The organizational framework of the breakup
On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev took over as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It is now seven and a half years later. By almost any standard, the developments in the USSR following his election, and most particularly the breakup of the union, constitute a world historic event.
Our problem is how to approach it. We are confronted daily with the historical world view of the bourgeoisie regarding the USSR, in which private property and the existence of exploiting and exploited classes are eternal categories. However, our approach is that of the world view of Marxism, which clearly points in the direction of the inevitable abolition of classes and the eventual disappearance of exploitation and oppression.
The collapse of the USSR has inevitably caused wholesale desertions from Marxism. This is not uncommon when great catastrophes are experienced by the world working class. Nevertheless, over a protracted period, the working class has always shown astonishing recovery and regeneration. We believe that the dissolution of the USSR will be no exception.
Before developing the historical perspective, however, we should examine, even if briefly, the immediate causes, for they are the ones that stick in the mind of the ordinary observer.
When Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party, he had done little to distinguish himself from his comrades in the Central Committee or later in the Politburo. The highest-ranking job he held was that of Central Committee secretary in charge of agriculture. He had earlier studied at the Stavropol Agricultural Institute where he obtained a degree in agriculture, to which he later added a degree in law. Thus, he was a lawyer and an agricultural official directly responsible from the Central Committee to the Politburo.
His performance up until then was, if anything, lackluster. Indeed, his last years in that post were characterized by agricultural failures attributed by the Soviet press to poor weather. They certainly didn't add to his stature. Nothing he had done could recommend putting him on a pedestal above all the others. Nevertheless, the world capitalist press, and in particular the U.S. media, almost immediately began to acclaim him as nothing less than a super-statesman who was commanding the attention of the whole world.
They devoted great attention to the personalities of Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa. Her Western dress, the style of her hairdo, shoes, gloves, perfume--all became points of the highest diplomatic interest. Gorbachev's fedora, his overcoat, and in particular his banter with the hordes of reporters following him were matters of fascination.
One wondered why the capitalist press painted them in such flattering terms. When Nikita Khrushchev went abroad after his election, he wore what was described as an expensive suit, custom-made in Italy. But the capitalist press derided him and scornfully pointed out the contrast between his elegant attire and the drab clothing of the ordinary worker in the USSR. Murray Kempton, a liberal columnist for the New York Post, went particularly out of his way to lambaste Khrushchev's wife. She was so ordinary looking, he said, she could be anybody's grandmother.
Later on, when Leonid Brezhnev was General Secretary and received as a gift a valuable cigarette case that would only open every half hour as a restraint on his chain smoking, he too was derided.
When Gorbachev came to the United States, the media showed thousands of people in the District of Columbia greeting him rather wildly. He, the man of the people, ostentatiously stepped out of his car to mingle with the masses, notwithstanding the custom of having so many security guards from both sides.
Gorbachev became the man of the hour, dimming the stature of even such imperialist statesmen as Francois Mitterrand and Ronald Reagan. As for Margaret Thatcher, she had met Gorbachev in London and passed the word around that she liked him as "someone we can do business with."
What had he done or said that impelled the capitalist press to virtually regard him as one of their own? Was this not an adventure on their part? Weren't they fearful that it might boomerang against them? Wasn't there even one among the rabid anti-communists in the think tanks of the Pentagon to caution that Gorbachev might be the old aggressive bear in new clothes, a communist putting on a show of friendship and conciliation in order to deceive the democratic West, as communists are supposedly wont to do?
How significant that there was none of this. If such sentiment existed, it must have been suppressed.
Searching for accomplishments
We therefore must examine the actual genesis of Gorbachev's rise to prominence and favor in the calculations of the capitalists. What had he accomplished in the first few months on the domestic front, for instance, which they would regard as an achievement?
One of the first anti-Soviet hardliners to rush into print with a book on Gorbachev was Marshall Goldman. Goldman is one of those who later disparaged Gorbachev. In this book, however, he elevated Gorbachev's campaign against alcoholism into a major achievement.
At first glance, it would seem that Gorbachev should have no trouble doing anything he wants in the Soviet Union with the economy or anything else," wrote Goldman. "Consider how effective he has been in dealing with the Soviet problem with alcoholism. Knowing full well that he would meet resistance, he nonetheless decided to crack down, even though that meant attacking social mores that are centuries old. Although Yuri Andropov, Gorbachev's mentor, first began the anti-alcohol campaign in 1982, Gorbachev is the one who has put teeth into it. (Gorbachev's Challenge, W.W. Norton Co., New York, 1987)
It is now generally acknowledged that this anti-alcohol campaign had no effect except to create a panic in the sale of sugar, which suddenly was in demand on the illegal market for making home brews. Within a few months, the campaign collapsed and died without even a decent burial.
Alcoholism, like drug addiction, is a complicated sociopolitical problem. It requires not a quick fix but a much more serious approach.
The real changes effected by Gorbachev are more revealing. In the first place, immediately after becoming General Secretary he reshuffled the Politburo and changed the personnel of the government administration.
Now, changing the personnel, even of the highest body, has accompanied the elevation of general secretaries throughout the history of the post-Leninist era. But until Gorbachev, it was done according to the letter of communist procedures, if not the spirit.
Under Gorbachev, this process was considerably altered, both by the speed with which the personnel changes were made and by a complete rupture with tradition.
Organizational maneuvers mask political changes
In July 1985, soon after Gorbachev's election as General Secretary, he is said to have persuaded Andrei Gromyko, the oldest member of the Politburo and the most enduring foreign minister in the Soviet Union, to step down and take the largely ceremonial post of President of the USSR. This was a distinct demotion, when one considers that Gromyko had served in the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs for half a century, and had been regarded by such observers of the Soviet scene as Harrison Salisbury as the probable successor to Konstantin Chernenko.
Nevertheless, Gromyko's departure might not have been so unusual, considering his age, were it not for the appointment of Eduard Shevardnadze in his place. The capitalist press soon discovered Shevardnadze's "charm and flexibility" in contrast to the "dour and unimaginative" Gromyko.
Shevardnadze, a Georgian, had just been promoted to full Politburo member. He and Gorbachev were old friends, having worked together when Gorbachev was in the komsomol in the Stavropol region of the northern Caucasus, near Georgia.
What was most unusual was that Shevardnadze had no experience whatever in foreign affairs. Unlike in the early days of the October Revolution, there was now a vast foreign ministry establishment, particularly that segment that dealt with the U.S. and Canada. This grouping had accumulated significant experience. Why pick Shevardnadze?
It might have been different if he had support from old hands in the foreign policy establishment. But this did not appear to be the case.
As foreign minister, Shevardnadze immediately developed a personal relationship with U.S. Secretary of State James Baker on such intimate terms that they held more private tete-a-tetes in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, than public ones. How and why this developed seems never to have caused any speculation or questions, certainly not in the capitalist press.
The subsequent history of this personnel change demonstrated conclusively that Shevardnadze's "new thinking" represented a fundamental change in Soviet foreign policy. A U.S.-Soviet axis had developed, over and above the Soviet leadership in general and the foreign policy establishment in particular.
It was not that the foreign affairs personnel were so averse to policy changes. All were committed to carry out Soviet foreign policy, no matter what it was, as Gromyko so well illustrated in his many years as foreign minister. But they had no hand in this appointment.
When one considers that the Gorbachev administration was being regarded as Exhibit A of the new democratic, law-abiding procedures as against the arbitrary, undemocratic ones earlier, this stands out as a very significant breach which went wholly without comment in the imperialist press. But it was only the first, even though the most important.
Grishin replaced by Yeltsin
Another Politburo member replaced by Gorbachev was Viktor Grishin. Long known as a conservative communist, he had been described in the capitalist press as a challenger to Gorbachev for the post of General Secretary in March 1985. Grishin had been head of the Soviet trade unions, but more significantly had become First Secretary of the Moscow Party organization, which he held for many years, from 1967 until Gorbachev's accession to Party leader in 1985. This position has always been regarded as a stepping stone to the highest post in the Party.
Gorbachev sought to replace this unmistakably conservative Communist. But with whom? Apparently, there was no one at hand who suited his scheme. He recruited Boris Yeltsin, then head of the Party organization in Sverdlovsk where he had earlier been an industrial engineer.
Not long after being put in the key position of head of the Moscow Party, Yeltsin began to receive a flood of very favorable publicity. He was a "charismatic figure." He was "popular with the masses," "forthright in his views," "witty" and had "rough, unkind words for the bureaucracy." Soon he became a "man of the people." But never, with all the publicity he got in the U.S., and even though he had been regarded as somewhat of a buffoon in his visits here, was it pointed out why he was popular.
What made him popular? Was it just his demagogic attacks on the bureaucracy? He was not alone in that; Gorbachev had done it first.
One of Gorbachev's first initiatives was legislation that allowed private enterprises on a small scale but wouldn't introduce any fundamental change in property relations. How was this taken in Moscow, the capital and principal city of the USSR?
Dusko Doder and Louise Branson tell us in their account of Gorbachev (Gorbachev, Penguin Books, 1990) that "In Moscow the Party organization, for instance, resisted Gorbachev's new legislation, which allowed private enterprise on a small scale." Moscow is the principal city in the USSR. Were an important vote of national significance to be taken in New York or Los Angeles, it would have tremendous weight throughout the country. This alone should speak volumes.
The Party bureaucracy, as Gorbachev referred to it in his attacks for its lack of democratic procedures, opposed the introduction of the private enterprises. Generally, throughout Soviet history, these were regarded as a regressive step backward to capitalism, even if at times a historical necessity.
"Only one of the city's 27 district Party committees endorsed the policy," the book adds. "The others voted against having any private enterprise in their districts." This puts a wholly new light on the so-called popularity of Gorbachev and his reforms and later on that of Yeltsin.
The new head the city Party, Boris Yeltsin, the Doder-Branson book continues, "had to intervene personally in each of the other 26 Party committees to push the official policy." This is what Gorbachev brought him in for. Yeltsin's job was to utilize high-pressure measures, if not coercion, to get the district committees to reverse a vote they had taken on the basis of their own individual inclinations.
This is how Yeltsin became a supposedly popular leader. It means he had commenced his counterrevolutionary activities long before he became the hero who thwarted the so-called August coup. One will never understand Yeltsin's historical evolution to become President of the Russian Parliament unless one understands his beginnings in Moscow--who brought him to Moscow, who made him Party secretary of the powerful city committee, and how he was able to replace a traditional Communist Party leader in that post.
The Moscow and Leningrad organizations were always very important in the struggle for leadership of the Party. In the earliest days after the Revolution, the issue soon became who would be the Party secretaries in Moscow and Petrograd, as it was called before Lenin's death.
When Grishin, described by Doder as "sleazy," was removed in December 1985, Gorbachev's big mistake was to let Yeltsin take over the post. Yeltsin was able to utilize it for factional purposes, to such an extent that he later could demonstratively resign from the Central Committee. Yeltsin's promotion, by the way, was supported, undoubtedly to his great regret later, by Yegor Ligachev, often described as a "hard liner."
Another personnel change, no less significant, was the removal of Vladimir Shcherbitsky from the Politburo in September 1989. He was the only Ukrainian on the Politburo. The Ukraine is the second largest republic. Russians in particular had been admonished again and again by Lenin to show the greatest sensitivity in relation to formerly oppressed nationalities. This rude and crude dismissal could not but be regarded with alarm, not only in the Ukraine but in the other republics.
Of course, it followed from this as day follows night that the ground was already prepared for the loss of Shcherbitsky's standing in his home republic. Later that month he was ousted from the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Party at a plenum in Kiev attended by Gorbachev. Gorbachev's presence at the meeting was obviously meant as pressure to replace Shcherbitsky.
By 1989, of the nine full members of the Politburo when Gorbachev took over, eight had been replaced. He had obtained the firm control which it had taken others years to obtain.
Rupture with Leninist tradition on the national question
The organizational changes were a mask for a basic shift in the political and economic spheres of the Soviet Union. But they did not by themselves constitute the kind of rupture that took place with the ouster of Dinmukhamed Kunayev, a Kazakh who was a member of the Politburo from 1966 until January 1987.
Kunayev's removal as First Secretary of the Kazakhstan Party in December 1986, and his replacement by a Russian, Gennadi Kolbin, was followed by a major rebellion in the capital of Alma-Ata. This opened wide the gates to counterrevolution and the dissolution of the USSR. It was given very little prominence in the U.S. press.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a great and unprecedented federation of socialist states based upon the equality of all nations. This is what enabled the Soviet Union to endure incredible hardships, from economic ruin during the civil war, to intervention by 14 imperialist powers in 1919, to the Nazi invasion in 1939, and all through the years of nuclear intimidation and coercion from the U.S. The three greatest pillars of this union were the Russian, Ukrainian and Kazakhstan republics. But after the Alma-Ata rebellion in Kazakhstan, and then the ouster of Shcherbitsky, a Ukrainian, two of the three pillars of the union had been weakened.
From the vantage point of the political struggle, these were gross violations of the rights of nationalities that could not possibly be lost on the other republics within the USSR.
All of this was given impetus by the bourgeois reforms of perestroika, which inevitably led Gorbachev to the violation of the national question. The Rock of Gibraltar of Soviet solidarity was sundered with the ousters of Kunayev and Shcherbitsky.
The bourgeois observers of the collapse of the Soviet Union have yet to fathom this. It is not part of their interpretation of the developments in the USSR. They harp on secondary and tertiary features--the cruelties of collectivization (never remembering its benefits), the bureaucracy and mismanagement (what state has been free of them?).
Their interpretation never deals with how the stimulus of the bourgeois reforms led to the violation of the sovereignty of the nations and from there to the breakup of the USSR.
Disintegration spreads to Nagorno-Karabakh
It was not long before the Gorbachev administration faced another major test on the national question. The issue was a small enclave inside Azerbaijan populated by Armenians. It was called Nagorno-Karabakh. The struggle between the nationalities there took on a violent form in the spring of 1988. Could this have taken place without the Kazakh development?
The dispute in Nagorno-Karabakh had long been simmering and did not lend itself to an easy solution. But Gorbachev proved himself utterly helpless and, more important, unwilling to risk his authority for a firm solution of the problem.
There seemed to be endless consultations between the two republics, but no firm solution from the government itself. The situation degenerated day by day, awaking all the ancient animosities. This was stimulated by the bourgeois reforms, which opened the door wide to the struggle over material gain on an individual basis as well as on a nationality, state or republic level.
There was an authoritative governmental body that should have settled the dispute: the Soviet of Nationalities. The Soviet Union had introduced a bicameral form of state with two houses, the Soviet of Deputies and the Soviet of Nationalities. The latter, made up of representatives of all the different nationalities, could have put the authority of the central government behind a solution.
But instead the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute was allowed to degenerate further. The last opportunity to change this was at the 19th Party Conference held in 1988. But it was never brought up.
After he became president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, in a publicity stunt intended to demonstrate his new stature and strong leadership, made an ostentatious visit to Nagorno-Karabakh armed with proposals to settle the dispute. After spending several days there, Yeltsin seemed to have mediated an amicable solution to the problem. But it was all a stage-managed performance. Within days after he left, the fighting resumed.
It showed he had no authority there and the Soviet Union was no more.
Once Gorbachev's actions had led to the rebellion in Kazakhstan, it was no longer a question of how to improve the relations between the nationalities and the center, but how to break away. Gorbachev seemed to learn nothing from it.
In order to find out why the USSR collapsed, it is not enough to go back to the Stalin period, as is done in bourgeois accounts, to analyze the subjective factor. It's very important to go over what Gorbachev did. His dismissal of Kunayev was not just an error of judgment, it was a brutal intervention in the internal affairs of what was considered then a constituent republic, the third largest. It wasn't between two republics, like the struggle over Nagorno-Karabakh, but between the central government and the Kazakh leadership.
The undemocratic Party conference
The 19th Party Conference, held in June 1988, had a great opportunity to settle both questions.
By this time, the imperialist bourgeoisie, particularly of the U.S., was fully apprised of the direction of the Gorbachev administration's policy and what the reforms really meant. The conference had the complete collaboration of the imperialist media, which covered it gavel to gavel. Besides having a powerful effect in the capitalist countries, the coverage within the USSR ideologically devastated the past administrations of the Communist Party.
One big difference between the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, where Khrushchev gave his "secret" report, and this conference is that the earlier meeting was a delegated body that represented the Party as a whole. This, on the other hand, was a conference only, attended by many who were not delegates but were hand-picked by Gorbachev and his lieutenants. How could he dare make such a fundamental change in the direction of the economy and politics of the USSR at a mere conference? This was to totally disregard the constitutional requirement that such matters be taken up at a congress of the Party, of which he was the General Secretary.
In a free press, as was already supposed to exist in the USSR, one would expect a howl of protest at such an undemocratic process. Instead, it was hailed as the very epitome of democracy.
This in itself exposed the so-called democratic character of the Gorbachev regime. The suppression of nationalities, packing a conference instead of calling a congress, opening up the conference to devastating attacks on the past without hearing any opposition whatever--such were the immediate stepping stones of the counterrevolution.
The conference was a decisive turn in the direction of capitalism. It broke with the past, presumably because of undemocratic administrative and bureaucratic practices, but in reality it was opening up the floodgates to the counterrevolution that would sweep away Gorbachev himself.
Conspiracy theory of history
We are not of the view that history is made of conspiracies and intrigue. While there are conspiracies galore throughout history, they are not the cause of fundamental changes but rather a byproduct of them. None of the turning points in history has ever been accomplished by conspiracy alone. Conspiracy may be a concomitant feature, but it is not the driving force.
The view that Gorbachev and his followers were recruited by U.S. imperialism, the CIA in particular, in a conspiracy to overturn the Soviet system does not at the present time seem to hold water and cannot be verified.
It is true, of course, that the U.S. has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to infiltrate and subvert the building of socialism in the USSR, often by means of force and violence, including nuclear threats. But it could not do it by conspiracy alone. Such a plan would entail such a substantial social and political stratum in the USSR that was ready, willing and able to collaborate in or permit such a conspiracy that it would no longer be a conspiracy, even though there might be secret deals and agreements.
The collapse of the USSR is accounted for in most imperialist accounts and by the crop of counterrevolutionaries in the USSR as stemming mostly from internal forces.
Certainly no Marxist could ever possibly disregard the subjective factors that contributed to the collapse of the USSR. The whole history of the USSR is one of internal struggle. But if it is not considered in the world context, it is not at all comprehensible. The revolutions of 1917, even more than the French Revolution of 1789, had to take into account international factors.
Is it not a fact that even in the French Revolution, the internal struggle of factions became colored by fear of the foreign enemy uniting with the aristocracy to end the revolution? The monarchies everywhere--especially in Austria, Italy and above all England--were terrified of the very thought that men like Danton, Robespierre and Marat would become the constituted authorities in France.
What finally happened, of course, was that the French Revolution was stripped of those revolutionary reforms not necessary for capitalist development. To the extent that Napoleon's armies were revolutionary, he was successfully defeated by a coalition of the capitalist powers. The Vienna conference that followed was the celebration of bourgeois reaction.
Yet bringing back the old monarchy did not in any way restrict the development of French capitalism. It stripped it of many of its revolutionary goals and achievements, but it did not bring back feudalism. That was primarily due to the fact that capitalism was a higher social order than stagnant feudalism and could develop the productive forces.
Is this not the case with the USSR?
Roy Medvedev, author of Let History Judge and no friend of Stalin, said that when Stalin took over in 1924 the country was in ruins, but that he left it a superpower. He said this in connection with Gorbachev, who took over the USSR when it was a superpower and left it in ruins. This was a very cogent remark.
In analyzing the collapse of the USSR, the basic point is to determine how much significance should be attached to its objective situation, that is, the external threat, as against the subjective one. Which played the greater role? Can they even be treated as separate phenomena and weighed against each other to see which one is greater?
When one considers the reciprocal relationship between the external, international situation of the USSR and the internal, domestic process, it is quite unrealistic and not at all in conformity with reality to try and compartmentalize them.
External influences on the USSR
It is 30 years since the missile crisis of October 1962. It is now easy to remain cool and calm while watching various reconstructions of the events. But the missile crisis did bring a large portion of the world to the edge of nuclear destruction. It was by far the greatest threat that had ever arisen in human history. All this is well known.
What is generally overlooked, especially in the U.S., is that the missile crisis also posed the threat of counterrevolution in the USSR. The same social and political forces which exist today in the USSR and are very much out in the open were also there at that time. Khrushchev, we should remember, came in as a bourgeois reformer, mild by comparison with Gorbachev but nevertheless a reformer and facing threats to his position from both left and right.
Right on the eve of the missile crisis, the poet Yevtushenko was enlisted to write a poem that was deliberately calculated to send a message to the leftists, nowadays called conservatives, that Khrushchev was not an adventurer but a conciliator seeking a path to peace.
Notwithstanding the popularity of the Cuban Revolution and its leader, Fidel Castro, the bourgeois elements in the USSR surreptitiously raised the slogan, "Cuba si, sugar no." It was a reminder that while the framework of the Party might be monolithic, class differentiation was taking its toll. Slowly but surely political reaction was raising its head, not without the help of Khrushchev himself. While he was strong on some issues in the struggle with the imperialist bourgeoisie, he was definitely retrograde in relation to China and partisan to the new, rising bourgeois intelligentsia at home.
The rise of Libermanism as a tendency in economics was clearly a reflection of Khrushchev's ascendancy to power. The enthusiasm of the intelligentsia to revise Marxist teaching on material incentives in the building of socialism was taking hold.
The missile crisis should be considered in this context. What was its essence? Was the missile crisis only a struggle between two strong-willed individuals? Was it between the Kennedy administration and the governing group in the USSR under Khrushchev? Was it a struggle between two states seeking diplomatic or narrow economic and political national interests?
When viewed in the long range of history, it was a struggle between two diametrically opposed social systems, each resting on a different, mutually antagonistic class base.
The principal leaders of the Bolshevik Party saw this ultimate struggle very clearly. From the first days of the revolution, the imperialists tried to strangle it, but they were engaged in a war among themselves that impeded their anti-Bolshevik offensive. "If it hadn't been for the war," said Lenin in 1918, "we would have seen a union of the capitalists of the whole world, a consolidation on the basis of the struggle against us."
In April, Lenin told the Party Executive Committee, "We got a breathing spell only because the imperialist war still continued in the west, and in the Far East imperialist rivalry is raging wider and wider; this alone explains the existence of the Soviet Republic."
Once Germany was defeated, the Allied imperialists turned their attention to crushing the workers' revolution. Fourteen countries sent troops against the Bolsheviks, but the resistance of the revolutionary masses was so determined, and communist appeals to the workers abroad had such an effect, that the effort finally had to be abandoned.
"We have now passed from war to peace," said Lenin in 1920. "But we have not forgotten that war will come again. So long as both capitalism and socialism remain, we cannot live in peace. Either the one or the other in the long run will conquer."
Influence of the French revolutions
Now listen to these words, so similar in content, but from an earlier period:
"In the present condition of Europe and insofar as the course of events can be foreseen, it is no longer possible to hope, unless one is blind, or to assert, unless one is a traitor, that socialism will be achieved in the advanced nations by peaceful means. The nation which first achieves socialism will see all the frenzied powers of reaction hurled against it at the same time. It will be lost if it is not itself prepared to seize a sword, to answer bullet with bullet, so that the working class of other countries may have time to organize and rise in its turn." (Quoted in Boris Souvarine, Stalin--A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, Octagon Books, New York, 1972)
Doesn't this sound like so many of the speeches and writings warning of an attack against the USSR? But it is a quote from a speech by Jean Jaurès, a French socialist (1859-1914), made many years before the Russian Revolution. The defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871 was the background for his remarks. Obviously its shadow loomed large even years later. The Commune was one of the principal sources of political analysis and forecasting, of revolutionary energy and thought for generations of revolutionaries in Europe.
Jaures was an elected deputy in the French parliament in 1885 and again in 1893. By his second term, he had become a socialist and was put forward as a candidate by the miners of Tarn after a long strike. He was very active in the defense of Dreyfus and the campaign for the separation of church and state.
It is sometimes believed that the Paris Commune and French revolutionary history in general acquired significance only after the Bolshevik Revolution. But that is not true. Lenin, Trotsky, Plekhanov, Martov, Axelrod, Stalin--all had considerable interest in and knowledge of the Paris Commune. It was still fresh in their minds, although the insurrection had been so cruelly drowned in blood several decades before them.
The specter raised by Jaures that the capitalist states would form an alliance to destroy a workers' republic was very plausible in light of the furious political and ideological offensives launched by the capitalist press worldwide following the destruction of the Commune. However, no such alliance of capitalist states took place. But that's what easily came to mind, particularly in Russia, when the Paris Commune experience was discussed in the revolutionary movement.
This possibility of an alliance of capitalist states took on exceptional importance almost immediately after the victory of the October Revolution. The threat continued virtually to the last day of the existence of the USSR as a unified socialist republic. But it took Jaures, a prolific writer and orator who had also written much about the French Revolution of 1789, to express it in such a way as to foreshadow the eventuality of an imperialist alliance against any socialist revolution.
Jaures, whose history of the French Revolution was written from what he considered a socialist point of view, might also have mentioned in his speech that England, Russia, Prussia, Austria, Spain and other states waged war against revolutionary France and even against the empire of Napoleon Bonaparte.
(Deng Xiaoping of the People's Republic of China visited France in the 1970s. In the course of his first discourse with journalists and politicians there, he found room to congratulate the French people for their "brilliant revolutionary history.")
The fear of a united front of the capitalist states against the USSR was not a figment of the leaders' imagination. The leadership was forced to take into its calculations during the course of socialist construction the ever-present danger of imperialist intervention and what its capabilities and its congenital tendencies might be. Immediately after the civil war, the 14 intervening imperialist states had to be vanquished and forced to withdraw before a credible plan for socialist construction could even begin.
Gorbachev's view in 1986
How different was the problem Gorbachev faced when he took over as General Secretary. Was the danger of an imperialist attack greater or less? Was the USSR, as a social system in fierce rivalry with the capitalist world, in a less precarious position than at the end of the civil war?
Let's see what Gorbachev had to say on Feb. 25, 1986, at the 27th Congress of the Party, in the speech where he proposed some of his reforms:
"Soviet society has gone a long way in its development. We have built the whole country anew, have made tremendous headway in the economic, cultural and social fields and have raised generations of builders of the new society. We have blazed the trail into outer space for humanity."
In contrast to the present, when the former USSR is going through a nightmare of economic chaos, this is how Gorbachev described the economy in 1986: "In a quarter of a century, real per-capita incomes have gone up 160 percent and the social consumption funds more than 400 percent; 54 million flats [apartments] have been built which enabled us to improve the living conditions of the majority of families. ... The transition to universal secondary education has been completed. The number of people who finish higher educational establishments has increased fourfold. The success of science, medicine and culture are universally recognized."
Analyzing the world situation, he said, "We have secured military strategic parity and have thereby substantially restricted imperialism's aggressive plans and capabilities to start a nuclear war. The position of our motherland and of world socialism in the international arena have grown considerably stronger."
On the other hand, Gorbachev made very sure to state that "The capitalist world has not abandoned the ideology and policy of hegemony. Its rulers have not yet lost the hope of taking social revenge and continue to indulge themselves with illusions of superior strength."
Later on, he says, "An essential feature of ideological work today is that it is conducted in a situation marked by a sharp confrontation between socialist and bourgeois ideology. ... The most important group of contradictions in terms of humanity's future is connected between countries of two systems, the two formations. These contradictions have a long history. Since the great October Revolution in Russia and the split of the world on the social-class principle, fundamental differences have emerged."
The world is split in two class camps! Why is this so? Gorbachev explains later, "The intrinsic mainsprings of the social and economic essence of imperialism prompt it to translate the competition of the two [antagonistic class] systems into the language of military confrontation. Owing to its social nature, imperialism ceaselessly gives rise to aggressive, adventurous policy."
This is the picture that Gorbachev painted at the 27th Congress of the CPSU.
Is this assessment of imperialism and its tendencies any different than that of his predecessors? Wasn't it ABC even for school children in the USSR? And if the standard of living and the social, cultural and scientific conditions had improved, as Gorbachev said and which has never really been denied by the imperialist press, why all the crisis today? Why the counterrevolution?