working class of the USSR has not yet entered the arena of struggle.
In order to have a greater understanding of the situation in the USSR, it is necessary also to have a clearer conception of the phenomenon of a coup d'etat.
A coup d'etat — literally, a blow against the state — sometimes occurs when a small group, either military or civilian, overturns the existing government and installs itself as the new governing power. The distinctive characteristic of a coup, whether done through violence or other illegal or unconstitutional means, is that it is carried out without the participation or knowledge, and often with the indifference, of the masses.
Frequently it abolishes whatever democratic institutions existed in the country. But history also shows that a coup d'etat, a change in the governing group of the state, can take place without any fundamental political changes. It doesn't have to result in or the abolition or restriction of democratic institutions such as the parliament, the congress or freedom of the press.
For instance, it was widely suspected that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was part of a coup d'etat that brought Lyndon Johnson to power. He was not only the vice president under Kennedy but had been his principal right-wing rival during the struggle for the Democratic nomination.
One week after his swearing in as president, Lyndon Johnson appointed Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren to head a commission of investigation. Its function was to give credibility to a coverup of the coup.
The Supreme Court of the U.S. and its chief justice have no constitutional authority to assume investigative powers. They had never done so before. Their authority is restricted to cases between litigants seeking adjudication. This investigation was even more irregular considering that Lyndon Johnson was regarded as a prime suspect in the conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy.
In his own account of what happened, Johnson wrote, "I knew it was not a good precedent to involve the Supreme Court in such an investigation. Chief Justice Warren knew this too and was vigorously opposed to it. I called him in anyway. Before he came, he sent word through a third party that he would not accept the assignment. He opposed serving on constitutional grounds." (Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point [New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971].)
The jurisdiction for such an investigation properly lay in the hands of the Attorney General — Robert F. Kennedy. But he appeared to be in a demoralized state during this period and did not challenge Johnson's authority. Later, when RFK ran in the 1968 primary for the presidential nomination, he too was assassinated.
Richard Nixon, the next president and the third occupant in the White House during the murderous Vietnam war, often seemed on the verge of being ousted. After he attempted to set up a spy network outside of the jurisdiction of the FBI and CIA, the capitalist press began to pillory Nixon. His opponents threatened to impeach him and remove him from office.
As a crisis neared, Nixon appointed General Alexander Haig as White House Chief of Staff in an attempt to line the Army up behind him. But certain incriminating tapes on Nixon's conspiracy to set up an independent spy grouping fell into the hands of those who could expose them to the public.
General Haig then demanded that Attorney General Elliot Richardson, who was investigating the Watergate break-in, return the tapes. But the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, got a court ruling against Nixon which was later appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The issue then was whether the president was legally obligated to obey a Supreme Court order. Could the judicial branch constitutionally demand that the executive branch carry out its order?
Could a coup d'etat could triumph under these circumstances? The issue was whether General Haig could represent the military establishment as a whole and bring it to bear against the Supreme Court.
But the capitalist press and most of the institutions of the bourgeois state were solidly opposed to Nixon. This included the military. Finally Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment.
Earlier, Gen. Douglas MacArthur had pushed for overall political and military authority during the Korea crisis. A few years later, Senator Joseph McCarthy attempted to subdue the Senate and the House. Only when he stepped on the toes of the Army did the tide begin to turn against his wild witch hunt. The U.S. capitalist press and media continually gush about their democracy, seeming oblivious to these coup attempts.
Such is the glorious democracy in the U.S.!
Briefly, this is what happened in the most recent phase of the struggle in the USSR:
On Aug. 19, eight of the most important members of the Soviet government, military and security forces announced the formation of a State Committee for the State of Emergency. They effectively put Mikhail Gorbachev, who was on vacation in the Crimea, under house arrest. Who were the eight? They were not an obscure grouping. Rather, they represented the greater part of the government itself. This aspect the capitalist press leaves out.
The eight were: Gennadi I. Yanayev, Vice President of the USSR; Valentin S. Pavlov, Prime Minister; Gen. Dmitri T. Yazov, Defense Minister; Aleksandr I. Tizyakov, president of an association of state industries; Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, Chairman of the KGB; Vasily A. Starodubtsev, Chairman of the Farmers' Union; Oleg D. Baklanov, first deputy chair of the Defense Council; and Boris K. Pugo, Interior Minister.
This grouping was in reality more representative of the state than the two individuals against whom the coup was directed, Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
Their idea was to get this Emergency Committee ratified by the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of Deputies. In that case, whatever may have been considered unconstitutional would be ratified by legal bodies.
The move by the Emergency Committee was completely bloodless. The imperialist media and the Yeltsin forces make much of the fact that three people died, and at first claimed they had been shot by soldiers. But it was later confirmed they had been crushed by accident during the movement of armored personnel carriers in Moscow (just as U.S. personnel are killed nearly every time the Pentagon deploys its forces).
During the entire course of Soviet history, when various government leaders were removed by the party, it scarcely caused a ripple in the imperialist countries. Were this attempt at a takeover merely a coup d'etat in the political sense of the term, it would have caused little concern among the Western imperialist countries.
A palace coup or revolution would not have aroused their indignation or the swift and feverish preparations to intervene. It was not the political changes or changes in personnel that were of significance to the imperialist bourgeoisie. In other words, it was not the political revolution that concerned the imperialists abroad and the bourgeois elements in the Soviet Union.
The fact of the matter is that the Emergency Committee was attempting to return to the course of socialist construction and to abolish, to the extent possible, the ruinous and chaotic consequences of Gorbachev's introduction of capitalist relations. What was involved was a changeover from one social system to another. In other words, it was a social counterrevolution that was at stake, not just political changes.
Of least concern to the West was the question of democracy in the Soviet Union. Imperialism is the biggest violator of genuine democracy, the democracy of the workers, at home and abroad. The men they hail as democrats have now closed Pravda, purged other organs of the press and media, and pretty much outlawed the Communist Party itself, with millions of members.
The matter reduced itself to this quintessential element: The Gorbachev regime, immediately after he became party general secretary at the Central Committee plenary meeting in 1985, slowly and gradually began a course of development which lead straight to capitalist restoration at home and the intervention of the imperialist bourgeoisie. For too long a time, the Communist Party leadership, in disregard of revolutionary tradition and resting on privileges it had accumulated over the years for itself, went along with Gorbachev.
The Gorbachev grouping seemed to have won an accommodation from the imperialist bourgeoisie. Slow and gradual nuclear disarmament and improvement of relations appeared on the order of the day.
Not clearly understood was the fact that the imperialist countries, while overflowing with flattery of Gorbachev and effusive expressions of accommodation with the USSR, were moving at a snail's pace to lift their virtual economic blockade. Only in the last few days, really, has the ban on trade with the USSR been lifted. Only in the last few weeks has the European Community, the community of imperialist robbers and colonialist predators, begun to deal with the USSR on a somewhat equal basis.
In the meantime, the country has been opened up to the ravages of the imperialist monopolies that are making deals with individual republics of the kind that could only reduce the Soviet Union to a neocolonialist status. It was not until a scandalous joint venture involving the fabulously rich Kazakhstan oil fields was accidentally made public that the masses got a view of the extent to which the imperialists had encroached and had found willing tools to virtually sell out to the giant Chevron multinational. The deal involved the USSR's most important energy resources — the vast Tenghiz oil fields.
But those are only the outer manifestations. The Gorbachev administration's policies at home were becoming increasingly ruinous. The effort, under the euphemism of a market economy, to reintroduce private ownership of the basic means of production meant bringing back the relationship of exploiter and exploited in the USSR. This finally touched off the emergency measures to try and halt this social and political catastrophe.
It is now backhandedly admitted by the imperialist bourgeoisie that the economic conditions — the shortage, the empty shelves, the idle factories and so on — all the result from the attempt to dismantle the socialist projects in the USSR.
Much to the surprise of the bourgeois reformers there as well as their Western masters, the task of bringing about a reestablishment of capitalism has proven to be stupendously difficult. The Gorbachev program is now well into its sixth year, and the easy dismantling of the socialist system the imperialists expected has not taken place to this very day.
This explains why the imperialists are so unwilling to extend cash or even credit to a willing group of neocolonialist stooges. The task of overturning, of obliterating the revolutionary socialist achievements of the USSR may well prove impossible.
However, the masses for most of this period were unaware of what the Gorbachev conspirators contemplated. To this very day, when the Gorbachev-Yeltsin alliance seems to be in power, the bourgeois reformers have not ceased to make wildly demagogic promises of a higher standard of living. In reality, however, their plans call for cutbacks, layoffs and a general reduction in living standards. The Yeltsin-Gorbachev economists are at wit's end over how to explain that harder, not easier times are ahead if the introduction of capitalism is to take place, even as the politicians of the restoration make the most scandalous promises of a higher standard of living. No wonder confusion reigns supreme.
The Gorbachev press is monolithic in advertising its virtues. However, those in the opposition who want to expose the true character of the bourgeois reforms have really had no voice, either in the government or in the press. And now the leading organs of the Communist Party have been muzzled.
The irony of this historic episode is that the confusion has lasted so long. Finally, however, it became virtually impossible to continue further on the course of capitalist restoration without an upheaval of one sort or another.
The coup attempt, if we may properly call it that, came as a last resort in the face of an impending disaster to socialist construction. These eight men, and many of their supporters in the government who became more and more knowledgeable and fearful of the consequences of bourgeois restoration, decided it was the only course to take.
Yet they acted timidly and with hesitation. What was their greatest fear? It was retaliation by the imperialist bourgeoisie — the continuing nightmare that has hung over the Soviet republic since day one of the October socialist revolution.
Hence they plodded along on a course of action intended to take the imperialist bourgeoisie off guard.
They issued an utterly inept and scandalously vague statement calculated to assure the imperialist bourgeoisie that foreign policy toward the imperialists remain the same and the reforms at home would continue. Not even the word socialism was mentioned in the manifesto, which promised that private property and the market economy would continue.
It is not unusual for those attempting a coup, especially when there is a swift change of government in a country, to assure the world that there will be no fundamental changes and that foreign policy will continue as before.
For instance, when Johnson took over as president, his first statements were calculated to assure the world that there would not be any fundamental change, especially in regard to the war in Vietnam.
Especially in countries that are militarily weak, whenever there's a change in government the immediate problem is to assure the imperialists that no fundamental changes would be made of the type that would enrage them.
But this manifesto by the Emergency Committee could never convince the imperialist bourgeoisie that they weren't planning a return to socialist construction. The very men who constituted themselves as the new government were known as relatively hardline Communists. Even though they had gone very far with the Gorbachev reforms, they were regarded as opposed to the restoration of capitalism.
Their manifesto, then, was a great miscalculation. The imperialist bourgeoisie wasn't fooled in the least. It immediately began to mobilize world public opinion and even intervened actively on behalf of the counterrevolution.
But the worst mistake of all was that they violated one of the most profound teachings of Marxism on the relationship of insurrection to a coup d'etat, the relationship between the masses and the leaders. The way they went about it was to indulge in the crudest form of Blanquism, trying to carry out a conspiracy without mass support. Nevertheless, the masses on the whole accepted the coup.
This could be seen by their rejection of Boris Yeltsin's call to go out on a general strike. But the Emergency Committee deprived the masses of the opportunity to give active support to the struggle against Yeltsin and Gorbachev.
This group of state and party leaders had not agitated, had not organized, had not publicly committed themselves to the revival of socialist construction. Certainly, they gave hinted now and then that they were critical of the Gorbachev reforms. But there was never any general attempt at agitation and propaganda against the bourgeois reforms and the continuing slide toward capitalist restoration.
By not taking the masses into their confidence, these leaders disregarded the essence of the October 1917 insurrection. They should have openly opposed Gorbachev as the Bolsheviks opposed the Kerensky regime. The Bolsheviks agitated for the insurrection openly. At the same time they were continually meeting in secret to work out the plans for the insurrection. They had every justification for this, since Kerensky himself was plotting the destruction of the revolutionary Bolshevik leadership of the Soviets.
The czar's chief general, Kornilov, was involved in his own conspiracy. The Bolsheviks promoted a revolutionary course for the overthrow of the Kerensky regime quite openly, while secretly organizing the mechanics and crucial timing.
In this case the Emergency Committee finally achieved a consensus among themselves to get rid of the bourgeois restorationist grouping. But where they failed was in their estimate of the imperialist bourgeoisie's reaction. Most of all they failed to mobilize the masses and the rank and file of the soldiers. The masses were left in the dark and became prey to general confusion and unawareness.
Nevertheless, the mass sentiment can be gauged by this: When Yeltsin, the principal architect for counterrevolution, was taken by surprise by the coup (that much the Emergency Committee planned well), he hastily called for a general strike of the workers. It was a near-total failure, as almost everybody now admits.
From there on it should have been clear to the committee that it was necessary to take action, firmly and without hesitation, not merely against Gorbachev but against Yeltsin. Whatever else they did, they had to move now. What stopped them?
Fear of imperialist aggression. Failure to mobilize the masses actively. Yeltsin was feverishly mobilizing the counterrevolutionary elements while the committee stood still, either hesitant or divided over taking the decisive step of attacking. At such a moment, indecision is ruinous.
The most devastating error was a failure to make a clear-cut case over a protracted period of time that the so-called market economy was in reality a move to restore the old capitalist system of exploitation and oppression. Because they had not said so in so many words, the Emergency Committee left the masses at the mercy of bourgeois concepts of legality introduced by the Gorbachev administration to cover up its destruction of socialist norms.
The Gorbachev grouping had abandoned socialist legality and substituted bourgeois legality. The Emergency Committee was not bound in principle to respect bourgeois concepts of legality. Furthermore, they should have borne in mind the difference between a social and a political revolution.
The Gorbachev grouping had claimed it was carrying out a political revolution. But it had overstepped the bounds of a political revolution and was attempting to disestablish and in fact to ruin the class structure of the workers' state. Therefore, the committee had every right to promote not only general socialist criticism of the Gorbachev regime but revolutionary communist agitation for its overthrow.
When faced with a social counterrevolution, where a transfer of class power is involved, legality is inadequate considering the magnitude of the issue. But the committee had socialist legality on its side. And even had this not been true, it could have been guided by the advice of another leader at another time.
It was Abraham Lincoln who said in his First Inaugural Address, on March 4, 1861: "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." Lincoln was in the middle of a class struggle between the slaves and slave owners. The slave owners pretended to legality, declaring states' rights.
The committee should have invoked the revolutionary right of the people in order to mobilize the masses against what was in reality a cold, clandestine takeover of a good part of the government by the bourgeois elements led by Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
The capitalist press views the dismemberment of the USSR as a fait accompli. We have continually pointed out that the greatest danger in the bourgeois reforms was that the collapse of centralized planning set in motion centrifugal forces that threatened to turn all against all, as in Yugoslavia.
Now the Baltic republics, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Moldavia, Byelorussia, and Georgia are all said to be asserting their independence. Of course we have pointed out this danger. It is a great stride backward in the decentralization and breakup of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless it is necessary to show its limitations and possible direction.
It is one thing to juridically or politically separate from the USSR. We communists, basing ourselves on the teachings of Leninism, have continued to adhere to the right of self-determination, including the right to secede, which has been written into all the constitutions since the formation of the USSR.
But it is something else again, 74 years after the Revolution and after more than a dozen five-year plans, to equate a juridical or political separation with economic separation.
In the first place, the Ukraine and Byelorussia have been politically independent for years, although acting in unison with the Soviet government. Both have seats in the UN and separate embassies in all the countries that recognize the Soviet Union.
When it comes to negotiations on grain, for instance, the Ukrainian delegation generally handles them. Although the imperialist governments refuse to admit it, they nevertheless have given them de facto recognition.
What about the Baltic states? What does their independence really amount to? Economically they can scarcely exist unless the Soviet Union provides them with oil at the cheapest prices and a market for their consumer goods. They can't possibly hope to compete with the imperialist West in the production of consumer goods. The USSR is their best customer.
In the Baltic area, except for Latvia which has a great revolutionary and Bolshevik tradition, the biggest problem for the Soviet Union is the reservoir of Nazi and fascist ideology in the ruling classes, particularly among the landed gentry. This is reinforced by a right-wing Catholic hierarchy, especially in Lithuania.
The real significance of this area to the Soviet Union leaders is military. They fear it will become a base for the U.S. military.
We should not regard the disintegration of the union as a finished process. Moldavia has announced its independence 100 times. It nevertheless is an economically integrated part of the USSR. It and others are not economically viable on their own. What brought this about is the great economic and technological progress of the USSR over 70 years of socialist construction.
To break up the union politically is to make economic regression inevitable. This goes for all the Soviet republics.
It is quite impossible to establish a stable capitalist system on the basis of economic disunity, and any attempt would be costly in human life and welfare. One only has to look at Yugoslavia. How can the Soviet bourgeois reformers avoid the lesson of Yugoslavia? It is literally staring them in the face.
Yugoslavia has not only become impoverished but is a scene of fratricidal struggle from which only the imperialists can gain. The country as a whole is sinking into virtual oblivion.
What we are seeing now is only one phase of the class struggle. The working class's emergence on the political arena is absolutely inevitable. And this is precisely what is holding the imperialists back whenever they are prodded by bourgeois academia and capitalist politicians in general to advance aid and credits to Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
Last updated: 19 February 2018