Collapse of Stalinism | Home | News | Donate | Join | Print

The Collapse of Stalinism

Part two

Comrades, when a group of what can only be called throwbacks, dinosaurs - the heads of the army, the police, the KGB, etc - attempt to take power and to screw down the lid on all the basic democratic rights of the working class, I believe that it is impossible not to take sides. Not only impossible, but wrong.

When a military commander appears on television, whose very appearance revives memories of all that was worse about Stalinism, when he declares not only that strikes and demonstrations and protests have been outlawed, but even the use of photocopiers, and attendance at sporting events, then I think that we cannot be indifferent. And there is absolutely no doubt in my mind, we certainly cannot be neutral, and I hope that nobody has suggested that. But as in other discussions, when it comes to the question of a coup, of course we must not allow our emotions to determine our actions, but I do think we have to have a certain feel.

Marxism is not, and never has been, a dry as dust science that you get out of text books, but it flows from participating in the living struggles of workers against all that will hold them back in their struggle for total political and economic emancipation. In going onto the streets on August 19^th, neither R nor myself nor any of our comrades had the aim of being heroes or martyrs. We are only too conscious that we have many more miles to cover in the interests of building a revolutionary alternative in the USSR.

But if this International is to gauge, to understand, to assess, to feel the pulse beats of events and trace the line of march of developments this cannot be done from an apartment, or from an Alitalia departure lounge at Moscow airport. And incidentally an apartment is probably the last place that a revolutionary, especially a foreign revolutionary should be at the time of a coup. Then, if you are on the streets and every few minutes you are meeting all the best workers and the contacts that you have made in the course of your work, I defy any comrade in those circumstances to suggest that these people should go home. It would not stand you in very good stead for your future work.

Many of these workers that we met expressed their hostility to Yeltsin, and to Sobchak, who had only recently attacked them - in the case of Sobchak only a week before these events, had denounced transport workers for trying to disrupt the city through their industrial action. But they said: "We are not here to defend Sobchak, and we are not here to defend the Leningrad Soviet, we are here to defend democracy, however limited it is at the present time." Some of these workers have seen the blacklists of the KGB. They have seen their names on these lists. They had the prospect that if the coup was successful they would flee to the forests or even across the border to Finland, because they knew very well what the alternative could be. One of the benefits, perhaps, of a so-called "Marxist education" is that they are well aware of the examples of the coups in other countries, in Chile and so on.

And even if the barricades were puny, or small, even if the call for a general strike was made by people with no interest in workers democracy, or wanted merely to switch on the power of the working class to save their skins, and then to switch it off again as soon as possible, we believe that our place was with those workers. Arguing the case for independent action, arguing the case for workers' committees, from every workplace, to come together on a city wide basis, to take control of armed defence of the city, to take control of the mobilisation of the general strike. It was our task to warn workers of the future role of these so-called "democrats", to express our lack of confidence in Sobchak and Yeltsin, and so on. But even in relation to the workers who did not go to the barricades, or who did not go to the demonstration, who were not convinced of the need to do so - and we recognise that there was a substantial number of such workers - we needed to explain, and to demonstrate by our actions, what we believed was negative and what we believed was positive in relation to the situation of the working class, and which side we were on.

After a period of the opening up and of the flexing of the muscles of the industrial proletariat, this attempted putsch represented a giant step backwards for the working class, and a defeat of this coup undoubtedly, even if only temporarily, increased the confidence of the working class. You only have to consider what the opposite outcome would have done, not only for the working class of the Soviet Union but the international working class, as BL(IS) mentioned. It was no accident that one of the first slogans to appear on the mass demonstrations was "No Pasaran!" - "They Shall Not Pass!" After the defeat of the coup there was a widespread feeling: "We stopped the tanks." Even the so-called "democrats" who benefited from the mass movement on the streets had to claim that in order to ride it, to control it, and to rein it in.

One of the tiniest sects on an international scale, the "Spartacists", along with the OFT - the "United Front of Workers" set up by the Stalinist bureaucrats - took the position of support for the putschists. Alright, they simply said that these putschists should have mobilised the working class in a general strike against Yeltsin. Whish is really the logic of not supporting the other side, in my opinion. Needless to say this tiny sect will remain a tiny sect. It got headlines in the press after the coup saying: "American Trotskyists supported the coup."

Another grouping, a so-called "independent" trade union, in Leningrad, actually instructed its members not to go to the barricades because they would ally themselves with the bourgeois imperialists. It's a Russian group. As a result of that, one of the youth in that group, who went to the barricades with the anarchists, came looking for us after the events, totally disillusioned with his organisation.

Now, as revolutionaries I believe also that there is no need to apologise for feeling a certain excitement and a certain presentiment of revolution at the sight of trolleybuses being turned over to stop the path of the tanks, of unarmed people talking to the troops, or of a banner unfurled in the Winter Palace Square, filled as it has never been filled before in history, that square, saying "the Air Force is with you!" I believe, as BL(IS) clearly outlined, that all the elements of revolution were beginning to develop in that situation; the split at the top, which couldn't be more extreme than one section of the bureaucracy taking up arms against another section, in my opinion, the middle layers in turmoil on the streets, and the armed forces being unusable, as far as the coup leaders were concerned, who remember, were the heads of the army, the police and the KGB.

The hated Omon, for example, the riot police who went into Vilnius, stood arms in hand defending the printing works so that newspapers could be produced against the orders of the putschists. They also stood guard at the television station along with "the people". All the elements of revolution were developing, including the combativity of the working class. And we discussed with workers' leaders who were prepared to fight to the end, arms in hand. They were a minority, although I think that is the case in any revolution, by the way, that it is a minority that actively carries through the revolution. But this was a small number because really there was no time to develop.

The strike call was responded to. Discussions and decisions took place in the factories. But even before some workers had come out on strike it was becoming clear that the coup was collapsing and the "democrats" were already advising workers to stay in the workplaces and continue production. But a general strike, as AB(Ge) said, is not the only indication of workers' combativity. The idea that the International's "observers" in the Soviet Union saw independent action on the part of workers where it didn't exist is an insult to those comrades, but since in the prevailing atmosphere in which they work they are constantly being ridiculed, even spat at, for carrying the banner of Trotskyism. So, as the Americans say, "we have no problem with that."

But the position of the comrades who seem to put a copy of the Independent or the Observer or the Financial Times to a blind eye, and say that they see no movement of workers, is an insult to the hundreds and thousands of workers who took action. They say that because no independent banner was raised by the workers, and because they have no mass independent organisations, that there cannot be any independent response of workers.

Who was it that drove the lorries from the auto factory in Moscow to strengthen the barricades around the White House? Spivs and speculators? Who brought sites to stand silent guard outside the Marinsky Palace in Leningrad for hours? Bankers and black marketeers? Who, after work, formed up in the Moscow Square, stood in the rain for hours, waiting for their delegation to return from the White House with orders as to where they were to fight? Tsarists and conscious pro-capitalists? What workers drew up the plans to block the canal bridges in Leningrad, to build the steel barricades in the factories? Open counter-revolutionaries? And who was it who took to the streets in Krasnodar, in Krasnoyarsk, which we haven't reported in the paper - I only found that out today, looking at this book - that all the major factories in those cities began strike action and demonstrations took place? Is the fishing fleet in Vladivostok, the Pacific Ocean fleet based in Vladivostok, which took the decision to strike, is that made up of spivs?

Was it only pro-capitalists that came up from the pits in Novokuznetsk and Vorkuta? And it was only "the people" who went in a constant stream to the Palace Square on the morning of the 20^th of August. How many times have we explained that the overwhelming majority of the population in the Soviet Union is proletarian? It was strange petty-bourgeois who jumped over the turnstiles of the factories to get to the Square to express their protest against the putsch. And an unusually large number of co-operators, 10,000 to be precise, who marched from the Kirovsky factory, that is the old Putilovsky factory, greeted by applause as they went to the Winter Palace Square. Of course the new petty-bourgeois and the putative capitalist class were scared. Some of them went to the barricades, or more accurately I think, his in the White House, many of them. But some of them, far from standing and fighting, cut and ran. For example a good few restaurant owners in Leningrad took a fast boat to Finland the moment that they thought that their non-culinary activities were about to land them in jail, or worse. They are valuta restaurant owners, hard currency restaurant owners.

No, comrades. My own eyes and ears tell me that hundreds of thousands of workers actively protested against the coup, and hundreds and thousands and millions more were prepared to come out on a general strike if the coup had not collapsed. I've no time to give more detail. The comrades have seen the material in the British paper, and there's more where that came from; it hasn't been selected out. There's more.

There was not, as the document mistakenly says, actually, there were not 20 factories in Leningrad on strike, in the classical sense of the word. But there was actually a coming out of workers in practically every factory in Leningrad. If the majority stayed in and one third made the conscious decision to come out, then that is an indication of the active participation of the working class. The fear of a general strike and the turnout to the demonstration on the morning of the 20^th of August in Leningrad, of more than half a million, had a huge impact on the situation. And, as in all revolutionary waves, so often provoked as they are by the threat of counter revolution, movements in different cities feed on each other. The defection of ten tanks in Moscow on the first day, on the Monday, emboldened the workers of Leningrad. The Leningrad "coming out" is the words used by Trotsky, by the way, as he describes the revolutionary events of 1905 and 1917, the "coming out" in turn emboldened the crowds around the White House in Moscow.

Sailors and army officers, with whom I personally spoke, regarded the big demonstration in the Palace Square as the decisive turning point. Sobchak led that contingent of workers from the Kirovsky factory to the Square, but then he declared that he had the assurance of the military commander of the Leningrad region that he would give no orders for the forces to be used against the people, so the workers could return to work, remain alert, keep up the committees in the factories at the ready.

But Sobchak himself was afraid that those committees that were forming in the factories could begin to take over the running of the strike, and threaten his own position of the hero at the head of this movement. Of course with this news that "they will not pass" in Leningrad there was a tremendous feeling of euphoria, there was the festival atmosphere that develops in revolutions. And the comrades of the Minority want to discount all of this - they think we are romantics, I think. I don't mind. But, concretely, at that demonstration real revolutionaries, who already had a substantial following amongst workers would have been able to take the tribune, to arouse the masses, to truly independent action, and the whole course of events would have been transformed.

But where there is not the subjective factor, where there not even independent organisations of the working class to speak of, then of course the struggle of workers will fall behind other banners and will merge with the movement of other layers against dictatorship. Because of the lack of the subjective factor there hasn't been a differentiation along class lines at the present time. That doesn't mean to say that we don't recognise the decisive role of the working class. And when EG says that we only talk about the "people" he is implying precisely that we don't recognise the decisive role of the proletariat.

At present there is no independent banner of the working class. It is our task precisely to lift that banner, to carry that banner, and not to stand aside until we have got the forces - that way we will never get the forces. And EG still hasn't said what should have been done precisely, which side we should have been on, where. And the task of a revolutionary organisation is precisely to accentuate the positive, it is precisely to give workers confidence in their capacity to transform society, not to deny it, to play it down, to say that no element of it exists. Workers knew what they were against, and the role of Marxists, as EG himself had many times said, is to make conscious the unconscious strivings of the working class. In this situation it is to channel that hatred of the bureaucracy, the hatred of privilege, and so on, away from false gods, to the belief in their own power. Precisely without the subjective factor, without our organisation, then truly independent action is not possible.

But that is not to say that the workers don't move and won't move. We are not idealising the working class. I think R would agree with me it is not possible to do that in the Soviet Union. And the extent of the workers action even surprised us, given the lack of basic organisations, lack of experience, in fact the horrific experience that have thrown back the consciousness over decades. And opinion polls showed that 47% of manual workers did not support Yeltsin's actions, but it does not mean that they supported the coup. A poll taken in Moscow on the 20^th of August showed that only 10% supported the declaration of the state of emergency and the setting up of the emergency committee. 79% were opposed to it, and that is in Moscow. But on the same day 72% were in favour of "order", you know, some measures to restore order, but 59% thought that the putschists would actually bring disorder. A poll at the moment actually indicates that a majority of the population do think that there is no harm in Yeltsin having powers to bring order to the situation - I'll come on that in a second.

And it is true that in general a situation of chaos, of shortage, of hardship, that is developing in the Soviet Union, where 100 million in the Russian Federation alone live below the poverty level - that is out of a population of 150 million so it is two-thirds of the population. Then they do want order, they want something done. But what does this mean for our future perspectives? And I should say that by the time that R and I could actually get together, two or three days after the coup, it was clear that the euphoria was already giving way to dark forebodings. You had women screaming on the buses: "What's going to happen now? There will be famine in the winter." You had Alksnis the black colonel, correctly saying that none of the economic problems had been solved by the victory over the coup, that rapidly the situation would deteriorate, new emergency measures would be necessary, this time with Yeltsin introducing them.

We are, have been and will be warning that capitalism means dictatorship, in these circumstances. We have been doing it ever since we got there, by the way, based on our perspective that the kind of capitalism that might get established, if it got established in the Soviet Union, would be that of the Latin American type: hyper-inflation, mass unemployment, poverty and dictatorship. It's not a new idea. But Yeltsin's hour of glory was short-lived, also Gorbachev's. His ratings went from 14% that BL(IS) mentioned to 28% at the time of the coup. It was like a sort of sympathy vote. In my opinion people didn't like the idea that he was actually going to be bumped off, they don't like the idea that there was going to be a coup that would lead to people being murdered. Now his ratings have fallen again, and some of our contacts believe that it is only a matter of weeks before he will disappear from the scene in one form or another. Up until now he has always been needed as a sort of scapegoat, maybe he'll continue in that role. Also in the West he has been needed to hold something together in what was the Soviet Union. Sobchak's popularity shot up and went even faster back down than Yeltsin's has gone down. The dark forebodings of the population are bordering on despair.

I have a whole series of comments of people in queues in Leningrad where they express their complete loss of hope in the future - they don't know how they are going to feed their children, they think that the old and the weak will die this winter, and in the case of a young woman whose pay is 200 roubles a month, when a kilo of sausage can now cost you 160, although you wouldn't touch it of course if you only had 200 roubles a month, she says: "I have no hope in anything anymore. I have drawn on all my savings. How things will develop now I don't know. I have not even the slightest hope left. But I am prepared to die."

But this dark despair existed before the coup. It has only become aggravated with the economic situation. Now you can stand in the queues for eight hours or more just for sugar, which you can say is bad for you but it is needed to conserve fruit, which is the only source of vitamins in the winter. So the basis of the coup, this kind of despair, the feeling of a need for order and so on, existed a long time ago, we saw it a long time ago to a certain degree. Why was it that the different attempts of government of the recent period put off price rises, put off coups? You see that Yeltsin is now in the same dilemma that Pavlov and Gorbachev were, as we explained in our documents, they were moving towards introducing these necessary measures for the transition to capitalism; that is the freeing of prices, the convertibility of the rouble, which would spell ruin for the overwhelming majority of the working people, and then they have drawn back, like a cat from hot milk, like we said. There is no need for them to have drawn back if they have nothing to fear from the workers.

Even without the subjective factor we had a virtual uprising in Byelorussia at the price rises in April, at the doubling of prices. Now Yeltsin might declare that they are not going to increase the prices just yet, but they are already racing away - the prices. I don't know when it reaches hyper-inflation but there is already 100, 200, 300, 400% inflation, up to a thousand by the end of this year is predicted. Some basic goods go from 3 roubles a litre to 32, in the case of Smetana which is a kind of yoghurt, I won't go into detail, but it is a kind of very basic commodity. If you can get it, it has now gone from 3 roubles to 32, if you can see it - R hasn't seen it in the last few weeks.

The recent developments, this movement of the workers, just for a few hours in August of this year was just a beginning. This mighty working class will not go back to sleep for 7 or 15 years while the bourgeois force through their programme. I cannot agree with the perspectives that EG outlined of a coup, of a military dictatorship, that could see as many killed as under Stalin. It's a small revision of his one-time position that it would "out-Stalin Stalin", now it would only be on the same lines as Stalin. But that would be 30 million, more, being annihilated, slaughtered. There is no basis for this argument.

Now, I don't discount the possibility of new coups, and we have warned of them from day one of the victory over the last coup. The most likely perspective, in my opinion, is of a further and further tightening of the screw by Yeltsin and co., with the armed forces, under the cloak of legality this time; necessary to take anti-strike action, to restrict the rights of workers, and so on, to get through this difficult period, then everything will be alright. And some people accept that. They accept that they have got to tighten their belts - it is going to be worse before it gets better. Maybe some people do think: "We have got to get through this process quickly." But they are not conscious of what this transition to the market means. There are people who are rejoicing at the triumph over the coup in the square, as the Russian, not Tsarist, flag was being hoisted above the Marinsky Palace, who when they were challenged that: "But Yeltsin wants the market yes, that means capitalism", replied: "No, no, no, that doesn't mean capitalism, no".

But, we will see whether Yeltsin can get away with it or not. There will be a new differentiation taking place in society, and it will be a differentiation along class lines. I think there are real prospects of hunger riots - EG is nodding his head, but I understand that at the Central Committee in this room he said that famine has never caused revolution. Well maybe he still sticks to that position, it is possible to day both, but it doesn't seem to fit in with the history of revolutions, even the great French Revolution where time and time again in the course of the years of that revolution there were uprisings on the question of bread. What about the February Revolution in 1917?

And a hatred of Yeltsin and co is already developing, rapidly developing. There are rapid changes in consciousness. His victory was a hollow victory. You already see the falling out of the thieves around Yeltsin; many resignations - people who feel they can't stand the heat of the kitchen that they victoriously went into. The class lines have become clearer. Workers will move, anti-strike laws will be imposed and enforced. Yeltsin has already talked about them. In the interests of "order", and so on. There will be a period of intense activity for us. Illusions will be shattering like glass. Those very people who declared on the 21^st or 22^nd that "Yeltsin doesn't want capitalism", will see their hopes further dashed. This disillusion with official politicians, that BL mentioned, and the lack of confidence even in their own ability, that does exist amongst workers, because of the lack of organisations. The lack of a lead and so on, is, as I understand it from Trotsky's writings, a feature of a period immediately before revolutionary upsurges.

If there has been no revolt in relation to abolishing elections it is not surprising. According to opinion polls maybe only 20 or 25% of people would even bother going out to vote, such is their disillusionment with the so-called "democrats" who have been elected in the recent period. They have no confidence in their local government, their local soviets. But we will see even more rapid changes. I think that the huge wage increases of the recent period, by the way, are partly responsible for the printing presses working so fast (printing money), and I think that in itself is an expression of the fear of the ruling layers to a revolt of the working class. They are trying to buy them off with increases in wages. The only trouble is they have only doubled the wages last year, and prices have trebled and quadrupled and the deficits have become worse, the shortages have grown.

New organisations will be thrown up, as they were in Byelorussia. Old organisations may be transformed. The leaders of the old official trade unions are desperate now to appear radical, to hold onto their seats, their positions. The triumph of the pro-bourgeois government was a huge defeat for the working class, but not on a par with the victory of the coup, which I also believe could not have lasted, but would have been pretty ghastly in its first stages. In a certain sense the situation has become more favourable for us. The comrades might find that difficult to understand in a way because of the vicious propaganda against communism, against the revolution, and so on, which we saw particularly at the time of the anniversary of the revolution. We have even these so-called "progressives", these so-called "democrats" of the Free Democratic Russia Party, who use pictures of babies born as a result of the Chernobyl accident with all sorts of deformities, to ask the question: "Is this life under Marx, is this life according to Marx?" - blaming Marx for the Chernobyl disaster - the responsibility of the bureaucracy. These are the new, free "democrats" of Russia.

So maybe it might seem a bit difficult for Marxists in this situation. But in a way this idea that the Communists have been cleared out has a positive side, because we can say: "They weren't real communists, those people were never real communists, and we are fighting for those things that you really believed these people were going to introduce eventually, in the bright future." And many of the basic socialist instincts are still intact. Even the polls in relation to the pulling down of the monuments show that the majority are against the pulling down of the monuments, and that a majority are against the changing of the traditional October Revolution holiday. Many are against the changing of the name of the city, where I live, including me, to St Petersburg. They say it is not going to clean up the city, it is not going to take crime off the streets, it's not the name of the city that we defended with no more than a million lives at the time of the war, in the blockade, and it is not going to put more food in the shops. They didn't want to celebrate the festival of the naming of the city because they said: "We have to stand in the queues just the same, it is no difference to us." Three million roubles spent on that when it could have been spent assisting the pensioners and so on.

The real enemy is now a class enemy, using the most revolting propaganda, as I said. The issues have become clearer as the struggles against the effects of the introduction of capitalist relations develops. Already there is widespread hostility to "wild" privatisation that puts the assets of the people, the assets of the working class into the hands of the spivs, the speculators, the black marketers and the old nomenklatura and the foreign exploiters. They oppose this "wild" privatisation, that would put ownership and control in the hands of the workers, workforce by workforce, even by giving them bits of paper that show that they are now owners, that they have 51% and so on.

In all of the battles that we are conducting, either on the streets or in relation to propaganda, or in relation to upholding the traditions of October, we need the help of the collective experience of this International. In our battle for resources too, we urgently need the assistance of this International. When we put forward our position at the time of the coup unfortunately it was only verbally. We had no resources. Even the workers organisations we were in touch with had no possibility of producing leaflets. Next time round we hope we will have a Web Offset printing press and a whole team of workers who can produce the leaflets by the millions. I don't think we will do it that quick because I think the coup's going to come a bit quicker than that. Anyway we need the assistance of the International - of the whole International, a united International. We don't need undeclared votes of no confidence, or unsubstantiated implications that our comrades in the Soviet Union are revisionists or don't recognise the leading role of the working class in the transformation of society, or even that those comrades are pro-Yeltsin.

Comrades EG and AW and the comrades from Italy and Spain must substantiate their censures, their criticisms, or withdraw them, in my opinion. And EG must answer categorically on the issue of what to do and whose side are you on? And let no-one imagine we underestimate the difficulties of establishing the first elements of a future mass Trotskyist organisation in that country. But the stand that we took at the time of the coup has enhanced the standing of our tendency and our paper in the eyes of the best workers and youth that we have so far reached. Huge opportunities open up in the immediate period. We will do all that is in our power to ensure that these opportunities will give a secure, growing and healthy section in the USSR, or whatever it might be in the future.

[Continue...]