__Australasian ____________ Number 147 Summer 1992/1993 50 cents Stalinism -Gravedigger of the Revolution How the Soviet Workers State Was Str.angled November 7 marked the 75th anni­ The ascendancy of Yeltsin and state power has been fractured, the versary of the Bolshevik Revolution. But capitalist-restorationist forces backing Communist Party-its bureaucratic core­ shattered and banned from the KGB and the workers state erected by the him was a pivotal event in determining armed forces, the multinational union is Bolshevik power, far and away the the fate of the 'Soviet Union, but it was ripping apart as one republic after another greatest conquest of the international not conclusive. In our August 1991 proclaims secession. proletariat and a momentous leap article, "Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin­ "But while Yeltsin & Co. now see a clear forward for humanity, did not survive Bush Counterrevolution!", which was field to push through a forced-draft reintroduction of capitalism, the outcome is its 75th year. The period of open immediately translated into Russian and not yet definitively decided .... OppOSition counterrevolution ushered in by Boris distributed in over 100,000 copies from the factories against the ravages of Yeltsin's pro-imperialist countercoup in throughout the Soviet Union, we wrote capitalist assault could ... prevent the rapid August 1991 has, in the absence of mass that workers mobilizations should have consolidation of counterrevolution." -Workers Vanguard [WV] No 533, working-class resistance, culminated in cleaned out the counterrevolutionary 30 August 1991 the creation of a bourgeois state, rabble on Yeltsin's barricades, thus however fragile and reversible. The task opening the road to proletarian political In the interim there was no decisive facing the Soviet proletariat today is revolution. As a result of Yeltsin's action to stop that consolidation. Pol­ socialist revolution to restore proletarian victory: itically atomized by nearly 70 years of power and reforge the Soviet Union on "The first workers state in history, sapped Stalinist usurpation of political life, para­ the foundation of Lenin and Trotsky's and undermined by decades of Stalinist lyzed by the CIA-supported pro-Yeltsin Bolshevik internationalism. bureaucratic misrule, lies in tatters. The "free trade unions" and the virulent Special Supplement, November 27 Registered by Australia Post-Publication No. NBF0710 Workers State ~::~b CnaprBKoBlI9B [SPARTACJST] 06alitcponlBWMAcA CT81lMlilit3Nt . Strangled ... ·OTkpblBaeT WIl103bl AIlA (continued from page 1) k8nMTallMc"wieckoM peCT8BpaqMM. COBBTelHB paOO'HB' to desperation, or even without them, ,QORoi BRhqHHCIO-OYIUBBCIYIO the nascent bourgeois forces will move IOHTPPBBORlOqHIO , to impose heavy-handed order through 17-,.cr.!.,r ..... p_C'~('_ .•• 110<... _. __ ,...... __ • ·-.._·~~.==.~"':: ... '1........ ,.._D __ .. a "strong state." The recent vicious e.. ..... _ ... r.,.,. __•• &r_.~ ::=..~E.E..~=- E..,. ..... onp.un~· ___r_r II...". - ... _ .._Mp ...... _. c-- .... __ ,.,...... •• __ ......-' .... pMo ""'.,. ... o.'"IIIIpo.a:" '"_ no,- • -'::':"~=":'rr.::.. crackdown, using Russian OMON riot ~.~. =':.. cru_",,-_._.UHy..... ...... ir-_---'_11:,.0... ••..., .... ___ .. __ _ _ --r~ ......._-- "" __.... ~_ --- =---..0.-. __ ___ police, on a strike by air traffic ~-:.:.~:-::...,-=-~ PO_, ""!::='~=.":.= controllers foreshadows the would-be .... ""--... .... ~.,.......,. _--""""',.- r... _ .... _"-<-.,..---., ""-- exploiters' determination to repress any =::~==a;.=.- "---______ Jl... «v working-class resistance. The rising racist ............~~.:...-:.=- O'......... ...................... hysteria against people from Central ............--_---._t"',._ _._"" ....................- .. ~ Asia and the Caucasus in major Russian ::!""".:=.";::~~=;,:::=== ==:~~"':- cities creates the climate for pogroms. ~~';::"':::~ ----- .. --.._--------.._ ....to With ethnic conflicts brewing on a dozen .............;:,:.=.:.:-;;:~=-..:..~~ .. =.::::,<---,,"-__ ._-.-- fronts on the periphery of the Russian Spartacist '-',.. .. .. ...-.."....01__ .......... _,._ ....-'--r_~o._---- republic, from the Baltics to Abkhazia in August 1991: Plotters of "perestroika coup" kept tanks Idling in Red Square Georgia and the Transdniester in Mol­ Instead of sending them against counterrevolutionary HQ at Veltsln's White dova to the longstanding nationalist civil House. ICL statement (right) declared: "Soviet Workers: Defeat Veltsln­ war between Armenians and Azerbaijanis Bush Counterrevolution I" in the Caucasus, the possibility of a (Moscow Times) or 20,000 percent Marx, Engels and Lenin are being destroyed through his perestroika "market re­ Yugoslav-style fratricidal bloodbath is all (Commersant). In the month of October in a pure ideological anti-communist frenzy". forms" and acquiescence to capitalist too real. -"For the Communism of restoration throughout East Europe, alone, the ruble fell by half its value. Lenin and Trotsky" The Soviet workers state-which once Gorbachev opened wide the floodgates Since January the price of bread has The conference drew a balance sheet served as a beacon for the exploited and climbed on the order of a hundredfold. to a direct counterrevolutionary on­ oppressed of this globe, which destroyed on these events and unanimously en­ As the economy decomposes, the bulk dorsed a 26 September document which slaught by Yeltsin & Co. Hitler's Holocaust machine, which for The bourgeoisie and the Stalinists of the population teeters on the brink of said: "The August 1991 events ('coup' decades kept U.S. imperialism from alike have long sought to identify outright starvation. Any spark could set and 'countercoup') appear to have been turning its nuclear arsenal on the world's off the tinderbox on which Yeltsin and Lenin's October with Stalin's conserva­ semicolonial peoples-is dead. But the decisive in the direction of development his cohorts sit. in the SU, but only those who are under tive bureaucratic rule. But nationalist class struggle is not. The nascent bour­ Stalinism is the antithesis of Leninist We Trotskyists of the International the sway of capitalist ideology or its geois states in Russia, the Ukraine and internationalism. The Soviet degenerated Communist League, who have fought material perquisites would have been elsewhere are fragile, isolated and intern­ workers state (and the deformed workers tooth and nail against ascendant count- hasty to draw this conclusion at that ally splintered. They do not rest on the states which later arose on the Stalinist solid foundation of a cohered capitalist errevolution, say: Stalinism is dead, but time." It resolved "to note and draw model) was a historic anomaly, resulting communism lives-in the class struggle conclusions from the position that the class. The new entrepreneurs consist of from the isolation of economically of the world proletariat and in the prog- degenerated workers state of Stalin and little more than petty speculators and backward Russia and the failure of pro­ ram of the revolutionary vanguard. The his heirs has been destroyed." mafia gangs, while sections of the old letarian revolution to spread to the ad­ industrial hierarchy of factory managers internationalist program through which In the founding program of the vanced imperialist countries. Stalinism the Soviet Union was created has been Fourth International, written on the eve are in the process of imposing their represented a roadblock to progress weight. The armed forces are bitter and carried forward under the banner of the of World War II, Leon Trotsky wrote: toward socialism. As Trotsky wrote in . Fourth International. It is the Trotsky- "The historical crisis of mankind is re- demoralized. "Not a Workers' and Not a Bourgeois The only thing which is certain in ists uniquely who warned that the con- duced to the crisis of the revolutionary State?" (November 1937): tinued stranglehold of the Stalinist leadership." This crisis of proletarian the ex-USSR today is increasing uncer­ "That which was a 'bureaucratic deform­ tainty and instability. On the eve of the bureaucracy over the Soviet workers leadership is no less acute today. To the ation' is at the present moment preparing to December 1 session of the Congress of state would lead to the destruction of beleaguered multinational proletariat in devour the workers' state, without leaving People's Deputies, Moscow is awash October, who fought for unconditional: the ex-USSR and socialist-minded el­ any remains, and on the ruins of national­ with rumors of coups, countercoups and military defense of the Soviet Union ements in the army and intelligentsia, we ized property to spawn a new propertied against in;tperialism .aBc!. -counter--:.-··jay: the key task facing you isk).oohere class. Such a ~ibility has drawn extremely ~creeping coups." Mea-nwhile, Yeltsin is near." engaged in furious negotiations with revolution, and called on the Soviet a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party, While the Stalinist regime was able to Arkady VOlsky, head of the powerful proletariat to sweep away the Stalinist forged in struggle around the inter- prolong its existence as a result of the industrialists' party, who is in league excrescence through political revolution· nationalist program which led your fore- heroic victory of the Soviet masses over with the militarist Russian vice president while there was still time. bears to victory in 1917. the Nazi invasion in World War II, Aleksandr Rutskoi. The volatility of the The "Rus.sian