By Andrea Bauer
A tale worthy of Christie
I can see the demise of the Soviet Union as an Agatha Christie story. The murderers have been feeding the victim arsenic for years; finally, death is announced.
Publicly, the executioners tut-tut over the victim's chronic ill-health and supposedly weak constitution. They laud her "epic" achievements with a respect never shown her in life, while simultaneously itemising her tragic flaws.
The victim? The USSR. The killers? The US government and the world's other major capitalist nations. Those arsenic? Endless embargoes; the invasion of the fledgling state by 14 countries between 1918 and 1922; devastation by Nazi Germany, followed by abandonment and sabotage by its World War II "allies"; and the Cold War, with its sophisticated spying and relentless military threats.
The murderers' version has been told in countless obituaries. Most commentators don't appear to be examining the right corpse. They equate the collapse of the Stalinist Soviet state with the death of communism, a classless social system in which labour and wealth are shared — a philosophy that has yet to be put into practice anywhere.
They subscribe to the Stalinist version of history, in which there was never any opposition to the perversion of revolutionary ideals by the elite rich and "Communists".
Civil war, desperate want, political isolation, and violent capitalist hostility combined in the newborn Soviet Union to give rise to the Stalinist bureaucracy, an army of overseers responsible for the distribution of scarce goods and services and then of the privileges conferred by possession of the keys to the cupboards. This bureaucracy launched a counter-revolution that eventually annihilated its domestic opposition.
But all through the '20s, Leon Trotsky's Left Opposition waged a fierce campaign for glasnost, worker's control, internationalism and the rights of women and national minorities. It took exile, assassinations, state terror, and ultimately mass imprisonment and murder to stifle the voice of authentic socialism within the USSR.
Any farewell to the Soviet Union that ignores this crucial history perpetuates the lie that Stalinism and communism are the same thing.
Mainstream media accounts also fail to mention the re-emergence of a contemporary pro-socialist, democratic mobilisation in the Soviet Union, including a Trotskyist party based on the ideas of the Left Opposition, a labour party and a workers' self-management movement.
They are all part of developments foreseen by Trotsky 60 The Revolution Betrayed, he predicted that the bureaucracy ultimately would either supervise the return of capitalism or be overthrown in a political revolution by workers determined to preserve the socialised economy.
The bureaucrats can declare the Union dead and socialism passé, but the decisive vote, that of workers, has yet to be cast.
The Soviet people have been inspired to overthrow the Czar, vanquish capitalism, defeat the Nazis and topple Stalinist tyranny. Can anybody really believe that they are now going to meekly accept a nightmare, 1990s version of Third World capitalism ushered in by cut-rate demagogues like Boris Yeltsin?
Not a chance. Every worker living in the Soviet Union today has as their birthright the towering aspirations of the 1917 revolution. It won't be all that long before the workers claim that birthright and bring back a union of truly socialist Soviet republics.
[Andrea Bauer is managing editor of Freedom Socialist, an international socialist feminist quarterly newspaper published in Seattle, Washington.]