Two reports have appeared in the New York Times that allege racism on the part of the USSR. One article on July 26 announces that the Soviet Union will sell uncut diamonds mined in the USSR through the international diamond cartel of De Beers, which is a South African-controlled company. There is, of course, a worldwide anti-apartheid boycott of all South African companies in solidarity with the struggle in that country.
The other New York Times article on July 30, datelined Johannesburg, reports "an announcement that the Moscow Circus plans to tour here next year has dramatized the new relationship that South Africa is cultivating with the Soviet Union and some of its Warsaw Pact neighbors as a consequence of political changes in southern Africa and Eastern Europe."
Progressives, and communists in particular, have learned over the years to discount racist and anti-Soviet propaganda emanating from the South African regime and dismiss it out-of-hand. It is important to remember that a significant aspect of the South African propaganda machine is to disseminate disinformation which the imperialist press worldwide graciously carries, especially if it has an anti-Soviet angle.
The suspicion that these reports are deliberately concocted by the South African government looms large since the reports have been timed to coincide with a very splendid and large demonstration by the South African Communist Party, which was attended by many prominent officials of the African National Congress, including its leader Nelson Mandela.
This rally was a high water mark in showing the solidarity between the South African Communist Party and the ANC. Nothing can serve the South African regime better than to disrupt the solidarity and sow confusion and demoralization with those reports.
It was impossible in the early period of the USSR for the Soviet Union to answer each and every slander that appeared in the capitalist press. Today, it is still difficult to do so. Communists throughout the world have had to learn to separate fact from fiction in the capitalist press.
But there are some allegations that have to be answered promptly and expeditiously by the USSR not only to counter the anti-Sovietism, but as in this case, to answer the charges of poisonous racism as well.
As of now, however, the USSR has not issued a statement on these reports. Inquiries made to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., and to the Soviet news agency Tass in New York City have shed no light on whether the USSR has denied the reports or confirmed them. This is unfortunate.
These reports occur at a time when there is uneasiness throughout the progressive and revolutionary movements worldwide concerning the scaling down of Soviet aid to the national liberation movements. It therefore makes it imperative for the Soviet Union to respond not only in its own interest, but in the interest of the worldwide anti-imperialist and working class struggle.
Unless there is some explanation from the USSR, the likelihood is that these allegations will be seen in the light of the domestic situation in the USSR.
Foreign policy an extension of domestic policy
Economics determines politics in the long run. The economic reforms initiated by the Gorbachev administration in the USSR are what determine its political course at home. Whatever the domestic policy may be, the foreign policy will surely become an extension of it and reflect the internal course of the Soviet Union.
In December 1986, when the Gorbachev administration ousted the Kazakh party leader Dinmukhamed A. Kunayev and replaced him with Gennadi V. Kolbin, a Russian, it was an unmitigated act of chauvinism. It was subsequently revealed that it was a case of a conservative, or so-called hard liner on the reforms, being replaced by someone more amenable to Gorbachev's anti-socialist bourgeois program.
This act of removing Kunayev was followed with a rebellion in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. In that early period of the reforms, scant attention was paid to the rebellion. It was mostly regarded as an isolated event concerning one nationality in one republic in the USSR. But, as we pointed out at the time, it was not. Rebellions in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and other areas followed.
Now we learn from the recently concluded 28th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party that Kolbin is out, and that the new Kazakh Communist Party leader and president is Nursultan A. Nazarbaev who is Kazakh and not Russian.
This move seems to have corrected the earlier gross error and high-handedness shown in the removal of the former leader of the Kazakh Communist Party, Kunayev. But this change is more form than essence. Nazarbaev not only promotes the Gorbachev bourgeois reforms, but he goes considerably further and is not fearful of making his position clear while in the U.S.
Nazarbaev is currently in the U.S. attempting to make a deal with Chevron Oil Company, among others, for joint ventures. His visit to the U.S. comes on the heels of the 28th Soviet Party Congress where Gorbachev appears to have consolidated his grouping against the conservatives and has given the green light to implement the anti-socialist reforms.
According to the July 30 New York Times, Nazarbaev has "prepared his own economic development plan that he says stresses the privatization of property, dissolution of monopolies, expansion of entrepreneurship, and the independence of enterprises."
In this same article, Nazarbaev reassures potential investors and shows he is willing to go beyond Gorbachev's program to obtain "economic sovereignty." He states: "We want a large number of American companies to work with us and we understand it has to be profitable to U.S. businesses. ... I think the Soviet government has been going about this all wrong and should not now be frightening off the foreign businessmen with whom they should be dealing."
Natural resources now property of republics
Nazarbaev can make such offers while in the U.S. because the Soviet Congress of Deputies passed a law which states that the natural resources are the property of the individual republics of the USSR. Kazakhstan has an immense oil reserve in the Tengiz field. The interest of the transnational oil companies in Kazakhstan is enormous and their appetite for profits is insatiable.
In the early 1970s and before, the USSR offered Japanese as well as U.S. transnational corporations the possibility of exploring the southern part of the USSR for oil and other natural resources for development purposes. The oil companies were to be compensated for the exploration; it was not a proposal for joint ventures. The aim at that time was to enable the USSR to develop those areas in the interest of socialist construction.
Those Soviet offers to Japan and the U.S. went little beyond what Lenin had offered to foreign imperialist monopolies for development purposes during the New Economic Policy (NEP) period. But the U.S. and Japanese corporations, just as in Lenin's time, turned the Soviet Union down.
The difference now lies in the new property law in the USSR that makes Soviet natural resources the property of the individual republics. In and of itself, this particular section of the law could be progressive. It could serve the interest not only of the individual republics, but could also weld them together in socialist solidarity on a federal level.
Greater autonomy for the individual republics did not alone pull them in a centrifugal direction against socialist centralization. It could just mean a greater amount of local democracy and more equality among the individual republics.
The problem arises, however, because of the Gorbachev administration's perspective to decentralize socialist planning, weaken the public ownership of the means of production, and open the road to private ownership. This is what causes and strengthens centrifugal forces.
The effort to decentralize the entire economy holds the danger of opening up the Soviet Union to the predatory imperialist monopolies. Inviting the imperialist monopolies for development as was done in the 1970s and during the NEP period may have posed some political risks. But, if the development plans had been completed according to an agreed upon schedule, they could certainly have been of great help in the pursuit of socialist construction. Joint ventures, on the basis of permitting the capitalists to garner super-profits on a so-called 50-50 basis as laid out in the current proposals, hold greater risks for the socialist economy.
Danger of joint ventures
The danger, if these joint ventures are consummated, has to be seen in light of the new powers that have been granted to the directors and managers of the industrial enterprises, who have been given wide latitude in relation to the accumulation and division of profits.
The directors' and managers' increased independence, not only from the federal government but from the individual state, creates one of the most formidable openings for economic invasion and political subversion of the USSR by the imperialist monopolies. The specifics of each joint venture under these circumstances may spell out a dangerous penetration of the Soviet economy by the very monopolies against which the October Revolution was carried out in the first place.
In addition, bourgeois decentralization reawakens old national animosities, particularly when they involve property rights. The rebellions first set off in Kazakhstan, which then spread to Armenia, Azerbaijan and other areas, where the Gorbachev administration called out Soviet troops to quell the uprising, all followed the pursuit of anti-socialist reforms which generated national animosities.
The bourgeois character of the Soviet economic reforms breeds chauvinism at home. And this will inevitably have its impact abroad on Soviet foreign policy.
One can only hope that the reports in the New York Times are false. If the reports prove to be true, however, it goes without saying that the actions of the Gorbachev administration must be severely condemned. But this should in no way be utilized to disqualify the USSR as a workers' state or negate its possibilities to recover from the social and political bourgeois deformations imposed on the USSR by the Gorbachev administration and the leaderships which succeeded the Leninist government.
Whatever the case may be, one can only hope that the revolutionary class consciousness of the Soviet working class will rise to the historic occasion and deliver the kind of rebuff to Gorbachev and his grouping which they so richly deserve.