I

.,' " I Howlhe , 'I. I Soviet Workers State Was' Strangled

Spartacist Homeless tent city In Moscow's Red Square.

August 1993 ..,X"23 Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116

I I Ii i1iililliliiii Ii i ililhili_i•• i .. "i_iiiiiii ""'hiliii"" Ii Ii i iiMilr iI= Ii i it 2 Table of Contents Introduction young Soviet republic,· premised on the Bankrupt Stalinism Opens Floodgates "Standing alone, as it does, the only to Capitalist Restoration live thing in the universe, there slogan "Workers of the world, unite," 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 Traitors, Not Trotskyists unrecognizably by the pressure of ist oppression. But due mainly to the 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 Yeltsln'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 Moscow: Cops Unleashed Against but build." many where revolutionary upsurges in Anti-Yeltsin Demonstrators -John Reed, March 1918 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 Yeltsln'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. V. 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 Com intern 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 tum, 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 .11111111111 .1111 ______. , 3 reprinted from 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 themselves (top). Pro-Yeltsln crowd In front of unemployment in the coming winter. The Russian "WhIte 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.

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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. 'roday 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 yourselves," perestroika fueled the throughout society who would fight for world. Cuba, in particular, is in Bush's forces of capitalist restoration which the program of October. cross hairs, and its defense is more than have now reached their fruition with ever a duty of all opponents of Yankee Yeltsin's countercoup. Perestroika Coup Fiasco .imperialism. Boris Yeltsin is not a "Westernizer"­ As the crowd of yuppies, students and From the time of Stalin's bureaucratic he is an extreme Russian chauvinist who assorted Russian nationalists, including usurpation of power in 1924, Leon Trot­ intends to sell out the Soviet Union to fascists and priests, gathered at the start sky and the Left Opposition waged an the West. He is connected to a far-right, of the coup outside the Russian parlia­ unrelenting fight for the internationalist racist outfit in the U.S. called the "Free ment, Yeltsin's "White House," a call program of the Bolshevik Revolution. Congress Foundation" (whose East Eu­ on Moscow workers to clean out this Under the deadly blows of Stalinist ter­ ropean operatives include notorious Nazi counterrevolutionary rabble was in or­ ror and slander, the Trotskyists perse­ collaborators) which takes credit for der. Yet the coup plotters not only did vered as the best and only consistent "training" him and his staff on how to not mobilize the workers, they ordered defenders of the remaining revolution­ seize power. His laws are being drawn everybody to stay at work and at home. ary gains. Today the International Com­ up by advisers supplied by the U.S. gov­ The working class did, and Yeltsin's munist League (Fourth Internationalist) ernment. One of Yeltsin's first acts as call for a protest strike fell flat. But continues this struggle. Moscow party chief in the mid-'80s was the free-enterprise "cooperativists" and Stalinism was the political rule of a to legitimize the anti-Semitic Pamyat petty-bourgeois self-styled "democrats" bureaucratic caste parasitically sitting fascists when they emerged from their intoxicated by the allure of dollars atop the proletarian property forms ratholes. While he promises working and D-marks thronged into the streets. created by the October Revolution of people that the free market will bring And the impotent "state of emergency 1917. Whether during the bloody purges them prosperity, in fact it will lead to committee" (GKChP) did nothing. Any of the 1930s or the myriad "reforms" the elimination of what every Soviet class-conscious Soviet worker who saw from Khrushchev and others, this system worker considered a right until recently: the urgent need to halt the capitalist­ based on lies and repression of the a stable job, free health care, an educa­ restorationist forces would certainly working class not only blocked further tion for their children-gains which all have been against Yeltsin, but critical' of the coup-which wouldn't stop Yeltsin, and was therefore doomed to failure. The ineptitude of the coup plotters SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S. LOCAL DIRECTORY astounded even imperialist commenta­ National Office: Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 • (212) 732-7860 tors. It was reported that they had ordered 250,000 handcuffs from a fac­ Atlanta Detroit Norfolk tory in Pskov as well as stacks of blank Box 4012 Box 441043 Box 1972, Main PO arrest orders, but they failed even to Atlanta, GA 30302 Detroit, MI 48244 Norfolk, VA 23501 seize the man who would clearly be the Boston Lo. Angele. Oakland focus for a pro-imperialist countercoup. Washington spokesmen ascribed this Box 390840, Central Sta. Box 29574, Los Feliz Sta. Box 29497 Cambridge, MA 02139 Los Angeles, CA 90029 Oakland, CA 94604 failure to follow the first rule of coup­ (617) 492-3928 (213) 380-8239 (510) 839-0851 making and arrest Yeltsin to a "miracle." San Francisco They didn't even cut off his phones, and Chicago Madison Box 77494 incredibly allowed TV to report Yeltsin's Box 6441, Main PO Box 1492 San Francisco, CA 94107 appeals for soldiers to disobey their Chicago, IL 60680 Madison, WI 53101 (415) 777-9367 orders! But these apparent stupidities (312) 663-0715 New York Washington, D.C. were no mere oversight. The coup authors staked everything on a neutral Cleveland Box 444, Canal st. Sta. Box 75073 Box 91037 New York, NY 10013 Washington, D.C. 20013 acceptance of the coup by the imperial­ Cleveland, OH 44101 (212) 261-1025 (202) 872-8240 ists, hinting that Gorbachev might be brought back and leaving Washington's darling Yeltsin untouched. The GKChP's TROTSKYIST LEAGUE OF CAIADA/LiGUE TROTSKYSTE DU CANADA statement vowed to "support private Toronto Montreal Vancouver enterprise" and to observe every treach­ Box 7198, Station A C.P. Les Atriums, Box 2717, Main P.O. erous commitment to the imperialists by Toronto, ON M5W 1)(8 B.P.32066 Vancouver, BC V6B 3X2 Gorbachev. Its chief economic spokes­ (416) 593-4138 Montreal, QC H2L. 4V5 (604) 687-0353 man Tizyakov insisted that "the policy of the reforms toward a market econ-

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target was the statue outside KGB headquarters of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, a Polish Communist and founder of the Cheka, the Bolsheviks' fighting arm against White· Guard subversion. The next day they toppled the statue of Yakov Sverdlov, a Jewish Communist and first president of the Soviet republic. There, the pro-Hitler NTS distributed a leaflet that called for the very measures that Yeltsin decreed the next day. The Rus­ Uniformed Pamyat fascists sian Orthodox Patriarch presided over burn Soviet the burial of three who died assaulting flag outside. the tanks. British TV reported, "The Communist images today were of old Russia, pre­ Party revolutionary, a country throwing itself headquarters. back 75 years." In the wake of the botched coup, Yel­ tsin, the former bureaucratic hack turned capitalist-restorationist, moved quickly and ruthlessly against his opponents. omy will not be reversed." There was "prison house of peoples"-declaring: In the best tradition of Stalin, Yeltsin no mention· of "Marxism-Leninism," "Our multinational people have lived for dragged the politically enfeebled Soviet "communism," Cir. even "socialism." centuries, proud of their Motherland." "president" Gorbachev before jeering For this was a "perestroika coup." For But in appealing to Russian nationalism, members of the Russian parliament to months there had been calls for a crack­ Yeltsin held the stronger hand. crudely humiliate him. Aping the tsar, down coming from hardlin~ Stalinist/ Nor did the coup organizers manage the "democratic" Russian president Yel­ nationalist "patriots" like the "black colo­ to assuage Washington and Wall Street. tsin haughtily issued a ukase (decree) nels" of Soyuz. But what moved the As soon as Bush took a hard line backing banning activities of the Communist coup leaders, all of them Gorbachev Yeltsin (and incidentally demanding Party on Russian soil and outlawed appointees, to action was the imminent Gorbachev's return), the coup began Pravda and other CP newspapers. The signing of a new union treaty, which unraveling. In the aftermath, there has CPSU Central Committee and Moscow would have ceded significant central been a lot of hoopla about the outpouring offices were sealed and surrounded by powers to the republics. The coup was of popular support for "democracy." bloodthirsty gangs. Flaunting his power not so much by the military, which While up to 150,000 (out of a city over Gorbachev, Yeltsin named the new largely stayed out of the fray, but by of ten million), undoubtedly including head ·of the Soviet army, KGB and inte­ top administrative and party hacks of many workers, turned out at one point rior ministry, who promptly outlawed the central apparat whose bureaucratic to hear Yeltsin, the fabled barricades Communist Party activity in these pillars fiefdoms were threatened. Their avowed outside the "White House" were purely of state power. The next day Gorbachev program was martial law to keep symbolic, generally having only a few not only resigned as general secretary of the USSR from breaking apart, which thousand hanging around them. "They the CPSU but called for dissolution of comes down to perestroika minus glas­ were mainly young ones, like myself, the disintegrating party and confiscation nost: the introduction of the market students, intellectuals, professionals ," of its property. but not so fast, and shut up. Thus one said one participant. In addition to a cou­ Yeltsin may wield the pen and the of the "gang of eight," Prime Minister ple dozen Russian republic police, Yel­ microphone, but his orders came on the Pavlov, was the Gorbachev regime's tsin's bodyguards were rent-a-cops from direct line from the White House on the main spokesman for the new law allow­ a private security company (like the Potomac to the "White House" on the ing widescale privatization of industry, strikebreaking Pinkertons. in the U.S.). Moskva. Less than 24 hours after Bush and was notorious for tripling food At most there were a dozen tanks, dis­ expressed dissatisfaction with Gorba­ prices last spring. At the time, he told a patched by pro-Yeltsin commanders, in chev's appointment of General Moiseyev British journalist: front of the building. Speaking of a pos­ as the new defense minister, Moiseyev "I must be very firm and say that sible assault, a Yeltsin "commander" was out. The Russian demagogue Yeltsin privatisation has always been on the said: "Of course, we could not hold them is portrayed as a great hero of "democ­ agenda of economic reform, and it was off for more than five minutes." But always, for obvious reasons, v.ery closely racy." This "democrat" is calling for the linked with the liberalisation of prices .... there was no !ierious assault. formation of a new Russian army, the We want to bring about the normal sit­ Emboldened by the paralysis of the "National Guard," whose fll'st decora­ uation of capital as in other countries." coup leaders, the reactionary mob tion would be the Order of St. George­ -London Independent (18 A:pril) heaved Molotov cocktails at young tank the tsarist emblem and banner· of the Not exactly a program to inspire drivers. And then, barely two and a Russian fascists. A former White House Soviet workers to support the plotters' half days after the action began, the official called Yeltsin "a Slavic edition bid for power! The coup leaders con­ army withdrew. At this point frenzied of Huey Long" (San Francisco Chroni­ spicuously avoided any mention of the Yeltsinites began rampaging through the cle, 22 August), the right-wing Louisiana October Revolution, or for that matter city. A lieutenant colonel who attended demagogue who in the 1930s used even the "Great Patriotic War." Instead the demonstrations was shocked: "I am populist rhetoric to build up a personal, they looked to the traditions of. the surprised by how many of the young authoritarian regime. Even many pro­ tsarist empire-which Lenin called a -are thirsting for blood." Their first Western, "free market" intellectu-als in

....·m~1I·1_1.111I.1 ••nlrrrlll.IIII.II.I.llIlTlmlf11~ .. 1IflflI1~r ....DTIIlIlIJIrlllflr--· .. ··]--- illllllll ••II.I.IIIIIIIIlDr.I_nrIIlIHllil __ llITIlllln.11II1 ___I_llllIITlIIlllIlIIlllIlll ___mllll ____ IIIIIII_mrmmRll1III1IIIMII'I •• lnlrlllnll __IDlIMDlI_IIII_lllinlliiI 6 the Soviet Union fear Yeltsin as a poten­ fying the system of bureaucratic rule socialist revolution. He also spelled out tial dictator who will ride roughshod installed by Stalin and his henchmen in the bleak alternative: over them. Like Poland's LechWalesa, 1924 with Leninism. Nothing could be "If-to adopt a second hypothesis-a admirer of the nationalist dictator Pil­ further from the truth. The Bolsheviks bourgeois party were to overthrow the sudski, he will try to use his popularity under Lenin and Trotsky carried out the ruling Soviet caste, it would find no small number of ready servants among to impose capitalist "shock treatment" October Revolution as the first step of the present bureaucrats, administrators, on the workers. the world socialist revolution. Backward technicians, directors, party secretaries The' imperialist media are exultant, Russia, the "weak link" of imperialist and privileged upper circles in generaL, hailing "The Second Russian Revolu­ rule, was the scene of the first workers A purgation of the state apparatus would, of course, be necessary in this case too. tion." The New York Times sneeringly revolution, but it had to be completed But a bourgeois restoration would prob­ refers to V.1. Lenin as "little more than by the proletariat in the advanced impe­ ably have to clean out fewer people than a demagogue with a lisp." (The Times is rialist countries if it was to sustain itself a revolutionary party. The chief task of so intent on portraying a counterrevolu­ and lead to socialism, a society of equal­ the new power would be to restore pri­ tion victorious that its copious coverage ity based on abundance. It was on the vate property in the means of production. First of all, it would be necessary to cre­ never once mentions the Soviet workers.) basis of the defeat of the European rev­ ate conditions for the development of But in the Soviet Union, even some of olutions, centrally in Germany, in the strong farmers from the weak collective the more liberal Yeltsinites are beginning 1918-23 postwar period, that the usurp­ farms, and for converting the strong to get nervous about reaping the whirl­ ers Stalin/Bukharin "discovered" the collectives into producers' cooperatives of the bourgeois type-into agricultural wind they have sown. Ogonyok editor profoundly anti-Marxist notion that it stock companies. In the sphere of indus­ Vitaly Korotich is now warning of a was possible to construct "socialism in try, denationalization would begin with the light industries and those producing food. The planning principle would be converted for the transitional period into a series of compromises between state power and individual 'corporations'­ potential proprietors, that is, among the Soviet captains of industry, the emigre former proprietors and foreign capital­ ists. Notwithstanding that the Soviet bureaucracy has gone far toward pre­ paring a bourgeois restoration, the new regime would have to introduce in the matter of forms of property and methods of industry not a reform, but a social revolution." Every Soviet worker, collective farm­ er, pensioner and soldier will immedi­ ately recognize that this process of coun­ terrevolution is well under way. The state monopoly of foreign trade has. been scuttled, the planned economy aban­ doned. In their stead, imperialist corpo­ rations from Pepsi-Cola to Chevron oil Coup organizers' press conference: (from left) Tizyakov, Starodubtsev, Pugo, have made encroachments on the Soviet Yanayev and Baklanov. economy. The Russian federation's new "land reform" lays the basis for destroy­ ing the kolkhoz collectives, promising "third force, which may be represented one country." Trotsky denounced this rural poverty for the many and riches for by certain young people of the fascist nationalist dogma as writing off the the new kulaks. "Cooperative" profiteers persuasion." The leaders of the "demo­ world revolution, and predicted it would and black market speculators have grown cratic revolution" are already promoting be the undoing of the Soviet Union if explosively in the vacuum of the col­ the.tsarist watchword of "Russia, one and the bureaucracy was not swept away by lapsed distribution system. But this is indivisible." Leningrad mayor Anatoly the resurgent working class. only the beginning. Yeltsin now intends Sobchak lambastes centrifugal forces In his decisive analysis of Stalinism, to ram through capitalist restoration at pulling apart the USSR: "This is insanity. TheRevolution Betrayed (1937), Trotsky breakneck pace. Yavlinsky, co-author of We are a nuclear country." Yeltsin aides asked prophetically, "Will the bureaucrat the Harvard-designed "grand bargain" to talk of destabilization of the economy devour the workers' state, or will the sell out the Soviet Union to the imperi­ and warn Ukrainran secessionists that working class clean up the bureaucrat?" alists, is now in charge of the economy. "these i lands were settled by Russians," In developing this; he elaborated the pro­ But for the Soviet working masses, the , Meanwhile, thousands of Muscovites gram of proletarian political revolution "magic of the marketplace" holds the have been lining up .to visit the led by a Bolshevik party to re-establish promise of hunger and homelessness. In Lenin mausoleum, worried that this Soviet democracy. The planned economy an insiders' newsletter, the major Wall may be their last opportunity to pay their would be subordinated to the will of the Street brokerage firm Merrill Lynch respects to, the founde.r of the .Sdviet workers, freeing it from the arbitrary zig­ hints at the truth being hidden from the state. zags of the faceless, grey bureaucrats. Soviet masses: And instead of the conservative anti­ Fight Capitalist Enslavement! "Although there is likely tl? be a surge revolutionary policies of Stalin's Krem­ in optimism among the Soviet people as For decades, the Stalinists and impe­ lin, the Soviet Union would again be­ a new political order emerges, expecta­ rialists have joined together in identi- come the headquarters of international tions about the new order's ability to turn 7

around the economy are likely to exceed what is realistically possible. If the expe­ rience of eastern Europe is any indica­ tion, the next several years will be pain­ ful for the Soviet economy as workers lose lifetime jobs and state-owned enter­ prises are restructured." -Wednesday's Global Report, 21 August Up until now Yeltsin has been able to blame the economic chaos and immis­ eration of perestroika on Gorbachev's "half-measures" and the sabotage of the old Stalinist apparat. The Russian dem­ agogue talks out of both sides of his mouth, visiting strikers one week and 1989 mIners strike threw up Incipient approving anti-strike laws the next. But workers councils . now Yeltsin will seek to implement his (soviets), showed real program, to impose brutal capitalist potential power austerity on the Soviet working class. of multinational He will be held responsible for closing USSR proletariat. down "unprofitable" enterprises, throw­ ing millions of workers into the streets, raising rents and the price of food, shut­ ting down childcare centers and attack­ ing Soviet working people in all ways. It is urgently, indeed desperately nec­ pogroms. Workers militias must be At the same time, it will be very difficult essary for the working class to now es­ formed, aided by Red Army officers and in the next several months to use the tablish organizational forms to mobilize soldiers loyal to socialism, to defend army, KGB or police to break strikes or its power to resist and overthrow the against and crush the lynch mobs and break up popular protests. forces of capitalist counterrevolution. pogromists . Despite Yeltsin's present ascendancy • As every hustler is out to "get theirs," • Illegalization of the Communist Party and the mood of anti-Communist hys­ workers will be anxious to protect their will be used as a precedent to ban aU teria among the petty bourgeoisie, it will own threatened livelihoods. Independent groups claiming to stand for socialism not be that easy to carry out a capitalist workers committees must be formed in or communism. The red purge will be counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. factories, mines, railroad yards and other used to victimize militant workers who In fact, one might expect a higher level enterprises to prevent layoffs and privat­ lead strikes against layoffs and privat­ of strike action than took place under ization by taking over the plants and con­ ization. Down with the witchhunting ban Gorbachev's perestroika. During this trolling production. Such workers com­ on the CPt Don't let them drag away period the Soviet working class has been mittees can be the basis for genuine Jewish or Communist coworkers! politically disoriented and confused by soviets, drawing into their ranks col­ • The escalating nationalist secessionist the ever-shifting lineup of Yeltsin vs. lective farmers, oppressed minorities, movements in the various republics are Gorbachev vs. the "hardline" Stalinists. working women, Red Army soldiers and fueling fratricidal slaughter among the Now the lines of battle are hard, and officers, old-age pensioners-all those deeply interpenetrated Soviet peoples. It raw. But the absence of genuinely com­ who will be victimized by the "new is urgently necessary to organize multi­ munist leadership represents the greatest order." national defense guards to ward off com­ obstacle, leaving the working class prey • Yeltsin & Co. have already begun munalist butchery. As Leninists, i.e., to confusion, false polarizations and purging the officer corps of the military: proletarian internationalists, we stand defeatism in the face of their class This has nothing to do with democracy. for full equality of all nations and nation­ enemies. He wants to tum the Soviet army which alities in a genuinely socialist federation. Both the Yeltsinites and the "hard­ defended the Soviet people against the Working women, who have suffered liners" compete on the terrain of coun­ Nazi scourge into a compliant tool for most under perestroika's economic. mis­ terrevolutionary Russian nationalism. internal repression in the interests of the ery, must be in the forefront not only of Starting with Stalin himself, vicious new capitalist masters. Committees of the battle to stop the closures of child­ Great Russian chauvinism has charac­ soldiers and officers must be formed to care centers, but in the forging of a terized the bureaucracy, undermining the oppose the purges and prevent the army genuinely communist nucleus. In Poland multinational USSR. The Pamyat anti­ from being used to attack the workers' and the former DDR (East Germany) Semites' rise was protected by sections interests. women are being driven from their jobs of the Gorbachev bureaucracy, in par­ • The anti-Communist mobs are the and abortion is considered a criminal ticular Yeltsin's wing. Meanwhile, the shock troops of a budding fascist move­ act. Reawakened women workers of the nationalist secessionists-mostly from ment, the future strikebrealcers, jailers Soviet Union-who have the most· to the better-off repUblics-yearn to be and torturers of militant workers and lose under capitalist counterrevolution­ pawns of imperialism today, as many of leftists. Already the NTS, former WWII must play a leading role as their grand­ their forefathers were for the Nazis. In quislings of the Hitlerite invaders, have mothers and great-grandmothers did in the last fight of his life, Lenin insisted, raised their heads at the Yeltsinite the Bolshevik Revolution. against Stalin, that the revolutionary mobilizations. The blackshirted Pamyat The youth, many shocked into polit­ Soviet state be a voluntary union based fascists are burning red flags. Next ical awareness for the first time in recent on equality of nations. they will be staging deadly anti-Semitic days, must find their way to the program 8

not one word of criticism of the GKChP. A call for workers militias to smash the counterrevolutionary Yeltsinite demon­ strations was certainly in order. But if the Emergency Committee had consoli­ dated power, it would have attempted to disband any such workers militias, which would otherwise have inevitably and rapidly escaped its political control. The last thing these degenerate Stalinists wanted to see was the independent mobi­ lization of the working class. Those communist-minded leftists who looked to the "patriotic" wing of the Communist Party and armed forces are now understandably in a state of polit­ ical trauma. They cannot understand what happened. In fact, they cannot understand what has happened since Gorbachev became leader of the CPSU in 1985. The economic chaos and mis­ eries of perestroika, the abandonment of Leon Trotsky shortly before his assassination by Stalin's agents In Mexico East Europe, the endorsement of the 1940. Left Opposition intransigently defended USSR against threat of capitalist American destruction of Iraq in the restoration. Right: Trotsky's 1935 article, "Where Is the Stalin Bureaucracy name of Bush's "New World Order"­ Leading the USSR?" in Bulletin of the Opposition. these are not simply a result of spine­ of revolutionary internationalism. Re­ had illusions in the "patriotic" elements lessness, corruption or stupidity on the version to the Siavophilic backwardness of the Stalinist bureaucracy, who fre­ part of Gorbachev and his collaborators. of Yeltsin & Co. precludes the genuinely quently appealed to Great Russian chau­ They are the legacy of more than six open intellectual and artistic climate that vinism and conciliated or embraced out­ decades of Stalinist perversion of the so many young people yearn for. Make right anti-Semites, fascists and tsarists. October Revolution: the bureaucratic no mi&take: life for youth in the West But for example Soyuz leader Colonel usurpation of workers rule, the high­ does not resemble a music video! The Viktor Alksnis denounces Gorbachev not handed bureaucratic mismanagement of reality for working-class youth under for introducing the market, but for intro­ the economy, the Great Russian chau­ capitalism is a nightmare of uncertainty, ducing "democracy": "My model is the vinism at the expense of national minor­ unemployment, hopelessness with the market first and democracy later." This ities, the stifling of free expression very real prospect of being cannon fod­ is known as the "Chilean option," mod­ and creativity, the political demobilizing der in the' next imperialist war. The eled on the bloody Pinochet coup, whose of the working class. ' young Soviet republic in the days of vaunted fake "economic miracle" was After the relative stagnation, of the Lenin and Trotsky fought for women's built on the corpses of tens of thousands last Brezhnev years, in their own way emancipation, for every kind of social of leftist workers and peasants. the dominant sections of the Kremlin emancipation, against censorship, for In late July activists from the "patri­ bureaucracy came to recognize there can freedom from state intervention in one's ots" milieu initiated a workers confer­ be no "socialism in one country," that personal affairs. ence in the capital which drew over 500 the Soviet Union must be integrated into Workers and soldiers soviets (coun­ delegates from 400 major Moscow-area the world economy as part of an inter­ cils) must orient to defeating the coun­ plants. A representative of the Interna­ national division of labor. Since the core terrevolutionary Yeltsin regime and es­ tional Communist League addressed this of the Stalinist ideological outlook is the tablishing a government based on soviet gathering: rejection of socialist revolution in the democracy such as was established by "Today the imperialists and the native advanced capitalist countries, this meant . the October Revolution of 1917. In this restorationists strive to dismember the integration into the world capitalist sys­ hour of dire need more than ever, the USSR by splitting, paralyzing the Soviet tem. The intent of Yeltsin and Gorba­ key to successful defense of the Soviet proletariat with nationalism. This is their chev-who both began as typical young, greatest weapon. But the proletariat has up-and-coming apparatchiks under the proletariat ,is the forging of a new, its own weapon-internationalism. We authentically communist vanguard party need to forge a party that mobilizes Brezhnev regime-to sell the Soviet of.the working class. Return to the road against all forms of discrimination, Union to Wall Street and Frankfurt is of Lenin and Trotsky! nationalism and anti-Semitism!" the logical culmination of the Stalinist - WV No. 532, 2 August doctrine of "socialism in one coun­ For Revolutionary During the coup, the Moscow workers try." Gorbachev's neo-Bukharinite "mar­ Regroupmentl council which came out of this July con­ ket socialism" was the antechamber to ference issued a call to: "Form workers counterrevolution. With the evident and total collapse militias for the preservation of socialized Despite the anti-Communist hysteria of Stalinism, there is a crying ,need property, for the preservation of social now raging in the Soviet Union, there for regroupment among the numerous order on the streets of our cities, for the are large numbers of workers and even would-be communist groupings on the control of the carrying out of the orders a few intellectuals who want to defend left fringe of the CPSU. Many of the and instructions of the State Committee socialism and communism. They must most communist-minded workers have on the Emergency Situation." There was understand that Trotskyism is the genu- 9

ine expression of Bolshevism today, that ington, Berlin and Tokyo. The present its forces into the fight for the perspec­ a Trotskyist party must be built to lead collapse of the Stalinist bureaucracy has tive of a red Germany of workers the struggle against the counterrevolu­ its immediate origins in the renewed councils. We initiated the call for tion. Stalin's first step in consolidating Cold War offensive launched by Amer­ the giant Treptow anti-fascist demon­ his regime, aided by Bukharin, was to ican imperialism after its ignominious stration of 3 January 1990, which drew purge and persecute the Left Opposition, defeat in Vietnam. In every key battle­ 250,000 people to honor the Soviet and eventually to murder the entire sur­ ground of Cold War II-Afghanistan, soldiers who died liberating Ger­ viving Old Bolshevik cadre, the leaders Poland, the German Democratic Repub­ many from the Nazis. Then, as Gorbachev of October. lic (DDR)-the International Commu­ gave the green light to a reunified The disastrous effects of "socialism in nist League (ICL, formerly the interna­ Fourth Reich of German imperialism, one country" on the world revolution and tional Spartacist tendency) has stood our comrades of the Spartakist Work­ on the USSR soon made themselves felt. resolutely in defense of the Soviet Union ers Party of Germany were the only Stalin/Bukharin collaborated with the against the capitulation of the Kremlin party which clearly and unambiguously British social-democratic labor bureauc­ bureaucracy. opposed capitalist reunification. racy who then sabotaged the 1926 Gen­ Where the Soviet Stalinists waged Within the Soviet Union represen­ eral Strike. They supported the Chinese a halfhearted war against CIA-armed tatives of the ICL have fought for a rev­ nationalist general Chiang Kai-shek, Islamic reactionaries in Afghanistan, olutionary internationalist perspective. who then drowned in blood the revolu­ ultimately selling out and withdrawing, Thus at a coal miners congress last Octo­ tionary proletariat. As the 1927 Platform we said "Hail Red Army in Afghani­ ber in Donetsk, we helped block the of the Opposition stated: "The defeat of stan!" and called to "Extend Social effort of right-wing, Yeltsinite forces the revolution in China, following the Gains of the October Revolution to the advised by the American "AFL-CIA" defeat of the British General Strike, has Afghan Peoples!" When in late 1981 federation to enlist Soviet miners in the inspired the imperialists with the hope Polish Solidarnosc, under the guidance international anti-Communist witchhunt that they may succeed in crushing the of Reagan and Pope John Paul Wojtyla, against British miners leader Arthur Soviet Union." Only a few years later, made a bid for power in the name of Scargill. The imperialist rulers hate Scar­ the German CP, on Stalin's orders, "bourgeois democracy," we raised the gill because he led the 1984-85 British allowed Hitler to come to power call: "Stop Solidarnosc Counterrevolu­ miners strike-which Soviet workers unchallenged. tion!" General Jaruzelski's countercoup generously aided. This momentous class Having rejected Trotsky's call for a temporarily spiked these clerical-nation­ battle gave the lie to the self-serving principled workers united front to defeat alist front men for Wall Street and Wash­ Stalinist myth that workers in advanced the fascists, as Nazi Germany became ington. But the Stalinists had neither the capitalist countries are incapable of an obvious threat to the USSR, Stalin moral authority nor the program to hard-fought class-struggle. called for a "popular front" with the undercut counterrevolution, and eight We urgently seek to bring the pro­ so-called "democratic" imperialists of years later the same Jaruzelski, with Gor­ gram of Trotskyism to the Soviet prole­ France and Britain. In the name of this bachev's approval, abdicated political tariat and socialist-minded intelligentsia "popular front," the Stalinists sabotaged power to Walesa & Co. with our Russian-language Spartacist a prerevolutionary situation in France When in late 1989 the Honecker Bulletin, containing in addition to key and strangled the revolutionary Spanish regime in East Germany fell and the documents of the ICL the section on working class, paving the way for Fran­ Berlin Wall was opened, the ICL threw the USSR from Trotsky's Transitional co's victory. Then, by beheading the gen­ eral staff of the Red Army during the bloody 1936-38 purges and relying on PROMrTlI LlJS RFSEARUI SERIJ:S 4 his "non-aggression" pact with Hitler, Stalin was directly responsible for the catastrophic losses in the initial stages of World War II. More than 20 million Soviet citizens were killed defending the homeland of Includes the 1972 Yugoslavia, East Europe and October and liberating all of Europe Spartacist article from the nightmare of Nazism. On the "Genesis of Pabloism" the Fourth International: basis of the Red Army's destruction of as well as several rare The Evolution of the Third Reich, subsequent threats to 1948 documents on the Pabloist Liquidationism the USSR by nuclear-armed American Fourth International's imperialism led the Kremlin to undertake flawed response to the by Jan Norden bureaucratically deformed social, i.e., Tito-Stalin split. anti-capitalist, transformations in East Europe as a defensive measure. But now East Europe is being handed back to the imperialists. $7 (includes postage) 70 pages We Trotskyists Have Defended the Soviet Union Order from: $(.(l1J Spartacist Pub. Co. PROMETHEUS RESEARCH LIBRARY ,\L",hl'J'), Today the Soviet Union faces being Box 1377 GPO dismembered and its constituent repub­ New York, NY 10116 lics turned into neocolonies of Wash- 10

Program. In recent months, we analyzed hourgeoisie, which simply moved in its Yeltsin would like to be a capitalist class, the mounting crisis in our article "Where state apparatus, laid waste to the DDR but they are not yet one. Even in Poland, Is the Soviet Union Going?" (W\;, Nos. economy and put half the working pop­ where the state is capitalist from top to 520, 521 and 522, 15 Fehruary, I March ulation on welfare. When the cost turned bottom, a capitalist class has not yet con­ and 15 March), including a program of out to he higher than expected, Bonn gealed because they lack ... capital. struggle for genuine soviet power. kept pumping in hill ions of D-marks. And there are additional obstacles: for The Soviet Union, in contrast, is a one, the Soviet economy is organized on It's Desperately Necessary huge country, with over 100 nationali­ an all-Union basis and the departure of to Fight ties, a tremendous potential for chaos major components, particularly if the Writing in 1935 on "The Workers' and no one to finance a capitalist take­ Ukraine pulls out. will wreak havoc. State, Thermidor and Bonapartism," over. The U.S. could prohahly buy the Moreover, many Soviet workers believe Trotsky noted: "The inevitahle collapse country for a few tens or hundreds of that the country belongs to them, and of Stalinist Bonapartism would immedi­ billions of dollars, but the American rul­ they have a deep reservoir of commit­ ately call into question the character of ing class is as ideologically opposed to ment to egalitarianism which must be the USSR as a workers' state." This has that as it is to financing a decent social rooted out for capitalism to be implanted. now occurred. He added: "The fate of welfare or health care system in this Thus although events are moving at the USSR as a socialist state depends country. Soviet petty-hourgeois yuppies breakneck speed, these factors may upon that political regime that will arise believe in a utopian capitalism, dreaming allow enough of a window for the Soviet to replace Stalinist Bonapartism." The that they will suddenly achieve a stand­ proletariat to go into struggle before the imperialists and their flunkeys such as ard of living like Scandinavia. In fact, counterrevolution consolidates. Should Yeltsin want to accelerate the consolida­ economically and pol itically their fate that happen, revolutionaries must seek tion of a capitalist state. But it will not under capitalism would be more akin to to intervene to provide leadership, seek­ be so easy. This is not East Germany, a Mexico, or worse, with deep impover­ ing above all to cohere a new revolu­ compact, homogeneous country which ishment of the masses presided over hy tionary vanguard party, the necessary was taken over hy the existing German an authoritarian state. The forces backing instrument for victory .•

"countercoup" against the inept "pere­ poverty unknown since the darkest days Introduction ... stroika coup" of the Stalinist has-beens of thc war against Nazi Germany. The (continued from page 2) of the "Emergency Committee." Yeltsin's former multinational state has become consolidation of his imperialist-backed a hotbed of Great Russian chauvinism exposed the suicidal program of "social­ power grab for "democracy," in the and anti-Semitic agitation, while wars of ism in one country" and analyzed the absence of mass resistance to the nationalist fratricide rage in the Cauca­ monstrous rise of the hureaucracy's encroaching capitalist counterrevolution sus. No longer challenged by Soviet apparatus of repression against the by a working class atomized and demor­ military might, U.S. imperialism has Soviet proletariat. alized by decades of Stalinist rule, spelled proclaimed a "one-superpower world," For decades, Stalinist hacks sneered the destruction of the Soviet deformed riding roughshod over semicolonial peo­ at Trotsky as an "ultraleftist" prophet of workers state. But the way for this was ples from the Persian Gulf (100,000 Ira­ doom and boasted of the Soviet Union's prepared. first by Stalin and his epigones, qis slaughtered) to Somalia. "superpower" status as they undermined whose sole answer to perceived threats, The "post-Cold War world" looks very and plundered the planned economy of whether from Old Bolsheviks and restless much as it did before World War I. The the workers state. They cited the exten­ workers or from nationalists and mon­ rival imperialists jock.:y for power amid sion of deformed workers states after archists, was terror and mass murder, and an international recession, while many World War II-created through indige­ then by his successors, up to and includ­ of today's "leftists" (in the spirit of their nous peasant-based revolutions in Yugo­ ing Gorbachev. Reflecting the increased social-democratic forebears of 4 August slavia and China (revolutions undertaken weight in Soviet society of a privileged 1914 who backed their own rulers in war­ by Stalinist parties in self-defense over layer of bureaucrats' children, techno­ time) huttress the "humanitarian" lies of the objections of the Kremlin bureauc­ crats and other would-be "yuppskis," U .S./U N imperialism as it takes up the racy) and the Red Army occupation of Gorbachev's "new thinking" was pro­ racist "white man's burden" in the Horn Eastern Europe where the collapse of the capitalist old thinking-to lise the "magic of Africa and prepares for military adven­ Nazi-allied regimes left a power vac­ of the marketplace" (which in the final tures in Bosnia and elsewhere. uum-as proof they could go on for­ analysis means gouging the maximum The bourgeois media ceaselessly ever "peacefully coexisting" with world of exploitation from the laboring masses trumpets that "communism is dead." But imperialism. But today fledgling capital­ by the threat of unemployment and it is not communism which has been ist regimes hold sway in Poland, Yugo­ starvation) to "revitalize" the USSR's shown to be a dead end, but its Stalinist slavia and throughout Eastern Europe. (bureaucratically distorted) centrall y perversion. Communism lives as the The Soviet Union has been destroyed, planned economy. When he proved inca­ Trotskyist program for world workers and a nascent capitalist state under Boris pable of ramming through the "capitalism revolution; it lives in the struggle of the Yeltsin erected over its ruins. It was Trot­ in 500 days" shock treatment, he was toilers everywhere against their exploi­ sky who posed the question squarely: replaced by the more ruthless ex-Stalinist tation and oppression. And today, not­ "Will the bureaucrat devour the workers bureaucrat Yeltsin. withstanding all the pious proclamations state, or will the working class clean up The ascendancy of counterrevolution of the bourgeoisie and its mouthpieces the hureaucrat'?" Now Trotsky's pro­ in the former USSR is an unparalleled ahout "the end of the class struggle" and phetic warning has been vindicated, bit­ defeat for working people all over the even "the end of history," working peo­ terly, in the negative. world, decisively altering the political ple from Germany and Italy to South The central event of the Russian cOlln­ landscape on this planet. The Soviet Africa and South Korea are showing terrevolution was Yeltsin's August 19 l ) I masses have been plllIlgcd into desperate through their protests and strikes that

~.J 1111111 •• 1111111111 II I 11 they are not in the least reconciled to being made scapegoats for rising unem­ we appealed for a massive united-front their rulers' attacks upon their living ployment and victims of emboldened demonstration against fascism and in standards and lives. Here in the "belly fascist attacks. And the outlines of future defense of the Red Army which defeated of the beast," the multiracial explosion trade wars and shooting wars are sharp­ Hitler. Eventually endorsed by the Sta­ in Los Angeles following the acquittal ening as Washington, Tokyo and Bonn­ linist party, the Treptow protest drew a of the racist cops who beat Rodney King no longer constrained by Cold War unity quarter of a million people who wanted was eloquent testimony to the indigna­ against the USSR-pursue their conflict­ a way to defend the DDR. We addressed tion of young people who see that they ing interests with a vengeance. The only the demonstration calling for revolution­ have no future in this decaying, racist way out of immiseration and war ary reunification through the immediate system. Even in the ex-USSR a massive remains the proletarian class struggle led formation of workers and soldiers coun­ strike in June by over a million coal min­ to victory by an internationalist revolu­ cils, a call which was seriously discussed ers and other workers in the Ukraine sent tionary leadership. in units of the East German army. Once shock waves through the would-be bour­ Throughout our existence as a ten­ again the alternatives were as Trotsky geoisies of the former Soviet republics. dency, the International Communist had outlined: the workers would take But desperate anger and willingness to League, of which the Spartacist League their fate into their own hands or the fight are not enough; the key to victory is the U.S. section, has placed the Trot­ workers state would be destroyed by is the forging of an authentic revolution­ skyist program for defense and extension imperialism. And the hankrupt Stalinists, ary leadership. of the gains of the Octoher Revolution in mortal fear of the masses, chose the Thanks to the Stalinist sabotage of at the center of our work. In the face of destruction of the DDR, apologizing for countless revolutionary opportunities, virulent anti-communist propaganda and Treptow and actually moving the elec­ the imperialist system was ultimately repeated imperialist provocations during tions forward so they could lose faster. capahle of sapping and destroying the "Cold War II"-the anti-Soviet crusade The Spa,·tacists were the only party in Soviet workers state, not merely by unre­ over Afghanistan. Polish SolidarnosC' the DDR to run in the elections on a mitting military pressure (beginning 1981 bid for power, Reagan's KAL 007 program of "No to Capitalist Reunifica­ immediately as 14 imperialist armies spy flight, etc.-we proudly upheld our tion." The Stalinists accepted the "inev­ invaded Russia in 191 R-19, continuing unconditional military defense of the itability" of capitalist restoration, quib­ with the post-World War II Cold War, Soviet Union. We exposed and sought bling only over the terms. Lacking any which was punctuated by episodic "hot to combat at every juncture the bankrupt credible mass leadership to resist the wars" from Korea to Vietnam to Afghan­ Stalinists' suicidal appeasement of impe­ onslaught, the East German masses istan) but by the pressure of the capital ist rialism-the introduction of "market voted overwhelmingly for unification world market. But capitalism remains a socialism" in Eastern Europe, the with­ under the deutschmark. fetter on human progress and, in its drawal from Afghanistan in the face of Our first publications in the Russian imperialist decay, a threat to all life on the massively CIA-armed and funded war language were intended largely for dis­ this planet. just across the border from Soviet Central tribution to the sizeable Soviet forces Consider the scenario sketched by Asia, the schemes to "rationalize" the stationed in the DDR, as we sought to bourgeois ideologues for the "post-Cold Soviet economy through "perestroika," appeal to the Soviet and East German War era": a "peace dividend" in an econ­ the decision to charge world market soldiers, doing their duty in the face of omy freed from the arms race, "national prices to Cuba for oil thereby devastating the threat of NATO imperialism, and win liheration" in East Europe and the ex­ the Cuban economy, the acquiescence to them to the internationalist program of republics of the USSR, continent-wide capitalist reunification of Germany. Leninism, hidden from them for decades. European unity beginning with currency The ICL's present efforts to implant This pamphlet brings together articles union, and (in the mouths of the U.S. an outpost of Trotskyism in the home­ from Workers Vanguard, our American rulers) a "New World Order" under land of the October Revolution follow a paper, and the Russian-language Sparta­ American hegemony. Now look at the vigorous intervention in the former DDR cist Bul/etill covering the recent events reality. The governments of the advanced (East Germany). When the barriers of in the ex-USSR. Beginning with the capitalist countries preach "austerity" Stalinist repression were loosened in pathetic "Emergency Committee" putsch and "sacrifice" to "their" workers, while response to massive sentiment from the and Yeltsin's pro-imperialist coun­ the impoverished masses of the "Third DDR citizens for a freer political and tercoup in August 1991, the material World" are squeezed dry by their impe­ social life, the ICL undertook a major contained here documents the unfolding rialist-dependent rulers to pay the "debt" effort to aid our German section in inter­ counterrevolution and the Trotskyist pro­ to the imperialist banks. Murderous "eth­ vening there. We fought for revolution­ gram to resist and reverse it. Included nic cleansing" rages throughout the weak ary reunification of Germany through are several polemical articles which new capitalist states of East Europe, workers political revolution in the East expose the role of numerous Western where nationalist ideology substitutes and socialist revolution in the West. With "leftists" in backing Yeltsinite counter­ for non-existent capital as the motor the German bourgeoisie and its loyal revolution and that of the Stalinist rem­ force of counterrevolution. "opposition," the social-democratic SPD nants in the former Soviet Union, whose In West Europe, so-called "welfare "Trojan horse of counterrevolution," bankruptcy is epitomized by their des­ state" measures arc rapidly becoming a sparing no effort to turn the incipient picable "red-brown coalition" with vir­ thing of the past as the bourgeoisies no DDR political revolution into a rush for ulent Russian nationalists, monarchists longer see any need for them (or for reunification with the capitalist West (on and outright fascists. Finally, we include social-democratic governments) to stave the basis of lying promises of instant an article from the current Russian-lan­ off the "spectre of communism." The prosperity), we launched a Trotskyist guage Rlil/etill No.4 which details the European monetary agreement is in newsletter and sold thousands of copies Stalinist degeneration of the CPSU and sham hIes; the only hourgeois "unity" to to receptive workers. the struggle of the Trotskyist Left Oppo­ be found there is the common crusade When fascists desecrated the Soviet sition for the authentic program of to deport immigrant workers, who are war memorial in Berlin's Treptow Park, Leninism. _ 12 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 535, 27 Septemher 1991

Traitors, Not Trotskyists \\ichita: ultrari~hh<;t ,treE't adion~ TH£ MILITANT are threat to workm~ people Soviet workers win giant Cheerleaders victory by defeating coup for Yeltsin's Counterrevolution -6 September 1991 The counterrevolutionary tide sweep­ thetic Stalinist "coup" attempt and pro­ crush anti-Semitic pogromists and anti­ ing the Soviet Union, spearheaded by capitalist countercoup was headlined: Communist lynch mobs and to ward Boris Yeltsin's pro-imperialist counter­ "Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin-Bush off communalist butchery by revanchist coup last month, poses a definitive test Counterrevolution!" (reprinted on page nationalists. We immediately translated for organizations claiming to speak on 3). Pointing to the yuppies, speculators, this article into Russian, and it is now behalf of the struggle for socialist revo­ fascists and priests who flocked to Yel­ being distributed among class-conscious lution. Openly capitalist-restorationist tsin's "White House" in Moscow to pre­ Soviet workers with the aim of forg­ forces led by Yeltsin and Gorbachev, sent themselves as the shock troops for ing a Leninist-Trotskyist nucleus capa­ now ascendant in Russia and other So­ social counterrevolution during the two ble of leading a struggle by the Soviet viet republics, are seeking to tear away days of the feehle putsch hy Yanayev & working people to victory over the every vestige of the greatest victory ever Co., we wrote: "a call on Moscow work­ counterrevo lu t ion. achieved by the international proletariat, ers to clean out this counterrevolutionary In contrast, in the "hour of mortal dan­ the October Revolution of 1917. rahhle was in order. Yet the coup plotters ger," a herd of pseudo-Trotskyists were The Left Opposition and the Fourth not only did not mohilize the workers, on the firs! harricade (!l counterrevolu­ International of Leon Trotsky waged a they ordered everybody to stay at work tion. Jack Barnes' Socialist Workers life-and-death struggle against the Sta­ and at home." Party (SWP), which after years of being linist bureaucratic caste, whose usurpa­ In the face of the ascendancy of the the reformist right wing of the cen­ tion of political power from the Soviet counterrevolutionary forces, we laid out trist United Secretariat (USec) finally proletariat and capitulation to imperial­ a program of struggle against capital­ dumped Trotskyism outright a few years ism undermined the first workers state ist restoration, calling for independent ago, cheered on the front page of the and created the present catastrophic sit­ workers committees in the factories to Militant (6 September): "Soviet Workers uation. [n doing so, the Trotskyists were take control of production and fight pri­ Win Giant Victory hy Defeating Coup." the best and most consistent defend­ vatization, for committees of soldiers As for the USec, its French-language ers of the gains of October. Uncompm­ and officers to resist the use of the organ echoed the imperialist gloating misint;. unconditional SOl'iet defensism Soviet army as an instrument against the over the "second Russian Revolution" has always been the basis for the Trot­ working class, for workers militias to with the headline, "Three Days That skyist call for a proletarian political rev­ olution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy. -September 1991 -September 1991 In his germinal 1933 article laying out the perspective of political revolution, II I II", ,j,,,III,' Trotsky warned of the "tragic possibil­ '1'~'DefenseofMarxism ity" of the counterrevolution now taking place: "But in the event of this worst possible variant, a tremendous significance for the subsequent course of the revolutionary struggle will be borne by the question: where are those guilty for the catastro­ phe? Not the slightest taint of guilt must fall upon the revolutionary internation­ alists. In the hour of mortal danger, they must remain on the last barricade." - "The Class Nature of the Soviet State" (October 1933) Socialist Workers Party (top) and its offshoots, Fourth Internationalist We of the International Communist Tendency (above left) and Socialist Action, hailed "democratic" capitalist League today continue the struggle for counterrevolution in Soviet Union. All falsely claimed Soviet working masses Trotsky's Fourth International. Workers were on the barricades for Yeltsin. Vanxuard's statement following the pa .. 13

Shook the USSR," a grotesque parody o .r:o on the title of John Reed's history of the Q. 1917 Bolshevik uprising. An article by ~, Catherine Verla stated baldly: "It was necessary to unhesitatingly oppose the coup and, on these grounds, to fight at Yeltsin's side" (/nprecor, 29 August). This same reactionary line is being pushed by two American pro-USec sat­ ellites which are offshoots of the SWP, Socialist Action and the Fourth Interna­ Spartacists tionalist Tendency (FIT). opposed For the last three decades our Sparta­ Solidarnosc cist tendency has denounced the impos­ counterrevolution tors who masquerade as Trotskyists in September 1981 NYC picket. while abandoning every principled posi­ tion Trotsky stood for and above all the fight for an independent Trotskyist van­ guard. We have polemically combatted those who sought popularity in becom­ ing the "left" tail of bourgeois "popular the democratic rights they had won in repressive forces and their own loyal fronts," from Allende in Chile to Mit­ recent years, and in the process widened bureaucracies." terrand in France. We exposed those the space to advance their interests So the Soviet workers should have who hail anti-Soviet nationalists from through demonstrations, debates, and backed the rabidly restorationist Yeltsin Khomeini in Iran to Walesa in Poland. political organization."' The FIT likewise in order that he would less readily attack We warned that their cowardly flinches praised the "Soviet masses" for stopping them! This takes the meaning of chutz­ and treacherous opportunism, their the coup, and Socialist Action trans­ pah to new heights! Did the Polish work­ renunciation in deeds of revolutionary formed the anti-Communist mobs of ers' earlier support for Walesa, which the Trotskyism, went against every historic pro-capitalist yuppies into a "popular USec so fulsomely enthused over, ham­ interest of the working class. Now they uprising" (see "Who Was on Yeltsin's string the "shock treatment" of capitalist have openly shown themselves for what Barricades," page 15). austerity he is now meting out? they are: not Trotskyists hut traitors to In justifying their support to Soli­ Mandel & Co. have no more in com­ the Octoher Revolution. darnosc counterrevolution a decade ago, mon with Bolshevism and its Trotskyist the line of these outfits was that "ten continuity than did Stalin and his heirs Painting Counterrevolution million Polish workers can't be wrong." with Leninism. Neither rooted in the as "Victory" Today Solidarnosc in power is subject­ working class for a prolonged period nor ing its former working-class base to anchored to a revolutionary program, Having lost the popular-frontist influ­ vicious capitalist austerity. Even when when buffeted by Reagan's Cold War ence they assiduously cultivated during the mass of workers is temporarily drive they were pushed ever more into the "antiwar" movement of the late '60s deluded into supporting counterrevolu­ the arms of anti-Soviet social democ­ and early '70s, the American SWP's tionary forces, it is necessary for the racy, whose hallmark since 1917 has eclectic brand of reformism has grown communist vanguard to swim against the been hostility to the October Revolution. increasingly bizarre over the years. The stream and defend the historic interests They joined the imperialist hue and cry same issue of the Militant which hailed of the international proletariat as a over the 1979 Soviet intervention in Yeltsin's countercoup also announced whole. Moreover, in this case it's utter Afghanistan and cheered Solidarnosc' that "World capitalism has suffered a his­ sophistry to claim that revolutionary­ bid for counterrevolution in Poland two toric defeat in Eastern Europe and the minded workers flocked to Yeltsin's years later. They hailed anti-Communist Soviet Union," and carried a talk by counterrevolution. If anything, the over­ nationalist mass murderers who collab­ Barnes under the heading, "Why U.S. whelming mass of Soviet workers­ orated with the Nazi genocide of the Imperialism Lost the Cold War"! One despite political confusion, cynicism Jews, like the Croatian Ustasha and has to ask, what planet do these people and illusions in Western-style capitalist Estonian Forest Brothers. live on') The Barnesites simultaneously "prosperity"-exhibited far more class These handmaidens of social democ­ proclaim themselves to be North Amer­ consciousness by refusing to heed Yel­ racy have become full-blown social dem­ ica's "Fidelistas" while pushing those tsin's appeals than these cynical liars. ocrats themselves. Thronging to the forces in the Soviet Union who are out Indeed, the USee's Inprecor (29 Au­ counterrevolutionary barricades out~ide to strangle the Cuban Revolution as a gust) not only acknowledged the lack Yeltsin's White House, they have offered favor to Washington. of working-class support for Yeltsin's themselves up as foot soldiers in Bush's Even as it unabashedly and uncriti­ counterrevolution, but chided the Soviet "New World Order." Not even a pretense cally reported how Yeltsinite mobs were workers for their absence: of Trotskyism is left to any of them. tearing down statues of Lenin and Feliks 'The next months will see the accel­ Dzerzhinsky, the Militant (13 Septem­ erated introduction of market reforms. Capitalist "Democracy" vs. ber) tried to paint it as some sort of The fact that the power play was the Workers State proletarian uprising: "Key to the defeat defeated without the mobilization of the of the August 19 coup was the action of workers certainly strengthens Yeltsin's Insofar as these cheerleaders for coun­ and the liberals' autonomy on this level; tens of thousands of workers in Mos­ for the moment. they arc less depend­ terrevolution in the Soviet Union attempt cow, Leningrad, and elsewhere who ent on workers and popu'lar support, to provide any kind of "theoretical" fig defied the government's tanks, defended and they will soon have their own leaf, it is that the Stalinist bureaucracy 14

gramme, no matter how many spivs and racketeers joined the barricades to ~ defend the Russian parliament, it would be revolutionary suicide to back the lON~-] coup-mongers and support the crushing of democratic rights .... "It is far better that the fledgling workers' organisations of the USSR learn to swim against the stream of bureaucratic res­ Rouge§-~l torationism than be huddled in the I• .,...... , L~ •• ----'... -) .).gJ,.'0'., 'breathing space' of the prison cells." Better to be subjected to capitalist exploi­ UNITE tation, to hunger and homelessness, to AU COTE DE brutal oppression of women and Great Russian chauvinist pogroms, says Workers Power, than for the Stalinist degenerated workers state to survive a day longer. Of course, the "workers organizations" they have in mind are those led by fascist-connected pro­ capitalist "free trade unionists" like the notorious Yuri Butchenko whom Workers Social-democratic traitors to Power toured through Britain last year. Trotskyism proclaimed "SOlidarity WP not only put themselves in Yel­ with Solidarity," adopting Polish tsin's camp, they attack him for not being Solidarnosc logo to identify with anti-Communist enough. WP concedes, Walesa's clerical-nationalist "The measures to deprive the Stalinists anti-Communist movement. of all the levers of economic and political is the chief, indeed the only, instru­ would-be Western "democrats" to the power are an essential stage, a prereq­ ment for counterrevolution. The view, fascists of Pamyat. uisite to turn to the next stage-the task summed up in the phrase "Stalinism But the bottom line for these Sta­ of rapidly dismantling the instruments is counterrevolutionary through and linophobic proponents of counterrevo­ of central planning." But they "put no through," has historically been used to lution, as it has been since the time of trust in Yeltsin ... to carry out the destruc­ justify de facto abandonment of the Trot­ Karl Kautsky's diatribes against the tion of the Stalinist dictatorship." No, skyist position of defense of the Soviet October Revolution, is to back capitalist they call for a workers' witchhunt, for Union. Today it is being used to justify "democracy" against the dictatorship of "workers' action to drive out the party support to the counterrevolution. Thus, the proletariat, whether under Lenin and and KGB spies in the workplace." And trying to buttress its outlandish claim Trotsky or disastrously deformed by Sta­ Workers Power's German affiliate, the that the victory of the Yeltsinites was a linism. Socialist Action leader Jeff Arbeitermacht group, calls (unnec­ defeat for imperialism, Socialist Action Mackler declared in an August 28 Bay essarily) for the SPD-bloodhounds (September 1991) claims that with the Area radio interview: "The essence of for the butchers of Luxemburg and botched coup by the "gang of eight": "It socialist politics is democracy." That was Liebknecht, and architects of the Ger­ will be extremely difficult now for the the "essence" of Kautsky's attack on the man bourgeoisie's Ostpolitik aimed at bureaucracy and its allies to organize a dictatorship of the proletariat under subverting and smashing the Soviet new, effective, instrument to carry Lenin and Trotsky. As Lenin replied in Union-to organize demonstrations to through the restoration of capitalism." The Proletarian Revolution and the Ren­ support the Russian counterrevolution. In the first place, as Trotsky pointed exade Kautsky (1918): "It is natural for a liberal to speak of 'democracy' in gen­ For a Fourth International out time and again, the bureaucracy was Trotsky Would Call His Own! not a homogenous class but a brittle, con­ eral; but a Marxist will never forget to tradictory layer resting atop proletarian ask: 'for what class?''' Mackler appar­ One self-styled Trotskyist grouplet property forms, from which it derived ently knows what class he is working that tried to maintain the usual centrist its privileged position, and potentially for-the bourgeoisie. In the radio inter­ posture-one foot in the camp of coun­ including both restorationist and revolu­ view he flatly declared, "I agree with the terrevolution and another in the camp of tionary elements. In the absence of a pro­ bans on the Communist Party." So does revolution-was the British Revolution­ letarian challenge and under sharp pres­ the SWP. Shades of McCarthyism! ary Internationalist League (affiliated to sure from imperialism, it was the In Britain, the Workers Power group, Peter Sollenberger's fragmented Revo­ restorationist wing of the Stalinist subject to the hegemonic influence of lutionary Workers League in the U.S.). bureaucracy which blossomed under Neil Kinnock's Labour Party, offers a The Revolutionary Internationalist (II Gorbachev. The coup plotters were them­ crystallized expression of bourgeois September) carried an article headlined, selves committed to introducing a capi­ "democratic" counterrevolution. Work­ "Defend Collectivised Property! Build talist market economy, though more ers Power (September 1991) scarcely Workers' Councils in the USSR!" The gradually and under centralized control. attempts to prettify the Yeltsinite forces, RIL acknowledged that in the wake of But the bureaucracy has now utterly col­ and even offers a candid eyewitness the botched coup, "All the forces push­ lapsed. And, in any case, Yeltsin had account of the social dregs that manned ing for capitalist restoration have been already broken from it to become the Yeltsin's harricades. Nevertheless it enormously strengthened." Yet, echoing spokesman for the incipient bourgeoi­ adamantly insists: Workers Power, they attack our call on sie-the "yuppskies," black marketeers "No matter what the socially counter­ Moscow workers to clean out the coun­ and a political spectrum ranging from revolutionary nature of Yeltsin's pro- terrevolutionary rabble outside the Rus- 15 sian parliament. They add: it was a "perestroika coup." But both in defense of a workers state. "For Trotskyists there should have been imperialism and the forces of internal Leon Trotsky went to his death-at no more talk of critical support for, counterrevolution were aligned on Yel­ the hands of a Stalinist assassin­ or for united fronts with the Yeltsinites tsin's side. The coup plotters were not an intransigent defender of the Soviet than with the coup leaders. Where strikes occurred in response to Yeltsin's only irresolute but didn't want to unleash workers state. His last political struggle initial (never-repeated) call, Trotskyists the forces that could have defeated was waged over this question, against should have participated, but fighting to the more extreme counterrevolutionar­ the Soviet-defeatist Burnham/Shacht­ turn them against both wings of the ies, for that could have led to a civil war man opposition in 1939-40 in the then­ bureaucracy. " if the Yeltsinites really fought back. And Trotskyist American SWP. As Trotsky The RIL wants to "fight" capitalist in an armed struggle pitting outright res­ wrote in his April 1940 "Letter to the restoration but doesn't want the workers torationists against recalcitrant elements Workers of the USSR" so eloquently: to crush the shock troops of restora­ of the bureaucracy, defense of the col­ "Those who are incapable of defending tion. They oppose a "united front" lectivized economy would have been conquests already gained can never fight with Yeltsin, but call on Soviet workers placed on the agenda whatever the Sta­ for new ones." Should the homeland of to observe Yeltsin's strike call-with linists' intentions. Trotskyists would October succumb to the counterrevolu­ the ludicrous aim of turning it against have entered a military bloc with "the tionary tide, workers around the world Yeltsin! They claim to oppose "Yel­ Thermidorian section of the bureaucracy will pay for it in blood for years to come. tsin and the restorationist wing of the against open attack by capitalist counter­ The need has never been more urgent bureaucracy," but attack the Spartacists revolution," as Trotsky postulated in the for reforging a Fourth International that for opposing Solidarnosc counterrevo­ 1938 Transitional Program. This pre­ Trotsky would have recognized as his lution in Poland. cisely was our policy toward laruzelski own. Defeat Yeltsin/Gorbachev counter­ The "gang of eight" was incapable of in 1981. But the RIL, beholden to social­ revolution! For a Trotskyist party in the sweeping away Yeltsin in its pathetic democratic "anti-Stalinism," can't stom­ Soviet union, built in the struggle to excuse for a putsch because, as we wrote, ach being in a bloc with Stalinists even reforge the Fourth International!_ Who Was on Yeltsin's Barricades?

reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 535, 27 Septemher 1991

"Soviet Workers Win Giant Victory by Defeating Coup," headlined the Socialist Workers Party's Militant as it lined up behind Yeltsin-Bush counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. The Fourth Interna­ tionalist Tendency likewise cheered "Masses Resist Soviet Coup!" And Socialist Action proclaimed: "The scale of the current popular uprising in the Soviet Union has had few precedents since the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917, led by VI. Lenin and Leon Trotsky." But were the Soviet workers out on Outside Veltsin's "White House": Russian nationalists, black marketeers, the barricades for capitalist restoration? yuppies, priests, fascists. To be sure, the demagogue Yeltsin won 60 percent of the vote for president of working-class support for capitalist floor, Borovik said: "'The majority of the the Russian republic last spring. His counterrevolution. The Yeltsinite rallies workers here supported the attempted imperialist backers certainly hoped that on August 20 in Moscow, Leningrad and coup. They're actually afraid of more with this "popu lar mandate," as soon as other Soviet cities were sizable, though perestroika. So far it's only brought them would-be Tsar Boris leapt atop a tank no more so than numerous other recent more misery." As for the activists who to call for a general strike to back demonstrations in the Soviet Union. As manned the barricades: "They were his pro-capitalist countercoup, workers for the fabled barricades outside Yel­ mainly young ones, like myself, stu­ would leave the factories in droves, just tsin's "White House," a spectrum of eye­ dents, intellectuals, professionals." as millions of Polish workers had witnesses, many of them pro-Yeltsin, The British Workers Power group elab­ followed the lead of Lech Walesa in uniformly attest that they never attracted orated on this in an eyewitness ac­ 1980-8\. But despite imperialist hopes more than several thousand hard-bitten count by a supporter of its League for a and the extraterrestrial daydreams of pro-capitalist activists, with virtually no Revolutionary Communist International, the SWP, FIT and SA, this was not the workers among them. which supported Yeltsin's countercoup: case. Shortly after the coup/countercoup, "At the same time the 'heroic struggle of the masses of Moscow' to defend From the start, Western bourgeois CBS News' IJO Minutes (25 August) the Russian parliament is largely a commentators expressed bitter dis­ interviewed pro-Yeltsin Russian reporter myth. Firstly, the few thousand people appointment at the lack of Soviet Artiam Borovik. Speaking from a factory who manned the barricades outside the 16

parliament itself were not, for the most ber of the Green Party interviewed by man for the group, described how "peo­ part, the most audacious workers and stu­ the United Secretariat's Inprecor (29 ple were surprised to see a red flag" dents of Moscow. "Rather they were in the majority small August) added: at the barricades. And while claiming, businessmen, speculators and owners "During the power play, the mobilization "The working class took part in the resis­ of I"free enterprise"l co-operatives, the was not very significant, and the peo­ tance; they were the real fighters in front traditional base of the IRussian nation­ ple had extremely divergent views. The of the White House," Gusev admits alistl 'Democratic Russia' demonstra­ majority of the population seemed rela­ "the working class as an organised tions, plus a few hundred young enthu­ tively indifferent. In Moscow no factory siasts. While there have been reports of went on strike. There were miners strikes force ... remained passive," and adds, "At strike action and mass mobilisations in in the provinces, but they were not really a factory where we distributed leaflets other parts of the USSR, in Moscow at massive. There were very few workers some workers told us they didn't want least the working class played little part in front of the 'White House,' the Rus­ to follow Yeltsin decrees" (Workers in the resistance to the coup." sian Parliament, during the construction Press, 31 August). - Workers Power, of the barricades. The great majority of Septem ber 199 I those who participated in these actions If Gusev's "red flag" and leaflets were were youth and members of Democratic not ripped up as well by the Yeltsinites The observer goes on to describe Russia, etc.; but some leftist militants at the "White House," it is perhaps also participated .... how leaflets, posted by Boris Kagarlit­ "We distributed and pasted up our leaf­ because these "reds" not only supported sky's pro-capitalist "Socialist Party" and lets on the barricades, but the reception Yeltsin's counterrevolution but, in the the Green Party, which opposed the was generally rather negative because words of WP's observer, "refused to coup "but also criticised Yeltsin ... were most of the activists were partisans of carry any slogans or any positions in immediately ripped down by the Yeltsin­ Yeltsin." defence of planning against Yeltsin." ites. This indicates the tensions within This did not deter the USec from stand­ In their own words, these "leftist" the anti-coup camp and the anti­ ing with Yeltsin. apologists for capitalist counterrevolu­ democratic character of many of Yel­ Another "socialist" outfit to join the tion confirm the urgency of our call on tsin's supporters." It sure docs! barricades for counterrevolution outside Moscow workers to sweep away the Workers Power were not the only Yeltsin's headquarters was the Moscow "counterrevolutionary rabble" manning "leftists" to shamefacedly admit that the Socialist Workers Union, affiliated to Yeltsin's barricades, including the hand­ Yeltsin barricades were manned by Cliff Slaughter's Workers Revolutionary ful of latter-day Mensheviks like Work­ utterly reactionary elements. A mem- Party in Britain. Alexei Gusev, a spokes- ers Power and the WRP.•

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PO Box 1041, London NW5 3EU, England Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116, USA Le Bolchevik Spartaco Publication de la Ligue trotskyste de France Bollettino della Lega Trotskista d'/talia 10 numeros: 30FF Hors Europe: 40FF (avian: 60FF) Abbonamento a 6 numeri: L. 6.000 Etranger: mandat paste international Europa: L. 8.000 Paesi extraeuropei: L. 12.000 BP 135-10, 75463 Paris Cedex 10, France Walter Fidacaro, C.P 1591,20101 Milano, Italy Platforma SpartakusowcoW Spartacist Canada Pismo Spartakusowskiej Grupy Polski Newspaper of the Trotskyist League of Canada/ 4 numery: 12.000 Z.f Ligue trotskyste du Canada Platforma Spartakusowcow, Skrytka Pocztowa 148 $3/6 issues $8/6 issues-Airmail 01-133 Warszawa 42, Poland ' Box 6867, Station A, Toronto, Ontario M5W 1X6, Canada 17 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 546, 6 March 1992 Soviet Union in the Balance More than 12,000 militia (police) and OMON elite "anti-crime" units clad in riot gear were thrown at Moscow dem­ Moscow: Cops-Unleashed. Against onstrators marching to celebrate Soviet Army Day on February 23. As the Anti-Yeltsin. Demonstrators protesters attempted to march through police barricades sealing off the city center, cops waded into them with batons flailing. A 16-year-old youth who stood atop a truck waving a red flag with Lenin's portrait was subjected to a particularly vicious beating. "I stood up there because I support communism, I support Lenin," he said. One demonstra­ tor, 71-year-old retired Soviet Lt. Gen. Nikolai Peskov, died after being kicked by police. While the series of demonstrations in Moscow since the January 2 price rises have remained limited to several tens of thousands, the Soviet working popula­ tion grows increasingly restive and des­ perate over exorbitant food prices and shortages. Production is plummeting, falling by 17 percent overall and 27 per­ cent in steel in January alone. The naked display of force on February 23 was a deliberate provocation by Russian pres­ ident Boris Yeltsin and Moscow mayor Gavriil Popov aimed at intimidating the entire Soviet working people. For the first time since the botched Au­ FHlanClal Times gust coup and Yeltsin's pro-imperialist Soviet Army Day, 23 February 1992: Pro-Communist demonstrator beaten by countercoup, the capitalist-restorationist Moscow militia (police). forces have drawn blood on the streets of Moscow. A pro-Yeltsin Moscow tele­ after revealing that he had refused to technology from the USSR, part of an vision commentator felt compelled to obey orders to use ~pecial agents on Feb­ "Administration policy intended to force deny any comparison to "Bloody Sun­ ruary 9 to "provoke disorder" among the the Russian space and military industry day," the tsarist police massacre of a demonstrators and provide an excuse for into such a decline that it poses no future January 1905 workers protest which sending in riot police. Meanwhile Yeltsin threat to the U.S." (New York Times, I triggered a revolutionary workers upris­ has been trying to buy off the officer March). The collision between a Soviet ing. Even prominent pro-capitalist corps by doubling military salaries and submarine and an American sub inside "democrats" like Yelena Bonner ex­ handing out dachas (country homes) to Soviet waters on February II indicates pressed alarm over Yeltsin/Popov's bru­ high-ranking officers. But this does that, whatever the state of the Cold War, tal tactics. The Soviet Army newspaper nothing to improve conditions for the the U.S. continues to target the Soviet Krasnaya Zvezda was openly critical of ranks of the army, who feel the brunt of Union and the Soviet military. Yeltsin the "politicians" who turn to the baton the growing impoverishment and eco­ tried to play down the incident, but the "to save Russia." Several hundred who nomic dislocation. On February 24-25, Soviet naval command expressed its turned out for Peskov's funeral were hundreds of desperate conscripts rioted indignation in no uncertain terms. more forthright, denouncing Yeltsin and at the Baikonur cosmodrome, launch site In this context, reactionary Russian­ his gang as "bloody heirs of Hitler." for the Soviet space program. nationalist forces are seeking to appeal Yeltsin has been looking for a bloody Nor is the military happy with Yel­ to the military to oust Yeltsin and provocation with the aim of testing the tsin's obsequious groveling before his re-establish a "strong state" under the militia. The February 23 police assault American paymasters. When Yeltsin old tsarist watchword, "Russia, One came on the hcels of a near-confrontation came begging for a miserly handout, and Indivisible." The fascistic Liberal­ two weeks earlier, as some 40,000 turned Bush turned a deaf ear while continuing Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhiri­ out for an anti-Yeltsin protest in Manezh to spend billions on new Pentagon nov sky featured prominently at the Square near the Kremlin. Moscow dep­ weapon development projects. The U.S. Army Day demonstrations. Zhirinovsky uty police chief Leonid Nikitin was fired has even banned the import of military was joined by the Russian Communist 18

Workers Party (RKRP) and other Stalin­ aide Anatoli Chubais vows that "pri­ ist "patriot" rumps. Among the speakers vatization by nomenklatura is inadmis­ were such "hard line" military figures as sible." Yeltsin, and before him Gorba­ anti-Semitic RKRP Central Committee chev, found their main base of support member General Albert Makashov and among technocrats and intellectuals in "black colonel" Viktor Alksnis, who re­ the lower layers of the bureaucracy cently joined with the monarchist dema­ who want to live like yuppies in the gogue Nevzorov in forming a Russian­ West. But it won't be so easy to cash in ,.' ~ nationalist party called Nashe (Ours). But on the counterrevolution-their careers the chief aspirant for a new nationalist have been built on managing (or, more strongman to replace Yeltsin is his own to the point, mismanaging) the centrally increa~ingly critical vice president, Air planned economy, and if that goes, so Force General Aleksandr Rutskoi, who will their jobs. has hecome self-appointed spokesman for Yeltsin and his cohorts know they the military-industrial hierarchy. The have to cohere a capitalist state appara­ evcr more stridently nationalist Rutskoi tus and new, loyal agencies of anti­ was the main speaker at a right-wing working-class repression if they are to nationalist conference in early February, consolidate their counterrevolutionary where he deelared: drive. While the military high command "We have to restore the true face of Rus­ continues to keep its distance from sia. We have to revive faith and spiritu­ Yeltsin and his counterparts in the other ality. We have to revive the glory of the republics, the use of the militia in Russian army." cracking down on anti-Yeltsin protest­

Last August's abysmal coup attempt ers marks a dangerous turning point I by the "gang of eight" Gorbachevite offi­ in determining the fate of the Soviet Stalinist "patriots" push vile Rus­ cials--wlto resolutely turned their faces Union. Our comrades of the International sian chauvinism. RKRP spokesman against any working-class mobilization Communist League (Fourth Internation­ Anpilov (right) shoulder to shoulder to defend collectivized property-was alist) in Moscow responded with a leaf­ with openly anti-Semitic reactionary. little more than a vicarious dispute over let (reprinted below), raising the alarm who would get the (non-existent) cash over this bloody escalation of Yeltsin's Union on internationalist principles. flow from perestroika. Now, in the face counterrevolutionary course and call­ The crisis wracking the Soviet Union of ascendant counterrevolution, many ing urgently for the formation of work­ has rcached a dangerous turning point. former Stalinist bureaucrats hope to get ers and soldiers soviets (councils) to The collectivized economy is being dis­ in on the ground floor and become the repulse the capitalist-restorationist tide membered. Production is disrupted and new capitalists. But Yeltsin economic and seize power. grinding to a halt in many enterprises. Rapacious price rises imposed by Yeltsin and his cohorts in other republics are Away With the Yeltsin Government! reducing the working class to utter pov­ erty and degradation. The lot of women, "White Tsar" Boris Wants a New Bloody Sunday now heing driven out of the workforce, is descent into a living hell. The dark forces of counterrevolution are fueling Form Workers and Soldiers Soviets nationalist fratricide aimed at tearing apart and smashing the multinational Soviet working class. to Stop Capitalist Restoration! Now we see blood on the streets of FEBRUARY 25-The "democratic" strained its bloodlust against the working Moscow. And it will get only bloodier counterrevolution has drawn its first class only because it lacks a loyal appa­ as the Yeltsin gang gains in confidence. blood. Called up by Mayor Popov, ratus of repression. Some, like the Russian Communist approved by Boris Yeltsin, thousands of With the assaults against Army Day Workers Party (RKRP), say the Soviet militia were mobilized to stage a prov­ demonstrators, the Moscow militia and Army "is our last hope." Yes, many sol­ ocation against workers, pensioners, sol­ OMON units allowed themselves, per­ diers and officers within the Soviet diers, officers and veterans honoring haps reluctantly, to be used against the armed forces remain loyal to the ideals Soviet Army Day. Soviet working people working class. Chastised by outraged of socialism and to the workers state. be warned: they're trying to restore cap­ demonstrators, one militiaman defen­ But to preserve the multinational Soviet italism over your bodies! sively responded: 'Tm just following state and army requires defending the From the moment the forces of capi­ orders. Why did you vote for these pco­ socialized property upon which it was talist restoration gained the ascendancy pie? Next time elect better leaders." created. The hopc fi)r rcversing the tide with Yeltsin 's countercoup on August 22, But these "leaders," stooges of im­ of rounterrevolutioll lies in orxanizing the alternatives were sharply posed: perialism, won't be unelected by any­ the workers, soldiers and collective either the proletariat reconquers political one. They must be swept away by the farmers into sOl'iets, and forginx a rev­ power, taken from it by the Stalin-led power of a mobilized working class. olutionary leadcrship whirh aims to bureaucracy in 1923-24, or there will be That is the proletarian political rev­ rcturn to the liherating and exa1itarian the bloody consolidation of social coun­ olution that we Trotskyists call for, to xoals of the Octoher RCI'olution. When terrevolution and national disintegration. stop the forces of counterrevolution, to the working class moves into struggle, The weak Yeltsin government has re- prevent hunger, to reforge the Soviet pro-socialist sections of the army and 19 militia will certainly follow suit. But in this crisis, sinister elements are seeking to appeal to the desperation of the working people. Beware of fas­ cistic Zhirinovsky, who openly spews poisonous anti-Semitism! Beware of Makashov, whose presidential bid last year was endorsed by the fascist black­ shirts of Pamyat! Beware of Nevzo­ rov, whose populist words hide a pro­ gram of monarchist reaction! Beware of Alksnis, who is no communist but wants to impose the market on the Soviet peoples, along the lines of the "Chilean model"-iron-fisted repression! They are organizing for Rutskoi, who would be bonaparte. Beware all those who seek to di­ vide the multinational working people through chauvinism and racism! The poison of anti-Semitism is the tool of the would-be bourgeois slavemasters to divide and cripple the workers' struggle. Was it a coincidence that on Army Day Moscow, February 1992: Protesters carry portrait of Lenin in demonstration the militia aimed its truncheons against against Yeltsin's "free market" misery. youth bearing red flags and portraits of Lenin? In the factories, in the mines, in and impotent pari ialllcnts of today, but reforms of Gorbachev, which in turn cat­ the collective farms, there are workers organs for struggle composed of depu­ apulted Yeltsin into power. The parasitic of different nationalities. They must ties elected by and recallable to the bureaucracy ran out of steam and is spin­ come together in proletarian unity, not workplace and harracks. Formed into ning off a layer which together with a be rent apart in nationalist feuding. powerful soviets---internationalist, egal­ new generation of yuppies wants to sell Nationalism is the game of the parasites itarian, revolutionary---the working peo­ off the Soviet Union. And for that they and capitalists! ple will be able to swcep away the shaky need a strong state that can coin blood The only way out of the current crisis regimes of the capitalist-restorationists into profit. is through revolutionary working-class with a flick of the finger. No new tsars­ Under the leadership of a new and action. In the summer of 1917, there away with Ycllsin--~f()r a repuhlic of genuine Bolshevik party, modeled on the was also a crisis of food supplies. The the working 17eo;,I(,1 party of Lenin and Trotsky, workers and capitalists made their last-ditch effort There can he no return to the old crap soldiers soviets will ensure the fullest to hold on to power and force the rev­ of Stalinism. Out of yesterday's Stalin­ workers democracy, according full rights olutionary workers into submission by ists come today's Yeltsinites. The era of to all parties that would fight in the name starving them. Lenin advanced a way Brezhnev paved the way for the market of socialism. To build a genuinely col­ forward. In "The Impending Catastrophe lectivist society capable of using the cre­ and How to Combat It," he insisted that ative forces of the working people, the the only way to stop the capitalist planned economy must be reconstructed sabotage was for the councils of elected and revised from top to bottom, purged deputies of the workers and soldiers to of all favoritism and privilege, of take the power, to take control of pro­ bureaucratism and arbitrariness. From duction and organize distribution of the shopfloor to the highest echelons of food. This pointed directly to the Octo­ the sta!.', decisive power must rest in the ber Revolution, which swept away the hands of the workers and their elected exploiters. representatives. Today new exploiters are trying to Workers: the moment is growing late. destroy the workers state. The question Do not wait until your children grow is: Who will prevail? The speculators, pale from hunger. The would-be bosses mafia parasites, entrepreneurs and the are taking the streets of Moscow away former partocrats seeking to become from you. Form authentic soviets now! capitalists by selling off the economy to Drive out the restorationist forces the imperialists? Or the working class through workers political revolution! which built it up at terrible sacrifice'! Defeat all attempts at nationalist fratri­ Through their own independent com­ cide-down with the poison of anti­ mittees, composed of delegates elected ,J~ Semitism! What is needed urgently is to by the enterprises, the working people "I. bring together the cadre of a Leninist­ must take control of food supplies and Le Boichevlk Trotskyist party, dedicated to restoring oversee distribution. What is needed ICL sign: "For Proletarian Political the proletarian foundations upon which once again is to form authentic soviets, Revolution to Sweep Away Yeltsin the multinational Soviet workers state not talk shops like the fake soviets Starvation Regime!" was built.. 20 reprinted ji-om Youn,R !iRartacus pa,Res, Workers Vanguard No. 558, 4 Septemher 1992 Moscow-Patrice Lumumba University African Student Murdered by Yeltsin's Cops their solidarity with thc students. Our Capitalist Counterrevolution Unleashing Racist Terror comradcs saw with their own eyes what a pack of lies the Russian press reports With the collapse of Stalinism and in the groin and beaten with rubber trun­ were. Thc kiosks were all there and none Boris Yeltsin's "countercoup" last Au­ cheons. One cop yclled, "\ will kill you. were burned; the dorms were in normal gust. the Soviet Union has been wracked swine!" condition. the rooms fully furnished. A by "all the old crap" of capitalist society The Russian press "justified" the cop student from Yemen, who was an eye­ surging to the surface. A storm or nation­ murdcr and rampage by inventing stories witness to the murder of Chimusoro and alist bloodletting has raged since Yeltsin of a student "riot"-Iies calculated to OMON's attack 011 the students, volun­ seized the reins of power in the name inflame racist fear and hatred of the teered to tell everything to the press. He of "free market" capitalism and Russian African. Asian and Latin American stu­ was interviewed. Shortly thereafter he chauvinism. dents at this university. A Nezavisimavo was violently attacked in a predawn raid At Moscow's Patrice Lumumba Ga:efa (13 August) headline screamed on hi.s dorm room and remains hospital­ People's Friendship University. a 25- "Only Machine Gun Fire Could Calm ized. A statement issued by the newly year-old Zimhabwean student, Gideon Down the Wild Running." Moskov.l'kii formed student Coordination Committee Chimusoro. was shot to death by a Rus­ Komsomo/efs invented stories of blacks warned: sian policeman on the night of August hurning cars and kiosks. of students hurl­ "We will hold [the press[ responsible for II. Militia were immediately dispatched ing furniture. televisions and burning any thin/! that would happen to any Afri­ mattresses out of dorm windows. A TV (an student in the future .... We will fight to the campus after the murder to hack to the end until our rights are respe(ted up the killer. The next day. the OMON anchorman closed the August 12 nightly and recognized in this country where the paramilitary units-a killer elite which news story by stating that the African African students in particular are con­ first drew hlood for the "democratic" students "promise to shoot down all stantly offended for having committed counterrevolution at an anti-Yeltsin pro­ of us tomorrow." This outrageous lie the only crime of being Black. being dif­ ferent. or simply being poor." test on Soviet Army Day in February­ was nothing but sinister incitement to savagely attacked a student demonstra­ a pogrom! On August 19 the Coordination Com­ tion protesting the slaying of Chimusoro. Upon hearing of the cop murder. com­ mittee organized a press conference and Students carrying hand-Iettcred signs rades from the International Communist invited comrades from the International reading "We need police protection. not League in Moscow immediately went to Communist League to participate. But police murderers!" were chased. kicked Patrice Lumumba University to cxprcss the university president clirectly inter-

Moscow, August 12: Hundreds protest at Patrice Lumumba University against police murder of Gideon Chimusoro. 21

vened to cut us off as soon as our to secure the fullest unity of the workers Pole, became chief of the secret police. comrade drove home the point that this of all nationalities, which made this Imagine comparable steps for the lih­ murderous attack on the foreign stu­ possible. eration of mankind today: a vict(lri()u~ dents was an example of the racism and However, the administrative apparatus American workers rcvolution installs nationalism unleashed by the counter­ of the Soviet state and thc Bolshevik a black communist as president and a revolutionary Yeltsin government's drive Party were subverted into a narrow Hispanic woman as chief of p()licc~ to to destroy the multinational Soviet work­ nationalist, bureaucratic caste headed clean out the remaining nests of KKK ers state. Later the university president by Stalin, who usurped political power and Nazi scum. tried to get the militia to shut down our In 1923-24. Stalin did not overturn Claudc McKay. a Jamaican-born pOd literature table, claiming that "political the economic basis of the new workers who addressed the Com intern \ Fourth activity is forbidden at the school." The state but consolidated his regime by re­ Congress (1922) in Moscow, wrote of militia refused to follow his orders when versing many of the liberating political the incredible reception he received as a we stood our ground and said, "We don't gains of the Bolshevik Revolution. Anti­ black man in Soviet Ru ...... ia: follow laws that allow racist murders and Semitism was revived to go after Trotsky "Never in my lift: did I kel plouder 01 ban political activity." as a Jew; Great Russian chauvinism was being an African. a blac". and no Illl"takc whipped up to keep the minority repub­ about it. ... From Moscow to Pet rograd Capitalist Counterrevolution lics in line; the cult of the family was and from Pctwl!rad to Moscow I ~\ellt Means Racism and triumphantly fn'im o;urpri,sc to surpn,sc', restored as a means of instilling respect extravagantly feted Oil every "ide .... I Impoverishment for authority and stifling freedoms for was the first NCi!ro to arrive in R w;sia since the Revolution. and perhaps I wa" Students interviewed by our com­ women and youth. The internationalist policies of the Bolshevik Revolution generally regarded as an omen of ~!()od rades at Patrice Lumumba University luck l Yes. that was exactly what it was. described the devastating plunge in their were undone with the "theory" of I was like a black ikon." "socialism in one country"-which led living conditions in the last year. As -A Long Wil.\" From /1111/11' stipends were slashed and prices soared, to a conscious policy of thwarting rev­ (1<)70) many students found themselves in olutions abroad in order to appease Despite the degeneration led hy Stalin, abject poverty. But more than anything, imperialism. the planned, collectivized Soviet econ­ it is the explosion of raw racism that has The ultimate "appeasement" of impe­ omy was thc hasis for a s(Kiety where turned their world upside down. Selected rialism came with the bureaucracy's self­ peoplcs of diverse races and nat ional it ies for study at a prestigious university destruction and the rush by yesterday's lived in relative equality. In 1935, Paul bureaucrats. headed by Yeltsin and his founded to train cadres for the Soviet Robeson sent his own SOil off to the Union's Third World allies, these stu­ cronies, to become part of a new capi­ Soviet Union to get an education where dents were once the honored guests of talist ruling class. Across East Europe "he would not have to undergo the dis­ Moscow. Today they are reviled for the and the former USSR, weak counter­ crimination his father faced in the United color of their skin and fear to go out in revolutionary governments. lacking cap­ States." public at all. ital, have substituted racism and nation­ The Bolsheviks saw the Russian A Moroccan student told our com­ alism as a tool to destroy the deformed Revolution as the first step of a world rades, "I would say the changes started workers states. "Ethnic cleansing" is the revolution. They looked to extend in 1985 when perestroika began. Now if battle cry of the ca pital ist -restorationists, proletarian power to Germany and the you are a foreigner you aren't worth any­ from the Serbian chauvinists and Croa­ rest of Europe, and also to the East. thing. They think you are the reason for tian fascistic commandos who destroyed In 1921 the Communist University for the crisis. And they say this in the name multi-ethnic Yugoslavia to nco-Nazis the Toilers of the East was founded of 'democracy'!" A Jamaican student firebombing immigrant hostels in the in Moscow as a cadre school for inter­ told us he had been dragged off public former DDR. nationalist revolutionaries. In Mem­ buses, attacked on the street and in hotel In Moscow, the Pamyat fascists, who oirs ol a Chinese Rc\'olutionary, Wang lobbies. Even high-ranking diplomats Yeltsin legitimi/"ed, openly describe Fan-hsi recalls that after the defeat of have been targets of attack. Godfrey themselves as "the last hope of white the 1927 Chinese Revolution--a defeat Chanetsa, a Zimbabwean diplomat, told ci vii ization." Yeltsin's "democratic intel­ sealed on Stalin's orders that the Chinese of racial taunts and threats directed at ligentsia" is shot through with Great Communists lay down their arms before himself and his family. He concluded, "I Russian chauvinist racism. A common the bourgeois-nationalist Kuomintang-­ don't want to learn Russian, because the reaction among these "yupskies" is that many young exile revolutionaries in more you learn the more you understand thc abandonment of Afghanistan was jus­ Moscow immersed themselves in the what they are saying" (Moscow Guard­ tified because "those Asians are not worth documents of the Left Opposition and ian, October 1991). the blood of our Russian boys." This is went on to struggle as Trotskyist fighters Only a few years ago, racist outbursts the racist face behind the mask of Yel­ for authentic communism. would have been regarded with almost tsin's "democratic" counterrevolution. Today the International Communist universal contempt. The Soviet Union For Workers League is struggling to reforge a gen­ was a deeply integrated society of over Political Revolution! uine Leninist-Trotskyist party to lead 100 nations. The very term "national­ the working class in a fight for politi­ ism" was regarded as derogatory. The Led by the Bolsheviks, the young cal power to oust the counterrevolution­ Bolshevik Revolution transformed what Soviet republic was a beacon of libera­ ary Yeltsin government. The horrifying Lenin called the tsarist "prison house of tion, especially for the most oppressed murder of a Zimbabwean comrade at peoples" into a multinational federation. peoples on earth. In a land that invented Patrice Lumumba University is one more It was only the Bolsheviks' internation­ the word "pogrom," a Jew. Yakov Sverd­ compclling example of what the tri­ alist program, asserting full and equal lov, became the first president of the umph of counterrevolution would have national rights for all peoples in order Russian RepUblic. Feliks Dzerzhinsky, a in store .• 22 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 560. 2 October 1992

ov Counterrevolutionary Veltsin regime smashed August 1992 strike of Russian air controllers, and then prosecuted leaders on criminal charges. Yeltsin Breaks Russian Air Controllers Strike

MOSCOW-In its first direct assault on as scabs. Faced with this onslaught upsurge of mass workers struggles is the workers movement here. the coun­ and the danger of civilian aircraft catas­ evident to all. [f the counterrevolution­ terrevolutionary regime of Russian pres­ trophes posed by the criminal use of ary regime succeeds in crushing this ident Boris Yeltsin is engaged in a untrained personnel to direct air traffic, relatively well-off workforce-remem­ vindictive campaign to crush a union the union called off the strike after one ber Reagan's destruction of the Ameri­ that crossed it. Last week. the govern­ day on the basis of a personal assurance can PATCO air traffic controllers in ment began criminal prosecution of the by Yeltsin's vice president Aleksandr 19R I !-this will set an ominous prece­ Federation of Air-traffic Controllers Rutskoi that there would be no reprisals dent, and put in place the legal ma­ Trade Unions (FPA). which carried out against the workers. chinery to take on the inevitable workers a one-day strike on August 15. shutting Rutskoi's promise to the air controllers struggles to come. down more than 40 of the country's air­ was immediately revealed to be a lie, as The showdown over the air control­ ports. Union headquarters were raided the government launched criminal pro­ lers strike is also important for the actors and ransacked, documents seized and ceedings against the strikers. One union on the government side. Rutskoi has officials hauled in for questioning. The leader in Kursk was arrested the day presented himself as a friend of the impact of this is all the more telling after the walkout, and some 15 others working people by demagogically de­ as the air controllers had actively aided have been victimized through transfers, nouncing the "free market" extremism Yeltsin's countercoup in August 1991, demotions and firings. FPA president of Yeltsin's economic policymakers, supplying information about military Vladimir Konusenko has threatened notably acting prime minister Yegor movements. Now they're experienc­ another strike, to be joined by the "free" Gaidar. But during the August strike, ing what capitalist counterrevolution is miners, pilots and other unions, if the Rutskoi called a press conference "at really about. victimization continues. which he waved an air-traffic control­ As reported below in an interview Yeltsin and Rutskoi, as part of their ler's payslip for 40,000 roubles, claiming given by FPA vice president Vladimir drive to erect a capitalist state, are clear­ bogusly that the union was striking for Brodulev to representatives of the Inter­ ly intent on a calculated provocation a wage of 70,000 roubles, 20 times the national Communist League in Moscow against this union, which represents national average. [n fact he had got hold on August 25, the regime unleashed a 7,000 of Russia's R,OOO air traffic con­ of a pays lip representing two and a half full panoply of strikebreaking forces trollers. With the prospect of mass un­ months back-pay" (Guardian [London], against the one-day walkout. KGB secret employment in the coming months, as 19 September). Soviet workers should police and OMON special militia units the capitalist-restorationist government note well the actions of this phony were called out against the strikers and begins its plan to privatize the bulk of "friend of labor." military personnel were ordered to act Russian industry, the possibility of an The air controllers and other "free" 23 unions-which broke away from the offi­ [n his interview with the ICL, sian Communist Workers Party of Viktor cial unions that in fact were an arm of Brodulev emphasized that the air con­ Anpilov which has been behind the anti­ the Stalinist bureaucracy-have been trollers were not demanding higher Yeltsin protests in Moscow and else­ militantly pro-Yeltsin and openly support wages, their main concern was improved where, also denounced a similar strike the restoration of capitalism. Their model flight safety. But if the Yeltsin-Rutskoi in the Ukraine in early September of is Lech Walesa's Polish Solidarnosc, regime met this union's demands, it miners, railway engineers, pilots and air favorite "union" of the CIA and the would encourage other Russian workers traffic controllers because the leadership Vatican. The Independent Miners Union to strike against the restorationist regime of the "independent" unions which (NPG), the most important of them, is as their living conditions are ravaged called them is anti-Communist and directly tied to the "labor" lieutenants of by hyperinflation and mass unemploy­ pro-Yeltsin. U.S. imperialism. When AFL-CIO chief ment looms. We Trotskyists support The old official trade unions, led by Lane Kirkland visited Moscow in May the air controllers strike, whose pro­ entrenched Stalinist hacks, tell the work­ 1991, the air controllers informed him Yeltsin leaders are now up against the ers not to make trouble but rather to sup­ that they would have guided his plane Yeltsin regime. while we underline the port the more nationalistic and conser­ even if they had struck. The AFL-CIO need for a genuinely communist van­ vative figures in the new regime like Bulletin (May /(91) reported that, "at a guard that fights Yeltsin-Bush counter­ Rutskoi and Arkady Vol sky, head of dinner at Spaso House. the American revolution down the line. Such a leader­ the Union of Industrialists (ex-Stalinist Ambassador's residence, President Kirk­ ship would seek to expand strikes into managers seeking to become capital­ land saluted the leaders of the Inde­ a working-cia,s offensive throwing up ists). In an interview with the ICL, a pendent Miners Union. the air traffic con­ soviet organs of proletarian power to re­ spokesman for the independent railway trollers, and air line pilots." Yet now the store the USSR on the basis of Leninist drivers union remarked about the offi­ air controllers are threatened with the principles. cial unions, "the prevailing sentiment PATCO treatment by Yeltsin, another Criminally, the various has-been Sta­ among them is conservatism and embar­ favorite of the "AFL-C[A." linist losers, who masquerade as "com­ rassment." The resulting opposition to Except for the coal miners, these munists" while tying themselves to the strikes plays into the hands of the coun­ unions are based on the labor aristocracy most reactionary nationalist and out­ terrevolution, and is an important factor (ai r controllers, pi lots, rai Iwaymen, etc.), right fascist forces, have lined up with in explaining the passivity and disorien­ highly skilled workers in strategic sec­ Yeltsin and Rutsklli in opposing the tation of the Soviet workers in the face tors of the economy. They thought they strike. A representative of Toiling Rus­ of Yeltsin 's catastrophic assault on their would have considerable economic lev­ sia. the coalition dominated by the Rus- livelihoods. erage in a capitalist market economy. For It is necessary for workers in the their part. the coal miners have a central "free" unions to draw the lessons of role in the Soviet industrial economy and Yeltsin-Rutskoi's breaking the air con­ were recognized as the heart of the work­ trollers strike. Capitalist restoration will ers movement hy the old Stalinist rulers. bring not prosperity and freedom but Thus many miners, too. believed they Third World-level poverty and police­ would have a strong bargaining position state repression. Workers in the old in a capitalist labor market. [n reality, Stalinist-led unions must understand capitalist restoration will bring massive that the differences between Rutskoi deindustriali:ation, reducing Russia, the and Yeltsin, between Volsky and Gaidar, Ukraine and other former Soviet repuh­ are squabbles over who will serve as Iics to neocolonial suppliers of raw agents of Wall Street, Frankfurt and materials to West Europe, North America Tokyo in exploiting and degrading the and Japan. workers of Russia and other former Miners-who had economic security Soviet republics. At a recent demon­ in the planned, collectivized Soviet sys­ stration against the privatization of the tem-wou[d find themselves competing mammoth Zil auto plant in Moscow, a with the highly mechanized strip mines spokesman for the ICL told the assem­ in the western U.S. and Australia as well bled workers: as South African coal extracted by super­ ''I'm from the former DDR where a exploited hlack workers. Key to the eco­ counterrevolution took place already two nomic viahi lity of Aeroflot-the largest years ago. I want to tell you that as a civilian air carrier in the world-is that resu It of that 50 percent of the workers are now unemployed and 80 percent of aviation fuel was made available at a the women. We see racist terror against small fraction of the world-market price. immigrants, with almost daily fascist Now, the [MF (the world bankers' cartel) attacks against immigrant hostels. is demanding that Russia increase the ''I'm a member of the International Com­ munist League. We are against the pri­ internal price of oil .lh-e~f()ld, which vatization and against the counterrevo­ among other devastating effects would lution. We fight to bring the workers into ground most of Aeroflot's planes. Thou­ power. For that we have to unite all the sands of Soviet air controllers would find workers. The multinational Soviet work­ AP themselves without a job. Meanwhile, ing class has to fight. American PATCO air traffic contro[­ "The workers have to take the power into the unions set up to carry out counter­ [ers dragged off in chains in 1981 as their hands in a fight against counter­ revolution are now finding out that cap­ Reagan government smashed their revolution. For that they have to build italism means union-busting. strike. workers and soldiers soviets. And the 24

workers need a leadership which is tion in the air. In general, there's a direct militia teams] forced our leaders out of opposed to all forms of nationalism, threat to the safety of flights; while we flight control rooms, saying "you have racism and fascism' lapplause I "We have to return to the road of Lenin are at control panels and radars, control­ nothing to do here." The strike commit­ and Trotsky! Down with the Yeltsin gov­ ling the air traffic, there's stress, perma­ tees were also forced out, in the presence ernment! For proletarian international­ nent nervousness. of procurators [state attorneys 1. ism!" lapplausel Q: Where did the strikes take place, and What else happened during the strike? what was the military doing to r,::place First, the chairman of the air controller * * * the air controllers? union of the Kursk airport had to undergo Following are excerpts of an inten'icw A: August 15 came. The strike started such an ordeal-very much like in 1937 with Vladimir Brodulel', I'ice president or at 10 a.m., Moscow time. Before the [during Stalin's purges]. On August 16, the Federation or Air-trafJIc Controllers strike started, we had received confirma­ at II p.m., when the strike was already Trade Unions of Russia, conducted on tions from 97 participating air traffic over, militiamen came to his place, August 25 in MoscoH'. control centers from differcnt cities­ showed him a warrant for his arrest, and Q: J represent the International Commu­ telegrams, protocols of secret ballot, he spent two days in prison pending trial. nist League. I would like to learn what etc. There were 97 air traffic control The military, with no special training, happened exactly. centers out of 130 in Russia. were ordered to take places at air con­ A: We appealed to the President of the Howevcr, developments took such a trol panels usually operated by civil air Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, with turn that the state machine-you can't controllers. They were not licensed to our demands on July 4. Our demands call it any other way: the government, control air traffic in these air sectors. It did not imply thc improvement of social the attorney general, the judicial bodies, was done by order. And it's mere luck facilities or any change in the existing the KGB, the Ministry of the Interior­ there were no accidents. It's just luck social conditions. Nor did we rcquire any came together and formed a single front people were not killed, and there are no rise in wages. However strange it may to fight the 8,000 air controllers of Rus­ coffins. sound, our major concern, the corner­ sia. What did it mean in practice? Vice We understand that in calling a strike stone, is now flight safety. Some people President Rutskoi immediately sent gov­ the air controller union took all passen­ don't quite understand why the trade ernment telegrams to local authorities gers captive. But we did not expose their union seeks not wage raises nor the ordering criminal prosecution of the lives to danger. Rutskoi and his men took improvement of its conditions, but the strikers. Heads of the Department of Air the passengers captive, too, But they did enhancement of flight safety in the skies Transport, in their turn, instructed the expose their lives to danger, and, as a of Russia. local bosses to keep the airports and air matter of fact, they potentially sentenced The means of communication, radar sectors open by all means. all passengers to death. Making the and navigation facilities used by the air Q: SO they mobilized the militia and crews board thc planes and fly to the controllers are very worn out and out­ forces of the KGB against the workers closed air zones and airports, and even dated. No modernization is undertaken, on strike? more, placing untrained personnel at our channels of communication perma­ A: Thcy presented this as maintaining flight control panels. [ think they are nently go out of order, thcre are also order at the airports, but as a matter of criminals. There's no other word: they constant failures in control of the situa- fact, in certain cases OMON [special are criminals. _

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Back issues available. Order from/pay to Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116, USA 25 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 561, 16 Octoher 1992 ICL Leaflet in Ex-USSR Stalinist Has-Beens: Left Wing of Nationalist Counterrevolution

pa Remnants of Stalinist bureaucracy now calling themselves patriots (left) bloc with anti-Semitic Russian fascists such as Pamyat (right).

The following lea{lrt was produced in lessness stalk the land. Pensioners line workers should have swept away the Russian hy the International Communist the street, sell ing their possessions to counterrevolutionary scum on Yeltsin's League j()r distrihution in the former survive. Thousands of factories face White House barricades. We issued an USSR. liquidation. Fratricidal wars rage. The urgent call, "Soviet Workers: Defeat counterrevolutionary drive could have Yeltsin-Bush Counterrevolution!" At the For the Communism of been spiked through concerted workers' same time, the botched putsch by Lenin and Trotsky! mobilization against the Yeltsinites at the the GKChP ["Emergency Committee"] outset, against the devastating price rises sought to enforce "perestroika without Why Haven't the in January, against the threat of mass glasnost" by imposing the heavy hand Workers Risen Up? unemployment which has been looming of repression in ordcr to continue on It is now more than a year since for months. But this has not happened. Gorbachev's road to capitalism. We the forces of counterrevolution led Why? At bottom it is a question of pro­ raised a program to mobilize the work­ by Boris Yeltsin and orchestrated by letarian leadership. ing class in struggle against the restora­ Washington gained the ascendancy and The International Communist League tionist drive: for independent workers launched a forced draft march toward (Fourth Internationalist) said in August committees in all enterprises to pre­ capitalist restoration. Hunger and home- 1991 that a mobilization of Moscow vent layoffs and privatization, through 26

nationalist and other pro-capitalist ele­ ments who III'C 110 /css committed to c(}untcl'I'cl'o/utioll thall Yeltsill. "Red-Brown" Coalition: Betrayal of the Working Class! The demonstrations of Anpilov's RKRP invariably include the fascist Pamyat and a gaggle of supporter~ of the rahidly anti-Semitic Zhirinovsky, while Anpilov's MO/lliyo (No, 39) calls on its readers to suhscrihe to that Pamyat-Ioving chauvinist rag /)iell. The RKRP is prominent in the disgust­ ing '"red-hrown" coaliti()11 with out­ right Great Russian chauvinists like the anti-Semitic writer Y. Rasputin ,1I1d Zhirinovsky, the monarchist Alexander Nevzorov and the Russian National Synod (Sohol') of General Alexander Sterligov. On the RKRP Central Com­ OliLleS/;:,vama Counterrevolutionary rabble manning barricades at Yeltsin "White House" in mittee sits Makashov, who calls Yeltsin­ August 1991 should have been dispersed by working-class mobilization under ites '"Zionists" and regularly denounces genuinely communist leadership. '"cosmopolitans"~Stalin's anti-Semitic code word for Jews~and was elected to seizing control of production; against the munist" or "socialist": the Russian the presidium of the Sohor. [t is no acci­ witchhunting ban on the CPSU; for Communist Workers Party (RKRP) of dent that Pamyat endorsed Makashov for multinational workers defense guards to Viktor Anpilov and General Albert president in June IQ91. prevent intercommunalist fratricide and Makashov, the All-Unioll Communist The June 12 conference in Mos­ nationalist and anti-Semitic pogroms. Party (VKPB) of Nina Andreyeva, the cow of the S()hlil'~including monarch­ Following the imposition of Yeltsin's Russian Party of Communists (RPK) of ists, black-shirted fascists and Cossacks "shock treatment," in our leaflet "Form Anatoly Kryuchkov, thc Union of Com­ in full regalia, a, well as the RKRP Workers and Soldiers Soviets to Stop munists (SK) of Alcxei Prigarin, the ~marked an important stage in Capitalist Restoration!" we raised the Socialist Party of Labor (SPT) of Roy the strengthening of fascist-corporatist call for workers committees to seize con­ Medvedev and A. Denisov, and the forces. The Soliol' railed that the Yeltsin trol of food distribution, backed up by Socialist Party of the Ukraine (SPU), as regime is an '"administration of national workers defense guards. "There can be well as Boris Kagarlitsky's Labor Party treason" which i., "Russophobic and no return to the old crap of Stalinism," (PT). They claim to represent significant JeW-loving," Sterligov is just as fanatic we stressed. "Out of yesterday's Stalin­ forces within the working class. Yet they an nnti-communist as Yeltsin or Gaidar. ists come today's Yeltsinites." have not organized a hint of serious Sterligov denounces communism as Throughout. the ICL has fought for working-class resistance to the ravages '"hostile to the old national traditions of proletarian political revolution to restore of capitalist restoration. Russia",so it is quite impossible to col­ the multinational Soviet state on the From "hardline" Stalinist leftovers lahorate with people who are carriers of basis of its Leninist foundations, to drive like Anpilov and Andreyeva to pro­ this ideology." Both Sterligov and his out the capitalist-restorationist govern­ Gorbachcv social democrats like Med­ deputy lIya Konstantinov, who paradcs ments of Yeltsin, Kravchuk & Co. and vcdev, these organizations have been a as head of the '"All-Russian Toilers replace them with the rule of democrat­ roadblock to struggle by the multi­ Assemhly," sided with Yeltsin in August ically elected soviets of workers and national Soviet working class. The rea­ 1991. But while Anpilov rails against soldiers deputies, and for a Leninist­ son: these organizations continue the Yeltsinite '"demofascists," this does not Trotskyist party to lead the workers Stalinist pol icies of national ism and prevent him from licking Sterligov's struggle to victory. In this, we continue hlocs with bourgeois forces which paved boots. The Leningrad RKRP's Namd­ the struggle of the Left Opposition of the way for counterrevolution. The naya P/'(ll'{/a (No. 24) featured the full Leon Trotsky, for which countless workers, not only here hut throughout text of Sterligov's June 12 speech to the numbers of Bolshevik-internationalists the entire world, have paid dearly for Sohol'. Mo/niya (No. 40) puhlished went to their deaths at the hands of this. another speech by Sterligov and hailed Stalin's assassins. The program of the Nearly seven decades of Stalinist it as an example of the '"intellectual Left Opposition was the program of the bureaucratic rule politically paralyzed might of the opposition," Bolshevik victory in October 1917. and atomized the Soviet proletariat, Sterligov/Zhirinovsky try to poison Stalinism, which trampled on that pro­ Today the numerous decomposition the Russian workers with chauvinism, gram, received its death blow in August products which emerged from the col­ the better to lead them to thc capitalist 1991, but the communism of Lenin and lapse of the bankrupt Stalinist apparatus slaughter. And they are aided in their Trotsky lives in the international class aid the consolidation of the counter­ efforts hy those, like the RKRP, who struggle. revolution by sowing passivity and crim­ stand at their side obscenely waving Now with the demise of the CPSU, inally fanning chauvinism within the red nags, This is a cynical opera­ there are more organizations than one multinational proletariat. One and all, tion. Anpilov & Co, call the Yeltsin can count which call themselves "com- they have blocked with reactionary gang '"demofascists" in order to justify 27 unity with "national patriots" against Western influence. This harks back to the supposed "national unity" against the Nazi invaders in 1941, when Sta­ lin resurrected the tsarist watchword of the "strong state" (der:ham). What a perversion of history! It was nei­ ther Stalin's chauvinist propaganda for a "Great Patriotic War" nor the alli­ ance with the "democratic imperialists" which defeated the Nazis, but the heroic effort and sacrifice of the multinational acist Keller/NY Times Soviet proletariat. The "red-brown" coa­ From left to right: Anpilov, Nina Andreyeva and Albert Makashov, leaders lition spits on the memory of that of Stalinist "patriots" aligned with anti-communist Russian nationalists. struggle. The Sohor's only difference with Yel­ fascists and other counterrevolutionar­ any taint of anti-Semitism or Great Rus­ tsin is in wanting to restrict a new class ies. In doing so they claim to be defend­ sian chauvinism. And not only before of capitalist exploiters to purebred sons ing Russian-speaking minorities against but also after October. In his struggle, of the Rus. Konstantinov calls for "Rus­ nationalist assaults. As Leninists we in league with Trotsky, against Stalin and sia, one and indivisible; equal rights for oppose a/l national privilege and all Ordjonikidze over the Georgian ques­ all forms of property; a mixed economy." nationalisms. To support either the tion, Lenin declared "war to the death Sterligov rails that property must not be Slavic or Romanian side in Moldova will on dominant nation chauvinism" (Octo­ allowed to pass into the hands of Jews only escalate the inter-ethnic bloodlet­ ber 1922). and foreigners, but only "those whose ting, further inflame murderous nation­ Yet today the Black Hundreds chau­ ancestors built Russia." In other words, alism and lead to an endless series of vinism denounced by Lenin is propa­ he wants to restore Russia's factories, communalist massacres and counter­ gated by those falsely claiming his collective farms, mines and oil fields to massacres. Look what has happened in mantle. A recent issue of the Toiling Rus­ those who would follow in the footsteps the Caucasus; and in Yugoslavia the sia newspaper Shto Delat ("What Is To of tsarist capitalists and landlords and workers state was destroyed in all-sided Be Done") carried a rehash by Yakushev the rest of the old Russian nobility, who nationalist fratricide! of the anti-Semitic tsarist secret police will be no less servants of imperialism It was only through the most ruthless forgery, "The Protocols of the Elders of than is Yeltsin. In reality, the pre-1917 struggle against all national oppression Zion." Mollliya (No. 39) then defended tsarist autocracy-for all its reactionary that Lenin created the basis for the multi­ Yakushev as a "leader of the workers Russian nationalism-served as agents national Soviet workers state. While rec­ movement." The June 12 demonstration of Western finance capital, especially ognizing the right to self-determination at Ostankino to demand a chauvinist the Paris hourse, in exploiting Russia's for all nations, Lenin opposed even "Russian Hour" on television, built toilers. "the 'most just,' 'purest,' most refined" through the efforts of Toiling Russia, Meanwhile the RKRP and others join nationalism ("Critical Remarks on the was an orgy of chauvinism and anti­ in every sinister chauvinist crusade, as National Question," 1913). He de­ Semitism dominated by Sterligov and over Moldova, falling in line behind the nounced as Black Hundreds propaganda Zhirinovsky, with signs proclaiming, "Russian TV Means TV Without Jews." As Lenin said, "KlO kovo?" (who does what to whom?). Elements of the RKRP may try to fool themselves that they are only "temporarily" using the Sterligovs and his ilk to further the struggle against Yeltsinite counterrevolution. Others, like the RKRPer whose letter was pub­ lished in Glasnost, worry about "too close contact with national-patriots." But Ostankino shows who is using whom. Any bloc with, any conciliation of these reactionary "national patriots," no mat­ ter how many red flags are present, only furthers their goal of bloody fascist counterrevolution. Allying with Capitalists to Fight Capitalism? The Ostankino demonstration was so flagrant Iy reactionary that some have sought to take their distance from it. Medvedev and Denisov even held a press conference on June 23 to announce Woman scrounging for food in Moscow garbage dump. Yeltsin's capitalist­ that "only a few I! I isolated provoca­ restorationist regime is starving Soviet working people. teurs" shouted "beat the yids." But the 28 journal Glasllost, on whose editorial board Medvedev and Denisov sit, praises the ,)'ohor of anti-Semitic provocateur Stcrligov. And the SPT-along with the RKRP, YKPB. RPK and SK-joined with such reactionary outfits as the Sohor, the "Lnion of Cossacks" and the "Fund for the Restoration of the Shrine of Christ the Savior" in signing the "Declaration on the Founding of the United Opposi­ tion" last March which formalized the "red-brown" coalition. This statement Cossacks, proclaimed: "We. representative of the descendants of 'left' and 'right' oppositions, have come shock troops of tsarist autocracy, to the conclusion that the salvation of reappear at the Fatherland is only possible through Congress of joint action on the basis of civil peace People's Deputies. and nat ion,d trust." The declaration in;,ists on "the impermissibility of con­ fruntation between 'whites' and 'reds'." In other words, this was an appeal for the workers to maintain "class peace" while the fascists march with impunity than Yeltsin, Kravchuk is administering establishment of self-management of and the counterrevolution rages trium­ the restoration of capitalism, which will people's enterprises." The same issue phantly. The "red-brown" coalition is necessarily proceed to a fascist or includes remarks by Buzgalin of the PT, simply the most grotesque form of the bonapartist stage in order to crush the which explicitly models itself on the pro­ class-collaborationist People's Front workers. capitalist British Labour Party, calling policy proclaimed by Stalin/Dimitrov in Is it not ohl'iolls that one cannot flght for the "transfer of property to the work 1935. Then as now, the popular front a!{ainst capitalist countclT('l'olution hy collectives." All of these, in one form or subordinates the workers movement to joining with ('apitali.11 j{JI'ces? The truth another, amount to calls for illusory a section of the bourgeoisie. Today there of the matter is that none of these organ­ "workers' privatization." is not even the old Stalinist fig leaf jus­ izations are opposed to the reintro­ Even if such a system could be set up, tifying support to "democratic" capital­ duction of capitalism. The SPT, SK and ownership by work collectives would ism as a supposed stage on the road to RPK all support a "mixed economy," only be a brief transition to neocolonial socialism, but rather an open bloc with which in the context of raging counter­ capitalist exploitation, Such collectives the more nationalist wing of the revolution means support to capitalist would be competing against one another counterrevo lu lion. restoration. under conditions of hyperinflation, total No different in substance is the sup­ The RKRP occasionally makes "left" disruption of the supply system and mass port given by many of these same ele­ noises against privatization, while regu­ unemployment. Most enterprises would ments around the SPU and SK in the larly proclaiming the "equality of all go bankrupt even if they cut wages to Ukraine to Kravchuk in last year's pres­ property forms." Molniya (No. 39) re­ the bone. Desperate worker collectives idwt ial elections as the "lesser evil" prints a statement from the "Federation would then have to sell the enterprises against the fascist Chornovil. The ram­ of Communists of Educational, Scien­ to foreign investors or well-heeled paging Ukrainian fascist bands see no tific and Creative Organizations" which members of the Russian mafia. Even in need to "unite" with the left. But no less calls for "destatificalion" through "the Yugoslavia, where limited "workers self­ management" existed on the basis of state-owned property, this undermined working-class solidarity, increased in­ equality in all spheres and widened eco­ nomic divisions between the constituent national republics, setting the stage for the bloody counterrevolutionary breakup of the country. We Trotskyists oppose the reactionary utopia of "workers' capitalism" and stand for a planned collectivi:ed econ­ omy under a workers government hased on democratically elected soviets. Gen­ uine soviets would be organs of mass Aleksandr Rutskoi struggle and proletarian rule rather than (far left) and Arkady Volsky the bureaucratic apparatuses under Sta­ (above), leaders of linism (or the artificial concoctions of corporatist faction the rump Stalinists today). of capitalist Stripped of "left" phrasemongering, in counterrevolution. Russia today the call for privatization 29

through the "work collectives" is noth­ et a!. ever led any strikes against Yel­ From the RKRP to the SPT, the var­ ing more than the program of the indus­ tsin's starvation policies? ious degeneration products of the col­ trialist Volsky and would-be strongman lapse of the Stalinist bureaucracy all Rutskoi for factory managers to take The Anti-Leninist Lie of trace their origins to this bankrupt, ownership of the means of production "Socialism in One Country" treacherous program. Thus RKRP "ideo­ under a corporatist "strong state." They Behind the capitulation by these self­ logue" Sergeev dismisses the idea of understand that the restoration of capi­ styled "communists" to nationalist coun­ "international collectivisn~" while claim­ talism cannot be carried through demo­ terrevolution is their fealty to Stalin/ ing that "the idea of Russian, or Great cratically, but requires the strong hand Bukharin's nationalist lie of "socialism Russian, if you please, collectivism will of a bonapartist, i.e., dictatorial, regime. in one country." Lenin concluded his work." And Medvedev echoes: "We have The "Russian Communists" of the brief address to the Petrograd Soviet to say ... of Leninism, that too much RKRP et a!. are in fact the left flank announcing the workers' seizure of importance was placed on the idea of of the counterrevolutionary faction of power in 1917 with the words: "Long world revolution." We have to say of Volsky/Rutskoi/Sterligov. When Rutskoi live the world socialist revolution!" Sergeev, Medvedev and their kind, that deployed the forces of the state to at­ Time and again, Lenin-expressing the those who repudiate the Leninist per­ tack the air traffic controllers strike in view of all Marxists-insisted that spective of world revolution arc neces­ August. the Stalinists stood aside. They socialism could triumph only through sarily incapable of combatting the justify their own hostility to the strikers international proletarian revolution. But counterrevol ution. by pointing to the fact that the "free trade in 1923-24, the Bolshevik Party of Octo­ In The Rel'o/ution Betrayed, Trotsky union" leaders are pro-Yeltsin, even ber was strangled and the program of explained that even a healthy revolu­ though these unions were now pitted Lenin was thrown overboard. The polit­ tionary workers state could not for against the Yeltsin regime. By arrogantly ical counterrevolution led by Stalin long escape the pressures of the imperi­ blaming the workers for the crimes of transformed the CPSU into a bureau­ alist world market. The choices: either their leadership, the Stalinists serve only cratic apparatus and proceeded to betray the promotion of socialist revolution to to drive these workers deeper into the one revolutionary opportunity after eliminate capitalism internationally, or arms of their reactionary leaders. And another-from China to Spain to post­ conciliation of imperialism abroad anq where have the arrogant supposed work­ war Western Europe-in the name of concomitant rehabilitation of domes­ ers' leaders of the RKRP, Toiling Russia "socialism in one country." tic nationalist reaction. The Leninist-

, Russian-Language Spartacist Bulletin

No.1 (56 pages) What Is Trotskyism

No.2 (64 pages) Fight for the Communism of Lenin and Trotsky!

No.3 (48 pages) The Leninist Party: Tribune of the People

No.4 (64 pages) Stalinism Has Collapsed: For the Fourth InternaUonal of Lenin and Trotsky!

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Trotskyists fought for the former pro­ ply switched over to tailing after the no attempt to come to grips with the gram; Stalin and his heirs promoted the "red-hrown" coalition. In a front-page degeneration of the Bolshevik Revolu­ latter. And when the bankruptcy of their appeal to Toiling Russia over fight­ tion, and thus it is only a cover-up for bureaucratic-commandist system be­ ing privatization, Workcrs Dcmo('racy the policies which led to Gorbachev and came apparent, Stalin's heirs saw no (April-May 1992) in no way denounced Yeltsin. alternative but to accept the development Toiling Russia's chauvinist position­ At the CPSU conference itself. held of capitalism. not even mentioning the words "chau­ on October 10, Prigarin, one of the vinism" or "anti-Semitism." Now Work­ authors of the Pral'da declaration, con­ "Workers Democracy" Group ers Democracy has finally mustered up tinued to defend blocs with "patriots" = Yeltsinite "Democrats" the courage to say. at least in the abstract, and called for an all-inclusive party The grotesque character of the "red­ "Down with nationalism and chauvin­ containing those who see "Stalin as a brown" coalition provides an open door ism! Long live the October of Lenin and criminal" and those who see him as a for some to offer a seemingly "left" alter­ Trotsky!" But what can such words "savior," those who want a centralized native as a halfway house to authen­ mean coming from people who invited economy and those who favor "market tic Leninism-Trotskyism. This is the role of the Workers Democracy group of Sergei Beits, associated with the British Militant group. Despite their economist demands and workerist rhet­ oric, they have not opposed capital­ ist restoration. On the contrary, in August 1991, they joined the forces of capitalist restoration in the defense of the White House with the rest of the Yeltsinite "democrats." Likewise, Alexei Gusev's Socialist Workers Union (affil­ iated to the British Workers Revolution­ ary Party of Cliff Slaughter), Dmitri Zhvania's Proletarian Revolutionary Cells (connected to the British anti­ Soviet Socialist Workers Party of Tony Cliff) and Workers Power all stood with Yeltsin in August 1991. Workers Democracy actually hails Yel­ tsin's counterrevolutionary countercoup as the beginning of "the revolutionary anti-bureaucratic process," grotesquely paraphrasing Lenin in proclaiming: "The Spartaci revolution that gave power to the hour­ Protest against privatization by workers at Moscow Zil auto factory in geoisie has finished, the next revolution September 1992 was add ressed by spokesman of the I nternational Communist will put power in the hands of league. the workers." These people have noth­ ing to do with Trotskyism, but rather outright monarchists for "comradely" socialism." Such a Kautskyan mishmash represent a strain of Stalinophobia. discussion at an August 29 meeting in is a recipe for a social-democratic party Behind their talk of "democratic social­ Moscow, and stood with Yeltsin on the which at hest would confuse and disori­ ism" is support to not-so-democratic harricades of counterrevolution '? ent those workers over whom it might capitalism against the Stalinist degener­ exercise influence. What these former Reforge the Communist Party bureaucrats fear ahove all is a clear, rev­ ated workers state. They supported Lech of Lenin and Trotsky! Walesa's Solidarnosc, financed by the olutionary program. Vatican and the CIA, during its drive There is much talk today of reconsti­ Seven decades of Stalinism perverted for capitalist restoration in Poland in tuting the CPSU. But what is decisive the conception of revolutionary leader­ 1981. They welcomed the destruction of is the question of program-a fighting ship into one of bureaucratic fiat, but­ the USSR, absurdly denying that "the strategy to mohilize the proletariat in tressed by the constitutional enshrine­ liquidation of the USSR weakened the struggle for its own power. We are ment of the "leading role of the party." position of socialism in the world" for the reconstitution of the Bolshevik Revolutionary leadership is the struggle (Workers Democracy, April-May 1992). Party of Lenin and Trotsky. The draft to break the working masses from the They are not Fourth Internationalists, but "Programmatic Declaration of the 20th misleaders who foster bourgeois and na­ Second International social democrats: All-Union Conference of the CPSU," tionalist ideology, and to mohilize them the Militant group in Britain was for published in Pr(/\'i1a (X September), around the genuine interests of the inter­ four decades buried deep inside the pro­ concedes "large-scale mi~cak'lIlations, national proletariat. What is needed imperialist, anti-Soviet Labour Party, to abuse of power and crimes against today is the genuine unity of all who which they remain loyal. the positions and the very lives of seek the communism of Lenin and Trot­ But in the classical manner of op­ people" under the Stalin era, as Khrush­ sky around the Bolshevik program of portunists, when they found there was chev already admitted in 1'J-';6. But world socialist revolution. That is the no gain to be derived from tailing despite its denunciation of "betrayal by only way forward. the Yeltsinite "democrats," they sim- the Gorbachev-Yakovlev group." there is 11 October 1992 31 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 564, 27 November 1992

Stalinism-Gravedigge,r of the Revolution How the Soviet Workers State Was Strangled November 7 marked the 75th anniver­ sary of the Bolshevik Revolution. But the workers state erected by the Bolshe­ vik power, far and away the greatest con­ quest of the international proletariat and a momentous leap forward for humanity, did not survive its 75th year. The period of open counterrevolution ushered in by Boris Yeltsin's pro-imperialist counter­ coup in August 1991 has, in the absence of mass working-class resistance, cul­ minated in the creation of a bourgeois state, however fragile and reversible. The task facing the Soviet proletariat today is socialist revolution to restore proletarian power and reforge the Soviet Union on the foundation of Lenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik internationalism. The ascendancy of Yeltsin and capital­ ist-restorationist forces backing him was a pivotal event in determining the fate of the Soviet Union, but it was not conclusive. In our August 1991 arti­ cle, "Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin­ For Socialist Revolution, to Bush Counterrevolution!", which was immediately translated into Russian and Sweep Away Yeltsin Counterrevolution!. distributed in over 100,000 copies throughout the Soviet Union, we wrote that workers mobilizations should have Opposition from the factories against degenerated workers state and push the ravages of capitalist assault could ... through the piecemeal consolidation of cleaned out the counterrevolutionary prevent the rapid consolidation of rabble on Yeltsin's barricades, thus open­ counterrevolution. " the counterrevolution. Quantity has now ing the road to proletarian political rev­ -wv No. 533, 30 August 1991 turned into qual ity. olution. As a result of Yeltsin's victory: In the interim there was no decisive But the situation cannot long continue "The first workers state in history, action to stop that consolidation. Politi­ as it is. For Yeltsin and other restora­ sapped and undermined by decades of cally atomized by nearly 70 years of tionists to nail down a solid capitalist Stalinist bureaucratic misrule, lies in tat­ Stalinist usurpation of political life, par­ regime, sooner rather than later a bloody ters. The state power has been fractured, the Communist Party-its bureaucratic alyzed by the CIA-supported pro-Yeltsin reckoning is likely, signaling to the core-shattered and banned from the "free trade unions" and the virulent masses that there is a new order. With KGB and armed forces, the multinational chauvinist poison of numerous Stalinist explosions of struggle by workers driven union is ripping apart as one republic remnants, the multinational Soviet work­ to desperation, or even without them, the after another proclaims secession. ing class has been overwhelmed by nascent bourgeois forces will move to "But while Yeltsin & Co. now see a clear field to push through a forced­ the counterrevolutionary tide. The Yel­ impose heavy-handed order through a draft reintroduction of capitalism, the tsin regime seized the advantage to tear "strong state." The recent vicious crack­ outcome is not yet definitively decided .... away at every vestige of the Soviet down, using Russian OMaN riot police, 32

and instability. On the eve of the Decem­ ber 1 session of the Congress of People's Deputies, Moscow is awash with rumors of coups, countercoups and "creeping coups." Meanwhile, Yeltsin is engaged in furious negotiations with Arkady Volsky, head of the powerful indus­ trialists' party, who is in league with the militarist Russian vice president Aleksandr Rutskoi. The volatility of the present situation is captured in the recent electoral victory of the ex-Stalinist Democratic Labor Party in Lithuania, ousting the rightist nationalist Sajudis movement from office. It did not take long for the realities of capitalist immis­ eration to drain away the nationalist euphoria which had intoxicated the Lithuanian people. However, the new

Sl Lithuanian leader Brazauskas reportedly ICL banner outside January 1992 Soviet officers conference in Moscow: "No has the same economic policies as to Capitalist Restoration! Yes to Gains of October!" Volsky-Rutskoi. Meanwhile, the working class of the on a strike by air traffic controllers fore­ Hitler's Holocaust machine, which for ex-USSR is faced with one assault after shadows the would-be exploiters' deter­ decades kept U.S. imperialism from turn­ another. Society is disintegrating, mass mination to repress any working-class ing its nuclear arsenal on the world's unemployment looms. Industrial produc­ resistance. The rising racist hysteria semicolonial peoples-is dead. But the tion has dropped 18 percent since the against people from Central Asia and the class struggle is not. The nascent bour­ beginning of 1992, while investment has Caucasus in major Russian cities creates geois states in Russia, the Ukraine and plummeted by 50 percent. To prevent a the climate for pogroms. With ethnic elsewhere are fragile, isolated and inter­ total collapse, the government has been contlicts brewing on a dozen fronts on nally splintered. They do not rest on the pumping credits into industry: the state the periphery of the Russian republic, solid foundation of a cohered capitalist budget deficit is escalating to a trillion from the Baltics, to Abkhazia in Georgia class. The new entrepreneurs consist of rubles, and debts of industrial enterprises and the Transdniester in Moldova, to the little more than petty speculators and are over 2 trillion. The result has been longstanding nationalist civil war be­ mafia gangs, while sections of the old hyperintlation, variously estimated at an tween Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the industrial hierarchy of factory managers annual rate of 14,000 percent (Moscow Caucasus. the possibility of a Yugoslav­ are in the process of imposing their Times) or 20,000 percent (Commersant). style fratricidal bloodbath is all too real. weight. The armed forces are bitter and In the month of October alone, the ruble The Soviet workers state-which once demoralized. fell by half its value. Since January the served as a beacon for the exploited and The only thing which is certain in the price of bread has climbed on the order oppressed of this globe, which destroyed ex-USSR today is increasing uncertainty of a hundredfold. As the economy

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August 1991: Plotters of "perestroika coup" kept tanks idling in Red ==:'-~--=.:.. Instead of sending them against counterrevolutionary HQ at Yeltsin's hite ::..,,::.::o.:~,;::,:o;::;:-_~.':;.", __, House. ICL statement (right) declared: "Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin-Bush ------_J Counterrevolution!" 33

decomposes, the bulk of the population time." It resolved "to note and draw con­ imperialism, not only military encircle­ teeters on the brink of outright starva­ clusions from the position that the ment and an arms buildup aimed at bank­ tion. Any spark could set off the tinder­ degenerated workers state of Stalin and rupting the Soviet economy, but also the box on which Yeltsin and his cohorts sit. his heirs has been destroyed." pressure of the imperialist world market. We Trotskyists of the International In the founding program of the Fourth As Trotsky wrote in The Third Inter­ Communist League, who have fought International, written on the eve of national After Lenin: "it is not so much tooth and nail against ascendant coun­ World War II, Leon Trotsky wrote: military intervention as the intervention terrevolution, say: Stalinism is dead, but "The historical crisis of mankind is of cheaper capitalist commodities that communism lives-in the class struggle reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary constitutes perhaps the greatest imme­ of the world proletariat and in the pro­ leadership." This crisis of proletarian diate menace to Soviet economy." gram of the revolutionary vanguard. The leadership is no less acute today. To the Although the planned economy proved internationalist program through which beleaguered multinational proletariat in its superiority over capitalist anarchy the Soviet Union was created has been the ex-USSR and socialist-minded ele­ during its period of extensive growth, as carried forward under the banner of the ments in the army and intelligentsia, we the need for quality and intensive devel­ Fourth International. It is the Trotskyists say: the key task facing you is to cohere opment came to the fore the bureaucratic uniquely who warned that the continued stranglehold of the Stalinist bureaucracy over the Soviet workers state would lead to the destruction of October, who fought for unconditional military defense of the I Soviet Union against imperialism and counterrevolution, and called on the Soviet proletariat to sweep away the Stalinist excrescence through political revolution while there was still time. The "Russian question" has been the touchstone for revolutionaries and the defining political question of the 20th century. Leading up to the Second Inter­ national Conference of the International Communist League (Fourth Internation­ alist) earlier this autumn, discussion focused on an assessment of the devel­ Bloody ethnic conflicts fueled by advancing counterrevolution. Above: opments in the former Soviet Union of an Armenian worker massacred in Yerevan. since August 1991. The main conference a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party, stranglehold more and more undermined document described the piecemeal con­ forged in struggle around the internation­ the economy. Finally, through his pere­ solidation of a capitalist state: alist program which led your forebears stroika "market reforms" and acquies­ "Recent developments continue to point in a dire direction. Stories abound in the to victory in 1917. cence to capitalist restoration throughout press of 'primitive capitalist accumula­ East Europe, Gorbachev opened wide the tion,' i.e., theft: Managers and former Why Didn't the Workers floodgates to a direct counterrevolution- bureaucrats are scrambling, using all Rise Up? ary onslaught by Yeltsin & Co. . /"'" manner of shady practices to get their hands on socialized property--encour­ The working class of the ex-USSR and The bourgeoisie and the Stalinists Y aged, abetted and advised by interna­ the world proletariat as a whole must alike have long sought to identify tional imperialism. The recent strike by digest the lessons of this bitter defeat. Lenin's October with Stalin's conserva- air traffic controllers in the Russian fed­ Since 1917, the social democracy has tive bureaucratic rule. But nationalist eration was decisively broken by the Yel­ Stalinism is the antithesis of Leninist tsin government using the OM ON and served its bourgeois masters by directly elements of the MVD and KGB. An Afri­ aiding and abetting imperialist revanch­ internationalism. The Soviet degener- can student at Patrice Lumumba Univer­ ism in seeking to destroy the conquests ated workers state (and the deformed sity was shot down by the Moscow mili­ of October. Since rising to power over workers states which later arose on the tia amidst a hysterical racist press Stalinist model) was a historic anomaly, campaign. Tons of volumes of the works the backs of the Soviet working class of Marx, Engels and Lenin are being through a political counterrevolution in reSUlting from the isolation of econom- destroyed in a pure ideological anti­ 1923-24, the Stalinist bureaucracy im­ ically backward Russia and the failure communist frenzy." posed a suffocating isolation on the first of proletarian revolution to spread to the - "For the Communism of workers state, suppressing one interna­ advanced imperialist countries. Stalin- Lenin and Trotsky" tional revolutionary opportunity after ism represented a roadblock to progress The conference drew a balance sheet another. In the name of building "social­ toward socialism. As Trotsky wrote in on these events and unanimously en­ ism in one country," the Stalinists­ "Not a Workers' and Not a Bourgeois dorsed a 26 September document which through terror and lies-methodically State?" (November 1937): said: "The August 1991 events (' coup' attacked and eroded every aspect of the "That which was a 'bureaucratic defor­ and 'countercoup') appear to have been revolutionary and internationalist con­ mation' is at the present moment prepar­ ing to devour the workers' state, without decisive in the direction of development sciousness which had made the Soviet leaving any remains, and on the ruins of in the SU, but only those who are under working class the vanguard detachment nationalized property to spawn a new the sway of capitalist ideology or its of the world proletariat. propertied class. Such a possibility has material perquisites would have been The isolated workers state was sub­ drawn extremely near." hasty to draw this conclusion at that jected to the unremitting pressures of While the Stalinist regime was able to 34

a decisive measure by the role of t~e party, the voluntary internal cohesion of the proletarian vanguard, the conscious discipline of the administrators, trade union functionaries, members of the shop nuclei, etc." -The Third International After Lenin And again, in "The Workers' State, Thermidor and Bonapartism" (February 1935), he stated: "In contradistinction to capitalism, socialism is huilt not auto­ matically but consciously." When Trotsky wrote these articles, the memory of the October Revolution was still a part of the direct personal experi­ ence of the overwhelming mass of the Soviet proletariat, albeit already consid­ erably warped by Stalinist falsification and revision. In the intervening decades, May 1991: the nationalist bureaucracy did much to German and extirpate any real understanding of what Polish comrades came to be iconized as the "Great Octo­ of the ICL address 300 ber Socialist Revolution." In Soviet mass ,/ Soviet officers consciousness, World War II, dubbed and soldiers by the Stalinists the "Great Patriotic commemorating War" and suffused with the Russian­ Red Army victory nationalist propaganda Stalin churned over Nazi Third out during the war, came to supplant the Reich, at air base October Revolution as the epochal event in East Germany. in Soviet history. In the end, Stalin and his heirs succeeded in imprinting their nationalist outlook on the Soviet peo­ ples; proletarian internationalism came prolong its existence as a result of the imperceptible about the social counter­ to be sneered at as an obscure "Trotskyite heroic victory of the Soviet masses over revolution in the ex-USSR, which has heresy" of "export of revolution" or, at the Nazi invasion in World War II, Trot­ been extremely violent and convulsive best, emptied of any content while paid sky's Marxist analysis has ultimately, throughout the former Soviet bloc. How­ cynical lip service. unfortunately, been vindicated in the ever, Trotsky also advanced the progno­ With Gorbachev's "new thinking"­ negative. sis that a civil war would be required to i.e., his cringing capitulation to each and Why did the Soviet working class not restore capitalism in the Soviet Union every imperialist ultimatum--even lip rally to defend its gains? How did the and undo the deepgoing proletarian service to the ideals of the Bolshe­ counterrevolution triumph and destroy revolution. vik Revolution went by the boards. the workers state without a civil war'? In In a wide-ranging discussion in the The Soviet soldiers who had been told, his seminal 1933 work laying out the ICL two years ago on the counterrevo­ and believed, that they were fulfilling perspective of proletarian political rev­ lutionary overturns in East Europe and their "internationalist duty" in fighting olution, Trotsky polemicized against the DDR (East Germany), it was noted against the reactionary Afghan muja­ social democrats and proponents of var­ that Trotsky had overdrawn the analogy hedin on the USSR's border, were then ious "new class" theories who claimed between a social revolution in capitalist maligned for perpetrating "Russia's Viet­ that under Stalin's rule, the Soviet Union society and social counterrevolution in nam" against Afghanistan. Gorbachev's had imperceptibly changed from a work­ a deformed workers state (see Joseph ignominious pullout from Afghanistan ers to a bourgeois state without any qual­ Seymour, "On the Collapse of Stalinist and his green light to the imperialist itative transformation of either the state Rule in East Europe," and Albert St. John, annexation of the DDR served only to apparatus or the property forms: "For Marxist Clarity and a Forward Per­ further a sense of defeatism and demor­ "The Marxist thesis relating to the cata­ spective," Spartal"ist No. 45-46, Winter alization among the Soviet masses, while strophic character of the transfer of 1990-91). Where the capitalists exercise the so-caIled Stalinist "patriots" who power from the hands of one class into direct ownership over the means of pro­ denounced Gorbachev's concessions did the hands of another applies not only to revolutionary periods, when history duction, and thus are compelled to vio­ so only to beat the drums for Great Rus­ sweeps madly ahead, but also to the peri­ lently resist the overthrow of their system sian imperial ambitions, explicitly hark­ ods of counterrevolution, when society in order to defend their own property, ing back to the time of the tsars. rolls backwards. He who asserts that the the preservation of proletarian power Even so, the spontaneous strikes Soviet government has been gradually changed from proletarian to bourgeois is depends principally on consciousness which erupted in the Soviet coal fields only, so to speak, running backwards the and orgal1i:ation of the working class. in the summer of 1989 against the rav­ film of reformism." Trotsky himself emphasized this point ages of Gorbachev's "market socialism" --"The Class Nature of the in his 1928 article "What Now?": dramatically demonstrated the potential Soviet State" (October 1933) "The socialist character of our state for militant working-class struggle. As There was certainly nothing gradual or industry ... is determined and secured in Russian social democrat Boris Kagarlit- 35

sky documents in his book Farewell Perestroika (1990), the strike commit­ tees in many areas became "the actual centre of popular power," organizing food distribution, maintaining order, etc. As we pointed out at the time, the Kuz­ bass strikes "have quickly generated organizational forms of proletarian power, including strike committees and workers militias" ("Soviet Workers Flex Their Muscle," WV No. 482, 21 July 1989). These developments pointed to the possibility of authentic soviets, which­ by drawing in collective farmers, women, pensioners, soldiers and offi­ cers-could have served as the basis for a new proletarian political power, oust­ ing the bureaucracy through a political revolution. But when the Gorbachev regime reneged on its promises to the miners, pro-imperialist agitators trained by the "AFL-CIA" moved into the vac­ uum of leadership and set up the Inde­ Nappel pendent Miners Union, organizing an Lenin at First Congress of the Communist International, March 1919. activist minority of the miners as a bat­ tering ram for Yeltsin. totally discredited by the flagrant cor­ countries, the Soviet working class did However, a majority of the miners as ruption and cynicism of the Brezhnev not rally in resistance against the well as the rest of the Soviet working era. Occasional appeals to defend encroaching capitalist counterrevolu­ class remained passive in the three-sided "socialism" made by the more conserva­ tion. And, as Trotsky noted in The Third contest between the Yeltsin-Ied "demo­ tive elements of the Gorbachev regime, International After Lenin: "If an army crats," Gorbachev and the more conser­ such as Yegor Ligachev, fell on deaf ears. capitulates to the enemy in a critical sit­ vative wing of the Stalinists. The mass The Stalinist "patriots," organized for uation without a battle, then this capit­ of workers were wary, if not outright example in the United Front of Toil­ ulation completely takes the place of a hosti Ie, to the pro-Western advocates of ers (OFT), were able to mobilize only 'decisive battle,' in politics as in war." a "market economy." Unlike in Poland a relatively small number of worker during the rise of Solidarnosc, the forces activists. The Army and the Bureaucracy of capitalist counterrevolution were not Atomized and bereft of any anti­ What then happened to the armed able to mobilize the Soviet masses in the capitalist leadership, lacking any co­ forces, the core of the state in the Marxist name of anti-Communism. herent and consistent socialist class understanding? In The State and Revo­ At the same time, the bureaucratic consciousness, skeptical about the pos­ lution (1917), written against the reform­ elite (the so-called nomenklatura) was sibility of class struggle in the capitalist ist view that the working class could sim­ ply appropriate the bourgeois state for its own purposes, Lenin emphasized: "Revolution consists not in the new class commanding, governing with the aid of the old state machine, but in this class smashing this machine and command­ ing, governing with the aid of a new machine." Similarly, social counterrevo­ lution requires the smashing of the pro­ letarian state and the creation of a new state machine serving the bourgeoisie. This task was vastly facilitated by the Stalinist political counterrevolution, which effected a qualitative degenera­ tion in the workers state issuing out of the October Revolution. At the base, the Soviet military was affected by the same pressures and paral­ ysis as the rest of society. The upper mma strata of the military command, on the Stalinist myths: Poster proclaims that other hand, were a component of the "Victory of Socialism in Our Country SOy iet bureaucracy. Trotsky explained Is Guaranteed." Leonid Brezhnev and that the bureaucracy was a brittle, con­ Henry Kissinger celebrate "detente." tradictory caste whose role was that of an 36

impotent proclamations of the coup committee. Having seized the reins of power, the Yeltsin regime immediately moved to reorganize the top echelons of the military, putting in a layer of younger officers who were marked either by sub­ servience to Yeltsin (e.g., Shaposhnikov) or by strident Russian nationalism, while seeking to buy off broader layers of the officer corps with salary increases. At the same time, there was a self-purge, Gorbachev's as numbers of pro-socialist officers left treacherous the army in disgust over the anti­ withdrawal from Communist ban. In any case, as Trotsky Afghanistan emboldened remarked in The Revolution Betraved U.S. imperialism (1937): "a bourgeois restoration w;uld and demoralized probably have to clean out fewer people Soviet masses. [from the state apparatus] than a revo­ lutionary party." The juridical dissolution of the USSR in December 1991 left the all-Union armed forces-nominally under the com­ intermediary between the workers state role. Its polar flanks would be flung to mand of the stillborn "Commonwealth and hostile imperialist encirclement. the different sides of the barricade." of Independent States"-suspended in - "The Class Nature of the midair, a "sixteenth republic," as some This contradictory position generated Soviet State" within the bureaucracy a range of con­ dubbed it. An officers conference in the tradictory political impulses: "all shades In the case of the 1956 Hungarian Kremlin the following month registered of political thought are to be found Revolution, the bulk of the bureaucratic overwhelming sentiment for maintaining among the bureaucracy: from genuine stratum went over to the side of the insur­ the military as a multinational institu­ Bolshevism (ignace Reiss) to complete gent pro-socialist proletariat. In con­ tion. But, as we warned at the time, "to fascism (F. Butenko)" (Transitional Pro­ trast, more recently in the Soviet Union, preserve the multinational Soviet state gram). Reiss was a leading cadre of the the steady pressure of conciliation to and army requires salvaging the social­ Soviet intell igence service who declared imperialism and internal market forces ized property upon which it was created." for the Fourth International and was mur­ pushed ever-greater sections of the Had the working class moved, sections dered by Stalin in 1937; Butenko was a bureaucracy into the camp of capitalist of the military would undoubtedly have Soviet diplomat who defected to Mus­ restoration, for whom Yeltsin early on gone over to its side. Instead the centrif­ solini's fascist Italy. became the chief spokesman: ugal forces set into play by Yeltsin's The dual character of the Stalinist The utter incapacity of the bureauc­ countercoup and formalized by the bureaucracy, and the conflicting politi­ racy to play any independent role was December 199 I decree moved to tear the cal appetites it harbored, remained even forcefully demonstrated in the events military apart and eliminate what after the bloody purges of the I 930s exter­ of August 1991. Behind the seeming remained of the workers state. National­ minated any remnant of the Bolshevik incompetence of the "Emergency Com­ ism, as in the chauvinist drum-beating "Old Guard." But while resting on and mittee" (made up of Gorbachev's chief over Moldova, has been a driving force deriving its privileges from proletarian lieutenants)-its failure to arrest Yeltsin in cohering an armed force loyal to the property forms, the Stalinist bureaucracy or even to cut off his direct line to Wash­ new capitalist order. was not irrevocably committed to their ington-lay the fact that these stodgy The use of Russian OMaN forces defense. It could play no independent bureaucrats had no alternative to the to break up an anti- Yeltsin protest in role in society. Under the impact of any program of restoration and their refusal February marked the emergence of a sharp frontal assault, either from the rev- to in any way antagonize the imperial­ repressive apparatus loyal to the new 01 utionary proletariat or the counterrev­ ist powers. Had the workers sprung regime. With the Ukraine and other olution, the bureaucracy would shatter. into action, mobilizing to clear out republics creating separate armies and As Trotsky wrote: the despised profit-gouging "cooperativ­ demanding loyalty oaths from Soviet ists," speculators and ruble millionaires troops stationed on their territory, in "When the prolctariat springs into action, the Stalinist apparatus will remain sus­ who manned Yeltsin's barricades, this May Yeltsin decreed the formation of a pended in midair. Should it still attcmpt would have indeed directly posed a civil distinct Russian Army, appointing the to resist, it will then be necessary to war between the proletariat and the relatively young general Grachev, a apply against it not the measures of civil active forces of counterrevolution, and strident Russian nationalist who pro­ war, but rather the measures of a police claimed his allegiance to Yeltsin during character. ... marked the beginning of a proletarian "A real civil war could develop not political revolution. Fearing proletarian the coup, as the new Russian defense between the Stalinist bureaucracy and mobilization far more than counter­ minister. An article in the CIA's "Radio the resurgent proletariat but between revolution, not a single element of the Free Europe/Radio Liberty" RFEIRL the proletariat and the active forces so-called "hardline" Stalinist "patriot" Research Report (21 August) observed: of the counterrevolution. In the event of an open clash hetween the two mass opposition to Gorbachev /Yeltsin tried "In many important respects, the camps, there cannot even be talk of to organize resistance to the Yeltsin­ appointment of General of the Army the hureaucracy playing an independent ite forces, hiding instead behind the Pavel Grachev to the post of Russian 37

Spartacists fought to defend October Revolution: our comrade Martha Phillips addressing delegates at July 1991 Moscow Workers Conference, and (at far right) protesting against closing of Lenin museum.

defense mInister on 18 May 1992 the Soviet Union dead and buried. Thus fought to provide a revolutionary pole marked the beginning of the post-Soviet they finally disencumbered themselves to win the Soviet working class to a pro­ period in the security sphere, much as of the albatross of (ever more formal and gram to reverse and defeat the counter­ the creation of the CIS in December 1991 empty) defense of the Soviet Union, revolution. Our comrade Martha Phil­ had marked the end of the Soviet period which the bourgeoisie has hated and lips, murdered in Moscow last February, in the political sphere." sought to destroy since the October made the ultimate sacrifice in fighting Navy Day, on July 26, was marked Revolution. for that cause. by the hoisting of the old tsarist In his 1933 article, Trotsky warned of Five years ago, when the first openly naval emblem, the St. Andrew's Cross, the "tragic possibility" that the Soviet counterrevolutionary force-the anti­ throughout the fleets, while Navy chief workers state "will fall under the joint Semitic nativist fascists of Pamyat­ Admiral Chernavin proclaimed: "The blows of its internal and external reared its head in Moscow and Lenin­ Russian fleet must retrieve its flag, not enemies": grad, we called for proletarian-centered because Soviet sailors were ashamed of "But in the event of this worst possi­ mass mobilizations to crush these latter­ the old flag but because it no longer cor­ ble variant, a tremendous significance day Black Hundreds in the egg. When, responds to the spirit of the Russian for the subsequent course of the revo­ in August 1990, Gorbachev endorsed a lutionary struggle will be borne by the navy" (Independent [London], 27 July). question: where are those guilty for the plan for full-fledged capitalist resto­ The flying of the tsarist banner over the catastrophe? Not the slightest taint of ration drawn up by Yeltsin, our first Kronstadt naval garrison, a bastion of guilt must fall upon the revolutionary Russian-language leaflet raised the Bolshevism in the October Revolution, internationalists. In the hour of mortal call "Soviet Workers: Smash Yeltsin/ danger. they must remain on the las! and atop the cruiser Aurora, whose fusil­ barricade. " Gorbachev SOO-Day Plan!" (WV No. lade against the Winter Palace signaled -"The Class Nature of the S I 0, 21 September 1990). That Novem­ the victory of the Petrograd proletarian Soviet State" ber, at the Revolution Day commemora­ insurrection, aptly if grotesquely sym­ And that is what the International Com­ tion in Leningrad, the banner of the bolized the dismantling of the Soviet munist League has done. To the extent Fourth International was openly unfurled workers state by the triumphant forces our limited forces permit. we have for the first time in the Soviet Union. of counterrevolution. Yeltsin and his counterparts in the other republics now have the beginnings of bourgeois armies. But the loyalty of these armed forces to capitalism has yet to be tested in blood. Noting that "the entire military could fragment along political or ethnic lines," one observer noted that "Russian leaders will be extremely wary of using the army to Soviet president maintain domestic order" (Mark Kramer, Mikhail Gorbachev "The Armies of the Post-Soviet States," signs treaty with Current History, October 1992). German chancellor Helmut Kohl in November 1990, Who Is Guilty for the accepting Catastrophe? capitalist reunification There was no lack of "Trotskyists" of Germany. who took thei r stand on Yeltsin's barri­ cades (in some cases, literally) and/or moved with shameless haste to declare 38

Despite our meager resources and We sharply opposed resurgent anti­ Who is guilty for the catastrophe? limited Russian-language capacity, we Semitism and Great Russian chauvinism First and foremost it is the Stalinists sought to intervene directly in the tur­ and warned that women have the most who bear responsibility. Beginning with bulent situation which opened up after to lose under capitalist restoration. the political counterrevolution led by Gorbachev took over. Following the dra­ Following Yeltsin's unleashing of the Stalin in 1923-24, the state apparatus matic coal miners strikes in the summer OMON and Moscow militia (police) was, as Trotsky wrote, "transformed of 1989, we sought to get our Trotskyist against protesters in February 1992, we from a weapon of the working class propaganda into the hands of these com­ issued an urgent statement: "'White Tsar' into a weapon of bureaucratic violence bative workers, whose struggle had elec­ Boris Wants a New Bloody Sunday." against the working class, and more and trified the Soviet working class and With the threat of widespread hunger more a weapon for the sabotage of shaken the Stalinist bureaucracy. ICL posed by draconian price increases on the country's economy" (Transitional representatives intervened in a miners food and other necessities, we raised a Program). By the later Brezhnev years, conference in Donetsk in October 1990, fighting program: bureaucratic mismanagement of the where they succeeded in temporarily "Through their own independent com­ planned, centralized economy had re­ spiking a CIA-orchestrated effort to mittees, composed of delegates elected sulted in a sharp decline in Soviet eco­ enlist Soviet workers in a redbaiting by the enterprises, the working people nomic growth, while rampant corruption must take control of food supplies and witchhunt against British miners leader oversee distribution. What is needed fueled the appetites of the pampered Arthur Scargill. once again is to form authentic soviets, children of the bureaucracy to live like During the 1989-90 upheaval in the not talk shops like the fake soviets and Western capitalists. Given its mortal DDR, as part of the ICL's struggle to impotent parliaments of today, but or­ dread of workers democracy which gans for struggle composed of deputies effect a proletarian political revolution elected by and recallable to the work­ would abolish their privileged positions, in East Germany, we issued Russian­ place and barracks. Formed into power­ the only option the bureaucracy saw for language propaganda addressed to and ful soviets-internationalist, egalitarian, intensive economic growth was to exper­ widely disseminated among Soviet revolutionary-the working people will iment with a neo-Bukharinite program be able to sweep away the shaky regimes troops stationed there, and later spoke of market-oriented "reforms"-Gorba­ of the capitalist-restorationists with a to assemblies of Soviet officers and flick of the finger. No new t.l'ars--i1\vay chev's perestroika. soldiers. In 1991, on the anniversary with Yeltsin---for a repuhlic olthe work­ While the August 1991 "Emergency of the Red Army's victory over Nazi ing people!" Committee" offered nothing but "pere­ Germany, the Spartakist Workers Party These demands retain their full force stroika without glasnost," today Stalin­ of Germany and the Spartakusowska today, though the consolidation of a ist leftovers like Viktor Anpilov's RKRP, Grupa Polski held a joint forum for bourgeois state poses the struggle not Kryuchkov's RPK, Prigarin's SK and several hundred Soviet military per­ for political revolution but for socialist Nina Andreyeva's YKPB et aI., who sonnel at an air base outside Berlin (see revolution to sweep away the nascent today posture as an opposition to Yeltsin, WV No. 526, 10 May 1991). Then, a capitalist class. offer nothing hut a "red" cover for month before Yeltsin 's countercoup, ICL representative Martha Phillips addressed the Moscow Workers Conference, calling for the formation of genuine soviets to stop capitalist counterrevolution, for opposition to all forms of chauvinist reaction, and for international socialist revolution. Our August 1991 call, "Soviet Work­ ers: Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counterrevo­ lution!", was the first statement widely distributed throughout the Soviet Union in opposition to Yeltsin's restorationist drive. We advanced a program for inde­ pendent working-class struggle against capitalist restoration and for genuine soviets as organs of a new proletarian political power: "Independent workers committees must be formed in factories, mines, railroad. yards and other enterprises to prevent layoffs and privatization by taking over the plants and controlling production .... Committe!'s of soldiers and officers must be formed to oppose the purges and pre­ vent the army from being used to attack the workers' interests .... Workers militias must be formed ... to defend against and crush the lynch mobs and pogromists .... In this hour of dire need more than ever, the key to successful defense of the Soviet proletariat is the forging of a new, authentically communist vanguard party Red Army's International Iron Battalion honors German Spartakists Luxemburg of the working class. Return to the road and Liebknecht after their murder in January 1919. Proletarian internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky!" was the cornerstone of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Trotsky. 39

capitalist counterrevolution. They have right fascists-which called for "salva­ (FNPR). Where Yeltsin's prime minister made no attempt to mobilize class struE;­ tion of the Fatherland ... on the basis of Gaidar grovels to the West for infu­ gil', not only because their chauvinist civil peace and national trust." Thus all sions of capital and promotes a fantas­ politics make them incapable of appeal­ these groups opposed the recent air traf­ tical scheme for privatization through ing to the still multinational proletar­ fic controllers strike. distribution of shareholding vouchers iat, hut hecause they are opposed to With their call for privatization to the entire population, the Vol sky/ any struggle which would disrupt capi­ through the "work collectives," the Sta­ Rutskoi faction hopes to maintain a talist class "peace." This was explicitly linist has-beens seek to be the "left" strong military-industrial sector by plac­ stated in the March 1992 "Declaration flank of the counterrevolution's cor­ ing ownership directly in the hands of on the Founding of the United Opposi­ poratist wing, whose most powerful the former managers. tion," signed hy all the Stalinist left­ representative is the Volsky-Rutskoi In the name of building the der­ overs as well as Medvedev and Deni­ Civic Union bloc. Aligned with them is zhava, the tsarist watchword for a sov's SPT-formalizing the repulsive the former official trade-union bureauc­ Russian strong state, the RKRP & Co. "red-brown" coalition with Great Rus­ racy, now calling itself the Federation of have willingly submerged themselves sian chauvinists, monarchists and out- Independent Trade Unions of Russia in every reactionary lash-up, from the

Soviet leL Supporter on Demise of USSR "Destruction of Workers' Consciousness Was Key"

We J7l1hlish helow a translation of important to acknowledge that a bour­ and fascistic dictatorship. It's a very dan­ the remarks at the Second International geois state has been established in the gerous illusion to delude oneself into Cont"erence ot"the International Commu­ Soviet Union. But it's also important to thinking that there are forces now in the nist League hy comrade Volodya K. realize that this is far from stable, it's territory of the former Soviet Union I think the key reason for the destruc­ very weak. This represents a transitional capable of fighting against this counter­ tion of the Soviet workers state has been moment, but a transition to what? revolution. In fact, all of these coalitions the destruction of the consciousness of Today there is massive opposition to delude themselves with the fact that after the proletariat, a process that began with the post-countercoup period. The immis­ the National Salvation Front comes to Stalin's liquidation of Leon Trotsky's eration and the impoverishment of the power, then they can resurrect their own Left Opposition, which represented the popUlation evokes the sharpest hatred power. It repeats the bragging of the Ger­ consciousness of the working class. The toward Yeltsin, but there is no left oppo­ man CP in 1933, who said, "After Hitler, tragedy is that the breakdown of Stalinist sition to guide this. The opposition that us." It's a suicidal policy. control was exploited not by the working does exist today only stands for a strong What is the real perspective that we class for its own end, but by the bour­ state. They share the idea that commu­ see before us? Concretely, we have a geoisie for its own purposes, purposes nism is an impossible utopia. They are task-to coalesce the nucleus of a rev­ for which they actually today have pre­ orienting for a strong state, a strong state olutionary workers party. This means a cious little support. based on capitalism. battle against the capitalists, the existing In August 1991 we saw some decisive But as the Yeltsin regime is incapable bourgeois government. This means a events. The question was posed: whether of introducing stable capitalism, the socialist revolution. Otherwise, if we fail the hourgeoisie, or perhaps more accu­ bourgeoisie is very weak. Weak, because in this, there will be consolidated a bour­ rately, whether parts of the Stalinist it's without capital backing. The only geois corporatist state. The key thing is bureaucracy, which received a death way that strong capitalism can be estab­ to explain to the working class that this hlow, would go forward to consolidate lished is through nationalism and vicious policy of supporting the "national patri­ a hourgeois state, or whether the work­ anti-working-c1ass repression, as we ots" as a temporary tactic is suicidal. ing class would step in for its own. In have just seen in connection with the air Once these "national patriots" come to that momcnt the working class could traffic controllers. The creation of this power, the working class will get noth­ have used the opportunity to take the National Salvation Front that the com­ ing, will get shit from these people. If power, hut instead the "red-brown" coa­ rades know about-should that Front we don't succeed in our propaganda in lition formed an obstacle to that; the come to power, that would represent this, then this is what the working class "red-hrown" coalition, which in no way another decisive blow against the work­ will receive. is opposed to counterrevolution, but in­ ing class. Now just a few words about timing. stead is against the liberalization of Sta­ All these Stalinists who think that it's I believe that prior to the unification of linist rule. they who are manipulating the national­ Germany, in the Soviet Union there was In this situation, as Trotsky predicted, ists, the so-called "patriots," in a tem­ a possibility for ICL intervention, at the no section of the bureaucracy was capa­ porary bloc, a bloc by which they can time when the debates and discussions hie of opposing the restoration of capi­ simply turn the clock back to before were about the true heroes of the Soviet tali,m. Instcad, they simply maneuvered perestroika, are deluding themselves. In Union and of the October Revolution, to he able to occupy the best place within fact what they are doing is paving the and not today's idiocy about how all is the restoration of capitalism. It's very way for the establishment of a corporate swell in the West. _ 40

fascistic Russian National Sobor of the of brutal exploitation and widespread "state capitalist" logic is absurd. Here anti-Communist, anti-Semite Sterligov unemployment. we have supposedly just witnessed the (who is now pushing restoration of remarkable spectacle of an entire "capi­ the tsarist throne) to the newly founded "State Capitalism": talist class" which simply committed sui­ "left-right" National Salvation Front. Anti-Communist Myth cide rather than seeking to defend its Indeed, every grouping which issued If the destruction of the Soviet Union property. And the millions upon millions out of the former CPSU-from the has placed a final epitaph on the sordid of working people in East Europe and RKRP to the SPT-accepts the "inevi­ history of Stalinism, it has also demol­ the ex-USSR who are now being dragged tability" of the "market economy" (res­ ished the numerous false "theories" down by immiseration, unemployment toration of capitalism). They're sim­ behind which various renegades from and fratricide aren't about to buy the ply squabbling over the terms-who Trotskyism sought to mask their refusal notion that they are just going from one gets to feed at the trough (see "Stalin­ to defend the gains of the October Rev­ brand of capitalism to another, much less ist Has-Beens: Left Wing of National­ olution. The "theory" that the Soviet hail it. ist Counterrevolution," reprinted on Union was a "state capitalist" society "Third campists" of the second mobi­ page 25). Meanwhile, the explicitly stands the Marxist analysis of capitalism lization, like the political bandits of social-democratic Labor Party (PT) of on its head. It posits a truly bizarre form David North's "International Commit­ Boris Kagarlitsky is in bed with a of "capitalism"-one in which capitalist tee" and others, argue that Stalinism section of the FNPR bureaucracy, and competition and the law of value are is "counterrevolutionary through and participates in the All-Russian Toiling external to the system, one marked not through." This Hatly denies Trotsky's Assembly. which is heavily populated hy cyclical crises of overproduction but understanding of the "dual position" of by Volsky's people and whose chair­ by distortions and bottlenecks due to the bureaucracy. More to the point, man Konstantinov is vice president of administrative fiat, one characterized not like Cliff's theory, the purpose is to wash the Sobor. by chronic mass unemployment but their hands of defense of the Soviet Everyone of the numerous Stalinist by labor shortages. The purpose of the Union. North claimed that from the and social-democratic outfits has fallen terminological sleight of hand, whether beginning Gorbachev was bent on "the into step behind the corporatist option, from the pen of Tony Cliff or his pred­ political, economic and social liqui­ appealing for privatization through the ecessors, was to deny any basis for dation of all that remains of the "work collectives" (i.e., factory manag­ defense of the Soviet Union. conquests of the October Revolution" ers). With their backs against the wall, While claiming to occupy a "third (Perestroika Versus Socialism r 1989]). many workers may look to their factory camp" ("neither Washington nor Mos­ North then rushed to proclaim that it is managers taking ownership of industry cow"), today the "state capitalists" join "impossible to define ... any of the repub­ as a last-ditch defense against unemploy­ the imperialists in rejoicing over the lics" of the ex-USSR "as workers states" ment and immiseration. "death of Communism." In August 1991, the moment Yeltsin decreed its juridical Soviet workers should entertain no the Cliffites cheered that "Communism dissolution ("The End of the USSR," illusions that their livelihoods will Has Collapsed" and hailed the Yeltsin­ Bulletin, 10 January 1992). be secure under a corporatist regime. ite ascendancy as "The Beginning, Not The various theories defining the Capitalism, whether under Volsky/Rut­ the End" (Socialist Worker, 31 August Stalinist bureaucracy as a "new class" skoi or Yeltsin/Gaidar or some variant 1991). The identification with imperial­ or "counterrevolutionary through and in between, necessari ly means the whip ist anti-Communism is evident, but the through" unite in appealing to knee-jerk

:::~~eHb CnapTaKOB~eB iSPARTACJSTI

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ICL leaflet, February 1992, called for the formation of workers and soldiers soviets to stop capitalist restoration. Spartacists protested in New York against Yeltsin visit to his Wall Street masters in January 1992. 41

----Wahlt---_ SPARTAKIST Nein zur kapitalistischen Wiedervereinigung!

Fur ein Arbelterratedeutschland! Spartakist-Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands

"" ""'" " K~,., "'U ' ~I,,,' ",u", q Spartaklst ------_.J Spartakists initiated January 1990 demonstration of 250,000 in Treptow Park, East Berlin protesting Nazi desecration of Red Army monument_ Spartakist Workers Party poster in March 1990 East German elections: "No to Capitalist Reunification!" moralism. In contrast, Trotsky's dialec­ in August 1990, Gorbachev openly recently, "Everything else flowed from tical and materialist analysis of the declared his support to capitalist resto­ that." A year after the Afghanistan with­ Soviet degenerated workers state, elab­ ration by endorsing the "SOO-Day Plan," drawal, Gorbachev gave the green light orated in The RCl'Olution Betrayed and only to back away from it later in his to capitalist reunification of Germany. other writings, has stood the test of time constant zigzagging. The ICL was unique in its unambig­ and provides a program for action for Gorbachev's evolution from "market uous and forthright opposition to impe­ the proletariat. Basing ourselves on this socialism" reforms to a program of rialist annexation of the DDR: the power Marxist understanding, we pointed to the outright capitalist restoration proved of the Trotskyist program to show contradictory character of the initial yet again the impossibility of "reform­ the way out of the collapse of Stalin­ Gorbachev reforms: "Gorbachev's pere­ ing" the Stalinist regime. a conception ism found a massive expression in the stroika not only goes against the imme­ advanced by the likes of Ernest Man­ 250.000-strong anti-fascist, pro-Soviet diate material interests of most workers del in his book Beyond Pcrestroika demonstration on 3 January 1990 at Ber­ but also affronts their deep reservoir of (1989). Whatever their quibbling differ­ lin's Treptow Park. which was initiated collective feeling. At the same time, the ences, support for Yeltsin counterrevo­ by the German Spartakists. The Stalin­ regime's call for Mlasnost permits a de­ lution brought together all of these ists. for their part, thought they could gree of organized dissent against official revisionists, from Cliff to North to Man­ have counterrevolution in one country. policies" (Spartacist League/U.S. con­ del-as well as the Militant group in But the sellout of the DDR directly ference document, "Toward Revolution­ Britain (formerly led by Ted Grant). prepared the destruction of the Soviet ary Conjuncture," June 1987). associated with Sergei Beits' Rabochiya Union. For the first couple of years, Gorba­ Demokratiya (Workers Democracy) in chev's neo-Bukharinite reforms had Russia. The bottom line for all of Reforge the Fourth some effect in reviving the Soviet econ­ these outfits has been capitulation to International! omy. Harvard economist Marshall Gold­ social-democratic anti-Sovietism, just as The collapse of the Soviet Union and man, in his book What Went WronR with a decade ago they were all united in the ensuing sharpening of interimperial­ Perestroika (1991), notes ofGorbachev's their cheering for counterrevolutionary ist rivalries have made the world a far 1985-86 program of "intensification" Solidarnosc in Poland and their denun­ more dangerous place. The "New World and "acceleration" that "initially these ciations of the Red Army intervention Disorder"-proclaimed during the U.S.­ reforms seemed to be working" and into Afghanistan. led imperialist slaughter in the Persian "industrial growth seemed to rebound." In contrast, the Spartacist tendency Gulf. to which Gorbachev gave his He even achieved the largest grain har­ proclaimed "Hail Red Army in Afghan­ approval-has the hallmarks of the old vest in Soviet history (240 million tons istan!" and declared "Stop Solidarnosc world order which led to the slaughter­ in 1990). But the subsequent introduc­ Counterrevolution!" in Poland. In re­ house of World War I, but this time tion of enterprise self-management on sponse to Gorbachev's 1989 pullout posing the threat of a nuclear conflagra­ New Year's 1988 proved to be the deci­ from Afghanistan in order to appease tion. Imperialist unity, maintained for sive step finally leading to collapse. The Washington, we warned it is far better decades by the "Communist menace," abandonment of planning in a planned to fight imperialism there than within has broken down as the contending economy led to a breakdown in eco­ the borders of the Soviet Union. But the powers fall upon each other, and vie to nomic administration and widespread Gorbachev regime didn't want to fight carve up the former Soviet bloc into shortages and looting. The result, Gold­ imperialism anywhere. "The decision to neocolonies. man writes, was "the undermining of the leave Afghanistan was the first and most At the same time. there is opening up planning system and the collapse of the difficult step." remarked Gorbachev's a new period of intensified class strug­ economy." As perestroika reforms failed, foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze gle. The semicolonial peoples of the 42 world, now that the imperialist powers bigotry, rising to the defense of all advanced industrial powers. chiefly Cler­ do not feel constrained by a Soviet coun­ those-including African and Asian many. The opportunities were manifold, terweight, are being subjected to outright students, and the Central Asian peoples but the revolutionary parties outside starvation. In the imperialist West, grow­ in Russia-who are increasingly ex­ Soviet Russia were too weak and polit­ ing trade war and exploitation have posed to violent racist terror. What is ically immature to pursue them. The already led to major class battles in required above all is a revolutionary German Spartakist uprising of 1918-19 Germany, Italy and Greece. The multi­ leadership capable of overcoming the and the 1919 Hungarian Commune went racial upheaval in Los Angeles following divisions inspired by chauvinism and down to bloody defeat. The possihility the verdict freeing the racist cops in nationalism, clearing away the decades of the Red Army marching to the aiel of the Rodney King beating testifies to of false consciousness fostered by Sta­ the German workers in 1920 by unleash­ the social instability in the United linism, and linking the struggles in the ing proletarian revolution in f)ilsudski's States. In East Europe and the ex-USSR, ex-USSR to that of the world proletariat. Poland was foiled. Finally. with the the working class will soon recover While social democrats squeal that defeat of the German Octo her in 1923. from the numbing experience of coun­ "Soviet Communism" discredited social­ the Soviet proletariat succumbed to terrevolution and begin to fight against ism in the eyes of the masses, an even the demoralizing prospect of a lengthy the ravages of capitalist exploitation. greater crime of Stalinism was the way period of isolation, which allowed the Poland already has been swept by it warped the consciousness of pro­ bureaucratic layer headed by Stalin to one major strike after another over the socialist workers, filling their heads with usurp political power. Thus was the rev­ past year. anti-Marxist illusions such as "building olution betrayed. The workers of Russia, the Ukraine socialism in one country," the "popular But this betrayal did not go unchal­ and the other former Soviet republics front" and the utopia of "peaceful co­ lenged. The Left Opposition of Leon still have time to regroup and strike back existence" with imperialism. "Socialism Trotsky continued the struggle for the before anything approaching a viable in one country" meant not only the authentic program of Leninism. In its system of capitalist exploitation is con­ suppression of revolutionary struggle struggle to defend and cx lL'nd Sov iet gealed. Hatred and bitterness toward Yel­ abroad, but the isolation of the Soviet power, the Left Opposition urged a pol­ tsin and his ilk are seething. Unlike in working class from any connection with icy of planned industriali/atioll to revive the ex-DDR, where masses of working the international class struggle. For more the enervated proletariat and enable the people bought the lie that D-mark than 60 years, Soviet workers were isolated workers state to hold out against Anschluss (annexation) would bring submerged in a cocoon walling them imperialist encirclement. The Trotskyists prosperity, in the former USSR there are off from political developments around fought uncompromisin).'ly against the few such positive illusions. There is, the world. In the course of fighting nascent bureaucracy's Great Russian however, a widespread view that there to reverse the counterrevolution which chauvinism. They fought against the is no alternative to the "market," for has plunged it into poverty and misery, treacherous policies emanating from which the bankrupt Stalinists bear the the Soviet working class will neces­ "socialism in one country," in the first main responsibility. sarily have to reappropriate the revolu­ instance the subversion of the Chinese The road to recreating a full-fledged tionary heritage which has been taken Revolution of 1925-27 and the Anglo­ capitalism is not as smooth as the from it. Russian trade-union bloc which led to Nevsky Prospekt. To free itself of its The proletariat which made the Octo­ the knifing of the 1926 British General would-be exploiters and oppressors, the ber Revolution learned from Lenin and Strike. This led to the subordination of working class must also assert itself Trotsky's Bolsheviks that it was part of the German working class to Hitler's as a "tribune of the people," opposing an international struggle. It understood jackboot, to the outright suppression of every manifestation of anti-Semitism that its only prospect for survival lay in the Spanish revolution in the late 1930s. and anti-woman and anti-homosexual the extension of the revolution to more By selling out revolutionary opportuni­ ties at the end of World War II. particu­ larly in Italy, France and Greece, Stalin­ ism enabled capitalism to survive, and thus prepared the way for its own ulti­ mate demise. With the utter liquidation of the Com­ Marxist Working-Class Biweekly of the Spartacist League munist International as an instrument for world revolution, Trotsky organized the founding of the Fourth International in o $ 7/24 issues of Workers Vanguard o $3/3 issues of (includes English-language Spartacist) Women and Revolution 1938. Today the International Commu­ o New 0 Renewal nist League fights for the rebirth of the international rates: 0$2/4 issues of Fourth International, whose cadre were $25/24 issues-Airmail $7/24 issues-Seamail Espartaco (en espanol) (includes Spanish-language decimated by Stalinist and Hitlerite ter­ 0$2/10 introductory issues of Workers Vanguard Spartacist) ror and which finally succumbed in the early 1950s to an internal revisionist Name ______challenge which denied the need for an Address ______independent revolutionary leadership. Only as part of the struggle to reforge ______Apt.# _____ Phone( __ ) ______an authentic world party of socialist rev­

City ______State _____ Zip ____----:c-:: olution can the workers of the former RUS Soviet Union cohere the leadership they Make checks payable/mall to: Spartaclst Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 need to sweep away the grotesque hor­ rors they now confront. _ 43 reprinted ji-om Workers Vanguard No. 572, 26 March 1993 Russia's New Exploiters The American press has painted the standoff between Russian president Yel­ tsin and the Russian Congress as a battle Capitalism Without Capital between capitalist "free marketeers" and recalcitrant "Communists." In fact, both the Yeltsinites and their opponents denounce each other for "Bolshevism." Yeltsin press secretary Vyacheslav Kos­ tikov railed that the Congress' decisions in early March signalcd a "slide back to Sovict communist powcr." while par­ liamcntary Icadcr Ruslan Khasbulatov attacks Ycltsin's "pathological" desire to eliminatc the parliament as a "genetic link with Bolshevism." More impor­ tantly, both sidcs are for a capitalist mar­ ket economy, which means utter impov­ erishment for thc working people of the former Soviet Union. The restoration of capitalist rule has put the very existence of the Soviet pro­ letariat at stake. If the Yeltsinites have their way, it will lead to a shutdown of anger vast sections of industry. Following Moscow stock exchange, where yuppie entrepreneurs dream of becoming dictates of the IMF, government plans junior partners of Wall Street, Frankfurt bankers and Japan Inc. call for privatizing over 5,000 medium and large-scale enterpriscs, employing ti fic institutions are being dismantled and the futile hope of securing a massive seven million workers, in 1993 alone. sold off for a song to Western firms. infusion of Western aid and investment, Part of the purpose is to cut these plants But the national-"patriotic" forces the YeItsinites imposed an economic off from statc credits, which would mean around Volsky/Rutskoi are no less com­ "shock treatment" crafted by Harvard that most would go under (unless they mitted to capitalist restoration than are boy Jeffrey Sachs. Since Yeltsin's Jan­ can get foreign financing). The industrial the Yeltsinite "democrats." They too are uary 1992 decree "freeing" prices on managers grouped around Arkady Vol­ subordinate to the laws of the capitalist basic commodities, the working masses sky (allied with Russian vice president world market, and they (along with the have been plunged into unprecedented Aleksandr Rutskoi) denounce the Yel­ yuppie "cntrepreneurs") are massively impoverishment. tsinites' plans for "Kuwaitization" of the looting state property in cahoots with Three months later, the government economy, in which Russia would only Western imperialists. All the contending statistical agency reported that 90 per­ produce raw materials like oil for export factions derived from the disintegrated cent of workers in Russia were earning to the West. Stalinist bureaucracy are the enemies of below the then subsistence wage of The Volskyites demagogically appeal the working people. The key to saving 1,500 rubles a month. Per capita income to workers' legitimate concern for their industry and the proletariat is a struggle in real terms at the start of 1993 was 43 livelihoods. Marxists fight to defend the for state power-socialist revolution to percent of what it was two years ago, industrial basc of the country, and thus establish effective centralized planning and even this figure disguises the Third oppose the wholesalc "privatization"­ in a reforged Soviet federation based World poverty facing millions of the meaning shutdown-of productive ca­ on proletarian democracy and socialist most downtrodden. A handful of specu­ pacity. We are outraged at the tearing internationalism. lators have become overnight dollar down of a modern industrial economy millionaires (or ruble billionaires!), and and military powerhouse built up through Yeltsin's "Shock Therapy": certain sectors of the proletariat, like decades of sacrifice by the multinational Third World Immiseration miners and transport workers, have been Soviet working people. Dcspite the warp­ What is behind the political crisis granted wage increases to keep up with ing influence of Stalinist bureaucratic in Russia is not a struggle between the galloping inflation. But the average arbitrariness, in many areas Soviet tech­ socialism and capitalism, nor between worker in Russia today receives two­ nology and science-espccially in basic democracy and totalitarianism, but the thirds of the 6,000 rubles a month con­ research and military-related fields-is utter failure of Yeltsin's economic poli­ sidered the bare survival minimum. Even as good as or better than anything in cics and, more broadly, the dilemma Time magazine (22 March) concedes: the West. The MIG-29, for instance, is of a counterrevolutionary regime seek­ "Yeltsin and his team of shock therapists superior to the planned next-generation ing to impose capitalism without capital. have been at the task since the So­ European fighter jet. Today major sci en- Acquiescing to Washington's diktat in viet Union collapsed in December 1991, 44

producing few successes and much tur­ moil, hardship and anxiety." Today Russian workers can survive only by also engaging in petty trade and deal-making or, if they have a dacha (house in the country), by growing food crops in their backyard. An engineer recently quit his job at a Moscow nuclear power station in order to protect the potato crop on his dacha from thieves! An 84-year-old pensioner stands on the freezing streets to sell a carton of milk or a pack of cigarettes at a markup to people who don't want to wait two hours on line. The official unemployment rate is 1.5 percent. but many workers are sent home on "forced vacation" on as little Old-age as one-fifth of their normal wage. pensioner And the hardest hit have been women. begging in who formerly made up 51 percent of Red Square. the workforce. Yeltin's labor minister Melikyan declaims, HI seriously don't think women should work while men are doing nothing." Many women arc being driven into prostitution to support thl'm­ selves and their children. ABC News' Prillle Tilllc Lil'c (18 March) reported on a doctor in Moscow who became a pros­ titute because it was the only way tll and was a former adviser to Gorba­ to cultivate a strong heavy industry provide for her seven-year-old son. chev, declaimed that Yeltsin's "demo­ and military sector while gradually shift­ Yeltsin \ opponents point to the widl'­ crats have already shown they are unable ing vast chunks of the economy over spread devastation his policies have to ensure a decent existence for the people to capitalism. But where China remains wrought on the entire Russian economy, 80 percent of whom today live below a deformed workers state, Russia has a warning that this level of irnmiseration the poverty line" (Moscow New Times, (weak) capitalist state. could set off a social explosion that July 1992). Vladimir Ovchinnikov, gen­ Vol sky & Co. argue that, particularly would sweep away the fledgling "market cral director of the Aleksandrov Radio in the absence of significant Western economy." Inflation has climbed to Factory, Russia's largest producer of TV investment, it is necessary for the new nearly 50 percent a month, with the price sets, declared that "real power is in the state to directly oversee the develop­ of a standard basket of goods having hands of directors because the livel ihoods ment of a capitalist economy through a increased almost a hundredf{)/d in the of tens of millions of people depend on corporatist policy not dissimilar to that past two years. Production dropped by them, and their workers believe in them." carried out by Mussolini in Italy in the 24 percent last year alone. Yeltsin's This was not mere demagogy. Many 1920s and '30s. This pol icy was already scheme to privatize the entire economy fearful workers now look to the manag­ advanced in the waning days of the in one quick fix by distributing 10,000- ers-most of them derived from the for­ Gorbachev era by "black colonel" Viktor ruble shareholding v0uchers to the pop­ mer nomenklatura (Stalinist bureaucratic Alksnis, who called for the introduction ulation has been a scam from start to elite)-to restore a semblance of the of capitalism through a Pinochet-style finish. In February, angry protesters "go(ld old days" under Brezhnev, when regIme. blocked the streets of Leningrad to Soviet entcrprises provided their work­ In The Revolution Betrayed (1937), demand their money back from f1y-by­ force with low-rent housing, inexpensive Trotsky noted: "Stalinism and fascism, night con artists who ripped off at least mcals in the factory cafeteria as weIl as in spite of a deep difference in social 350,000 vouchers by promising an meat to take home, summer vacations on foundations, are symmetrical phenom­ instant return on their "investment." the Black Sca, etc. As one woman who ena. In many of their features they show While the Yeltsinites' social base is now makes 3,000 rubles a month as a a deadly similarity." In effect, the cor­ in the new "robber baron" entrepreneur­ cook in a children's hospital said, "We poratist wing of the counterrevolution ial elite, the opposition-centered on worked hard, and now we have nothing. seeks to resurrect Stalin's heavy-handed the Civic Union bloc of "industrialist" With pleasure, I would go back to the bonapartist regime on capitalist social Volsky and militarist vice president old days" (Washillgtoll Post, 27 January). foundations, maintaining a streamlined Rutskoi--draws its support from the But the factory managers are no less state sector as a motor force for a new country's factory managers. Appealing intent than Yeltsin's yuppies on being capitalist economy. to the old "military-industrial complex," the new exploiters of Russia's proletariat No less than the Yeitsinites, the cor­ Vol sky & Co. vow to maintain a strong in coIlaboration with international cap­ poratists see the need to use the whip of Russian state and demand the continued ital. Where the Volskyites differ with repression to discipline the proletariat in flow of government subsidies to the Yeltsin is in how to develop Russian order to facilitate the primitive accumu­ country's key heavy industries. capitalism. Thcy look to Deng's China lation of capital. To make Russian indus­ Last summer Volsky, who heads the as a model, where the bureaucracy main­ trial goods cheap enough to compete Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs tains firm political control and continues on world markets, such a regime would 45 layoff millions of "redundant" workers, metal, kitchen fittings, rest home passes cedes and BMWs" (Washington Post, while those who remained on the assem­ and a telephone for the apartment of the I February). bly lines would be subjected to harsh doctor looking after the director's wife! The New York Times (2 August 1992) speedup. The slashing of real wages Managers were no longer concerned painted a glowing portrait of a typical brought about under the Yeltsin/Gaidar about their enterprises' long-term devel­ new entrepreneur, Natalya Maloletneva, "shock treatment" would be maintained opment because they doubted whether a manager of a Moscow clothing store and likely intensified by police-state they had a future themselves. who bought a controlling interest when regimentation of the labor force. Trade Growing nationalist 'disintegration the shop was privatized lasl spring. She unions would be permitted only as pliant added another element to the economic claims she purchased her share for tools of the corporatist state, and strikes chaos, as factories dependent for parts 60,000 rubles from personal "savings." would be suppressed as "unpatriotic." and supplies upon warring republics like The Times' glorification of Mrs. Malo­ Notably, it was Rutskoi, Volsky's main Armenia and Azerbaijan ground to a halt. letneva provoked a biting letter to the political ally, who played hard cop in National republics also imposed export editor from an emigre Soviet academic, smashing the Russian air controllers restrictions on goods in short supply, who pointed out that as a highly paid strike last summer. especially if they could be sold on the university professor he would have had world market for hard currency. Simul­ Gorbachev's Perestroika: taneously, the new nationalist regimes, First Stage of Descent spearheaded by Yeltsin as president of into Chaos the Russian republic, started refusing to The Soviet economy was integrated turn over the central government's share on an all-Union basis and enterprises of tax collections, causing the burgeon­ were designed to take maximum advan­ ing inflation of the final Gorbachev tage of economies of scale. In some period. Less than 30 percent of all taxes cases, to be sure, the Stalinist techno­ collected in the first nine months of 1991 crats indulged in industrial gigantism for went to the central government. To make its own sake, going beyond the limits of up the shortfall of rubles, the Gorbachev economic rationality. But whether eco­ regime ran the printing presses overtime. nomically optimal or not, in many indus­ In other words, Yeltsin deliherately tries just a few factories supplied vital sabotaged the Soviet economy and then inputs for scores of enterprises from exploited popular discontent over ris­ eastern Siberia to the Baltic republics. ing prices and shortages to push through For example, 70 percent of all the dif­ the counterrevolution. By the summer ferent types of machine tools made in of 1991, most working people were the USSR were produced in one enter­ indifferent to the fate of the Gorba­ prise and in no other. chev regime. Many believed falsely that things could not get worse. And some Clearly, such a system could work Spiegel only under centralized direction where bought the line that only a rapid move Would-be Tsar Boris with Ruslan a given enterprise was ordered to supply to a full-fledged market system could Khasbulatov, speaker of Russian other enterprises at a set price. Otherwise restor~ the health of the economy. parliament, a former Yeltsinite. managers could ruthlessly exploit their IMF Orders Surgery Without monopoly position, selling to the highest to save every last kopek of his salary for bidder while enterprises which could not Anesthesia ... ten years to amass 60,000 ruhles. Clearly afford to pay would have to cut back The collapse of the industrial supply Maloletneva was skimming off the prof­ their output. That is exactly what hap­ system, which began under Gorbachev, its of the enterprise she was entrusted to pened when Gorbachev scrapped cen­ was greatly accelerated with the breakup manage on behalf of the Soviet working tralized planning in January 1988 and of the USSR formalized in December people. No wonder Russia's new capi­ decreed that all Soviet enterprises were 1991. A month later, Yeltsin I ifted con­ talists are known as the mafia. to become self-financing on the basis of trols on consumer prices, implementing But the new "hi:ne:" harons and khozraschet (cost accounting). Con­ the IMF "shock therapy" under his eco­ "hrokeri" fear that the hatred of the sumer goods managers cut back ship­ nomic "expert," the obscure academic masses will lead to a new regime that ments to state shops, where prices were Yegor Gaidar. A year after Yeltsin seized will confiscate their ill-gotten wealth. As still fixed, diverting output to private power in the August 1991 countercoup: a self-described "middleman" in Lenin­ "cooperatives" where mafia-like entre­ • Industrial production in Russia had grad put it: "Everything we do is aimed preneurs practiced price extortion. Pro­ fallen 27 percent. at a quick profit. We huy, we sell, and ducers of industrial and intermediate • Investment in plant and equipment had we get out. Only a fool would invest his goods likewise jacked up their prices. fallen 55 percent. money in a long-term business in Ru: - By 1990-91, as inflation was eroding • Prices had increased 1,560 percent. sia" (Washington Post. 30 September the value of the ruble, the industrial • Real wages had faJlen 32 percent. 1992). Wall Street and Frankfurt bank­ supply system degenerated into crude While working people are struggling ers, German and Japanese industrialists, barter deals negotiated on the basis of to survive in an increasingly ugly and and Texas oilmen are not fools. And they economic blackmail. For example, the violent society, the new entrepreneurs aren't investing their money in Russia managers of the Sverdlovsk transformer flal\nt their wealth: "Representatives of either. factory refused to deliver transformers the New Class can be seen wavisg their On the contrary. there has been mas­ to the huge Uralmash engineering com­ gold cards in Western-style grocery sive looting of the Russian economy in plex unless the latter provided them with stores, dining at hard currency restau­ the past couple of years. One out of every a list of items including piping, scrap rants, and driving around town in Mer- three barrels of oil and one ('lit of every 46 two tons of nickel leaving Russia is Gorbachev for sclling out East Germany scribed Russian society under Yeltsin as smuggled out, while fully 80 percent of to the Deutsche Bank in early 1990 with well as in Gorbachev's last years as a the raw materials ticketed for the Baltic $47 billion in "aid," promising more to pyramid with the top broken off. Power port of Kaliningrad never arrives there. come. The rulers of the Fourth Reich descended to the next highest level, Marc Rich, the strikebreaking owner envisioned their own neocolonial empire mainly made up of managers in big of Ravenswood Aluminum in the U.S. in the former Soviet bloc, extending enterprises. The vice general director of (currently living in Switzerland to evade from Siberia to the Balkans. But with the huge Vaz Auto Works in Togliatti­ tax and fraud charges). boasts trading its vindictive destruction of the East which produced 60 percent of all cars in revenues of $2.5 billion per year in nat­ German economy following capitalist the USSR-states: "Management, in a ural resources from the former Soviet reunification, the Bonn government went sense, has become the owner of Vaz ... Union. heavily into debt as millions of unem­ we run the company as if we owned it, Everything in Russia is for sale for ployed East Germans were put on the although we don't really." But as Trotsky hard currency these days, from religious dole. Last spring Kohl announced, "we wrote in The Rel'olution Betrayed of the icons peddled by Orthodox priests to Germans have reached the limit of our capitalist aspirations of sectors of the high-tech weaponry supplied by finan­ capacity to help" Russia and the other Stalinist managerial bureaucracy: "It is cially strapped arms factories. Iran is fonner Soviet repuhlics. Since then Ger­ not enough to be the director of a trust; rumored to have acquired two Soviet­ many has entered a deepening recession, it is necessary to be a stockholder." made nuclear warheads. Last year as widening its budget deficit and making While many factory managers de­ much as $15 billion in hard currency was large-scale aid to Russia even less likely. nounced Gaidar as the archenemy, bent siphoned out of Russia into private bank As for Washington, Reagan!Bush on bankrupting their enterprises on orders accounts in the U.S. and West Europe. transformed the U.S. into the world's from the IMF, the main beneficiaries of This is more than twice the $7 billion largest dehtor to pay for the massive mil­ the "shock treatment" were in fact the in net aid and credits which the Yeltsin itary buildup against the Soviet Union. managers in consumer goods and food regime got from Bush's America. Kohl's Now Clinton is pushing to subsidize processing. Since their prices wcre Germany and its other imperialist god­ high-tech industry whil<: raising taxes increasing 50 percent faster than the fathers. Meanwhile, the scramble for and cutting social program~ for the poor wages they paid, they were swimming dollars which can be safely stashed in and elderly. Aside frolll a $1.5 billion in profits. Managers in heavy industry foreign bank accounts continues to drive credit to buy U.S. grain and other goods and munitions got around Gaidar's down the value of the ruhle at Moscow's in 1992, what Washington has allocated attempt at tight money by granting open­ limited currency exchange. I n the past to promoting capitali~ITI in Russia is truly ended credit to one another. In thc first six months, the exchange rate has gone peanuts. Even a relatively modest shift five months of 1992, inter-enterprise debt from just over 200 rubles to the dollar of 10 percent of U.S. impnialism's Cold increased from forty billion to two trillion to nearly 800, figures wildly out of kilter War military budget would mean some rubles. Thc managers also wielded the with the actual state of the Russian $35 billion a year in aid to Russia. But threat of massive social unrest should a economy. with the American rulers intent on main­ cutoff in industrial subsidies lead to wide­ taining their military hegelllony at any spread layoffs, arguing that only they .. .But Refuses to Pay the Bill expense, no less a White Iiouse crook could contain workers' anger. As Volsky Yeltsin, Gaidar & Co. expected to be than Richard Nixon today appears as put it, "they keep the people from taking rewarded with $24 billion in IMF aid as about the only farsighted representative to the strcets." a first installment for torturing the work­ of this ruling class in arguing for aggres­ So that the managers would keep on ing masses through economic shock sive aid to Russia. keeping the pcople from taking to the treatment. But the IMF demanded as a Japan-the only major imperialist streets, Yeltsin abandoned any attempt condition for disbursing funds that Rus­ power with a large financial surplus­ to control the money supply. [n April sia raise its internal price of oil to world­ has not and will not give the Moscow he offered an additional 200 billion market levels while exporting more to regime any yen at all unless it gets back rubles in enterprise credits. The fol­ repay its foreign debt. This would mean the Kuril Islands, which the Red Army lowing month three stalwarts of the instant bankruptcy for most of Russia's took at the end of World War II. But "industrialist" party were appointed to industrial enterprises, which were geared for Yeltsin to sell Russian territory to key economic ministries. In June the to consuming energy for a small fraction an imperialist power and historic enemy managers placed their man, Viktor Gera­ of the cost extorted by the Seven Sisters would enormously intensify nationalist shchenko, in charge of the central bank. cartel and the Arab oil sheiks. and popular oppo~ition to him. [n any Gerashchenko in turn extended 1.5 tril­ The London Economist (24 October case, whi Ie Tokyo might cough up $5 or lion rubles in credit to the managers, 1992), the house organ of international $10 billion to grab the strategic Kurils, an amount greater than the entire financiers, argued half seriously that Japan Inc. is not presently interested money supply generated hy all Soviet "Russia would be economically better in making Russia as such a subsidiary. governments over the previo/l.1 40 years. off if every Russian worker, except those Japan's empire-building ambitions re­ The resulting hyperinflation has all but in the country's mining, oil and trans­ main focused on the Far East, above all destroyed the ruble as a medium of ex­ port industries (who would he needed to the reconquest of China. change. Increasingly, Russians speak of ship raw materials to the West) simply The bottom line is that Yeltsin did not two classes in their country: those who stopped working"! Western bankers are get the deutschmarks, dollars and yen he have access to dollars or other hard cur­ demanding that Yeltsin reduce the post­ was counting on. rencies, and those who earn rubles. Soviet Russian economy to conditions In the present conditions of counter­ structurally more primitil'e than that Factory Managers Ignite Hyperinflation revolutionary chaos, curbing innation of tsm'ist Russia, where foreign capital means first of all slashing enterprise promoted heavy industry. Yevgeny Yasin, a prominent econo­ payrolls through mass layoffs. This is The Kohl regime initially rewarded mist in the "industrialist" camp, de- already beginning to happen. In Ivanovo, 47

a textile center northeast of Moscow known as the "city of single women" for its predominantly female labor force, output has been cut in half by the shortage of cotton due to the breakdown in the transport system and the civil war in the Central Asian republic of Tadzhikistan. On paper 6,500 are still employed by the Frolov textile factory, but only 2,000 of them come to work. The other 4,500 are told to stay home, where they receive 1,035 rubles a month, about $1.50 at the rapidly depreciating exchange rate. Only Socialist Revolution Can Save the Soviet Working Class Such desperate conditions can easily and suddenly produce an angry explosion among the toiling masses. To prevent this, the capitalist-restorationist forces of all contending fa(,tions seek to erect a strong state capable of crushing popular unrest before it gets out of hand. What exists today, in Russia as in the other former Imes Soviet republics, is not a counterrevolu­ Workers at huge Vaz auto plant in Togliatti, where old Stalinist managers want tionary order but rather counterrevo­ to become new capitalist owners. lutionary chaos. The restorationist forces -both the pro-Western "democrats" ing a section of the coal miners as well tion." In many large enterprises, such as around Yeltsin and the nationalist­ as air controllers and railway engineers, the Vaz Auto Works, 25 percent or more corporatist camp of Vol sky/ Rutskoi-are have supported Yeltsin under the illusion of the stock has already been given to weak and internally strained. There is no that capitalist restoration will lead to liv­ the work collectives under the Yeltsin/ cohered capitalist class. The armed forces ing standards comparable to those in the Gaidar regime in order to make privat­ are rife with discontent, and it is uncertain imperialist West of which they have an ization more palatable. This translates that they could be used effectively to idealized picture. Strikes and threats of into zero influence on enterprise policy, suppress mass struggle. work stoppages by coal and oil workers which remains firmly in the hands of the The consolidation of the counter­ have in recent years focused on securing old management. In any case, what would revolution therefore depends on the con­ better selling conditions for "their" prod­ "workers' privatization" mean under tinuing passivity, paralysis and mislead­ ucts. But while these workers are for the conditions of hyperinflation, economic ership of the working class. The Stalinist moment hetter off, the counterrevolution disarray, mass unemployment and nation­ "patriots" join hands with outright fas­ has already reduced Russia to conditions alist fratricide? cists in a "red"-brown coalition, while of neocolonial degradation comparable We want a modern economy in place giving a left cover to the Volsky/Rutskoi to, say, Mexico or Brazil. for the Soviet working people to take corporatists. This is expressed, for With the collapse of Stalinist rule in over when they regain power. But that example, in their call for "workers' the Soviet bloc. most of the left interna­ economy will not he preserved through privatization." Thus Vladimir Isakov of tionally has bought the hourgeois line corporatist capitalism in the epoch of the Russian Communist Workers Party that centralized planning is inherently imperialism's decay. A few hard-fought demanded that pari iament pass legis­ inefficient and bureaucratic. and that strikes where the workers win something lation "so that work collectives can a market system is the only viahle way would do much to reverse the demoral­ become the owners of their workplace." to organize an economy. In Latin Amer­ ization and atomization of the Soviet Boris Kagarlitsky's Labor Party, a social­ ica, petty-bourgeois nationalists out of proletariat and provide an opening for democratic outfit deliberately modeled power, like the Nicaraguan Samlinistas, revolutionary intervention. The situation on its British namesake, likewise calls are now calling for worker participation cries out for a genuinely Bolshevik par.y, for the "transfer of property to the work in privatized factories and farms, i.e., the based on the principles of Lenin and collectives"-which in the mouths of utopia of a "people's capitalism." Trotsky, to lead the multinational work­ these "leftists" includes managers having While historically associated with ing class of Russia and the other former a majority of the shares (see "Stalinist anarcho-syndicalism, calls for giving Soviet republics against the mafioso Has-Beens: Left Wing of Nationalist property rights to work collectives in entrepreneurs, the managers who would Counterrevolution," reprinted on page Russia today are not merely utopian but he stockholders, and their imperialist 25). are above all intended to give pseudo­ godfathers. The main trade-union federation, the populist legitimacy to a nationalist­ Down with Yeltsin and the Russian FNPR led by Brezhnev-era Stalinist corporatist regime. Volsky himself pro­ parliament-For a workers government hacks now reinforced by social demo­ poses "to encourage collective ownership based on soviet democracy ".S in Octo­ crats like Kagarlitsky, also supports the by workers" (Izvestia, 30 September ber 1917! Fer a planned, collectivized corporatist faction. Meanwhile, the CIA­ 1992), and the government even refers economy based on a reforged Soviet sponsored "free" trade unions, embrac- to this as a "fourth variant of privatiza- Union! • 48 reprinted from Workers VanRuard No. 573, 9 April 1993 --USee's Labourite Nationalization Fetish-- Camp Followers of Counterrevolution "Yeltsin's coming to power in Rus­ strike-should have been supported and Counterrevolution!" We fought for the sia heralded the spread of restoration­ taken up by the workers organisations." Trotskyist program of proletarian polit­ ist 'shock therapy' in the former So­ On every front-from East Germany ical revolution, from East Berlin to viet republics," warns Ernest Mandel's to Poland, the Baltics and Russia-these Warsaw and Moscow, to defeat the coun­ United Secretariat (USee) in Interna­ groups gave open or back-handed sup­ terrevolutionary onslaught and oust the tional Viewpoint (March 1993). "Down port to the forces of counterrevolution. bankrupt Stalinist bureaucracies. with Yeltsin's Coup!" proclaims the Brit­ Even now, the USec's International And when it was clear that the forces ish Workers Power group, in a March 23 Viewpoint (March 1993) provides a plat­ of capitalist restoration had succeeded resolution of its League for a Revolu­ form for erstwhile idol Jacek Kuron­ in destroying the workers state, we told tionary Communist International (LRCI) who as Walesa's labor minister is the bitter truth: "The period of open coun- on Yeltsin's abortive bonapartist power grab last month (7i'otskyist BuUetin, April 19(3). Strange noises are emanat­ ing from the fake-leftists who fell over - September 1991 each other trying to scramble (mostly vicariously) onto the Yeltsin barricades in August 1991. What's going on? Revolutionary Marxists should have stood in the front ranks of those fighting to smash the Now that the Soviet workers are being 19 August coup. At the same time there could be no political support for Yeltsin. With plunged into dire poverty by capitalist restoration, these groups are desperate Sygma to "disappear" their former support to the Yeltsinite "democrats." At a recent talk in New York, Mandel volubly denied that his organization had sided with Yel­ tsin in August 1991 (see WV No. 571, of this 12 March). And Workers Power would mutation, Yeltsin will be without doubt now have us believe that it took no side its midwife. It was necessary without hes­ between Yeltsin and the "Emergency itation to oppose the coup, and in this Committee": "Just as Russian workers respect to struggle alongside Yeltsin, but beyond this it is also necessary to say in should have opposed both Yannaev and advance what the effects would be of the Pugo's August 1991 coup and Yeltsin's application of the SOO day reform he sup­ previous coups [in August and December ports and to judge him on his acts. 1991], so now they should oppose Tsar Boris' latest measures." But they weren't screaming "Down with Yeltsin!" when he seized on the botched August 1991 coup attempt by Workers Power (top), Gorbachev's former lieutenants to seize USec (above) and other the reins of power and usher in the fake-Trotskyists took their destruction of the Soviet degenerated place with Veltsin on workers state. When it counted, the barricades of capitalist USec, WP and their ilk all lined up restoration in August 1991. with Yeltsin and the forces of capitalist counterrevolution. chief strikebreaker for the Solidarnosc terrevolution ushered in by Boris Yel­ The USec loudly proclaimed: "It was regime-to pontificate on the question tsin's pro-imperialist countercoup in necessary without hesitation to oppose of "social justice"! August 1991 has, in the absence of mass the coup, and in this respect to struggle Uniquely, we ofthe International Com­ working-class resistance, culminated in alongside Yeltsin" (International View­ munist League opposed capitalist resto­ the creation of a bourgeois state, how­ point, 16 September 1991). Workers ration across the board. Against Walesa's ever fragile and reversible" (see "How Power (September 1991) wrote, "Revo­ bid for power in 1981, we demanded: the Soviet Workers State Was Strangled," lutionary Marxists should have stood "Stop Solidarnosc Counterrevolution!" reprinted on page 31). We raised the call, in the front ranks of those fighting to In Germany in 1989-90, we alone unam­ "For Socialist Revolution to Sweep Away smash the 19 August coup," while a 22 biguously proclaimed: "No to Capitalist Yeltsin Counterrevolution!" August 1991 LRCI resolution stated Reunification!" At the time of Yeltsin's In the difficult conditions of coun­ baldly: "Yeltsin's call-for active resis­ August 1991 countercoup, we declared, terrevolutionary chaos, we Spartacists tance against the coup and for a general "Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin-Bush have sought to cohere a Soviet nucleus 49 around the banner of Trotsky's Fourth state apparatus was literally dissolved We have descrihed the situation in the International. and its territory bodily incorporated into ex-USSR and East Europe as "capitalism the Greater German imperialist state. without capital." But the absence of sig­ "Disappearing" the More than half the popUlation in the cast nificant imperialist investment does not Counterrevolution is now unemployed, the planned econ­ in itself make a country non-capitalist, To cover the tracks of their treachery, omy is gone, virtually every social ser­ as much of neocolonial Africa shows. the fake-Trotskyists hide in a fantasy vice created by the workers state has Nor does the presence of widespread world which denies that the counter­ been swept away, and the 7/"c'uhand nationalizations--hy the logic of these revolution has conquered in East Europe which oversees the "sale" (read: destruc­ arguments, Third World nationalist re­ and the former Soviet Union. Workers tion) of industry is a direct agency of gimes (which use state action to build Power insists that "Russia remains a the capitalist hanks. Yet Mandel & Co. up a domestic hourgeoisie) might have degenerated workers' state." Mandel still insist, "Even in the former GDR been labeled workers states. Indeed, in continues to call the East European countries "bureaucratic post-capitalist societies. " How do they pull off this sleight of hand? On Russia, as elsewhere, the Man­ delites claim that the Stalinist bureauc­ racy remains in place, and talk of "the rule of the old nomenklatura." The Polish Mandelites vituperate against the "red bourgeoisie." Likewise the follow­ ers of the late Nahuel Moreno argue, in their journal Correo internacional (Sep­ tember 1992), that "to the extent that the relations of property and production haven't changed, the bureaucracy cannot renounce power, from which it is direct­ ing the transition." The idea that the Stalinist bureaucracy remains intact in the wake of-and indeed presides over-capitalist coun­ er Spiegel terrevolution is of a piece with the view USec pushed "Solidarity with Solidarnosc" and hailed "socialist" Jacek Kuron that Stalinism is "counterrevolutionary (right), now chief strikebreaker for Walesa's clerical-nationalist regime. through and through," or in the Workers Power version, "invariably a counterrev­ capitalism has not yet prevailed" (Inter­ the mid-I960s, Italian USec leader Livio olutionary force." Such Stalinophobic national Viewpoint, Man;h 1(93). Maitan foresaw the "passage to a work­ arguments were used to justify the In Walesa's Poland, the private sector ers state" through a "cold" process (not refusal to defend the Soviet Union wher­ accounts for almost half of all non­ involving revolutionary mass mobiliza­ ever it was concretely posed. Trotsky, in agricultural production and employs 42 tion) in Nasser's Egypt and Burma-and contrast, characterized the bureaucracy percent of the lahor force. Yet the Polish even the West African states of Guinea as a brittle, contradictory caste, parasit­ Mandelites around the newspaper Dale), and Mali, which hardly had the begin­ ically resting on the proletarian property speak of "our economy" and raise as nings of a proletariat! forms of the degenerated workers state. their maximum demand: "An immedi­ State-owned collectivized property, But the bureaucracy as a caste has now ate program for rescuing the economy central planning and state monopoly of been shattered. Yeltsin himself demon­ and defending state industry" (Socialist foreign trade are indeed the defining fea­ stratively broke from the Communist Action, June 19(2). So they want to "res­ tures of proletarian property forms-the Party-the bureaucracy's "apparatus of cue" the new bourgeoisie's economy! necessary economic foundations for the domination," as Trotsky called it-well Meanwhile the Catholic church is the development of a classless, socialist before becoming Russian president. He predominant social force in society, dic­ society on an international scale. But to offered himself up as spokesman for the tating religious indoctrination in the the extent state property remains pre­ new layer of yuppie speculators and schools and a sweeping ban on abortion dominant in the former Soviet-bloc Western-oriented entrepreneurs. (to which the Mandelites capitulate with countries, it is not organized through a So on what basis do these pseudo­ a lame call for "the right to choose central plan (in the USSR, the planning Trotskyists claim that East Europe and motherhood"! ). principle was done away with in 1988) the ex-USSR are still workers states'? Arguing that foreign capital is "es­ nor is there a state monopoly of foreign Their bottom line is that nationalized sential to any restorationist project," trade. Even in state enterprises in the property remains. The USee takes this Intenwtional Viewpoint continues its ex-USSR, the factory managers act more to its logical absurdity when it comes to obfuscation: and more like outright owners, with deci­ the former German Democratic Republic "It is not necessary for all the means of sions relating to production and pricing (East Germany). production to be privatized for this to be being made autonomously and inter­ The East German economy was for­ achieved nor that the only logic at work enterprise relations based more on barter mally subordinated to Bonn and the is capitalist. Rut capitalist logIC must pre­ than on central directives. vail. Such a state of affairs does not exist Frankfurt bankers on I July 1990, when in Eastern Europe and the f<,lrmer Soviet In our recent article "Russia's New the D-mark became the common cur­ Union now anci there is no inevitability Exploiters" (reprinted on page 43) we rency. Later that year, East Germany's that it will l'xist.·' noted: "Marxists fight to defend the 50

industrial ha<.;c of the country. and thus oppo"e thc wholesale 'privatization'­ meaning shutdown---of productive ca­ pacity." But only through the prism of social democracy, which claims that the hourgeois state is "class-neutral" and proflli'es a gradual, parliamentary road to ",ncialism" through incremenlal natiollalizations, is the questioll of na­ tionalized industry per se primary. As we recently noted in regard to the Revo­ lutionary Workers League, which like­ wise argues that the ex-USSR remains a workers state on the basis of national­ ized property: "Like the Lahourile social democrats. the RWL elevatn national­ ized property tn the highest Jll'destal­ and remain, utterly indifferent to the key question of which class mles" ("RWL: Mitt)sis of a Cult," WV No. 570, 26 Fehruary). In positin)! nationalized plOperty as defining ,\ \\ orkns statl'. the:.e groups fundamentally dCllv the LCllilit.l/ ullder­ U",II Verlag standillg (Illite sfate. As Lenin explained The dictatorship of the proletariat: Red Guards and Baltic fleet sailors in in The Sfatc IIl1d Revolutioll. "the state Moscow, October 1917. is a 'special coercive force· .... And from it follows that the 'special cllercive ers. In Yeltsin's Russia, the new coun­ Castro's Cuba (see "Cuoa and Marxist force' for the slippre>;siun of the prole­ terrevolutionary houJ;r;cois state seeks to Theory." Marxist /Jlllll'lill No. X). Cas­ tariat hy the bourgeoisie, of millions of suppress the proletariat in the inter­ tro's victory in 1959 led to the crumbling working people by handfuls of the rich. ests of the profiteer and commercial of the corrupt Batista dictatorship and must he replaced hy a 'special cocrcive racketeer. its armed force, and brought to power a force' for the suppression of the hour­ If nationalization is the sill!' qua 111111 peasant -based guerri lIa movement. In geoisie hy the proletariat (the dictator­ of a workers state, then thosc who claim the absence of a proletariat politically ship of the proletariat).'· that Russia today is still a proletarian organized as a class for itself and with Today we arc talking of counterrevo­ state must perforce hold that Bolshevik its ties to the old hourgeoi<.; order rup­ lution. Let's look at the question from Russia was not one hefore the autumn tured, the petty-bourgeois Castro regime the other end. The Bolsheviks seized of 1918, or, for that matter, after the was initially autonomous from the two power in Rus,ia on 7 November 1917. introduction of widespread petty capital­ major classes in society. A state in yet major industry was not nationalized ist commodity production with the New the Marxist sense--armed bodies of men until late in 191:-<. In the interim, as Economic Policy of 1921. committed to the defense of a definite Lenin noted, "petty-bourgeois capital­ The Bolsheviks, as the conscious van­ set of property forms-did not exist. ism prevai Is in Russia" ("Left-Wing guard of the proletariat, made clear their Faced with the relentless pressure of Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois infent to collectivize the economy from U.S, imperialism, which effectively Mentality." May 191 S). So what was the the outset. But evcn in tlie ca.'e of social demanded that the new regime commit class nature of the Soviet state hetween overturns led by petty-bourgcois Stalin­ suicide, the Castroites were compelled Novemher 19 J 7 and the autumn of 1918? ist forces, the nationalization of the in the fall of 1960 to expropriate the U.S. Lenin was categorical. declaring in his means of production did not necessari ly sligar companies, the Cuoan bourgeoisie October 1919 article. "Economics and mark the creation of a (deformed) work­ and its Mafia patrons, therehy defining Pol itics in the Era of the Dictatorship of ers state. In China and South Vietnam, the new Cuba as a deformed workers the Proletariat," that 8 November 19 J 7 protracted and bloody civil wars meant state. was "the fir>;t day of the dictatorship of that by thc time the peasant-hased Sta­ In general, in periods of revolution the proletariat." linist forces took power, there was no or counterrevolution, economic forms The key question was who held state viable section of the bourgeoisie left can be, and often are, at variance with power, whose class interests did their with which they could form a popular the political character of the state, of armed hodies of men serve? If industry front and they were thus forced to rule the ruling class in society. Trotsky ex­ remained uncler the ownership of the in their own name. Yet those remnants plicitly addressed this question in "Not bourgeoi.,ie, albeit under workers con­ of the Chinese bourgeoisie which did not a Workers' and Not a Bourgeois State'!" trol, for a period of time, there was no immediately flee to Taiwan were not (November 1937): douht that r,om day one of its rule, expropriated until late in the Korean War "Should a hourgeois counterrevolution revolutionary soviet power served to (1953). The Hanoi regime did not col­ succeed in the USSR. the new govern­ slIppress "the profiteer, the commercial lectivize the South until three years after ment for a lengthy period would have to racketeer, the disrupter of mOllopoly"­ its 1975 victory. hase itself upon the nationalized econ­ omy. But what does such a type of tem­ the forces Lenin termed "our principal One instance where nationalization of porary conflict hetween the economy and 'internal' enemies." The Red Guards in the economy was decisive in determin­ the state mean') It mcans a r('\'o/ulio/l or power served the interests of the work- ing the class character of the state was a countcrr('\,o/utiof1. Thc victory of one 51

class over another signifies that it will privatisation of industry and agriculture, because they aim to be the lIew oWllers reconstruct the economy in the interests It wIll Impede the emergence of the mass of the factories. The Civic Union has a of the victors." unemployment and factory closures that well-worked-out program for corporatist In his decisive analysis of Stalinism, Yeltsin knows are necessary if Russia is to go back to capitalism." capitalism, aiming to maintain a stream­ The Remlutian Betrayed, Trotsky like­ WP ludicrously paints the ragtag Rus­ lined state-subsidized heavy industry wise emphasized that denationalization sian Unity bloc (the parliamentary voice sector as the motor force for building would not follow immediately on the a strong Russian capitalist state (see heels of a counterrevolutionary victory, of the fascist-infested "red"-brown coa­ lition) as a powerful force seeking a "res­ "Russia's New Exploiters," reprinted on laying out a scenario which fairly accu­ toration of bureaucratic central com­ page 43). rately depicts what is now taking place: mand planning," while claiming the Volsky/Rutskoi seek to emulate fascist :'In . the sphere of industry, denational­ Civic Union is a confused and "hetero­ dictator Mussolini's corporatist state, IzatIOn would begin with the light in­ which boasted of controlling three­ dustnes and those producing food. The geneous" formation: "Either they would planning principle would be converted have to adopt the very measures over fourths of the Italian economy. In The for the transitional period into a series which they brought down Gaidar or they Re\'Olutiol1 Betrayed, Trotsky cites a of compromises between state power and would have to roll the restoration process mouthpiece for the Mussolini regime: mdlvldual 'corporations'-potential pro­ "The corporative state directs and inte­ prietors, that IS, among the Soviet cap­ backwards and restore key elements of tallls of mdustry, the emigre former the central command economy." grates the economy, but docs not run it, proprietors and foreign capitalists." In effect, both the USee and Workers which with a monopoly of production, Power argue that Yeltsin/Gaidar repre­ would be nothing but collectivism." The Tailing the Corporatist Wing sent the only program for bringing cap­ Russian corporatists seek to make the of Counterrevolution italism to Russia and thus any opposi­ factory managers the legal captains of tion, however hesitant or contradictory, industry, while maintaining a strong state The logic of fetishizing nationalized and state suhsidies to "dir~ct" and'''inte­ property leads the USee to tail after those is objectively anti-capitalist. In fact, there is no significant political force in grate" the new capitalist economy. This forces who appear to be defenders of too will reljuire imperialist investment, state property against the pro-IMF mon­ Russia today which argues for a return to bureaucratic central planning. Where massive layoffs and the whip of repres­ etarist policies of Yeltsin and his former sion to regiment the working class. That economic adviser Yegor Gaidar-nota­ Yeltsin/Gaidar, based on the new layer of yuppie "entrepreneurs" and specula­ is hardly an alternative to capitalist bly the Civic Union bloc of militarist restoration. vice president Aleksandr Rutskoi and tors, seek to ram through rapid privat­ industrialist power broker Arkady Vol­ ization of large state enterprises, which The Bankrupt Methodology of sky, which represents the powerful fac­ in practice would mean an end to state Bankrupt British Labourism tory managers. In her article in the March subsidies and thus widespread closures, 1993 Illternaliollal Viewpoint, USee the factory managers call for privatiza­ The pol itical methodology and pro­ Soviet "expert" Catherine Samary sees tion under the enterprise "work collec­ gram underlying the position of the "a tense but real convergence of interests tives," over which they exercise control. USee and the other fake-Trotskyists between workers and managers." They seek to maintain state subsidies is not crypto-Stalinism, however. hut The same issue has an article by Russian USee supporter Alexander Buz­ galin, a leading light in Boris Kagar­ litsky's social-democratic Labor Party, The Labor Party braintrusts the Moscow Partial contents: bureaucracy of the former official trade­ • Malcolm X: What's Missing union federation (FNPR), which is a bloc from Spike Lee's Movie partner of the Civic Union, and it joined • Activists Remember the Civil Rights Movement and with Rutskoi's Free Russia party in a the Black Power Era recent "Congress of the Democratic • Imperialism Starves Africa Left." Buzgalin hails this as a "real • U.S, Global Cops breakthrough" and explicitly lauds the Out of Somalia! Civic Union: "The economic programme • Vancouver: 3,000 Drive Off worked out by experts close to the Fascist Skinheads GC [Civic Union] would indeed be • Georgia: Down With the far more helpful in getting the country Flag of Slavery out of the crisis than Gaidar's monetar­ • Drywallers Strike Settled, ist experiments." Samary and Buzgalin Fight for Solid Union don't bother to mention that Civic Union Goes On leader Rutskoi ran point for the Yeltsin • Moscow: African Student Murdered by Yeltsin's Cops regime in breaking last summer's strike by Russian air traffic controllers. Workers Power similarly argues in the $1 (48 pages) March LRCI resolution that the parlia­ mentary opposition to Yeltsin is some­ Order from: how anti-capitalist: Spartacist PUb. Co. Box 1377 GPO "Yeltsin wants to destroy the rival power New York, NY 10116 of the Congress and the Supreme Soviet. As long as this alternative power exists II Will obstruct his programme of mass 52 the "Clause IV socialism" of the British Originally adopted to counter the 1950s, who had carried out exten­ Labour Party. This called for "common influence of the Bolshevik Revolution sive nationalization of foreign-owned ownership of the means of produc­ on the British proletariat, Clause IV was railroads, oil and slaughterhouses. At tion, distribution and exchange" under ultimately watered down to the point bottom, what motivates these pseudo­ the auspices of the British Crown. When where wday's Labour Party does not Trotskyist outfits is support to their own Labour was swept into power under even promise to reverse most of the bourgeoisie. Clement Altlee in 1945, the working denational izations carried out by the It was their fealty to the social democ­ class entertained enormous illusions Thatcher government. We of course racy which led the USee and the rest that "its" government would implement oppose the denationalization of industry to tail behind the imperialist anti­ socialist measures. In the U.S., the right under capitalism \\; hen, as is almost Soviet war drive and to cheer on wing of the Shachtmanites argued that always the case, it means an attack the same counterrevolutionary forces Britain in the late 1940s was becoming on the union organization, working con­ whose victory they now seek to hide incrementally socialist. ditions and living standards of the work­ under a rug. The USec rejoiced over The Altlee government was faced with ers. In neocolonial countries, revolution­ the victory of Mitterrand's anti-Soviet a British capitalism which had been in aries defend nationalizations which are popular front in France, which became a state of decline for decades and had directed against imperialist hold­ the ideological spearhead for Cold emerged from World War II with its ings, such as Nasser's seizure of the War II. The Mandelites glorified the empire looted and in the process of dis­ SUC/. Canal in Egypt and Cardenas' Nazi-collaborationist Estonian Forest integration. Industries vital to the econ­ nationalization of oil in Mexico. But Brothers and idolized Solidarnosc ideo­ omy, such as the mines and railroads, wc do not defend bourgeois nationaliza­ logue Jacek Kuron. In Czechoslovakia, were bankrupt and falling apart. Attlee tions in principle (see "Chrysler and the USec supporter Petr Uhl was even a proceeded to nationalize~by and large Bankruptcy of Social Democracy," WV member of Vaclav Havel's capitalist­ with broad acceptance by thc capitalist No. 247, II Janllary 19XO). restorationist government. For its part, class~only the most inefficient and Yet the perspective of Labourite Workers Power solidarized with anti­ failing industries, which then continued nationalizations rcmains the lodestar of Communist mobs in East Berlin, called to operate through heavy subsidies ex­ the British fakc-Ieft and other social on Thatcher's Britain to aid the ultra­ tracted from more productive sectors of democrats who masquerade as "Trotsky­ nationalist Lithuanian Sajudis against the economy and, ultimately, from the ists." Indicatively, the USec's British the Soviet degenerated workers state, pockets of the working class. The end affiliate is today buried deep inside the and sponsored a speaking tour by a result was the continued impoverishment Labour Party. In the case of the More­ fascist-connected, pro-Yeltsin Russian of the British workers, whose standard noites, what's behind their nationaliza­ miner. of living over the years was to sink to tion fetish is their support to Argentine Having repudiated the Trotskyist one of the lowest in West Europe. bonapartist general Juan Peron in the struggle for an independent proletarian vanguard party, these opportunists are driven by inveterate tail ism, capitulating to any force that seems momentarily SUBSCRIBE! popular. Twenty years ago, the Mandel­ ites were the loudest cheerleaders for No. 42 Third World Stalinism, only to flip over Spring/Summer 1993 a decade later to slavishly tailing anti­ $1 (48 pages) Soviet social democracy. Two years Includes: ago, they hailed the struggle for "democ­ From East Berlin to Tashkent: racy" spearheaded by Yeltsin & Co. and • From East Berlin to Tashkent: Capitalist every counterrevolutionary nationalist Counterrevolution Capitalist Counterrevolution who claimed to be fighting "Russian Tramples on Women Tramples on Women domination." Today, with Yeltsin dis­ credited in the eyes of the Soviet masses, • Stephen Jay Gould and -:-.'-- -~ the Mismeasure of Marx '------1.' c; ,. they bloc with the corporatist faction rI,: ,<: • Mobilize Now to Save of the counterrevolution which claims Mumia Abu-Jamal! to be opposed to Western imperialist • Murderous Bigotry domination. Against Gays in Mexico From pushing "solidarity with Sol­ -Stop the Killings! idarnosc" to metaphorically climbing • Torture of Native Women atop Yeltsin's barricades of counter­ in Canada revolution, the Mandelite United Secre­ • Australia: Capitalist tariat~which abuses the name of the Attacks Target Immigrant Fourth International~bears its fair share Women Workers of political responsibility for the final • Clinton Bows to destruction of the greatest gain yet of Anti-Gay Hysteria the international proletariat, the USSR, • Pro-Death Penalty the homeland of the October Revolution. Clinton: No Friend of This crime will not be forgotten as a Working Women new generation of militants goes on to 3-issue subscription $3 reforge a genuine Fourth International, Make checks payable/mail 10: Spartacisl Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York. NY 10116 one Trotsky would have recognized as his own .• 53 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 575, 7 May 1993 Russian Referendum: The Morning After

regime of being rife with corruption, claiming that defense minister Pavel Yeltsin's Bloody May Day Grachev had illegally sold Soviet mili­ tary property in East Germany. After the Less than a week after his victory in made no attempt to go after the Yel­ vote, Yeltsin declared his rival was no an April 25 vote of confidence put the tsinite counterrevolutionaries hut rather longer in charge of the government's wind in Russian president Boris Yeltsin's opened the way to Yeltsin's seizure of anti-corruption investigations. sails, Moscow militia (police) and spe­ power, we Marxists condemn this anti­ Yeltsin's victory in the referendum cial OMaN anti-riot troops provoked a Communist trial by the nascent bour­ certainly gave the would-be strongman bloody clash with several thousand anti­ geois state against the losers at the what he wanted, a vote of "Da, Da, Nyet, Yeltsin protesters in Moscow on May bureaucratic trough. Da" on the four questions posed in Day. Earlier in the week, Yeltsin had The bloody May Day clash capped a the vote: 5R percent "yes" to his presi­ decreed that the traditional rally site at week of moves by would-be Tsar Boris dency, an unexpectedly high 53 percent Red Square be sealed off to all street aimed at consolidating power in the approval of his "shock treatment" eco­ protests. But police trucks and horse­ wake of last Sunday's referendum vic­ nomic policies, just under half were for mounted cops, wielding batons and tory, including a ban on Communist new presidential elections, with 64 per­ water cannon, moved to block demon­ Party activity in all state enterprises and cent in favor of new elections to the Con­ strators when they tried to march to a decree outlawing the nationalist news­ gress. Yeltsin's imperialist paymasters another site in the university area near paper Dell. The National Salvation whooped for joy. "This is a very, very the Lenin Hills. The anti-Yeltsin demon­ Front's blustering notwithstanding, it is good day," burbled Clinton. A New York strators responded with a hail of rocks not this ragtag coalition of Stalinist Times (27 April) editorial gushed that and masonry. has-beens and anti-Semitic Great Rus­ "Yeltsin's trust in the people was over­ Some 70 protesters and a larger num­ sian chauvinists which is presently Yel­ whelmingly reciprocated." To produce ber of police were wounded in the blood­ tsin's main concern, hut the corporatist­ this result, Yeltsin's Western backers iest street fighting seen in Moscow since nationalist Civic Union parliamentary pulled out all the stops. Yeltsin seized the reins in August 199 I. bloc for whom the "red"-hrowns servc New York ad agency Saatchi and Demonstrators responding to the caIl of as shock troops. Saatchi "covertly" ran Yeltsin's media the "red-brown" National Salvation Two weeks before the referendum, campaign, which harnessed the state-run Front (NSF) chanted "Death to Yeltsin!" Yeltsin publicly humiliated his vice pres­ TV for an "unrelenting stream of gov­ Moving to the Russian parliament's ident, Civic Union spokesman Aleksandr crnment propaganda" (London Guard­ "White House," the headquarters for Yel­ Rutskoi, stripping him of his government ian, 26 April). Yeltsin was shown "at tsin's pro-imperialist countercoup in Mercedes and bodyguards, and remov­ home" with his wife in a modest three­ 1991 and now the center of the anti­ ing him from his post overseeing agri­ room apartment-while the government Yeltsin bourgeois opposition, demon­ culture. Rutskoi in turn accused the spends 100 million rubles a month to strators raised barricades and hoisted red banners and monarchist white-yellow­ black tricolors. NSF spokesman IIya Konstantinov, connected to the fascistic Russian Na­ tional Sobor, warned of a sharper clash next week on Victory Day, commemo­ rating the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II (portrayed by Stalin as the Great Patriotic War): "This is the beginning of the real resistance. We can say that on May 9, the OMaN will be met differently. Motherland or Death!" At the head of the march were several of the failed putschists from the August 1991 "Emergency Committee," whose trial finally went to court last month and has now been indefinitely suspended. Campaigning for vote of confidence, WOUld-be Tsar Boris takes aim at his While their botched "perestroika coup" opponents. Above: touring weapons plant where AK-47s are made. 54 build him a lavish new penthouse suite complete with tennis court and swim­ ming pool. [n the days before the vote, Yeltsin douhled old-age pensions, can­ celed rent increases, raised subsidies to the mining industry and promised more money for veterans. He also promised to restore the Cossacks' privileges and lauded these tsarist pogromists as "one of the most important entities of the new democrat it Russia." Meanwhile the Group of Seven impe­ rialist power~ did their bit by promising a new $2X billion aid package, while the World Bank threw in a billion more to keep Russia's oil wells pumping. Even then, many people voted for Yeltsin only because they were even more fed up with the Congress' shenanigans and wanted a "strong hand." On the eve of the referendum, the Bloody May Day in Moscow as Yeltsin's cops provoke clash with anti-Yeltsin [nternational Communist League took protesters. the position that it was in the workers' interests that Yeltsin suffer a resounding general statement did not adequately Duma was an impotent "advisory" coun­ defeat, calling for a vote of "Nyet, Nyet, address the specific questions posed in cil set up (and repeatedly disbanded) by Da, Da" on the four questions. In an the referendum. the last tsar, Nicholas II, as a "democrat­ earlier article ("Yeltsin Meets His Pay­ The New York Time.\" (26 April) ob­ ic" sop following the 1905 Revolution. master," WV No. 573,9 April), we noted served that "Nyet, Nyet, Da, Da" was To get the support of regional leaders, that "the implicit alternative offered is how anti-Yeltsin voters "who tended Yeltsin is prepared to intensify the cen­ to support the nationalist-corporatist pol­ to be from the pox-on-all-their-houses trifugal forces tearing the country apart icy of the Civic Union opposition," and school" voted. Any class-conscious and sharply limiting the central govern­ wrote, "Russian workers have no stake worker would certainly say "nyet" to ment's writ. A number of districts had in the outcome of this referendum, the Yeltsin and his economic policies, which already added a fifth question to the ref­ continuation of a power play between amount to the immiseration of the pop­ erendum, promoting regional autonomy two wings of the capitalist counter­ ulation and the destruction of industry. or independence, and some, like seces­ revolution." While the working class And, while we do not fetishize abstract sionist Chechenya, boycotted entirely. cannot give political support either to democracy, when posed with the question Meanwhile, Yeltsin's "privatization" the imperialist stooge Yeltsin or to of new elections for president and par­ scheme would destroy the country's his corporatist-capitalist opponents, this liament our answer could only be yes. industrial base, turning Russia into a With Russia now a capitalist state­ neocolonial supplier of oil and other raw moreover one in which all the contend­ materials to the imperialists. But while ing bourgeois forces seek to establish corporatists like Rutskoi talk of preserv­ bonapartist rule-it is necessary for the ing the country's heavy industry and a revolutionary party to maintain the strong Russian state, they would be no utmost vigilance with respect to demo­ less dependent upon imperialism. Mean­ cratic forms. while. Rutskoi openly appeals for bona­ Marc Cooper in the Village Voice partist rule, vowing that "Iaw and order (4 May) caught the flavor of the Russian must be restored in a strong state." referendum in declaring the winner to As we wrote in "Dogfight in Moscow" be ... "General Augusto Pinochet," the (WV No. 572, 26 March): "The working Chilean military dictator. As one street­ class must oppose moves from any corner wise Muscovite interviewed by Cooper to place its neck in the yoke 4 a hona­ said of Yeltsin: "After the referendum, partist dictatorship." Nothing short of be careful. With a vote of confidence socialist revolution to sweep away all in his back pocket, and unable democrat­ the contending factions of the nascent ically to implement his revolution, he bourgeois state can save the Soviet work­ could decide to call in the army and try ing people, whose very existence is to do it by force." Five days after threatened by the ravages of counterrev­ the vote, Yeltsin summoned 88 regional olution. The key lies in the formation of leaders to Moscow to endorse his draft a genuinely communist party, based on for a new constitution, which would the principles of Lenin and Trotsky, to enshrine a semi-bonapartist "presidential lead the multinational working class of

Dm Spiegel republic," replacing the legislature with Russia and the other former Soviet repub­ Scenes from the counterrevolution: a toothless bicameral "representative" lics to power. For a planned, collectivized Old-age pensioner passes swank body, whose lower house would, appro­ economy based on soviet democracy and boutique. priately, be called the State Duma. The revolutionary internationalism t • 55

Above left: Churchill, Stalin Drowned the Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta (1945). Above Communist Party ... right: Brezhnev with (('(illfiIlIlCd .limn page (j..f.) Nixon (1973). Left: Yeltsin with Bush to perish," Trotsky insisted, as he ,l'l out (1991) at U.S. White to build a new Bolshevi" party and Inter­ House. Decades of national over the corps<'s of the old. Stalinist capitulation Berdt of a proletarian party, the Soviet to imperialism in degent'ralt.'d workns ,tate did indeed ulti­ guise of "peaceful matel) pnlsh, drowllt'll in the abSl'11L'C coexistence" paved of oq.!1. more to thl' the various projects to reconstitute t he "red -brow n" coa lit ion-- -co -chai rIll an point, the vast properties of the old the "CPS II," was graced by the presence of the fascistic Russian National ":obor CPSU. of several leaders of the GKChP, the of Sterligov and a leading figurc in the What would it Illean to revive the "Emergency COTllmittee" whose botched "left-right" National Salvation Front. CPSU') Whether they look II) the ('I' of "coup" provided the opportunity for Yel­ Already in 1922, Lenin lool.;ed at Sta­ Brezhnev, of Khrushchev ur uf Stalin, !sin '.\ ascendancy. These former Gorba­ lin and saw in him tIll' spectrl' of a the Stalinist leftovers are nol calling for thc" licutcnants lVere wildly applauded. d:cr:livlllori/a, a Great Russian bully. Sta­ a revolut ion ary i nternat ional i st workers r:or \1 liat" They wanted to continue pere­ lin's latter-day heirs, who openly rally party but for the restorati()11 of a bureau­ ,Iroika - only without glasnost. In the around the harist watchword d('!'::IIi/\'(/ cratic apparatus. Certainly, amid the ,tll­ aftelillalit. Yeltsin has sought to convict (strong slate), truly de\erve thcir fascist sided t:conolll ic and social dev astat ion. till' faikd putschists for "treason" (to bloc partners. At the time: of Stalin's the wars of nationalist fratricide, the sky­ \\ hlllll (;,'orgc Bush?). We Marxists blood purges, Trots")' nntcd: 'Stalinism rocketing crime and impoverishml'l1t clllllknlil 11;,'. anti-Communist trial by and fascism, in spite of a deep cliflcrencc which now heset the peoples of the (,'\­ thl' naSl'l'lIl I.durgcois state against the in social foundati\ll1s, art' ,vfTJlllctric

Rel'o/ufion Be/raved). With the social sky and Company," July 1(33). losing time in vain' by occupying our­ foundations of the workers state now Those who today try to follow in Sta­ selves with curing the Com intern. We ripped away, what indeed is thele to dis­ lin's footsteps grotesquely lie that Trot­ never promised anybody that we would tinguish between the anti-Semitic ravings sky was "anti-party." Yet the fact is that cure the Comintern. We only refused, of "red" general Makashov and fascistic Trotsky and the Left Opposition refused until the decisive test, to pronounce the general Sterligov, between the Great Rus­ to abandon the CPSU to Stalin as long sick as dead or hopelessly ill." Stalin's sian chauvinism of the "proletarian com­ as there appeared even the slightest pos­ refusal to block Hitler's rise to power munist" Anpilov and the populist-tsarist sibility of reversing the bureaucratic was the decisive test: Nevzorov') As we noted in "Soviet Work­ degeneration from within, even after their "Only after the German Communist ers Bleed'" (Workers Vanguard No. )7, expUlsion in 1927. In numerous polem­ Party, which had been gathering mil­ 7 August 19(2), "The rump Stalinists ics. Trotsky argued against those. like lions of votes, proved incapable of offering even the least resistance to Hit­ have increasingly taken on the political the Democratic Centralist tendency of ler, and after the Com intern refused coloration of the openly pro-capitalist Y.M. Smirnov and T. Sapronov, who to recognize not only the erroneous­ nationalists they tail," overlappil1g and claimed that the workers state had been ness of its policy but even the very interpenetrating with fascists and anti­ destroyed and that "the party is a corpse." fact of the defeat of the proletariat (in reality the victory of Hitler is the great­ Semitic chauvinists. Trotsky was adamant that as long as the est defeat of the proletariat in the his­ tory of the world!) and replaced the analysis of its mistakes and crimes by a new campaign of persecution and slander against real Marxists-only after this did we say: nothing can save these people any more .... The historical judge­ ment on the Com intern has been pro­ nounced. There is no appeal from this verdict." - "The ILP and the New International" (September 1933) Moscow, 7 November 1991: The verdict of history, pronounced 60 Trotskyists years ago. was scaled by the CPSU's protest closing of utter collapse in the face of a counter­ Lenin Museum. revolutionary ascendancy within the So­ ICL sign calls viet Union itself. The RKRP, RPK, KP­ for "Return to the RSFSR, etc. arc not parties based on the Road of Lenin working class. but fragments of the bu­ and Trotsky!" reaucracy, which had contempt for, and above all feared, the working class. None of these self-styled "Communist workers' leaders" tried to mobilize the proletariat in struggle against Yeltsin counterrevo­ What do such types want to "n~con­ party retained its proletarian core, it was lution. The International Communist stitute"? They have nothing but contempt necessary to intervene from the inside League (Fourth Internationalist), repre­ for proletarian political power based on to oust the conservative-oureaucratic fac­ senting the continuity of Trotsky's strug­ soviet democracy and the revolutionary tion or Stalin: gle for Leninism, did. "Soviet Workers: internationalism which was the bedrock '"Naturally, such intervention is out of Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counterrevolution!" of Lenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik Party. the yuestion if the point of departure is that the party as a whole has degenerated. we proclaimed in an August 199 I leaflet They denounce in the vilest anti-Semitic that the party is a corpse. With such an that was distributed in the tens of thou­ terms the Trotskyist Left Opposition, evaluation of the party, it is absurd to sands in the Soviet Union. And today which fought unremittingly and uniquely address oneself to it, and still more we continue to fight for an authentic van­ absurd to wait for it, or for this or that against the party's degeneration. What guard party of the working class to unite they want to recreate is not the party of section of it. that is, primarily, for its proletarian core. to heed or to understand the Soviet proletariat in the struggle for October but the bureaucratic machine you. To conquer this core, however, is socialist revolution against all the would­ which dcsfroved it. to conyuer the party. This core docs not be exploiters. In raising the call, "It Is Necessary consider itself-and quite rightly-­ to Build Communist Parties and an Inter­ either dead or degennatcd." Thermidor: The Decisive national Anew." after a decade of struggle - "Our Difference,; with the Degeneration against Stalinist degeneration, Trotsky Democratic Centralists" To explain how, when and why the (~ovelllber 192k) wrote in July 1933: "The present CPSU CPSU degenerated is crucial for anyone is not a party but an apparatus of dom­ Trotsky insisted that until a decisive who seeks to regenerate an authentic ination in the hands of an uncontrolled historical test proved that the CPS U was communist party. Today's Stalinist has­ bureaucracy." And again: "To speak now dead as a proletarian party, to prema­ beens don't even attempt a materialist of the 'reform' of the CPS U would mean turely renounce it necessarily meant analysis: at most they give a date for to look backward and not forward,'" appealing to more backward layers out­ when "traitors" took over. insisted the co-leader of the October Rev­ side the party. Responding in 1933 to • Anpilov's RKRP claims the 1961 olution. "In the USSR. it is necessary to the '"left" critics of the Left Opposition, CPSU "program erroneously proclaimed build a Bolshevik party again" ("It Is he wrote: "During the last few years­ the rejection of the dictatorship of the Impossible to Remain in the Same' Inter­ appropriately enough--our opponents proletariat and announced the all-people national" with Stalin. Manuilsky, Lozov- have lold us lIlore than once that we 'are nature of such specially class institu- 57 tions as the party and the state, thus ually began to take the ascendancy" Meanwhile, Khrushchev served his creating a cover for their petty-bourgeois after Lenin's death: "At the end of the apprenticeship under Stalin, Gorbachev degradation. " '20s, the beginning of the '30s, this led' served his under Brezhnev, and Yeltsin • Sidorov's Kontrargumenty i Fakty the party-state bureaucracy, headed by and Kravchuk were formed from the (No.2 [24], February 1993) likewise pins Stalin, to reject the Leninist policy of same mold. They all came out of the blame on Khrushchev, claiming that NEP" (Rossiskaya Pravda, No. 5-6 the same Stalinist pigsty. Indeed it is the 20th Congress in 1956 ushered in a [12-13] 1993). notable that while the various capitalist­ "constantly emerging class of a new So some of these characters stand with restorationist leaders were all once in the Soviet bourgeoisie." KiF even exten­ Bukharin's Right Opposition against the top echelons of the CPSU leadership, the sively quotes from Trotsky's analysis of Stalin of the late '20s and early '30s, moving spirits behind the new "Commu­ the Soviet Thermidor and the Stalinist while others stand with Stalin against nist" parties were until a couple of years bureaucracy, only to label it "slanderous" Khrushchev, and still others heap all the ago third-rate non-entities. The Stalinist without even an attempt at serious rebut­ blame on Gorbachev. These cynical after­ leftovers were the losers at the bureau­ tal, instead ludicrously trying to equate the-fact alibis have nothing to do with cratic trough, but they and the restora­ Trotskyism with Khrushchev's tepid either a Marxist analysis or with any tionist tops were. all responsihle for denunciation of "the cult of personality" history of struggle for Leninism. Until strangling the Soviet workers state. and Gorbachev's later pro-market attack Stalin lashed out against the Right Oppo­ Sidorov's KiF even supported Yeltsin's on "bureaucratic commandism." sition and its base of kulaks (wealthy August 1991 countercoup! When they • Prigarin, one of the authors of the peasants) and Nepmen (petty capitalists), phlce the turning point at 1931 or 1956 September 1992 "Programmatic Decla­ Bukharin had been his chief henchman or 1961 or 1987, they are covering up ration of the 20th All-Union Conference and ideologue, and he continued to lick for Stalin's criminal betrayal of the Octo­ of the CPSU," echoes Khrushchev's Stalin's boot until it came crashing down ber Revolution, and their own role. denunciation of "large-scale miscalcula­ on his neck. As for rejection of the Trotsky, in fighting to defend the tions, abuse of power and crimes against dictatorship of the proletariat, the 1936 Bolshevik-Leninist program, empha­ the positions and the very lives of peo­ Stalin constitution (drafted by Bukharin) sized: "The smashing of the Left Oppo­ ple" under the Stalin era, while pointing decreed its juridical liquidation in favor sition implied in the most direct and im­ the finger at "betrayal by the Gorbachev­ of a "people's" dictatorship based on mediate sense the transfer of power from Yakovlev, group." (the lie of) "universal, equal and direct" the hands of the revolutionary vanguard • Kryuchkov's RPK locates "the suffrage; even in 1931, Stalin boasted into the hands of the more conservative causes of the cri.sis of Soviet society" in that the USSR had "entered the era of elements among the bureaucracy and the a "bureaucratic tendency" which "grad- socialism," a classless society. upper crust of the working class. The year 1924-that was the beginning of the Soviet Thermidor" ("The Workers' State, Thermidor and Bonapartism," Feb­ ruary 1935). The decisive degeneration International Communist League of the CPS U came in 1923-24 when a (Fourth Internationalist) conservative layer in the party and state Correspondence for: Address to: apparatus usurped control from the work­ Spartaclst League of Australia ...... Spartacist League, GPO Box 3473 ing class and throttled its Bolshevik van­ Sydney, NSW, 2001, Australia guard in a political counterrevolution. SpartaclatLeague/Brltaln ...... Spartacist Publications, PO Box 1041 How did this occur? Lenin had ear­ London NW5 3EU, England lier voiced grave concerns over the Trotskyist League of Canada/ possibility of the party's bureaucratic Llgue Trotskyste du Canada ...... Trotskyist League, Box 7198, Station A Toronto, Ontario, M5W 1X8, Canada degeneration under the combined impact of a backward, largely peasant mass Spartaklst-Arbelterpartel Deutschlands ...... SpAD, Postfach 51 0655 and imperialist encirclement. The most 13366 Berlin, Germany advanced layers of the working'~lass had Llgue Trotskyate de France ...... Le Bolchevik, BP 135-10 been decimated in ~he Civil War. Anhe 75463 Paris Cedex 10, France II th Congress of the Bolshevik Party in Spartaclst Group India/Lanka ...... write to Spartacist, New York March-April J922, Lenin obse.'ved: Dublin Spartaclst Group ...... PO Box 2944, Dublin 1 "If we take Moscow with its 4,700 Com­ Republic of Ireland munists in responsible positions,. and if Lega Trotsklsta d'italla ...... Walter Fidacaro we take that huge bureaucratic machine, C.P 1591,20101 Milano, Italy that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much Spertaclst Group Japan ...... Spartacist Group Japan whether it can truthfully be said that the PO Box 49, Akabane Yubinkyoku Communists are directing that heap." Kita-ku, Tokyo 115, Japan The "Workers and Peasants Inspec­ Grupo Espartaqulsta de Mexico ...... P Linares, Apdo. Postal 453 06002 Mexico 1, D.F., Mexico tion" (Rabkrin) was set up in 1919 in order to curb bureaucratic abuseS. But Spartakusowska Grupa Polski ...... Platform a Spartakusow06w Skrytka Pocztowa 148 under the control of Stalin and his cro­ 01-133 Warszawa 42, Poland nies, the Rabkrin itself became a source Spart8clst League/U.S ...... Spartacist League, Box 1377 GPO of bureaucratism. When Stalin was ap­ New York, NY 10116, USA pointed party general secretary follow­ ing the 11 th Congress, he wasted no time Sparlaclst ...... 121019 Moscow g-19 AlYa 19, Russia in transforming this administrative posi­ tion into a personal power base, creating 58 a parallel hierarchy with a separate for not having "enough in yourself of with similar support in Petrograd. But Organization Department under Kagano­ Lenin's unbending and unyielding char­ when the conference opened, five days vich, and cultivating a layer of the appa­ acter," a criticism which Trotsky evi­ 'before Lenin's death, the Opposition was ratus. That July an Orghuro resolution dently took to heart. But it is the most allowed only three of 128 delegates. granted party functionaries wages sev­ grotesque cynicism for latter-day hack Having shaken its fist at the party, the eral times higher than those of the aver­ "historians" (like erstwhile Gorbachev nascent bureaucracy now moved to con­ age worker. and various bonuses and toady and current Yeltsin aide Volkogo­ solidate its control. Where the living perks on top of that. The inchoate nov) to criticize Trotsky for not fighting Lenin had ordered a purge to weed out bureaucratic faction began manifesting Stalin hard enough while simultaneously corrupt, careerist or politically incompe­ the Great Russian chauvinism which was denouncing him as a would-be Stalin, tent elements under the watchword "Bet­ later to become a hallmark of Stalinism. "the dictator who never was," ter Fewer, But Better," the "Lenin levy" On Stalin's instructions, Ordjonikidze By late 1923, the defeat of the German ,which followed the conference opened and Dzerzhinsky came down heavy­ , Revolution,had led to widespread demor­ the gates wide to 240,000 raw recruits handedly against the Georgian Commu­ alization ~n the Soviet proletariat, while who promised subservience to the nist leaders, with Ordjonikidze even the economic "scissors crisis" (the gap bureaucratic ,regime which had elevated launching a physical assault. between high industrial prices and low them into the ranks of the ruling party. Barely nine months after appointing agricultural prices, which induced peas­ "The political aim of this maneuver was Stalin general secretary, Lenin now called ants not to produce for the market) of to dissolve the revolutionary vanguard for his removal, warning that Stalin "had which Trotsky had warned was creating in raw human material, without experi­ concentrated an enormous power in his massive urban unrest. Meanwhile, the ence, without independence, and yet hands." In his letters to the 12th Congress apparatus moved to strengthen its organ­ with the old habit of submitting to the (his "Testament"), Lenin outlined the izational control over the party ranks; authorities," explained Trotsky in The central issues in what was to be his last increasingly, party secretaries were no Revolution Betrayed. struggle: defense of the state monopoly longer elected but, appointed. Trotsky of foreign trade, curbing the abuses of fought for a two-pronged policy: a pro­ The Nationalist Lie of the Rabkrin and combatting Stal in's high­ gram of planned industrialization to "Socla"sm in One Country" handed treatment of the non-Russian strengthen the Soviet state in the face of How did Stalin, a mediocrity in Lenin's nationalities. Bedridden, Lenin formed a temporary international isolation, to party, come to stand at the head of the political bloc with Trotsky and implored reinforce the smychka (union) of the bureaucracy? Trotsky observed: him to accept no compromises with workers and peasants and, not least, to "Before he felt out his own course. the Stalin and his then-allies Zinoviev and revitalize the proletariat; and the revival bureaucracy felt out Stalin himself. He Kamenev. of internal party democracy. Trotsky's brought it all the necessary guarantees: Lenin was soon incapacitated by position was echoed later that month in the prestige of an old Bolshevik, a strong character, narrow vision, and close bonds another stroke. Trotsky, meanwhile, the "Platform of the 46," signed by an with the political machine as the sole pulled back from the sharp struggle which authoritative array of party leaders. source of his influence .... A secondary Lenin urged, accepting the troika's assur­ When a campaign to discredit the figure before the masses and in the ances of agreement on all the political Opposition among the party ranks back­ events of the revolution, Stalin revealed issues and acquiescing to their pleas that hirnself as the indubitable leader of the fired, the troika was forced to open the Therrnidorean bureaucracy, as first in its the Testament not be read to the congress. pages of Pravda one last time for a midst." At that point Trotsky did not know where candid party discussion. In his pamphlet - The Rel'ofufiOI1 Betrayed Stalin was going (Stalin probably didn't The New Course, Trotsky warned that One of Stalin's most appealing features know himself), and was probably overly "if the old course should seek to maintain for the nascent bureaucratic layer was concerned not to appear to push himself itself at all costs by tightening the reins, his nationalism. Stalin was unique as Lenin's successor. Years later, Adolf by increasingly artificial selection, by among the Bolshevik leaders for his Joffe in his suicide note chastised Trotsky intimidation, in a word, by procedures hidebound parochialism, his disdain for indicating a distrust of the party, the international and theoretical questions: actual danger of degeneration of a con­ in 1911 Stalin dismissed Lenin's emigre siderable part of the cadres would inev­ struggle against liquidationism as "a for­ Spartacist League itably increase." eign tempest in a teapot." Indicatively, As preparations proceeded for the 13th Stalin never once addressed a congress Public Offices Party Conference in January 1924, it was of the Communist International. -MARXIST LlTERATURE­ clear that the reins were being tightened. In late 1924, Stalin promulgated the When cell discussions didn't go to their doctrine of "socialism in one country," Bay Area liking, Stalin's appointed secretaries a statement that the bureaucracy's inter­ Thurs.: 5:30-8:00.p.m., Sat.: 1:00-5:00 p.m. made sure to pack the meetings or to ests were divorced from those of the 1634 Telegraph, 3rd Floor (near 17th Street) Oakland, California Phone: (510) 839-0851 bury pro-Opposition resolutions. Pravda international proletariat, and thus coun­ falsified reports of the discussions (as terposed to the Comintern's program of Chicago Stalin's personal secretary later admit­ world socialist revolution. The anti­ Tues.: 5:00·9:00 p.m., Sat.: 11:00 a.m.·2:00 p.m. ted) to downplay Opposition support, revolutionary consequences of this na­ 161 W. Harrison St., 10th Floor Chicago, Illinois Phone: (312) 663-0715 particularly in urban proletarian centers. tionalist dogma would soon become In Moscow the Opposition carried a solid apparent in Britain and China. By 1932, .e.YorkCRy majority among military trainee and stu­ in a published discussion with an Amer­ Tues.: 6:30-9:00 p.m., Sat.: 1 :00-5:00 p.m. dent cells (which consisted largely of ican engineer. Stalin had explicitly repu­ 41 Warren St. (one block below Chambers St. near Church St.) demobilized veterans of the Civil War), diated any notion of seeking to "com­ New York, NY Phone: (212) 267·1025 a third of all military cells and, at least munize the world," saying "that Trotsky initially, a majority of workers' cells, believed in universal communism while 59

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;.1 .... A.' M~'~d~d~;i no Armed workers militias In Shanghai, 1927 (left). Stalin's class-collaborationist policy of subordinating Chinese CP to Chiang Kal-shek's Kuomintang led to mass slaughter of Communist workers. he [Stalin] wanted to confine his efforts In China, Stalin ordered the CP to The Prophet Unarmed-Trotsky: 1921- to his own country." subordinate itself to the bourgeois­ 1929). Sentiment for Trotsky likewise Following its defeat in 1924, the Left nationalist Kuomintang of Chiang Kai­ permeated the GPU and other intelli­ Opposition looked toward revolutionary shek, the most catastrophic expression gence services (see, for example, Eliza­ developments which would revive the of the two-class "worker-peasant party" beth· Poretsky,. Our Own People). A demoralized Soviet proletariat and impel policy, which the Stalinists justified by decade later Stalin took his revenge its most class-conscious elements-who falsely appealing to Lenin's pre-19J7 by decapitating the Red Army's gen­ were still to be found in the ranks of the formula of the "democratic dictatorship eral staff, beginning with Marshal party-to sweep away the Stalin faction. of the proletariat and peasantry." The CI Tukhachevsky. In late 1925, the increasingly onerous insisted that the main task in China was By the time the Sixth Comintern' Con­ burden on the proletariat of Stalin­ "the further development of the Kuomin­ gress convened in 1928, the leadership Bukharin's pro-kulak policy led to a split tang" (Communist International, March which had led the CI and its sections in by Zinoviev and Kamenev, who con­ 1927), even as the Kuomintang was Lenin's time had long since been trolled the Leningrad and Moscow party moving to bloodily suppress the Shang­ removed and repl,aced. Yet even con­ organizations. Trotsky described Zinov­ hai workers insurrection which began in firmed Stalinists like Togliatti and Tho­ iev's Leningrad Opposition as a "bureau­ March 1927. Trotsky savagely indicted rez were affected by Trotsky's '~Critique cratically distorted expression of the po­ Stalin for his criminal policies: of the Draft Program" and its devastating litical anxiety felt by the most advanced "The official subordination of the Com­ polemic against "socialism in one.coun­ section of the proletariat over the course munist Party to the bourgeois leadership, try." More s,ignificantly, delegate James of our economic development as a whole and the official prohibition of forming P. Cannon, ·a·leading oadre·of the Amer.­ and over the fate of the dictatorship of soviets (Stalin and Bukharin taught that ican Communist Party who had worked the Kuomintang 'took the place' of sovi­ the proletariat" ("A 'Bloc' with Zinoviev ets), was a grosser and more glaring for a period of time in Moscow in Lenin [For a Diary]," December 1925). betrayal of Marxism than all the deeds and Trotsky'S Comintem, was won over Zinoviev embraced Trotsky's call for of the Mensheviks in the years to the Opposition on the basis of Trot­ planned industrialization and came out 1905-1917." sky's critique. Cannon, in turn, won to against "socialism in one country." But -The Permanent Trotskiyism much of i the pre"existing by the time the United Opposition came Revolution (1929) "Cannon faction" of the American .cp, together in the spring of 1926, Stalin had The defeat of the Chinese Revolution providing the nucleus for what was 00 already destroyed Zinoviev's power base again dashed the expectations of the become the strongest section oflhe Inter~ in Leningrad. In late 1927, the United most advanced Soviet workers, reinforc­ national Left Opposition and, later, the Opposition fell apart when the Zinoviev ing defeatism and passivity. But Trot­ Fourth International. group capitulated in the face of threats sky's consistent, repeated and vindicated In 1928, in the face of a virtual kulak of expulsion. warnings did not fall on deaf ears. Along­ insurrection, a paniCked Stalin broke Consonant with its conciliation of side the growing number of careerists, with Bukharin and made a left turn on Nepmen and kulaks at home, the Stalin­ opportunists and outright criminal ele­ economic policy, implementing in' his Bukharin leadership sought to nuzzle up ments in the CPSU, there remained a own brutal way significant 3'»pec.ts·of to the social democracy in West Europe, kernel of subjective communists who Trotsky's economic program, dramati-' epitomized by the Anglo-Russian Trade feared where Stalin was leading them cally vindicating Trotsky's five-year-' Union Committee. When the British La­ and saw in Trotsky's struggle a fight long struggle against the rightist course. bour bureaucracy betrayed the 1926 Gen­ against the corruption of the revolu­ But this also caused turmoil in the Op­ eral Strike, using its "anti-imperialist" tion. In 1928, a group of Red Army position's ranks. Prominent Opposition­ bloc with the Soviet trade unions to cover leaders, including Muralov, Putna and ists like Pyatakov, Preobrazhensky and its left flank. Trotsky demanded an im­ Yakir, addressed a secret statement to Radek capitulated, arguing that the Sta­ mediate break with the strikebreakers. the Politburo expressing solidarity with lin faction had ·now adopted their pro­ Stalin and Bukharin refused. the Left Opposition (Isaac Deutscher, gram. Pyatakov and Preobrazhensky had 80

always been concerned primarily with more undifferentiated reactionary force to make immediate preparations for the question of socialist industrialization, but aimed to strangle the entire labor the emigration of some of its leading the latter even accepting the possibility movement: cadre and for the publication of an of building socialism in a single country. "Fascism is not merely a system of repri­ organ abroad. In Germany, they illegally But, as Trotsky later noted, the corner­ sals, of brutal force, and of police terror. printed a widely distributed appeal "To stone of the Left Opposition's struggle Fascism is a particular governmental sys­ All Members of the Communist Party tem based on the uprooting of all ele­ was the perspective of world socialist ments of proletarian democracy within of Germany, to All Social Democratic revolution: ' bourgeois society. The task of fascism Workers, to the Entire Proletariat of Ger­ "The Left Opposition began with the lies not only in destroying the Commu­ many," which ended in the call, "Smash struggle for the industrialization and nist vanguard .... It is also necessary to fascism! Long live the joint action of the agrarian collectivization of the Soviet smash all independent and voluntary proletarian front! Long live the victory Union. This fight it won in a certain organizations, to demolish all the defen­ sense, namely, in that, beginning with sive bulwarks of the proletariat, and to . of the .proletariat!" 1928, the whole policy of the Soviet gov­ uproot whatever has been achieved dur­ Many in the Opposition had antici­ ernment represents a bureaucratically ing three-quarters of a century by the pated that some kind of civil war would distorted application of the principles of Social Democracy and the trade unions." follow Hitler's appointment as chancel­ the Left Opposition. Without this the - "What Next?" (January (932) Soviet Union would not be in existence lor on January 30. Addressing the dis­ any longer. But the economic questions "What Next?" was distributed in the tens orientation in the ILO's ranks, Trotsky of the USSR formed only one part, and of thousands, evidencing widespread wrote: a subordinate one at that, of our program, receptivity to Trotsky's call for a, united "The complete absence of resistance on whose center, of gravity rested in the front of the Communist and Social the part of the German workers has pro­ sphere of international revolution." vokedcertain troubles within our own -"The Meaning of Rakovsky's Democratic workers organizations. In ranks. We expected that the onward Surrender" (March 1934) early 1932 the German Left Opposi­ march, of the fascist danger would sur­ tion, though extremely 'weak, initiated a mount not only the perfidious policy of Germany: The Decisive Test Workers Struggle Committee in Oranien­ the reformists but.also the ultimatist sab­ otage of the Stalinists. These hopes were Stalin's left turn against the kulaks and burg (near Berlin)-embracing the KPD, not confirmed. Were our expectations Nepmen was accompanied internation­ SPD, unions and unemployed commit­ false? This question cannot be put in such ally by the so-called "third period" pol­ tees-which led to the formation of a a formal manner. We were obliged to pro­ icy of sectarian opposition to the united workers defense squadron against the ceed from a course based upon resistance Nazi gangs. Trotsky also called on the and to do all in our power for its real­ front and to the official trade unions. ization. To acknowledge a priori the With the onset of the Great Depression Kremlin leaders to mobilize the Red impossibility of resistance would have in 1929, the Weimar Republic was Army on Germany's borders in the event meant not to push the proletariat forward thrown into severe crisis. Both the Nazis of a Nazi takeover. "A victory of fascism but to introduce a supplementary demor­ in Germany," he warned in November alizing element." and the Communists were gaining influ­ -"Germany and the USSR" ence rapidly, though the KPD's base of 1931, "would signify an inevitable war (March 1933) industrial workers plummeted as a result against the USSR." of mass layoffs and its abandonment of But Stalin did not fight in Ger­ The Fight for the the official trade unions in favor of "red many, nor did he want to fight in the Fourth International unions." Yet the workers were straining Soviet Union when Hitler invaded in Initially, Trotsky called only for a new against the passivity imposed by the June 1941 (as the memoirs of nu­ party in Germany, waiting to see whether Social Democratic tops in the face of the merous high-ranking Red Army offi­ sections of the CI would rebel against mortal fascist threat. The situation was cials attest). Behind the Stalinists' StaBn's catastrophic course. The Inter­ heading in the direction of a revolution­ pseudo-revolutionary bluster about national Pre-Conference had sent a tele­ ary clash between the proletariat and the "social-fascism" was a criminal passivity gram to the Comintern demanding the Nazi shock troops of German capitalism. rife with illusions in the strength of the immediate convocation of its Seventh But in place of a revolutionary policy, KPD's parliamentary support. KPD Congress, and full rights for participa­ the Stalinists substituted pseudo-leftist leader Remmele blustered in the Reichs­ tion by the Opposition, to discuss the adventur~m and sectarian posturing. tag, "Let Hitler take office-he will German situation and the threat posed Stalin dubbed the Social Democracy the soon go bankrupt, and then it will be to the USSR. But from within the CI "left wing of fascism," refusing to pro­ our day." Thalmann ridiculed Trotsky's there were not even demands for a crit­ pose joint action which would have urgent appeals for action, declaring ical discussion. It was clear that the exposed the SPD's treachery and mobi­ in September 1932: "Germany will of stranglehold of the bureaucracy over the lized its ranks in struggle. In 1931 the course not go fascist-our electoral CPSU and CI could no longer be dis­ KPD even joined with the Nazis in an victories are a guarantee of this." Nine lodged through factional struggle. This unsuccessful attempt to unseat the Social months later, Thalmann was sitting in had immediate ramifications for the fate Democratic PrUss ian state government Hitler's dungeons. of the Soviet Union itself. It was now throu,gh the "red referendum." Trotsky Hitler's appointment as dJancellor did clear that only 'a proletarian political rev­ denounced the Stalinist bureaucracy for not in itself signal the death knell olution could reverse the degeneration trying "to act against fascism with its for the German proletariat. The Interna­ which had progressively engulfed the own weapon,lborrowing the colors of its tional Left Opposition hoped and worked Soviet state since 1923-24. Trotsky out­ political palette, and trying to outshout for proletarian resistance to Hitler's lined this course in "The Class Nature it at the auction of patriotism" ("Against new government. The International Pre­ of the Soviet State" (October 1933): National Communism! [Lessons of the Conference of the Opposition, held in "In reality, the last congress of the Bol­ 'Red Referendum')," August 1931). Paris in early February 1933, voted to shevik Party took place at the beginning of 1923, the Twelfth Party Congress. All Time and again, Trotsky warned that levy a special assessment on each mem­ subsequent congresses were bureaucratic Stalin's strategy was a recipe for disas­ ber to further the struggle in Germany. parades. Today, even such congresses ter, that fascism was not simply one The German Opposition was instructed have been discarded. No normal 'consti-

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&_..__ , •. & .. __ -10"'-

Nazi stormtroopers march on KPD headquarters, Berlin, January 1933. In their fight for workers united front to crush fascist gangs, German Trotskyists In their newspaper . Permanente Revolution raised the call: "Protect and Defend the KPDI"

tutional' ways remain to remove the rul­ the Second International, in 1933 Trotsky Seeking a regroupment of revolution­ ing clique. The bureaucracy can be com­ began the arduous struggle of assembling ary forces, in August 1933 the ICL signed pelled to yield power into the hands of "The Declaration of Four" with. the Ger­ the proletarian vanguard only by force." the forces for a new international revo­ lutionary vanguard. Now calling itself man SAP (Socialist Workers Party) and Following Hitler's assumption of the International Communist League, the the Dutch OSP (Independent) Socialist power, the Comintern, seized with panic, Left Opposition sought every opportu­ Party) and RSP (Revolutionary Socialist dropped all mention of "social-fascism" nity to break out of isolation and find Party) of Sneevliet, centrist formations and rapidly embarked on the all­ new allies, even temporary ones, so that which stood halfway between the Second embracing class collaboration of the the first steps co'uld be taken toward the and Third Internationals but were moving "people's front against fascism," which building of a new International. There left under the impact of the German deba­ was codified at its Seventh Congress in was some resistance to this course even cle. The discredited parties of the Second 1935. The CI had been transformed into within the ICL. Arguments were raised International were also being reinvigo­ an instrument for the Kremlin's diplo­ that the call for a Fourth International rated, as working-class militants and matic maneuvers, an agency for shack­ was "premature," or misplaced in a youth disillusioned with the Comintern ling the international proletariat to its period of proletarian. defeats. Trotsky joined the social-democratic parties. In imperialist rulers. In the name of the replied: "The proletariat has need of an February 1934, an international you,th popular front, French CP leader Thorez International at all times and under all conference in Belgium voted to work broke a general strike in 1936. In Spain, conditions. If there is no Comintern for the creation of a new International. the Comintern became a direct agent of today, we must say so openly and im­ In France, Belgium, Switzerland· and bourgeois counterrevolution. Even as mediately start the preparation for a new Spain, sections of the Socialist Youth they cynically appealed to anti-fascist International" ("Success or Failure?", became sympathetic to Trotsky'S ideas-. sentiment to mobilize international bri­ September 1933). the Spanish youth explicitly appealed to gades, the Stalinists sabotaged the work­ Trotsky also waged repeated struggles the Trotskyists to join their party in order ers revolution which was the only way against those who wanted to wash their to help make it Bolshevik. to crush the Francoists, instead declaring hands of the Soviet.degenerated workers In response to these developments the their commitment to defense of bour­ state and who argued that the Stalinist ICL adopted the tactic of the "French geois property against the insurgent bureaucracy represented a new class of tum," temporary entries into the SPs Spanish proletariat, while slaughtering exploiters, variously described as "state­ aimed at winning to Trotskyism sections. the most revolutionary-minded workers capitalist" and, later, "bureaucratic­ of the burgeoning left wings. The su.ccess on behalf of the "democratic" imperial­ collectivist." Against them, Trotsky in­ of these en.tries varied from country to ists. In 1935 Trotsky wrote, "Stalin Has sisted that it remained the task of the country, with the American Trotskyists: Signed the Death Certificate of the Third international proletariat .to uncondition­ recruiting a sizable enough layer of International," calling the Seventh Con­ ally defend the Soviet Union against working-class militants and youth to gress later that year the "Liquidation imperialism and counterrevolution. The found the Socialist Workers Party in 1938 Congress." It was indeed. In 1943, in bureaucracy was not a new social class with over 2,000 members. In Spain, order to appease his wartime imperialist but a fragile, contradictory parasitic where an entry appeared most fruitful allies, Stalin formally liquidated the CI caste which derived its privileges from, and could have had the most immediate with the stroke of a pen .. and thus was at times forced to defend, revolutionary repercussions, Andre Nin 's As Lenin had done following the by its own bureaucratic means, the social Communist Left refused to carry. out the 4 August 1914 collapse of the SPD and foundations of the workers state. tactic, instead breaking with Trotsky to 62

of World War II, as its most talented European cadre were decimated by the combined onslaught of fascist and Sta­ linist repression. Legacy of Stalinism In his 1987 speech on the 70th anni­ versary of the October Revolution, Gor­ bachev said "the Party's leading nucleus headed by Joseph Stalin }fad safeguarded Leninism in an ideological struggle" against Trotsky, who "negated the pos­ sibility of building socialism in condi­ tions of capitalist encirclement." The "ideological struggle" which Gorbachev hailed was a campaign of harassment, repression and terror that ended in the blood-drenched dungeons of the Lubian­ ka and the desolate concentration camps in Vorkuta. From the first expulsions and arrests of Oppositionists in 1927 to the first execution two years later, when GPU official Jacob Blumkin was shot for hav­ ing had contact with Trotsky in Prinkipo, Turkey, the anti-Bolshevik terror mush­ roomed into the horrendous blood purges surrounding the Moscow show trials. Blumkin was not the last GPU cadre to. be shot for supporting the Left Oppo­ sition; in 1937, Ignace Reiss was assas­ sinated after declaring for the Fourth International. Notwithstanding the bour­ geois homHy that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" to the contrary, it took repeated purges to turn ,the GPU into a pliant instrument of Stalin's anti-Bolshevik terror. The GPU SWP memorial meettngfor Leon Trotsky, New York, 28 August 1940. ." agents who were sent to drag Trotsky , , off to Alma Ata in 1928 expressed shame pursue an unprincipled fusion out of terhher 1938. But with the impending and embarrassment. Even in the prison which came the centrist POUM. The threat of imperialist war and the drying camps in the early '30s, the GPU treated signifi'cance of this' betrayal for the fate up of the various centrist currents communist oppositionists with some of the Spanish:ctvil Wilr can be gleaned following the advent of popular-front measure of respect. In his autobiograph­ from the fact 'that the Spanish CP at governments ·in France and Spain, the ical The Russian Enigma (1940), Ante the time consisted of several hundred objective need for the foundation of a CiJiga recalled how he and his .comrades members. With an infusion of thousands new International permitted no' further in prison were allowed to carryon organ­ of revolutionary-minded workers and delay. Declaring that "The historical cri­ ized political discussions, and noted: YOllth from the SP, the Spanish Trotsky­ sis of mankind is reduced to the crisis "The terms 'political repression,' 'polit­ ists would have been well-placed to of the· revolutionary leadership," the ical' prisoners or exiles are, in the combat Stalin's sabotage of the Spanish basic programmatic document adopted at U.S.S.R., applied only to socialists, anar­ Revolution. the founding conference, The Death chists and Opposition Communists. Trdtskyism also found an echo in colo­ Agonyo/Capitalism and the Tasks o/the They alone are entitled to the special nial and semicolonial countries like Viet- . Fourth International (Transitional Pro­ treatment of political prisoners." nam, Ceylon arid Bolivia, where the gram) noted: By the early 1930s, there were some Stalinist' policy of the "people's front" "The definite passing over of the Com~' one thousand Oppositionists in the Vor­ meant' support to continued imperialist intern to the side of the bourgeois order, kuta prison camp alone, and thousands its cynically counterrevolutionary role subjugation.·In 1945, the Vietnamese throughout the world, particularly in mQre in other camps. As they were later Trotskyists led a mass anti-imperialist Spain, France, the United States and marc/led off to be shot and thrown into in'surrection of the Saigon proletariat other 'democratic' countries, created ex­ unmarked mass graves in the Vorkuta as Ho Chi Minh was welcoming the ceptional supplementary difficulties for wastes, the Trotskyists defiantly sang the the world proletariat. Under the banner troops of British and French "demo­ of the October Revolution, the concilia­ lnternationale. Finally, in August 1940, cratic" colonialism. tory politics practiced by the 'People's Stalinist agent Ramon Mercader tracked 'Nonetheless, with the exception of the Front' dooms the working class to impo- down and assassinated Trotsky himself U:S~ SWP, the sections of the Fourth . tence 'and clears the road for fascism." in his .home in Coyoacan" Mexico. '. International consisted of dozens'or hun­ Weak in· numbers, the .. Fourth Interna­ Ultimately it was not enough for St3Jin dreds"at the 'time of its founding in Sep:' tional was soon thrust into the maelstrom to smash and isolate his political oppo-

-~ .... ______11,_. __ ,____ ••• , ___ ,1_.,1 •• _.,.,111111 ••••,11,. __,. ______• ______... ,____ : _III 63 nents to secure the rule of the conserva­ observed that "all shades of political the Soviet regime and guarantee its tive bureaucratic caste. He had to destroy thought are to be found among the' further development toward socialism. There is but one party capable of leading, the Stalin faction itself, including assas­ bureaucracy," from Bolshevism to fas­ the Soviet masses to insurrection-the sinating Leningrad party chief Sergei cism-in itself evidence that the CPSU party of the Fourth International!" Kirov, since many of its leading mem­ had ceased 10 be a political party in any - Transitional Program bers were opposed to shooting Commu­ sense. This was empirically shown in Stalinism corrupted or crushed the nist opponents of their faction. 1937 when three leading Soviet officials communist aspirations of one generation By the mid-'30s, all the leading per­ broke with the Stalin regime: GPU agent after another, extirpating the internation­ sonalities in Stalin's bureaucracy had, Ignace Reiss joined the cause of the alism which had animated the Russian with few exceptions, been arrayed Fourth International (and was,soon assas­ Revolution. But where the tentacles of against the Bolsheviks in 1917 (Vyshin­ sinated); Butenko, a Soviet diplomat in Stalin's murder machine could not reach, sky had signed the order for Lenin's Italy, went over to fascism; and Walter there remained cadre who continued to arrest!). A t least since 1933 on, the CPSU Krivitsky, also a GPU agent, defected to fight for the authentic Bolshevism of was basically a gang for skimming off American bourgeois democracy. Lenin and Trotsky. James P. Cannon's the social surplus generated by the In the face of a political revolution, struggle for Trotskyism, and his direct planned, collectivized economy. In The this bureaucratic caste would shatter, experience working in the Communist Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky described Trotsky noted, with one wing going over International of Lenin and Trotsky, pro­ the "automobile-harem factor," as the to the counterrevolution and another to, vided much of the slender thread of rev­ heiresses of the former nobility flocked the insurgent proletariatAn any case, only olutionary continuity which is today to marry into the new Stalinist aristoc­ the ouster of the bureaucracy and a return embodied in the International Commu­ racy. While the working class sweated to the soviet democracy instituted by the nist League (Fourth Internationalist). to fulfill the five-year plans, rightfully Bolshevik Revolution could guarantee Our tendency arose out of a struggle taking pride in the economic achieve­ the further advance to socialism: against the revisionism of Michel Pablo, ments of their workers state, "the whole "The bureaucracy replaced the soviets as which abandoned the fight for an ,inde­ class organs with the fiction of universal advance in social well-being, municipal pendent proletarian revolutionary van­ utilities, comfort, culture. art, still serves electoral rights-in the style of Hitler­ Goebbels. It is necessary to return to the guard and in 1951-53 destroyed the chiefly. ifnot exclusively, this upper priv­ soviets not only their free democratic Fourth International and was to engulf ileged stratum." form but also their class content. As once Cannon's SWP a decade later. We can the bourgeoisie and kulaks were not per­ But because these privileges derived rightly echo Cannon's words in 1939: from its position atop the workers state, mitted to enter the soviets, so now it is lIel'essal'l' to dril'e the hureaucracy alld "We are, in facl, the party of the Russian the bureaucracy was not a new social the lIew aristocracy out of the sOI,irts .... revolution. We have been the ppple, and class but a par;sitic caste which embod­ "Only the victorious revolutionary upris­ the only people, who have had,the Rus­ ied enormous contradictions. Trotsky ing of the oppressed masses can revive sian revolution in their program and in their blood." One week after Hitler took power in 1933, Trotsky had warned that the Sta­ linists' continued refusal to organize pro­ James P. Cannon and the Early Years letarian resistance to Hitler "will be noth­ ing less than a surrender to fascism, an of American Communism historic crime tantamount to the liquida­ tion of the party and of the Communist Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-1928 International. Should such a disaster hap­ --- The book includes: '--- pen, the working class will have to make its way towards a Fourth International; James P. Cannon • Extensively documented and it will have to make it through moun­ and the Early Years introduction tains of corpses and years of unbearable • Explanatory footnotes for sufferings and calamities" (quoted in of American Cannon's text Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast-Trot­ Communism .16 pages of rare historical sky: 1929-1940). Unfortunately, that has photographs proved to be the case. More than ever, the fate of the multinational peoples of • Glossary of names and terms the ex-USSR and all humanity hinges with over 200 entries on the reforging of an authentically • Bibliography of Cannon's works, Leninist-Trotskyist Fourth International. 1912-1928 We wish to cite two invaluahle sources • Index for hackground to this article and for a hroader description of the degenera­ 624 pages, smyth-sewn binding tion of the CPSU. One is Isaac Deutsch­ er's three-volume hiography of Trotsky: Paperhack $14.50 ISBN 0-9633828-1-0 New York State residents add 8.25% sales tax. The Prophet Armed-Trotsky: 1879- Shipping and handling: $3.50 1921 (/954), The Prophet Unarmed­ Trotsky: 1921-1929 (/959) and The Order from/make checks payable to: Prophet Outcast-Trotsky: 1929-1940 Spartacist PubUsbing Company, Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 (/963), The second is E.H. Carr's multi­ volume series, A History of Soviet Russia (1950-78) .• translated from Russian-language SJ!.artacist Bulletin No.4, Spring 1993

Reforge the Fourth Inter~ational! Stalin Drowned the Communist Party of Lenin and Trotsky in Blood

Y. Shtelnberg The party of October was revolutionary and Internationalist: Lenin and Trotsky (center) with delegates to the First Congress of the Communist International, Moscow, 1919.

January 1993 marked 60 years since German Social Democrats, beholden to Opposition gavc thc alarm: "the leader­ Hitler's rise to power, which was the the capitalist state, refused to mobilize ship of the Com intern is driving the Ger­ prelude to the 1941 Nazi invasion of the the working class to stop Hitler from man proletariat toward an enormous Ij, Soviet Union and the slaughter of well coming to power because proletarian catastrophe, the e"ence of which is a over 20 million Soviet citizens, and mil­ struggle would endanger the Weimar panicky capitulation hefore fascism!" In " lions more Jews, Gypsies and others. The Republic. The German Communist Party the aftermath, Trohky drove home that " (KPD) abetted this suicidal policy by its this world-historic defeat of the prole­ 3 5 criminal passivity. And Stalin himself tariat signaled that the Communist Inter­ bore direct responsibility for this unpar­ national (el) and the Communist Party If II alleled catastrophe, by rejecting outright of the Soviet Union (CPSU), its control­ the possibility of joint struggle against ling center, wen: dead for the cause of the Nazis by the Communist and Social revolution. "Yet the proletarian party is Democratic workers organizations. indispensahle if the Soviet state is not o 7447081034 Repeatedly, Leon Trotsky and the Left continued on page 55

.~' " I