Vol. 79/No. 6      February 23, 2015

In a Dec. 23 article titled “A Season’s Reflections on Socialism,” Sam Webb, who served as national chairman of the CPUSA from 2000 to 2014, said that it’s not enough to blame the “unexpected implosion of the Soviet Union” on its then-President Mikhail Gorbachev, who headed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

“In the name of building socialism in one country … Stalin and his acolytes committed crimes on a vast scale,” Webb admits. “The command-style, undemocratic structures of political and economic governance were deeply rooted and persisted long after Stalin’s death” and “by the 1980s stagnation, exhaustion and cynicism came to define the society.”

Rick Nagin, Ohio correspondent for the People’s World, wrote a response titled, “Socialist-Minded People Still Need to Discuss Implosion of Soviet Socialism.” He argued against minimizing the role of Gorbachev or of Boris Yeltsin, who he says “led a core of corrupted officials of the CPSU to privatize the economy and impose capitalism.” Yeltsin served as president of Russia from 1991 to 1999. There was “no evidence of any deep disaffection among the masses of the Soviet people,” Nagin claims. “The destruction of the Soviet Union was primarily the handiwork of opportunist and corrupt top-level forces hostile to socialism.”

Norman Markowitz, a contributing editor of the CP magazine Political Affairs, agreed with Nagin, saying you can’t blame “the Stalin leadership for events that took place nearly four decades after Stalin’s death.”

Emile Schepers, a leader of the CP’s work in solidarity with Cuba, stated that more study is needed to analyze what happened, which is challenging because “we don’t have easy access to information available in Russian,” nor access to Soviet archives.

This isn’t a new question, and there’s plenty of information available for working people to study in English — and many other languages — in the writings of V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky and documents of the Socialist Workers Party.

The October 1917 Russian Revolution, led by the Bolshevik Party, brought the workers and peasants of the former czarist empire to power, opening the door to the world’s first socialist revolution. The toilers immediately confronted nearly three years of civil war with the landlord and capitalist former rulers and an invasion by 14 imperialist powers, which devastated the economy and took the lives of many of the most conscious worker-Bolsheviks.

Lenin, the central leader of the Bolshevik Party, led a fight to maintain a revolutionary working-class course in the face of these pressures, including on such key questions as the alliance of workers and peasants, and the fight for a genuinely voluntary union of soviet republics, respecting self-determination for oppressed nations in Ukraine, Georgia and elsewhere. This is documented in Lenin’s Final Fight: Speeches and Writings, 1922-23.

Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Trotsky continued this struggle. But by the early 1930s a political counterrevolution was consolidated by the Stalin-led bureaucracy. What happened under Stalin and his successors were not “mistakes,” but the opposite of communism. All political debate was stifled and the working class was driven out of politics through brutal, police-state methods. Thousands of party leaders and other revolutionaries were framed up, sent to the Gulag, or murdered, including Trotsky. Over decades, communist continuity was broken. The “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” was transformed back into the prison house of nations inherited from czarism and imperialism.

This counterrevolutionary cancer ate away at the possibility of a political revolution to reestablish workers and farmers power and the revolutionary policies of Lenin. That made inevitable the implosion of the Soviet Union. The new capitalist classes that have consolidated in Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics largely came out of layers of the ruling bureaucracy that were in the best position to seize control of former state enterprises and resources.

And its crumbling was hastened by new waves of ferment by miners and other workers and battles for independence in Ukraine and elsewhere, boding well, over time, for the rebirth of the revolutionary movement.

Consequences of fall of USSR
Nagin’s article concludes that “the destruction of the USSR has been an unmitigated disaster for humanity.”

But the real blows to the working class took place decades before. From the 1930s on the Communist parties that looked to Moscow subordinated the workers’ movement and national liberation struggles to the diplomatic interests of the Soviet bureaucracy and the privileged social layer it rested on — the opposite of the internationalist tradition of the Bolsheviks, and that the Cuban Revolution today has exemplified.

The collapse of the USSR opened the possibility for workers there to once again be part of politics and link up with others fighting the bosses across the globe. This is a step forward, not back.

One of the best explanations of this process, and of its consequences for the toilers worldwide, is “U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War,” a resolution adopted by the Socialist Workers Party in 1990 and published in the magazine New International.

In the U.S., the CPUSA subordinated the union movement and the working class to the Democratic Party, including helping the employers police the working class to back the U.S. imperialist war effort during World War II.

This class-collaborationist outlook is shared by those involved in this discussion in the CP. Nagin argues that instead of a struggle to overturn capitalism workers need to fight “for the survival of elementary bourgeois democracy,” by building “a broad democratic coalition to rout right-wing extremism.” By this he means do everything possible to keep channeling workers into the Democratic Party. Nagin himself serves on the County Democratic Party Executive Committee in Cleveland.

What the working class needs today, in the United States and elsewhere, is to organize independently of the capitalist rulers and all their political parties. As working people are driven to struggle against the effects of the world capitalist crisis on our jobs and living conditions, on political liberties and to build solidarity with toilers worldwide, we can rebuild a road to taking political power.

These fights will lead working people to study the real lessons of past labor and social battles, and the continuity with the road opened by the Russian Revolution, when workers and farmers used state power to fight for a world based on human solidarity, not class exploitation.  
 
 
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