Who lost the cold war? This question has been raised on numerous occasions since the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the fall of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe.

"What was defeated in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was Stalinism, not imperialism," writes David Frankel in a letter. The Militant "gives the impression that the struggle over property relations in Eastern Europe (and in the Asian workers states and Cuba as well) has already been decided" when it states that Washington lost the cold war, Frankel says.

The Militant has never said this question has been settled - that's exactly the point. The fact remains that the imperialists haven't yet succeeded in their strategic goal of overturning the workers state and restoring capitalist property relations in a single one of these countries.

"Cold war" was the term used to describe the strategic military course forced on U.S. imperialism and its allies by the international balance of class forces following World War II. Facing a rise in anticolonial struggles and the refusal of U.S. troops in 1945-46 to continue fighting - particularly against the revolutionary forces in China - Washington was limited to using its military power to attempt to contain extensions of the revolutionary overturns of capitalist property relations and blows against imperialist domination.

Imperialism was forced to rely on pressuring the bureaucratic castes in the Soviet Union and Eastern European workers states to police the working class there and keep it isolated from the struggles of workers and peasants around the world.

From Washington's viewpoint, this strategy would prepare the way for direct military aggression, after the working class was sufficiently weakened by Stalinist demoralization. But that didn't happen. Instead, the working class proved stronger than the Stalinist apparatuses, which came crashing down starting in 1989.

In early February, for example, almost half a million miners went on strike in Russia to demand back wages; they were joined by nearly one million Ukrainian miners. Working people in Germany - east and west - continue to resist the austerity measures the government there seeks to impose, and the ruling capitalist class in Bonn is choking on its unsuccessful efforts to force workers in eastern Germany to accept capitalist social relations. In May some 10,000 workers at an electronics factory in Serbia went on strike demanding back wages. This is evidence that the working class in Eastern Europe and Russia has not been defeated.

Stalinism was not defeated but considerably weakened. The regimes that were overthrown have not been replaced by anything progressive, as a glance at the various presidential candidates in Russia or the warring gangs led by different wings of the former ruling bureaucracy in Yugoslavia will tell you.

The imperialists tried to wait out the carnage in Yugoslavia, hoping it would weaken the workers state sufficiently for them to walk in and restore capitalism. But Washington and its rivals in Bonn, Paris, and London have a problem. Working people have not been crushed in Yugoslavia; instead, they continue to seek ways to struggle to end the bloody slaughter and improve their living and working conditions. Imperialism is forced to send its troops in preparation for directly taking on and trying to break the working class there.

In this process, struggles by working people in the Eastern and Central European workers states and in capitalist Europe will more and more influence each other. Workers will be more open to seeing their fight as a struggle against the dehumanizing system of exploitation and imperialist oppression by the capitalist classes and its reflections through various transmission belts, whether Social Democratic, Stalinist, or other petty-bourgeois misleaderships.

Frankel states, "One immediate result of the downfall of Stalinism has been to allow the imperialists a freer hand in military moves," as if Stalinism has ever halted their war moves around the world.

In a 1993 interview with the Mexican daily El Sol de México, Cuba's minister of the armed forces, Raúl Castro, explained how he went to Moscow in the early 1980s seeking support against Washington's renewed war threats. Castro said the Soviet leader he spoke with replied, "We cannot fight in Cuba because you are 11,000 kilometers away from us. Do you think we're going to go all that way to stick our necks out for you?"

But the collapse of the Stalinist regimes and apparatuses removed the biggest obstacle to forging the kind of communist leadership that is necessary for any advances in the struggle for national liberation and socialism. Political space exists to develop revolutionary leadership in all the workers states. Young fighters, whether in eastern Germany, Chechnya, or Yugoslavia, are in a better position today to find out the truth about the Cuban revolution and will be attracted to its shining example. That's why the socialist course led by the revolutionary leadership in Cuba remains the greatest proof that imperialism lost the cold war.

- Maurice Williams  
 
 
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