. '-.-~ ___ J - '-. -. ") .----~~ How the .Soviet Workers State . Was Strangled August 1993 ..x~" Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 2 Table of Contents Introduction "Standing alone, as it does, the only young Soviet republic, premised on the Bankrupt Stalinism Opens Floodgates live thing in the universe, there slogan "Workers of the world, unite," to Capitalist Restoration is a strong probability that the Rus­ became a beacon to the exploited and Soviet Workers: sian Revolution will not be able oppressed the world over, from the pow­ Defeat Yeltsin-Bush to defy the deadly enmity of the erful organized workers movements of Counterrevolution! ............... 3 entire world. But whether it survive Europe to the small but militant prole­ or perish, whether it be altered tariats of countries subjected to colonial­ unrecognizably by the pressure of ist oppression. But due mainly to the Traitors, Not Trotskyists circumstance, it will have shown absence of a hardened, tested leadership Cheerleaders for that dreams can come true, that the like the Bolsheviks, the revolutionary Yeltsin's Counterrevolution ... 12 race may be to the strong, that the wave was repulsed in the advanced impe­ toiling masses can not only conquer, rialist centers, first and foremost Ger­ but build." many where revolutionary upsurges in Moscow: Cops Unleashed Against Anti-Yellsin Demonstrators -John Reed, March 19 J 8 1918-19 and 1923 were defeated. Under conditions of hostile imperial­ Soviet Union in the Balance ... 17 The Russian Revolution of 25 October 1917 (7 November in the modern calen­ ist encirclement, economic backward­ dar) was the defining political event of ness and the disappointment of the hopes Moscow-Patrice Lumumba University the 20th century. When the working the advanced workers and party cadres African Student Murdered class, led by the Bolshevik Party of had placed in the German revolution, a conservative, nationalist bureaucratic by Yeltsin's Cops ............... 20 Lenin and Trotsky and organized in democratically elected soviets (workers caste arose in the Soviet Union headed councils), seized power from the bour­ by J.Y. Stalin. This parasitic layer of Yeltsln Breaks Russian geoisie and its autocratic holdovers and usurpers of working-class political power Air Controllers Strike .......... 22 built the world's first proletarian state, acquired self-consciousness as it sought they gave flesh and blood to the Marxist to consolidate and expand its privileges theory developed by an earlier genera­ atop the apparatus of the young work­ ICL Leaflet in Ex-USSR tion of revolutionists. ers state; its "theoretical" outlook was Stalinist Has-Beens: The great German revolutionists Karl Stalin's 1924 formulation of building Left Wing of Nationalist Marx and Friedrich Engels had seen har­ "socialism in one country"-an impres­ Counterrevolution .............. 25 bingers of proletarian power as early as sionistic and defeatist acceptance of cap­ the 1848 revolutions in Europe and italist restabilization outside the borders particularly the 1871 Paris Commune. of the USSR. Stalin and his henchmen Stalinism-Gravedigger of the Revolution Although the 19th century working class perverted the Communist International, How the Soviet Workers State was too weak to conquer and hold state hoping (falsely) to mitigate imperialist Was Strangled .................. 31 power, Marx and Engels foresaw that the hostility to the Soviet Union, ultimately bourgeoisie which was conquering the by eschewing international revolution. planet for its mode of production was The parties of the Comintern increasingly Capitalism Without Capital also bringing into being a powerful pro­ became "reformists of the second mobi­ Russia's New Exploiters ...... 43 letariat which would be its gravedigger. lization," using the authority of the Octo­ Just as the capitalist class, deriving vast ber Revolution to sell out revolutionary economic power from the tremendous opportunities through alliances with the USee's Labourite Nationalization Fetish leap in the productive forces made pos­ "progressive" wing of the class enemy, Camp Followers of sible by the industrial revolution, had to from China to Spain in the 1920s and Counterrevolution .. ....... ' .... 48 push aside the agrarian-based feudal rul­ 1930s to Italy, Greece and France fol­ ing classes (whose decrepit social order lowing World War II. had become an obstacle to growth of the The rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy Yeltsin's Bloody May Day means of production and to commerce, did not go unopposed within the Bolshe­ Russian Referendum: science and secular culture), so too must vik Party. In the struggle which he waged The Morning After .. ............ 53 the proletariat, in its turn, sweep away at the head of the Left Opposition and the rule of the bourgeoisie and usher in later the Fourth International against the a new society of peace and plenty based degeneration of the workers state, Leon Reforge the Fourth International!. on an international division of labor and Trotsky insisted that only the restora­ Stalin Drowned the Communist the end of exploitation of man by man. tion of soviet democracy and a return to Party of Lenin and Trotsky The Russian working class, and its the perspective of world socialist revo­ In Blood .......................... 64 Bolshevik leadership, saw their revo­ lution could save the USSR from ulti­ lution as the first victory of the rev­ mate defeat at the hands of imperialism olutionary wave which followed the and counterrevolution. Sixty years ago, unprecedented carnage of World War I. Trotsky advanced the program of prole­ It was a truism for all revolutionists at tarian political revolution to oust the the time that the conquest of power in bureaucracy. In works like The Third at least several advanced capitalist coun­ International After Lenin (1928) and The tries was necessary if a workers state Revolution Betrayed (1937), Trotsky was to survive in backward Russia. The continued on page 10 3 reprintedJrom Workers Vanguard No. 533, 30 August 1991 Bankrupt Stalinism Opens Floodgates to Capitalist Restoration Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counterrevolution! AUGUST 27-The working people of the Soviet Union, and indeed the workers of the world, have suffered an unparal­ leled disaster whose devastating conse­ quences are now being played out. The ascendancy of Boris Yeltsin, who offers himself as Bush's man, coming off a botched coup by Mikhail Gorbachev's former aides, has unleashed a counter­ revolutionary tide across the land of the October Revolution. The first workers state in history, sapped and undermined by decades of Stalinist bureaucratic misrule, lies in tatters. The state power has been fractured, the Communist Party-its bureaucratic core-shattered and banned from the KGB and armed forces, the multinational union is ripping apart as one republic after another pro­ claims secession. But while Yeltsin & Co. now see a clear field to push through a forced­ draft reintroduction of capitalism, the outcome is not yet definitively decided. As the imperialists rejoice and the pro­ capitalist petty bourgeoisie eXUlt, Soviet workers are facing a disaster of cata­ strophic proportions: every gain for which they, their parents and grand­ parents sacrificed is on the chopping block. An explosion of even greater nationalist strife is looming. The lash of capitalist exploitation being introduced amid universal economic dislocation threatens widespread hunger and mass Bush and Yeltsln congratulate the'mselves (top). Pro-Yeltsln crowd In front of unemployment in the coming winter. The Russian ·Whlte House" In August 1991. Soviet proletariat, whose capacity for militant action was dramatically shown throw a giant wrench in the works many of the most advanced workers, who in the miners strike of the summer and prevent the rapid consolidation of opposed Yeltsin's plans for wholesale of 1989, has not been heard from. counterrevolution. privatization and Gorbachev's market Opposition from the factories against Soviet Stalinism has breathed its reforms, looked to the so-called hard­ the ravages of capitalist assault could pathetic last gasp. Even up to the coup line "patriotic" wing of the bureaucracy. 4 There is no room anymore for such progress toward socialism but clogged rest on the collectivized economy. illusions .. every pore of Soviet society. After dec­ The alternatives posed before the So­ The coup's collapse and the ascen­ ades of self-sacrifice extracted from the viet bureaucratically degenerated work­ dancy of counterrevolution in the Soviet proletariat in the name of building ers state have always been: counterrev­ Union buttresses, for the present mo­ "socialism in one country," Gorbachev's olution or Trotskyism. Today Stalinism ment, Bush's proclaimed "New World perestroika was the last desperate is dead. The key to frustrating the bloody Order" militarily dominated by the U.S. attempt of the Stalinist bureaucracy to plans of Bush, Yeltsin and their counter­ Following its annihilation of Iraq, the preserve its position by adopting capi­ revolutionary cohorts is the early forging triumphalist and vengeful American rul­ talist measures. But like Nikolai Bu­ of a Trotskyist nucleus in the Soviet ing class threatens to tum its wrath, unre­ kharin's appeals to the rich peasants Union, regrouping those elements in strained by the deterrent of a powerful (kulaks) in the late 1920s to "en­ the workers movement, the army and USSR, against myriad peoples of the rich