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" How far did the USSR ‘democratise’ in the Gorbachev period? "
No books
No web-sites
Less than a day left
Whhhhhhyy?
No books
No web-sites
Less than a day left
Whhhhhhyy?
Page:
I haven't studied Gorbachev myself yet, but I know a fair bit about Russian history.
What time period did he "rule" and stuff?
What time period did he "rule" and stuff?
be a tad more specific if you can and ill see what I can find you chief.
I'm afriad that text was pretty useless but thanks anyway.
Oh so my help is no good now?
This is so unfair, poor me.
Had a history essay to hand in last Thursday and yesterday.
I had to work 8 hours on Saturday and yesterday.
I thought my last Poltiics essay would be good enough to rule this one out, I started to work on a tutorial question thinking it was an essay question.
All the bloody textbooks left were in Russian.
ARRRRGGGH I need sleep.
Had a history essay to hand in last Thursday and yesterday.
I had to work 8 hours on Saturday and yesterday.
I thought my last Poltiics essay would be good enough to rule this one out, I started to work on a tutorial question thinking it was an essay question.
All the bloody textbooks left were in Russian.
ARRRRGGGH I need sleep.
Wow, never used that before. Quite good that.
Yeah, you'd better run it through auto summarise in word before you submit it.
That'll be recorded in the plaigarism detector now. If your uni has one.
Word skank!
Paradox: wrote:
> The result of the lack of socialist democracy was that by the 1970s,
> the Soviet economy stagnated, and then actually contracted a bit, for
> the first time since the second world war. More far-sighted people in
> the bureaucracy began to see that more openness and transparency in
> society and in economic planning were necessary. Among the masses,
> especially in Eastern Europe but also in the USSR, there were
> movements toward more democracy. The successes in the USSR and in
> Eastern Europe in the field of education and industrialisation meant
> that working people and the middle layers were far above the cultural
> level of the masses of the USSR when Stalin consolidated the power of
> the bureaucracy in the late 1920s. This process culminated in
> Gorbachev’s campaign for glasnost and perestroika.
>
> Gorbachev’s proposals went in the direction of introducing gradually
> aspects of bourgeois democracy, not workers’ democracy. That is, his
> proposals didn’t go in the direction of empowering the workers and
> peasants to democratically run their enterprises, or to reviving the
> soviets as real workers and peasants committees to democratically run
> the government and the economic plan.
>
> Undoubtedly, Gorbachev’s campaign was welcomed not only by the more
> far-seeing sections of the bureaucracy, but by the Soviet masses as
> well, who wanted to break out of the stifling bureaucratic
> straitjacket and achieve more democratic rights and democratic
> functioning of the government. These aspirations were progressive and
> had to be supported.
>
> Under Gorbachev, central control over economic administration was
> dismantled, but it was not replaced by popular control from below.
> The result was that the centre became powerless. It turned out that
> the relaxation of the bureaucracy’s totalitarian control over
> political debate, information and activity led to calling into
> question the power and privileges of the bureaucracy itself. The
> Gorbachev reforms failed. The only way to preserve the bureaucracy’s
> privileged access to consumer goods and services, in the face of the
> disintegrating “command” system, was to “go legit” and link those
> privileges to private property.
>
> Another centrifugal force was national oppression in the Soviet
> Union. One of the features of the Stalinist counter-revolution was
> the reversal of the Bolshevik position supporting national
> self-determination for the oppressed nationalities under tsarism.
> Lenin’s last fight against Stalin revolved around this question.
> Stalin reintroduced Great Russian chauvinism and national oppression.
> As the totalitarian grip was relaxed under Gorbachev, the USSR’s long
> oppressed national minorities began to demand their rights, which led
> to the plans to hold a referendum on the continued existence of the
> Soviet Union itself. These plans led to the abortive coup attempt
> against Gorbachev, the mass resistance to it, the collapse of the
> USSR and Yeltsin’s initial popularity, which he utilised to begin the
> transformation to capitalism.
>
> How could the bureaucracy embark on this road without unleashing a
> civil war? When Trotsky outlined the two possible political outcomes
> for the USSR in 1938, he thought that either course would entail a
> violent struggle. In 1938 this was undoubtedly true. Among the
> workers were still the generation of 1917. The great majority of the
> population believed in socialism, even though they chafed under the
> yoke of the Stalinist dictatorship.
>
> It is clear now that the consciousness of the Soviet working class in
> 1989 was not as it was in 1938 in spite of the Stalinist terror.
> After 40 more years of stultifying bureaucratic rule, socialist
> consciousness had ebbed, especially in the context of the economic
> difficulties the Soviet Union was facing. Moreover, there was no
> political party that stood for the rebirth of the Soviet Union on the
> basis of Leninism, unlike in 1938, when there were still tens of
> thousands of Bolshevik-Leninists alive, even if they were in prison.
> The living link of cadre going back to the revolution had been lost.
> The workers were politically leaderless.
>
> Thus the counter-revolution, begun back in the 1920s when the
> bureaucracy usurped power, reached its culmination in the
> bureaucracy’s project to restore capitalism, and this happened
> without a civil war.
>
> But the process has not been without resistance by the workers. There
> have been regional and local strikes and demonstrations, some that
> have resisted police violence. There are indications that worker
> resistance is becoming more organised, but it has yet to take on a
> nationwide character.
>
> I have left out the parallel and intertwined developments that were
> occurring at the same time in the countries of Eastern Europe. For a
> more complete picture, they should be included. But here I want to
> note only certain aspects of the history of Eastern Europe after the
> second world war.
>
> With the exception of Yugoslavia, the social transformations in these
> countries were carried out under conditions of occupation by the
> Soviet army. To be sure, workers were mobilised to support the
> overthrow of capitalism, but in a tightly controlled way. Stalin so
> feared that things might get out of hand (as later happened with
> regard to China) that he arrested and shot his loyal followers who
> were at the heads of the local Communist parties. So in addition to
> the imposition upon these countries of Stalinist regimes along with
> the social transformation, these regimes were very weak, and depended
> on Soviet troops, who were seen as foreign occupiers. This was one of
> the reasons there were real attempts to break out of the Stalinist
> straitjacket in Eastern Europe and not in the Soviet Union in the
> postwar years.
>
> The first of these was the 1953 worker uprising in East Germany. It
> was suppressed by Soviet troops, but forced some economic concessions
> from the Kremlin. In Poland in 1956 and in 1970, there were powerful
> mass movements for socialist democracy that the bureaucracy was able
> to coopt over time with the threat of Soviet troops in the
> background.
>
> The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 succeeded in toppling the
> bureaucratic regime. The army went over to the side of the workers,
> and the secret police was smashed. A government led by the liberal
> Communist Imre Nagy came into power, which included old time
> socialists. This was only a decade after the end of the second world
> war. Hungarians remembered vividly the Nazi occupation and that
> particularly horrible form of capitalist rule. The new government
> pledged to preserve the social gains of the workers’ state, but to
> introduce democracy. Soviets (councils) of workers, soldiers and
> peasants appeared. If this development had been allowed to continue
> and a democratic workers’ state had been established, this would have
> had a profound impact on the rest of Eastern Europe and the Soviet
> Union itself. The Kremlin felt mortally threatened, and moved to
> crush the uprising with tanks.
>
> Similarly, when the “Prague spring” erupted in Czechoslovakia in
> 1968, under the slogan of “Socialism with a human face!” the USSR
> again invaded.
>
> I think the last effort to democratise one of the workers’ states on
> a socialist basis in Eastern Europe was the upsurge of the Solidarity
> trade union in Poland. Solidarity’s 1980 program, adopted after long
> debates in the workplaces, would have led to a working class and
> egalitarian government on the basis of retention of the nationalised
> and planned economy. The imposition of martial law to suppress
> Solidarity, with the threat of a Soviet invasion in the background,
> seems to have been the last straw to break the back of hope for
> socialist renewal in Eastern Europe. Solidarity itself split and
> disintegrated, and what later emerged as “Solidarity” had lost the
> spirit and content of the 1980 program.
>
> When the mass movements for democracy erupted in Eastern Europe at
> the end of the 1980s, pro-capitalist elements were able to take the
> leadership. While these mass movements for democracy were progressive
> and had to be supported by Marxists, they were unable to move toward
> socialist democracy.
>
> In both the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, nationalism and
> racism have flared, including into wars. At bottom, the failure of
> these bureaucratised workers states to solve the many national
> questions throughout the region, and their perpetuation of national
> oppression, is at fault. To this we must add the Stalinist turn away
> from internationalism, with a resultant increase in xenophobia and
> outright racism. Black socialists from the US who travelled to
> Eastern Europe in the 1980s reported they felt the racism. The turn
> to capitalism, with its attendant negative impact on the welfare of
> the workers, rising unemployment and so forth, is creating new
> fertile ground for racism, and it has exploded far beyond what it was
> before the collapse.
>
> We have also seen sharp blows dealt to women since the turn toward
> capitalism. The Stalin counter-revolution also reversed Bolshevik
> policy in this field. While the Bolsheviks weren’t able to realise
> their program of the gradual socialisation of domestic labour due to
> the poverty and devastation of the country, the Stalinists once again
> placed the burden of such labour on the backs of women in fact and in
> theory, in their program. But still there were gains in health care,
> care of the aged, education and employment for women in these
> bureaucratised workers’ states. The turn towards capitalism has
> caused unemployment among women to soar, prostitution to become
> rampant and sexist ideology to flourish.
>
> The transition to capitalism in Eastern Europe has not been as
> catastrophic as in Russia, but it too has been marked by great losses
> for the working class. Workers in both the republics of the former
> USSR and Eastern Europe remember the social conquests they used to
> take for granted. They will resist more and more what the transition
> to capitalism is bringing and will bring down upon them. It is
> through these struggles that socialist consciousness can once again
> emerge, and new revolutionary socialist parties built. The workers of
> the former USSR and Eastern Europe know they do not want to go back
> to Stalinism. They are learning and will learn that capitalism is not
> the answer.
I have one thing to say.
I disagree.
> The result of the lack of socialist democracy was that by the 1970s,
> the Soviet economy stagnated, and then actually contracted a bit, for
> the first time since the second world war. More far-sighted people in
> the bureaucracy began to see that more openness and transparency in
> society and in economic planning were necessary. Among the masses,
> especially in Eastern Europe but also in the USSR, there were
> movements toward more democracy. The successes in the USSR and in
> Eastern Europe in the field of education and industrialisation meant
> that working people and the middle layers were far above the cultural
> level of the masses of the USSR when Stalin consolidated the power of
> the bureaucracy in the late 1920s. This process culminated in
> Gorbachev’s campaign for glasnost and perestroika.
>
> Gorbachev’s proposals went in the direction of introducing gradually
> aspects of bourgeois democracy, not workers’ democracy. That is, his
> proposals didn’t go in the direction of empowering the workers and
> peasants to democratically run their enterprises, or to reviving the
> soviets as real workers and peasants committees to democratically run
> the government and the economic plan.
>
> Undoubtedly, Gorbachev’s campaign was welcomed not only by the more
> far-seeing sections of the bureaucracy, but by the Soviet masses as
> well, who wanted to break out of the stifling bureaucratic
> straitjacket and achieve more democratic rights and democratic
> functioning of the government. These aspirations were progressive and
> had to be supported.
>
> Under Gorbachev, central control over economic administration was
> dismantled, but it was not replaced by popular control from below.
> The result was that the centre became powerless. It turned out that
> the relaxation of the bureaucracy’s totalitarian control over
> political debate, information and activity led to calling into
> question the power and privileges of the bureaucracy itself. The
> Gorbachev reforms failed. The only way to preserve the bureaucracy’s
> privileged access to consumer goods and services, in the face of the
> disintegrating “command” system, was to “go legit” and link those
> privileges to private property.
>
> Another centrifugal force was national oppression in the Soviet
> Union. One of the features of the Stalinist counter-revolution was
> the reversal of the Bolshevik position supporting national
> self-determination for the oppressed nationalities under tsarism.
> Lenin’s last fight against Stalin revolved around this question.
> Stalin reintroduced Great Russian chauvinism and national oppression.
> As the totalitarian grip was relaxed under Gorbachev, the USSR’s long
> oppressed national minorities began to demand their rights, which led
> to the plans to hold a referendum on the continued existence of the
> Soviet Union itself. These plans led to the abortive coup attempt
> against Gorbachev, the mass resistance to it, the collapse of the
> USSR and Yeltsin’s initial popularity, which he utilised to begin the
> transformation to capitalism.
>
> How could the bureaucracy embark on this road without unleashing a
> civil war? When Trotsky outlined the two possible political outcomes
> for the USSR in 1938, he thought that either course would entail a
> violent struggle. In 1938 this was undoubtedly true. Among the
> workers were still the generation of 1917. The great majority of the
> population believed in socialism, even though they chafed under the
> yoke of the Stalinist dictatorship.
>
> It is clear now that the consciousness of the Soviet working class in
> 1989 was not as it was in 1938 in spite of the Stalinist terror.
> After 40 more years of stultifying bureaucratic rule, socialist
> consciousness had ebbed, especially in the context of the economic
> difficulties the Soviet Union was facing. Moreover, there was no
> political party that stood for the rebirth of the Soviet Union on the
> basis of Leninism, unlike in 1938, when there were still tens of
> thousands of Bolshevik-Leninists alive, even if they were in prison.
> The living link of cadre going back to the revolution had been lost.
> The workers were politically leaderless.
>
> Thus the counter-revolution, begun back in the 1920s when the
> bureaucracy usurped power, reached its culmination in the
> bureaucracy’s project to restore capitalism, and this happened
> without a civil war.
>
> But the process has not been without resistance by the workers. There
> have been regional and local strikes and demonstrations, some that
> have resisted police violence. There are indications that worker
> resistance is becoming more organised, but it has yet to take on a
> nationwide character.
>
> I have left out the parallel and intertwined developments that were
> occurring at the same time in the countries of Eastern Europe. For a
> more complete picture, they should be included. But here I want to
> note only certain aspects of the history of Eastern Europe after the
> second world war.
>
> With the exception of Yugoslavia, the social transformations in these
> countries were carried out under conditions of occupation by the
> Soviet army. To be sure, workers were mobilised to support the
> overthrow of capitalism, but in a tightly controlled way. Stalin so
> feared that things might get out of hand (as later happened with
> regard to China) that he arrested and shot his loyal followers who
> were at the heads of the local Communist parties. So in addition to
> the imposition upon these countries of Stalinist regimes along with
> the social transformation, these regimes were very weak, and depended
> on Soviet troops, who were seen as foreign occupiers. This was one of
> the reasons there were real attempts to break out of the Stalinist
> straitjacket in Eastern Europe and not in the Soviet Union in the
> postwar years.
>
> The first of these was the 1953 worker uprising in East Germany. It
> was suppressed by Soviet troops, but forced some economic concessions
> from the Kremlin. In Poland in 1956 and in 1970, there were powerful
> mass movements for socialist democracy that the bureaucracy was able
> to coopt over time with the threat of Soviet troops in the
> background.
>
> The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 succeeded in toppling the
> bureaucratic regime. The army went over to the side of the workers,
> and the secret police was smashed. A government led by the liberal
> Communist Imre Nagy came into power, which included old time
> socialists. This was only a decade after the end of the second world
> war. Hungarians remembered vividly the Nazi occupation and that
> particularly horrible form of capitalist rule. The new government
> pledged to preserve the social gains of the workers’ state, but to
> introduce democracy. Soviets (councils) of workers, soldiers and
> peasants appeared. If this development had been allowed to continue
> and a democratic workers’ state had been established, this would have
> had a profound impact on the rest of Eastern Europe and the Soviet
> Union itself. The Kremlin felt mortally threatened, and moved to
> crush the uprising with tanks.
>
> Similarly, when the “Prague spring” erupted in Czechoslovakia in
> 1968, under the slogan of “Socialism with a human face!” the USSR
> again invaded.
>
> I think the last effort to democratise one of the workers’ states on
> a socialist basis in Eastern Europe was the upsurge of the Solidarity
> trade union in Poland. Solidarity’s 1980 program, adopted after long
> debates in the workplaces, would have led to a working class and
> egalitarian government on the basis of retention of the nationalised
> and planned economy. The imposition of martial law to suppress
> Solidarity, with the threat of a Soviet invasion in the background,
> seems to have been the last straw to break the back of hope for
> socialist renewal in Eastern Europe. Solidarity itself split and
> disintegrated, and what later emerged as “Solidarity” had lost the
> spirit and content of the 1980 program.
>
> When the mass movements for democracy erupted in Eastern Europe at
> the end of the 1980s, pro-capitalist elements were able to take the
> leadership. While these mass movements for democracy were progressive
> and had to be supported by Marxists, they were unable to move toward
> socialist democracy.
>
> In both the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, nationalism and
> racism have flared, including into wars. At bottom, the failure of
> these bureaucratised workers states to solve the many national
> questions throughout the region, and their perpetuation of national
> oppression, is at fault. To this we must add the Stalinist turn away
> from internationalism, with a resultant increase in xenophobia and
> outright racism. Black socialists from the US who travelled to
> Eastern Europe in the 1980s reported they felt the racism. The turn
> to capitalism, with its attendant negative impact on the welfare of
> the workers, rising unemployment and so forth, is creating new
> fertile ground for racism, and it has exploded far beyond what it was
> before the collapse.
>
> We have also seen sharp blows dealt to women since the turn toward
> capitalism. The Stalin counter-revolution also reversed Bolshevik
> policy in this field. While the Bolsheviks weren’t able to realise
> their program of the gradual socialisation of domestic labour due to
> the poverty and devastation of the country, the Stalinists once again
> placed the burden of such labour on the backs of women in fact and in
> theory, in their program. But still there were gains in health care,
> care of the aged, education and employment for women in these
> bureaucratised workers’ states. The turn towards capitalism has
> caused unemployment among women to soar, prostitution to become
> rampant and sexist ideology to flourish.
>
> The transition to capitalism in Eastern Europe has not been as
> catastrophic as in Russia, but it too has been marked by great losses
> for the working class. Workers in both the republics of the former
> USSR and Eastern Europe remember the social conquests they used to
> take for granted. They will resist more and more what the transition
> to capitalism is bringing and will bring down upon them. It is
> through these struggles that socialist consciousness can once again
> emerge, and new revolutionary socialist parties built. The workers of
> the former USSR and Eastern Europe know they do not want to go back
> to Stalinism. They are learning and will learn that capitalism is not
> the answer.
I have one thing to say.
I disagree.
Page: