A truly significant development has taken place in the Soviet Union, but you wouldn't know it by reading the capitalist press. Both the print and electronic media are deliberately underplaying the results of the referendum on the union treaty, which took place March 17.
The imperialist bourgeoisie can't complain about how the referendum was conducted. Indeed, it was carried out according to their own rules of parliamentary democracy. About 75% to 80% of the population participated, a high proportion according to the standards of capitalist elections. In the U.S., an average election brings out only between 55% and 60% of the eligible voters.
Baker's reception in Moscow
For almost a year, the Bush administration has been preparing for this referendum. It sent Secretary of State James Baker over there just before the election so he could meet with dissident leaders and preside over the liquidation of the Soviet Union as a unitary state.
But even a week before his arrival, the capitalist news media let the U.S. public know that the results of the referendum might not be so overwhelmingly favorable to the bourgeois counter-revolution as U.S. finance capital had been looking forward to. When Baker arrived in Moscow, the counter-revolutionary elements were already so fearful of the results that Boris Yeltsin, the new darling of the U.S. ultra-right, thought it wiser not to be seen shaking hands with him.
The referendum showed first that the Soviet population as a whole is dead set against any breakup of the USSR.
But it has significance beyond just the struggle among the nationalities, which in certain areas has reached venomous proportions. It reflects a genuine mass revolt against the imposition of the counter-revolutionary 500-day economic plan to dismember and dissolve the Soviet Union and bring about the restoration of capitalism. The principal political exponent of this plan was none other than Boris Yeltsin.
Gorbachev had tried to negotiate with Yeltsin on the plan. But after a few brief meetings, even Gorbachev, the instigator and originator of the capitalist reforms, retreated from it in horror.
A plan to bring back capitalism
Just to briefly go over what was really at issue with the masses, one has to refer back to the main provisions of the 500-day plan, which Yeltsin and his free enterprise economists were promoting. As Business Week explained it back on Sept. 17, 1990:
"The 500-day plan ... involves massive doses of privatization and an end to state subsidies. The selloffs would start in a frenzy on Oct. 1, when citizens could start buying state cars, trucks, incomplete construction projects, and military land now used for peaceful purposes. The auction could shrink the nation's budget deficit from about 170 billion rubles to 5 billion, sopping up perhaps half the nation's idle savings. Other huge changes would start up between October and mid-January, including a massive turnover of collective farms to private owners. ... [Our emphasis--SM.]
"By late 1992, some banks could trade rubles freely against Western currencies. ... Large-scale privatization of industry will start by early 1992. Up to 40% of all major state industrial enterprises and half of the construction would be up for sale."
But something funny happened on the way to the execution of this plan. The masses learned about it.
The facts about these measures were reaching down from the bureaucratic state apparatus to the lower echelons in the rural areas and small towns all over the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev himself got taught a lesson when he thought he was teaching the masses. He had thought that the real obstacle in the way of his capitalist reforms was the party bureaucracy. Once he bypassed or disintegrated them and reached the level of the masses, his plans would be a sure-fire success. He found out that was a big mistake.
The Wall Street Journal decided to examine the current situation in one town, Archangel, where it found everything in chaos. The article in the March 20 issue concludes:
"The Soviet Union's experiment with democracy [read capitalism--SM] has sparked frustration across the nation and undermined confidence in the new leaders." Says Andre Shalov, an aide to one of the reformist deputies in Archangel's town council, "Everyone thought democracy was a panacea, but now we are approaching a crisis of democracy."
The Journal adds, "The town councils themselves bear some of the blame." We have been told it was the top-heavy bureaucracy that was to blame. So now it's the town councils!
"Rather than focus on local problems," says the Journal writer, "council sessions have often turned into discussion clubs at which communist and reformist deputies settle old scores." What is the real meaning of this? That the class struggle has reached down to the lower depths of the masses.
The opposition from the party apparatus, especially the higher echelons, was merely a rather poor reflection of the opposition from below to capitalist restoration.
Masses saw referendum as choice between Yeltsin and Gorbachev
While the referendum on the ballot didn't explicitly pose the question, it was seen by the masses as a choice between the program of Yeltsin and that of Gorbachev. They chose the lesser evil. The masses recognized that Yeltsin was pushing the capitalist reforms hardest and fastest of all. Gorbachev was in the middle and evasive.
All the big talk about transferring power from the bloated, swollen bureaucracy to the masses has come down to some very basic questions, like how to distribute the national income and collect revenue. Yeltsin has been in power now for more than a year. He has made it clear that so far as the Russian Republic goes, the revenues are to be collected from the masses in the form of taxes, while the income is to be held and disposed of by--guess who?--the central authorities of the republic.
It turns out that Yeltsin's formula about income and revenue doesn't differ an iota from that of Reagan and Bush. Give 'em democracy! Transfer the power to the local authorities! It all means make the local governments responsible for raising taxes on the masses. As for the distribution of the national income, that of course is strictly in the hands of the state apparatus.
Until he proposed his 500-day plan, Yeltsin was railing against bureaucracy and dictatorship. But when it gets down to the bread-and-butter issues, his version of bureaucracy isn't really any different.
His big schemes about the Russian Republic becoming an independent state, dealing in foreign relations and exports and imports with the imperialists, who would come running with huge contracts and generous credit--all this has turned out to be nothing but demagogy. What the imperialist monopolies are looking for in the vast area of the Russian Republic is how to drain its resources and rake in super-profits. That's not a very appealing prospect to the town councils. Even the Wall Street Journal has to admit that.
Behind the issue of separatism
The underlying issue in this struggle is not separatism as such. Is that really what the republics want? Even the Baltic movements are the result of Gorbachev's initial efforts to push them to the front of the reforms, beginning in 1986. In his view, they were to be the window of opportunity to the West, which would be able to come in that way and deal on the basis of the reforms. He never thought how far this would go or that it would be turned around into attempts to coopt them into the imperialist camp.
But Armenia, Georgia, all the other republics, are they really interested in becoming separate states? Or is the struggle over a revival of bourgeois competition and rivalry? It was stifled under the previous regimes and is in stark contrast to socialist cooperation. The successful beginnings of socialist revolution, which expropriated the bourgeoisie politically and economically, brought harmony in place of poisonous nationalist rivalries.
Not to be forgotten, of course, is the role of Great Russian chauvinism against the other nationalities of the USSR. Yeltsin is exactly the type of chauvinist Lenin wrote about in one of his last letters, "The Question of Nationalities or `Autonomization,'" dated Dec. 30, 1922. In it Lenin said that the apparatus which the Bolsheviks had taken over from tsarism and "slightly anointed with Soviet oil" was "unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietized workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a fly in milk." (V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 36, p. 606.)
There's nothing so ridiculous as to believe that Yeltsin is a defender of the non-Russian nationalities. It is pure hocum. He is a Great-Russian chauvinist, precisely as Lenin described in that historically different context. But it serves Yeltsin's purposes to be demagogic.
Yeltsin has shown himself to be a hypocrite, a charlatan and a demagogue who even faked his own drowning. He is socially the "drunken bum" as correctly described by an Italian reporter who accompanied him on his tour of the U.S. His riotous social behavior should have been diligently and energetically investigated by the Soviet prosecutor. But they failed to do so and he was let off the hook.
Fortunately, a good portion of the Russian and Soviet public do recognize his hypocrisy, notwithstanding his demagogy.
Gorbachev the lesser evil
The inevitable conclusion with respect to the referendum is that it was a resounding rejection of the breakup of the USSR as a workers' state. But it was by no means an endorsement of the Gorbachev reforms themselves, as claimed by his minions. The masses merely chose the lesser evil, as they often do in capitalist elections.
Gorbachev himself, in his nationwide television appeal the day before the referendum, did not call for a resolute defense of the socialist achievements of the USSR. He barely made some vague allusions to it.
He did, however, repeat the platitudes of bourgeois historians about the nature of the Russian state, which he said was 1,000 years old. Is he trying to connect the state born out of the October Revolution with the ancient feudal states of czarist Russia? And confounding both with the bourgeois state in later centuries? Is "the Russian state" to be seen as one continuous sociological common denominator?
The truth is that in the feudal period there was a state of the landlords and nobility, the boyars. The Bolsheviks overthrew the state of the landlords and the bourgeoisie. It's a fiction to say that the workers' state built by the Revolution is a related social phenomenon. This was nothing but a bare-faced attempt to line up some of the anti-democratic, even czarist riffraff, in the interests of widening the margin for the referendum.
This referendum has shown the truth of the matter. In numerical strength, the bourgeoisie definitely comes out as a poor minority. If the nature and makeup of the Yeltsin grouping were correctly analyzed and explained, its support would be reduced much further, even in the Russian Republic.
In the light of this referendum, one should reexamine the electoral successes of the Yeltsin grouping in Moscow and Leningrad. It would be interesting to compare the demagogy of Yeltsin at the time of that election with the real program he is now seeking to put across, to compare words with deeds, to show that during the tenure of his office the masses have reaped nothing but higher rates of inflation and shortages.
It now remains for those who are thoroughly committed to the socialist cause to take the offensive. Having to a large extent beaten back the counter-revolution--the greater evil as against Gorbachev and the reformists who go half-way--it is now necessary to lock horns in a serious way with the Gorbachev bourgeois reformists. For it is they, with Gorbachev himself as the leader, who have brought the socialist cause and the whole socialist camp to such a catastrophic situation.