:USSR:
Yesterday @CoralMarks made a great reply on Andropov and how his approach to reforms and party work might have saved the USSR, had he lived long enough. I think analysing the downfall of the USSR is of great importance to us as leftists. The Soviet Union was an immense achievement but ultimately it failed and capitalism was restored. Future socialist projects need to learn from this to avoid making the same mistakes and to effectively debunk bourgeois "socialism always fails" propaganda.
On the top of my head a few points seems to be obvious:
- The people in charge were too old. The system failed to include younger generations which made it lose touch with the people and made it harder to keep developing Soviet society
- The development of the nomenklatura as a new bourgeoisie within the party made the system lose track of revolutionary goals and opened up for corruption
- The Sino-Soviet split is one of the great tragedies of the communist movement as it prevented a strong communist block from forming. I don't know enough about it to say if and how it could have been prevented but it is certainly high on my "Things in history I wish would have turned out differently" list.
- Cultural conservatism did more harm than good to the USSR. I understand the fear that western cultural products could act like a Trojan horse for capitalist ideology but ultimately attempts to prevent western culture from affecting the USSR was experienced as silly in the population and made Soviet culture look weak and outdated in comparison. Maybe a more permissive and confident cultural policy that invited foreign inputs and expanded upon them in a socialist context could have made a difference and put the socialist world on the cultural offensive. It shouldn't be that hard to pick up on a youth culture that rebelled against conservative bourgeois norms and see it through a socialist lens.
- The balance that was found between protecting the revolution and the individual liberties of the people left the people dissatisfied and eroded trust in the system. It is a hard question; naive liberal permissiveness would have exposed the USSR to bourgeois subversion and brought the system down even faster but the people really didn't like the censorship and the secret police stuff. Maybe there are valuable lessons to learn from China about being permissive and even inviting of public criticism of material problems and concrete policies but cracking down on challenges to the socialist system, ie. people should be welcome to tell about how the bus system is run badly and how the guy in charge is corrupt but they shouldn't be allowed to say that done capitalist should own and profit from it.
- The apparent wealth gap between the west and the AES countries was a highly efficient propaganda tool for the bourgeoisie. On one hand more could have been done to credibly tell people about the whole picture of how wealth and poverty coexisted in the capitalist west, for instance by facilitating cultural and personal exchanges with western proletarians. You might not believe it when the state media tells you about poverty in the west, but it is harder to dismiss when a poor American exchange student or guest worker tells you about his life story. On the other hand there was a significant gap and a greater supply of consumer goods, of treats, might have stabilised the system. The USSR was not as developed as the west and had to spend significant resources on defense, on the other hand Soviet industry was not as efficient as it could have been. The before-mentioned corruption and conservatism of an aging leadership proved disastrous to the USSR.
- A series of failed liberal reforms under Gorbachev tried to solve the problems of the socialist USSR by making it look more like the capitalist west, but instead they accelerated the downfall that killed millions and impoverished the nation. Centrism is a dead end that ultimately leads in a reactionary direction. Problems in a socialist society must be dealt with in a socialist manner and policy must always be true to the revolutionary and proletarian roots.
So, it was a near run thing. As late as early 1991 it could probably have been saved (I don't hold much chance of the August coup succeeding.
Also, they were not that old despite the memes, Biden is older than every Soviet leader when they got into power. He's nearly older than every leader when they died! (Gorby is the exception) Andropov was 69 which is old, but not unheard of even in nations where Leaders are traditionally in their 40s when attaining power (Churchill was 66 I think in 1940 and people thought him too old for power.)
I would not go as far as calling the Nomenklatura a new class. They were not and people drastically underestimate the power workplace councils and local Soviets had in the SU due to Great Man theory and CIA propaganda. But yes, the Beauracratisation of the SU was an issue, one that Lenin precipitated, Stalin made worse before realising his mistake, and almost every leader tried and failed to solve. It is one of the reasons the SU could not reform.
The S-S split is a tragedy, and if it didn't happen yes, the SU would be here still. It's a serious lesson in Left Unity, and the reason I always support states like the DPRK that I otherwise might strongly critique. We cannot afford bullshit like that ever again.
Cultural Conservatism waxed and waned, though it is something to critique. I might note that a lack of it didn't help the GDR
This gets close to the major cause, but the USSR was exposed to bourgeois subversion. If everyone had believed in the system, the USSR would have pushed through what was a far less serious crisis than that of it's first 30 years. Many useful reforms could have been made. But after Stalin's democratisation measures were repeatedly voted down and Corn Pop cemented rule of the party nomenklatura, its hard to see how more power could be devolved to local Soviets. China has made great strides in solving this. IMO, Cuba and Vietnam have done even better.
The wealth gap was a huge issue in the 80s, mostly because the SU decide it was. But it was primarily an issue in the upper ranks, who basically dissolved the SU for treats.
Gorby did kill the SU through about 5-6 consecutive bad decisions and yeah, tactically, he's the precipitator of the fall.
I'd like to add a reason of my own
The underdeveloped nature of the Soviet Bloc. Only Czechoslovakia and the GDR could be considered fully developed as economies, and both had been wrecked and looted, first by WW2, then by Nazis fleeing west with half the factories, then by Soviet reparations. The SU was largely Feudal in 1917 and despite mistakes their modernisation of the economy was far, far less bloody than the famines and clearances that accompanied Capitalist development. Despite this, the Soviet Union never quite managed to complete industrialisation in many areas beyond an 1850s-style primary resource economy (with modern bells) At it's peak just before the Sino-Soviet Split, the entire Communist World had a third to a half of the economic power of the USA. China today is more powerful economically than every other socialist state, living or dead, combined.
Following on from this is the fact that market socialism is hard to do, you either have an NEP/Dengism and let some billionaires in and hope they don't slip the leash, or you do a full command economy, which in the 70s meant you could only command about 100 products, and that not well. Everything else was just kind of half-assed between quotas from stats agencies and an informal fixer arrangement. The SU, assuming it doesn't continue the NEP into the 1930s, made two horribly poor decisions here. One was to not cybernetise the economy and develop an internet in the 60s. The second was to implement market reforms at the exact fucking moment command economies that controlled most primary and secondary industries became possible. The SU literally marketised its internal industries just as the People's Republic of Walmart was swallowing up its suppliers and vertically integrating its logistics.
Seige Socialism: After the failure of the Rhur Uprising and the Soviet defeat at Warsaw, the Soviet Union can be seen as a state under a slow, strangling siege from the west. This never stopped, and since the west out-competed them economically, it was only a matter of time before one crisis or another killed it, or it managed to achieve command economy take-off and out-compete the west. China has taken the road of the NEP, and looks like it could probably start integrating it's primary industries entirely! Xi is making some moves in this direction, though not as many as I'd like.
I'll also add that there is an important historical event everyone seems to gloss over, to no fault of their own since it's literally outside the experience of damn near everyone alive right now:
The Great Patriotic War costed the Soviet Union 27 million lives. Among those 27 million are many of the best and brightest future leaders of the Bolshevik Party who sacrificed their lives for the survival of the Soviet peoples. The Komsomol, the youth league of the CPSU was bled dry of both its young members and it's older cadre.
It stands to be understandable to a fault why the Bolcheviks national level was a Gerontocracy: many surviving members below the old leadership were pencil pushing bureaucrats that helped hold the State together but were wholesale unsuited for leadership, therefore a new generation of leaders needed to be educated. Which in turn was a problem unto itself because the many educators that would help cultivate a newer generation through educational theory and practice were also sent to the front lines.
What of the survivors you ask? Couldn't they help educate the newer generation to come? They were faces with a devastated land in ruins, great work had to be done to restore it and that left little time for in-depth education.
I'll paraphrase Molotov, in his book 'Molotov Remembers'; The Founding Bolcheviks all knew Kapital through and through, they could debate all the finer details of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and so forth, writings with the same degree of skill they had for their respective fields of work. The following generation faced the Great War, having so little time to dedicate to reading the theoretical material in-depth had to settle for selected readings to learn the basics of the ideology while fighting for their lives and struggling to rebuild. The generations following them learned from pamphlets and summarized briefs on the writings of theoreticians.
I recently re-read Blackshirts and Reds, and Parenti touched on this topic too - He explains how not only was there a lack of understanding Marxist theory, but there was also a lack of understanding of capitalism in general.
I'd never thought of it like that. That's such a tragedy. Fucking Nazis.
We see the effects of under 1 million dead and more retiring or otherwise leaving the labor force. I can't imagine having 27 times that.
:side-eye-1: :side-eye-2:
Tfw you have the same level of education as Gorbachev the pizza hut
Now the question of how to solve such a problem as a "Gerontocracy" of upper leadership?
The answer is as simple as it always been. The Communist Party needs and draws from its youth league for its future leaders. Without a youth league, the party is cut off from the new blood needed to keep the party in touch with the masses.
I think youth league at the same time promotes people dissociated from the workers. Politician from the age of 25 is immediately sus, as they would work only in political sphere, and likely be offspring of politician. As class struggle was generally muted in ussr, it wouldn’t be leaders born from struggles, so their aims of joining party might be counterproductive.
Gorbachev, Chernenko, Andropov, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Malenkov, Dzhugashvili, and Rykov were all born as poor and proletarian as can be with only Molotov and Lenin being nominally concidered being born in the petite bougeoise. They all lead working lives prior to joining the party, from Khrushchev proudly boasting about his days with the boys working in the steel mills to Gorbachev fondly recollecting his childhood driving combine harvesters in his collective farming lot.
Assuming that there a problem with someone's leadership qualities because they're too young or too old is ageism. Opportunism and ideological deviations happen and have happened at every stage of human life - making blanket statements of any group is simply accepting a simple answer instead of critically examining the underlying problems. What fundamentally matters is your ideological prowness, your leadership capabilities, and your experience in organizing, educating, agitating, and administrating.
The youth leagues exist to help the most brightest young men and women learn both theory and practice through both studying a broad range of material ranging from ideological to agricultural, and experiencing collective leadership through Committee work assignments, work liason assignments, district or city management assignments, etc.
We can look at the youth leagues of Cuba, China, Laos, and Vietnam in the modern period to see living examples for ease of understanding the kind of vital work the youth leagues do in forging the next generation of the peoples cadre.
I’m not saying too young or too old, I’m saying that progression through party doesn’t guarantee marxists views, hidden inner-party struggles of neo-stalinists, kosygin-related socdems, other socdems and straight opportunists existed throughout the 60s till the end. I’m willing to bet yeltsin could have recited some works of lenin in his sleep, yet he shouldn’t have ever been were he was. Why was yeltsin elevated through the ranks or gorbachev? How could the structure be organized in such way that this cannot happen, that’s the question I feel.
That's the magic question that everyone's been trying to figure out these past few decades.
Yea, and my thinking is that for bad thing not too happen it shouldn’t be possible for one (or hundred) people to do it, like if decisions influence lives of millions it should be done by millions (obviously, after revolution*). Which is anarchist-adjacent pov, but unfortunately I have not seen theory of such structures developed (although i suspect I should read some cybersyn stuff :theory-gary: )
Molotov Remembers is a fantastic book, though very scattered. If you want a frank, critical account of what one of the last surviving Old Bolsheviks thought, this is it. Cringe takes and all.
Absolutely essential reading.
Carlos Martinez, in his essays on the fall, interestingly ties the lack of faith in the system to de-stalinization. His point is, many/most Soviet citizens didn't exactly have advanced knowledge of Marxism or Communism (not a criticism). What they did know is that when Stalin was in charge, their material conditions improved on a scale that's almost hard to comprehend. So many folks associated socialism and the Soviet system with Stalin. So by denouncing Stalin, the Corn Man completely undermined the faith people had in the system.
I remember reading somewhere that, as late as 1986 or so, the notion of the USSR collapsing would seem highly unlikely - both from the POV of the Soviets and the Americans. All the problems we know about were there and the Soviet leaders understood a lot of them. So something had to be done.
But Gorby's reforms in the mid/late 80s, instead of addressing the problems in a constructive way, only cranked up the contradictions to 11, which toppled the system.
Personally, I wonder if China wasn't maybe in a somewhat similar situation to the USSR when Xi rose to power. Certainly not in as dire of a situation. But Xi is the anti-Gorbachev. He saw the problems going on (like the rising power of the neoliberals and corruption in the system) and has addressed it the right way.
excellent post, interesting read