1991 USSR coup attempt rocked world of U.S. Stalinists

Was Soviet coup an attempt to halt 'slide toward capitalist restoration'?

The Militant September 27, 1991

BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS 

Tens of thousands of working people toppled the August 19 coup in the Soviet Union. But some organizations in the United States that call themselves socialist or communist gave outright support to the coup as it unfolded.

Leaders of the Workers World Party and the Communist Party (CPUSA) argue that the coup was an attempt to slow down steps by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev that are leading to the restoration of capitalism, a fate now sharply posed with the coup's failure. Soviet workers in fact did not oppose the coup, the Workers World Party claimed. Despite mistakes by the coup leaders "the masses on the whole accepted the coup," stated Sam Marcy, Workers World Party chairperson, in the September 5 Workers World weekly. He claimed the coup was "completely bloodless," dismissing the killings of three people in Moscow as accidents. Bourgeois commentators have also dismissed the resistance put up by Soviet workers to the coup. Events as they unfolded in the Soviet Union "call into question the popular picture in the U.S. of an outpouring of Russians and other Soviet citizens resisting autocratic government and demanding democracy," wrote liberal commentator Tom Wicker, in the New York Times. "Only perhaps 1 percent of Moscow's population turned out for what appeared on U.S. television to be a massive demonstration," Wicker added. 

Each of these analyses has a common starting point: they all attempt to conceal the nature of the class struggle in the USSR and try and keep workers around the world from seeing fellow toilers there as the only social force capable of resolving the deepening economic and social crisis into which the bureaucratic regime has led the country. A careful examination of the facts easily refutes these arguments. 

Workers in Soviet Union resist coup 

Masses of working people recognized that the coup's main goal was to close down the political elbow-room and democratic rights won in recent years. Refusing to return to the decades of complete suppression of these rights, workers and others held mass protests in defiance of the coup leaders' attempts to impose curfews and ban demonstrations. In Moscow a crowd of 5,000 surrounded the Russian parliament August 19, erecting barricades and maintaining an around-the-clock vigil. By the next day the protest swelled to 50,000. Demonstrators fraternized with troops, some of whom turned their tanks around to help defend the parliament building. 

Two hundred thousand demonstrated in Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg, and 400,000 in Kishinev, capital of the Moldavian republic. "To see how people were awakening, beginning to respect themselves, almost made me cry," said Aleksander Kondrashov, a 46-year-old machinist who joined the march in Leningrad with thousands of his coworkers from the Kirov tractor factory. The Kirov plant became an important center of resistance to the coup. 

Coal miners went on strike in several regions. After returning to work following the coup's failure, miners at Siberia's Kuzbass field, the country's largest, refused to load coal for delivery until all the coup leaders were arrested. 

These mobilizations also gave an impulse to actions against government officials in Soviet republics identified with the authoritarian rule of the central regime. 

Georgians opposed to the autocratic government of President Zviad Gamsakhurdia organized daily mass rallies outside the Georgian Parliament. In the Chechen-Ingush ethnic region, demonstrators who had been blockading the Parliament for 15 days demanding the resignation of parliamentary leaders for their support to the coup finally stormed the building, forcing the chairman to resign. 

Through their actions on the barricades and in the streets working people have widened the political space open to them and gained greater confidence for the struggles to come. 

Was coup attempt to avert capitalism? 

"The fact of the matter is that the Emergency Committee was attempting to return to the course of socialist construction and to abolish, to the extent possible, the ruinous and chaotic consequences of Gorbachev's introduction of capitalist relations," wrote Sam Marcy in the September 5 Workers World. 

"These eight men," he added, referring to the members of the short-lived State Committee for the State of Emergency set up during the coup, "knowledgeable and fearful of the consequences of bourgeois restoration, decided it was the only course to take." Gus Hall, chairman of the CPUSA, said after Gorbachev was returned to power that the coup "was an attempt to deal with real problems, but in a wrong way." In the wake of the coup Russia's President Boris Yeltsin "becomes the biggest danger," Hall added. These statements fly in the face of the fact that the coup leaders pledged to continue Gorbachev and Yeltsin's economic and social course, based on the vain hope of integrating the Soviet Union into the world capitalist market through introducing progressively greater use of market mechanisms in the economy. [My emphasis- JR].

The coup leaders also promised to hold a "nationwide discussion" on the treaty Gorbachev had negotiated with top officials of most republics of the Soviet Union. They claimed they would solve problems of food and housing through an immediate return to "labor discipline and order," thinly disguised code words for the intensification of labor under the threat of the whip. 

Advertising one or another wing of the ruling layer in the Soviet Union as the "real" defenders of socialism is the stock-in-trade of Stalinism and its adherents around the world. The "eight men," Gorbachev, and Yeltsin represent different wings of a petty-bourgeois social layer - best described as a caste -that through force and violence usurped power from the working class allied with the peasantry. This counterrevolution as led by Joseph Stalin beginning in the early 1920s. By the mid-1930s the rising bureaucratic layer had consolidated its hold on power, reversed many of the social gains of the October 1917 Russian revolution, and driven working people out of political life. By presenting the accomplishments of the working people as its own and draping itself with the mantle of the first victorious socialist revolution, the bureaucratic regime convinced many fighters around the world that it was a progressive force. But, as the legacy of Stalinist rule comes to the light of day, the fact that it is 100 percent counterrevolutionary is clearer to millions. 

Arguing that a "socialist course" can be advanced by the methods of the coup leaders negates the fact that socialism can only be achieved by a politically conscious and mobilized working class progressively taking on more and more of the decision making and administration of all aspects of economic and social life. 

Because this would mark the death knell of the bureaucratic regime, the caste organizes to prevent any motion in that direction. 

Is capitalism on the agenda? 

A September 5 editorial in the Workers World says capitalism has already been reintroduced in Eastern Europe. "Look at the destruction left in Eastern Europe. The introduction of capitalism has been a tyranny as bad as any terror." 

The statement released by the CPUSA following the coup's failure said: "Developments have quickly moved to a new stage. Processes are now in motion that inflame anti-Semitism and nationalism, seriously threaten the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of socialism, and push the country in the direction of capitalism and wholesale plunder of the USSR." But nationalized property relations- the central conquest of the Russian revolution - remain in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. 

Top officials in the Eastern European and Soviet workers states, many with overtly procapitalist and proimperialist views, have repeatedly announced ambitious "market re-form programs" and their intentions to sell off basic industry to private capital. But each has backed off when faced with deep-going opposition from working people to each concrete step needed to reintroduce private ownership of industry and banking. 

Resistance by working people has proved to be the major stumbling block to any "peaceful" transition to capitalism. The Wall Street Journal reported that Gorbachev, in a September 11 meeting with U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, "stressed that he hoped to press ahead with making the ruble a convertible currency in order to attract foreign investment." The exchange rate of the ruble today is 3.6 cents. Many workers earn about 300 rubles, or about $10.80, a month. Since the ruble is not a convertible currency this does not translate into comparable prices for goods purchased by workers. 

But it does give a picture of the implications of any attempt to make the ruble convertible for workers' standard of living. Clearly such a move would provoke colossal social explosions. 

A section of the leadership of the U.S. Communist Party that aligns itself with the Gorbachev wing of the bureaucracy took the position that the Soviet coup should have been clearly condemned. 

"Some in the leadership of our party reacted to this coup differently than the Soviet public," said an article in the September 7 issue of the People's Weekly World, the news-paper published by the Communist Party. The article was signed by James Jackson, Charlene Mitchell, and Danny Rubin. "Having identified Gorbachev as the source of all of the crisis developments in the Soviet Union, they tended to welcome his removal" the CP leaders wrote. This "led to the CPUSA National Board vote to 'neither condemn nor condone'" the coup. The authors said the coup "dealt a body blow to perestroika." 

Public rift in CPUSA 

A similar line marking the growing public rift in the CP, was carried in an article by Mark Solomon in the same issue of the People's Weekly World. Solomon argued that Gorbachev's policies have resulted in "giant strides for peace" and "began to put an end to the stifling identification of socialism with totalitarianism." 

That Gorbachev's course, rather than that of the coup leaders, represents some progressive thrust forward for working people is also the position of others on the "left". "The delicate, evolutionary process, painstakingly put together by President Mikhail Gorbachev, was beginning to bear fruit," wrote Fred Weir in the Guardian, a weekly newspaper. "The coup attempt blasted it all out of the arena," he added. But there is nothing progressive about Gorbachev or Yeltsin's pragmatic policy decisions. Both are today responsible for organizing the defense of the privileges and prerogatives of the caste, a task that places them as point men in the assault on the rights and standard of living of working people. Working people can and should oppose the coup and identify with those in the streets without having to extend one iota of political support to Yeltsin or Gorbachev. 

In hopes of ameliorating its deep-going economic and social crisis, the regime in Moscow has staked its fortunes in the last few years on earning expanding investments and massive loans, trading privileges, and entry into imperialist financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund. It has attempted to accomplish this through political concessions to Washington and other imperialist powers. 

In craven pursuit of this, Gorbachev's regime threw its support behind the U.S.-led onslaught against the Iraqi people. So much for "strides for peace." 

The same economic and political considerations lie behind other foreign policy moves by Moscow such as growing diplomatic relations with Israel and trade with the apartheid regime in South Africa; its open endorsement of the "two Koreas" policy long advocated by the capitalist regime in Seoul and its masters in Washington to block the aspirations of the Korean people for national reunification; and its steps towards rapidly implementing trade relations with Cuba at world market prices paid for in scarce hard currencies. 

These facts help to answer Gus Hall's argument that "the USSR has also been a strong force for the rights of third world countries and against racism." 

Class-collaborationism 

Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union have followed a class-collaborationist course with imperialism for decades. This has led to the betrayal of many revolutionary opportunities the world over. 

Following the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939 the Soviet regime cynically carved Poland in half in a deal with German imperialism and turned over thousands of revolutionaries to the Nazis. Following World War II the Kremlin and its supporters in Stalinist parties organized the betrayal of revolutionary opportunities in Greece, France, and Italy, and joined with French imperialism in bloodily suppressing anticolonial rebellions in Indo-china and Algeria. The Soviet bureaucracy has always been the agent of imperialism inside the workers state. 

This is the opposite of the internationalism of the Bolshevik party that sought to aid workers' struggles in other countries and extend the revolution. 

As a result of the weakening of the bureaucratic apparatus in the Soviet Union the Stalinist misleaders are less able than ever before to disorient and betray revolutionary workers who look to them under the illusion that their policies point the road out of oppression and exploitation and towards socialism. 

The CPUSA's claim that the Communist Party in the Soviet Union has been an instrument in the fight of socialism is also utterly false. 

The Bolshevik Party, renamed the Communist Party after the October 1917 Russian revolution, was destroyed by Stalin's counterrevolution and turned into an instrument of brutal repression. 

The party's internal democracy was abolished and tens of thousands of communist workers in the party were killed, jailed, or exiled. By the rnid-1930s all those who led the party in the early years of the revolution had become victims of or capitulated to Stalin's terror. 

Since then the CP, along with the secret police (the KGB), has for many decades been an integral part of maintaining the rule of the bureaucracy. 

Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who both back the recent measures banning the CP, are simply registering the fact it is no longer a useful tool for maintaining the caste's rule over working people. 

Gorbachev and Yeltsin, though, are acting against what they consider to be a political party. Any moves against current or former members of the CP by the central government in Moscow or the various regimes in the republics that restrict the right to form political parties should be protested by working people. 

Working people in the Soviet Union are now taking the initial steps back into political life. Out of their struggles, over time, they will develop class consciousness and an internationalist outlook. Out of these fighters and revolutionaries will come a communist party capable of leading the toilers in a political revolution that will sweep the bureaucratic caste from power.

Source: http://themilitant.com/1991/5534/MIL5534.pdf