Is Moscow defending Ukraine from EU and U.S. imperialism?

A friend on Facebook recently wrote:

Now both Ukraine and Russia are oppressed countries. Russia is led by an anti-imperialist capitalist regime. Because Russia is part of the global anti-imperialist bloc, the US and EU imperialists are trying to lock down Ukraine as a base in their camp. This requires forcing Ukraine to join EU. The majority of Ukrainians oppose it. Why would anyone want to join EU? Workers in Britain, France, and other countries are trying to escape it. EU is an anti-worker imperialist trap.

To me reliance on Putin's regime as "anti-imperialist" recalls a previous disaster for workers who were led to believe their "anti-imperialist" capitalist government had their interests at heart:  Indonesia in 1965.  Such illusions, fostered at the time by Peking as well as the leadership of the Indonesian Communist Party, led to disaster.  Putting reliance on Moscow today as caretaker for the aspirations of Ukraine's workers and farmers, and Russia's, promotes similar illusions. 

Workers need their own leadership and their own party.  Reliance on the class enemy is not even a short-term solution.  It is a deadly trap.  Especially when it also means ignoring three hundred years of national oppression and liquidating the struggle of an oppressed nationality [the Ukrainians], whatever their current level of consciousness and leadership.

More on Indonesia in 1965:

‘Maoism vs. Bolshevism’: Lessons from Indonesia
(In Review column)

Maoism vs. Bolshevism by Joseph Hansen, 90 pages. Pathfinder Press, 1998. Education for Socialists bulletin, Documents of the Socialist Workers Party. $12.

BY EMMA JOHNSON
Maoism vs. Bolshevism deals with the social and political roots and the international repercussions of the “most devastating defeat for the working class since the fascist victory in Germany in 1933”—the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of members and supporters of the Communist Party and other working people in Indonesia in 1965. The Indonesian Communist Party, the biggest in the capitalist world, along with unions and other organizations were wiped out in just a few months.

The massacre was directed by Gen. Suharto, who subsequently led a coup that brought him to power. The reactionary U.S.-backed Suharto tyranny endured for some three decades.

Maoism vs. Bolshevism is a collection of Socialist Workers Party documents between 1966 and 1974 by Joseph Hansen, then a leader of the party.

Hansen poses the question: How could a political force like the Indonesian Communist Party, claiming 3 million members, another 3 million in the youth group and 20 million in mass organizations, undergo a mauling at the hands of armed forces totaling 350,000?

Workers and farmers in Indonesia were inspired by the 1949 Chinese Revolution. The Chinese Communist Party—which came to power on the crest of that mighty social upheaval carried through by millions of Chinese toilers—had enormous prestige and was looked to for leadership and guidance. The defeat in Indonesia cannot be understood, Hansen says, without understanding the role played by the CCP led by Mao Zedong. He compares it to the role the Soviet Communist Party under Joseph Stalin played in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s and in the Spanish Revolution in the 30s.

“In relation to Indonesia, Mao played a role comparable to that of Stalin in the German events,” wrote Hansen. “Just as Stalin … blocked the German Communist Party from developing a revolutionary policy that could have stopped Hitler and put the German working class in power, so Mao out of similar passing diplomatic needs (an alliance with Sukarno and the Indonesian bourgeoisie) blocked the Indonesian Communist party from developing a revolutionary policy that could have stopped the reactionary generals and put the Indonesian working class in power.”

Sukarno became Indonesia’s first president after a powerful national movement forced the Dutch colonialists to cede independence in 1949. He ceded power to Suharto in 1967.

The leadership of the Indonesian Communist Party, with Chairman D.N. Aidit at the helm, put the brakes on the mass movement and subordinated it to the Indonesian bourgeoisie, at the urging of Beijing.

Hansen points to the international repercussions of the defeat in Indonesia. “The most spectacular immediate result … is to be seen in China. The evidence strongly indicates that it was the precipitating cause for the ‘cultural revolution,’” a brutal and culturally repressive campaign launched by the Chinese Communist Party in August 1966.

Maoism vs. Bolshevism documents the discussion in the Fourth International, at the time an international organization of revolutionary parties, going into its 1969 and 1974 World Congresses on the assessment of the Cultural Revolution. The main dividing line is the characterization of the Maoist leadership.

Hansen and others saw the Maoist policy as expressing the interests of a “crystallized bureaucratic caste” that could not be reformed, but had to be overthrown. They characterized this privileged social layer in China as “Stalinist, because of its essential similarity to the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy consolidated in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s.”

It’s this commonality, in fact, that drove at that time the deep rivalry between the Soviet and Chinese governments, the booklet explains.

“Mao’s policy on the international plane was fundamentally opportunist, aimed at reaching an accommodation with American imperialism and at practicing class collaboration with the bourgeoisie in the colonial and semicolonial countries,” Hansen explained. This “generalized policy of peaceful coexistence is dictated by the material interests of the bureaucratic caste, which fears the spread of revolution and the effect it might have on the masses in its own country.”

The opposing position held by Ernest Mandel, Pierre Frank and Livio Maitan, leaders of sections of the Fourth International in Europe, saw the Maoist leadership as “bureaucratic centrist,” sensitive to mass pressure for reforms and that significant concessions to the masses would be a forthcoming result of the Cultural Revolution.

In an assessment of the Cultural Revolution presented to the 1974 World Congress, Hansen points to the effects of the Maoist foreign policy in relation to Vietnam during the U.S. war to roll back the revolution in that country. “The bankruptcy of this [Mao’s] foreign policy became glaringly clear when … Mao offered ‘peaceful coexistence’ to the [U.S. Richard] Nixon administration.

“The real stake for Nixon was Vietnam. Mao paid off by inviting Nixon to Peking in February 1972. So that the Vietnamese should be certain not to miss the point, Nixon timed his visit to Peking to coincide with a savage escalation of the bombing of Indochina.”

The documents point to a number of other examples in which narrow nationalists interests of the Chinese bureaucracy clash irreconcilably with the interests of the working class on the international plane and reveal its counterrevolutionary character. Beijing was the first to recognize the reactionary Boumedienne regime that came to power with the overthrow of the Algerian Revolution in 1965, and among the first to recognize the bloody fascist-like dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. It backed, and in some cases aided, capitalist military dictatorships around the world—from Gen. Francisco Franco’s Spain, to Greece, Ceylon, Sudan, East Bengal and Peru. It opposed reductions in NATO forces aimed against the Soviet Union and gave only lip service to selected workers’ struggles that didn’t impinge on these alliances.

The introduction to Maoism vs. Bolshevism was written by Steve Clark on behalf of the Political Committee of the SWP in 1998, just weeks after Suharto’s resignation.

“Responsibility for the defeat [in Indonesia] lay not with bad ideas, but with a self-serving class-collaborationist course of the privileged bureaucratic caste in Peking and its subservient followers in the leadership of the Indonesian Communist Party,” writes Clark. “Only by clearly understanding the accountability of Stalinism for the 1965 catastrophe in Indonesia can we accurately appreciate the historic significance of the fact … that the Indonesian workers, peasants, and youth who are today beginning to return to political life no longer confront this massive counterrevolutionary obstacle that repeatedly stood in their path to victory throughout much of this century.”

http://www.themilitant.com/2012/7640/764036.html

Defending the Socialist Workers Party on capitalist restoration in Russia

A week ago I posted an article from the 3 February issue of The Militant on the Facebook Group for the Discussion of the Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism.  The article: "18th World Youth Festival hosted in Quito, Ecuador."

The Facebook post motivated these comments, initiated by Workers World Party leader [and World Youth Festival attendee] Caleb Maupin:

Caleb Maupin: The SWP sold many books.... and was hostile to the Bolivarian countries... wow... wow...

Jay Rothermel: Hostile at the event to people from those countries? Or hostile to the government's capitalist policies?

Caleb Maupin: Watching a group of white people from the United States lecture the Cubans about why "your revolution is different from what Chavez is doing that, you need explain that people!" is something I will never forget. -

Caleb Maupin: The SWP is a bizarre, bizarre animal. The USSR is still a "worker's state", the Tea Party is more progressive than Occupy Wall Street, the Assad regime is the biggest threat to the "workers and farmers of Syria".... These people are from the Planet Saturn.

Caleb Maupin: These folks are like an episode of Star Trek... where on some far off planet, Farrell Dobbs and James P. Cannon are deities, the policies of the fourth international in the 1930s are permanent reality.

Caleb Maupin: Did you see my talk on the festival?

Jay Rothermel: Where did the party say the tea party was more progressive than OWS? I prepared a doc two years ago of everything the party wrote about OWS and I never read that.

Caleb Maupin: I was told by an SWPer that OWS were "petty bourgeois radicals", but the Tea Party was a movement of "actual workers" with "real demands and grievances."

[Comments by another group member at this point have been removed for privacy purposes].

Caleb Maupin: They insist "the working class lost nothing in 1991".... oh boy!

Jay Rothermel: On the tea party: you and I discussed three years ago that workers with grievances were attracted its rhetoric, and in early 2011 we were discussing ways to intervene in that process. The SWP I suspect has seen the same process, and has found among workers attracted to the tea party an openness for political discussion.

Jay Rothermel: On Russia: your library and mine are full of books and documents written by people who wanted to tell the world that capitalism has been restored in Russia. Some called it state capitalism. Mao and our friends Hoxha and Avakian said it happened a few hours after Stalin died. Your party seems to think it happened with the advent of Yeltsin. But these are all impressionistic and subjective assumptions based on staffing changes at the higher levels of state apparatus and their subsequent ideological rationalizations. Who among those claiming capitalism has been restored in Russia has done the hard sociological work to make that case? Who has shown how the commanding heights of the economy and the state monopoly of foreign trade have been ended?

I am not suggesting this is an academic question exclusively. But claiming capitalism has been restored because you don't like the fate of the Stalinist caste you used to identify AS the socialized property relations speaks only to historical impatience and exasperation.

Jay Rothermel: Some notes on SWP and OWS I made in 2012:
Did The Militant and the U.S. SWP publish anti-OWS screeds? A look at the documentary record
 

Caleb Maupin: When the means of production are privatized, capitalism overthrown [sic - I think he meant "restored" - JR], statues of Lenin torn down, the Communist Party driven from power, and a new constitution written, and the natural resources sold to the highest bidder... capitalism has been restored.

Caleb Maupin: China today is a mix of contradictions but all the former Soviet republics except Belarus are capitalist.

Caleb Maupin: Russia is taking a nationalist anti imperialist world position. But it is capitalism. It calls itself capitalism. Openly talks of how "socialism was overturned" in 1991

Caleb Maupin: In 1991 there were big changes in property relations. The other restoration theories you listed are only about political line.

The Facebook discussion ended there.  

I posted a few articles on my blog at the beginning of the week from The Militant that dealt with the question of restoration.  But I was contacted offline by a fellow supporter of the SWP's line, who had some very useful comments on the question of capitalist restoration in Russia.  The real purpose of this post is to preserve his thoughts.

He wrote:

Great initiative Jay in posting different articles on the Workers state!

You may want to take a closer look at the report of Jack Barnes to the 1992 fusion congress of the Communist league in the UK - "Youth and the Communist Movement".  Its included as the last chapter in the Pathfinder book Capitalism's World Disorder.

There are some sections in that report - given in 1992, shortly after the crumbling of the Stalinist apparatuses - that give a concrete flavor of the development of the Marxist position on the Workers state.

"... Second, we stand on the analysis of "What the 1987 Stock Market Crash Foretold," the political resolution adopted in 1988 at an international conference held in the United States.... At the time we adopted that resolution, of course, nobody could have predicted the concrete timing of events that would further complicate the shape of the capitalists' crisis: the rapid collapse of the Stalinist apparatuses in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union; the price the German imperialist rulers would pay for formal reunification of the country and its impact on capitalist Europe and the world; the Iraq war and its consequences; and the results of the worst destabilization of the international monetary system since the 1930s..."

To point out the inaccuracy of the arguments advanced by Caleb Maupin and the whole school of petty-bourgeois revisionists that the SWP didn't recognize the "negative" consequences of the further degeneration of the workers states:

"...If we look at the unfolding slaughter in Yugoslavia, we will see many elements of the world we are describing. The most difficult things to come to grips with in discussing Yugoslavia are not the theoretical questions...The slaughter in Yugoslavia is the product of the breakdown of the capitalist world order; it is the product of intensifying conflicts among rival capitalist classes in the imperialist countries and would-be capitalists in the deformed workers states. These conflicts, in which exploiting layers demagogically don national garb to defend their narrow class interests, will increasingly mark world politics..."

On Yugoslavia at the beginning of the 90s concerning the importance of the correct revolutionary attitude towards the national question; inter-imperialist rivalries; the political characteristics of Stalinist petty-bourgeois leadership:

"What is happening in Yugoslavia also bloodily demonstrates the fact that Stalinist leaderships cannot unite toilers from different national origins on a lasting basis to open up a broadening federation of soviet republics working together to build socialism."

"The federated Yugoslav workers state that the imperialists and rival Stalinist gangs are now trying to tear apart was a gigantic accomplishment of the Yugoslav revolution of 1942-46. Workers and peasants who were Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and from other nationalities forged unity to oust the Nazi occupation forces and their local collaborators, carry out a radical land reform, and expropriate the capitalist exploiters. It was truly one of the great revolutions of this century, a proletarian socialist revolution."

"The war in Yugoslavia sharpens inter-imperialist conflicts. It sharpens the divisions between the United States and Europe, as well as divisions within Europe itself."

On the concrete developments in the Chinese workers state and its relationship to the growing world disorder of capitalism (not the solution to its problems) and the potentialities of a growing world proletariat:

"We should never underestimate how attractive the Chinese revolution remains to hundreds of millions of toilers, especially to peoples of color long oppressed and exploited by imperialism. Despite the crimes of its Stalinist misleadership, China stands as an example of a people... who carried out a powerful revolution, swept aside the landlord and capitalist exploiters, and restored their national sovereignty and dignity."

"Today, more and more toilers in China are being drawn out of the countryside and into factories, mines, and mills owned by the state and increasingly also by foreign and domestic capital. As this process unfolds, the breakdown of Stalinist apparatuses that we have seen in Europe and the former USSR will inevitably shake the deformed Chinese workers state as well. It will take time, but class tensions and conflicts are already growing in China's cities and workplaces, as well as in the countryside."

"What is really going on is not simply that the People's Republic of China is about to gobble up Hong Kong. What is happening instead is the "Hong Kong-ization" of southern China. What is developing in China today is an accelerated expansion of capitalist methods and penetration by international finance capital - the growing sway of the law of value in southern China especially, as well as Shanghai and other coastal areas....

"Ever since then, the biggest problem confronting revolutionists within the working-class movement has not been that weak people, political cowards, or corrupt individuals have been attracted to Stalinist organizations. The problem has been that revolutionary-minded workers, peasants, and youth looking for communist answers - the best and most self-sacrificing representatives of their generations - ended up joining Stalinist organizations. They ended up internalizing ways of carrying out politics that are the counterrevolutionary opposite of communism. That was what happened to the overwhelming majority of such fighters; only small numbers somehow found their way to the communist movement."

"But today that obstacle has crumbled. The Stalinists still exist and have political influence, of course. But they are no longer a force with state power in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, with the attendant massive resources. They find it more difficult to misrepresent themselves as the continuity of the Bolshevik-led Russian revolution and mislead fighters on the basis of that spurious political authority. As a result, the Stalinist lie that there is a way of building national socialism has also begun to crumble. The lie that socialism can be built by bureaucrats, social engineers, and a massive police apparatus has been weakened. And the lie of both the Stalinists and social democrats that socialism can be advanced in alliance with one or another wing of the bourgeoisie has been undermined."

Reading this report with both feet firmly planted in Today - doesn't it give an accurate and objective evaluation of some world-historic happenings in a very concrete way? Compare this scientific way of proceeding with the rumblings of a Caleb Maupin: "When the means of production are privatized, capitalism overthrown, statues of Lenin torn down, the Communist Party driven from power, and a new constitution written, and the natural resources sold to the highest bidder... capitalism has been restored." "China today is a mix of contradictions but all the former Soviet republics except Belarus are capitalist." "Russia is taking a nationalist anti imperialist world position. But it is capitalism. It calls itself capitalism. Openly talks of how 'socialism was overturned' in 1991"

[Continuing quotation from the Barnes article]. "Youth must also be offered a tradition. Without a political tradition, there is no chance whatsoever of building a working- class movement. Moreover, young people have to find living carriers of that tradition, fighters whose experience draws from more than one generation of working-class struggle. Youth have to find others like themselves from previous generations whom they can join with in building a common movement." "Just being a radical, just being against the bourgeoisie, just negating bourgeois values is no more likely to lead somebody to communism than to fascism. We should think about the political implications of this fact. It is only finding the working-class movement, and finding the human beings who carry its tradition, that leads rebel youth in the direction of communism."

No one will find that tradition in the WWP, nor the other petty-bourgeois currents inside the labor aristocracy, labor bureaucracy or the well-meaning middle-class-with-bourgeois-appetites-meritocracy who call themselves "socialists".

"Moreover, what disintegrated in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was not socialism; these Stalinist regimes were the transmission belts within the workers movement of capitalist values and pressures against the toilers in those horribly deformed workers states and worldwide."

Note the importance of making a distinction between "regimes" (governments) and the character of the state. (Without the dialectical understanding of the dynamics of workers and farmers governments in our time, would have been impossible for the SWP and communist movement world-wide to scientifically understand this question)

"What happened during the subsequent sixty-four years is certainly no revelation to the communist movement. We know that history very well. After the first levies of revolutionists who came to our movement in 1928 and 1929 out of the Communist parties in the United States and other countries as they were becoming Stalinized, we never once broke off a significant current, even a small one, from the Stalinist movement."

"Not only was a massive murder machine consolidated in the Soviet Union based on a broad, petty-bourgeois social layer, but it also laid claim to the legacy of Marxism, its literature, history, and traditions. This Stalinist apparatus turned the overwhelming majority of potential communists in the working- class and national liberation movements into pseudo-communists who believed they were communists, and who believed one of their duties to be the physical marginalization, if not the murder, of apostate communists."

"The strength of Stalinism gave social democracy a new lease on life as well. The Stalinists and social democrats always claim to hate each other. On one level, they do; they ultimately served different masters - the parasitic regime in Moscow, on the one hand, and the imperialist ruling classes, on the other. For a few years in the late 1920s and early 1930s the Stalinists called the social democrats "social fascists." The social democrats decried "totalitarian communism." Notwithstanding, the Stalinists and social democrats have come together many times in "popular fronts" to make sure the working class stays under the thumb of the capitalist state and does not threaten the international status quo."

"The qualitative enormity of the Stalinist obstacle to the influence of the communist movement and our ideas is now behind us, however. That is what has changed. Yes, the Stalinists are still around in large numbers, and will continue to be. But shorn of any linkage to state power falsely endowed with historical authority, the material basis of Stalinist organizations, the trough from which they fed, has now substantially dried up. They have been irreversibly weakened. And this decline of Stalinism weakens social democracy and a number of ultraleft and centrist currents in the workers movement as well."

"What the communist movement can accomplish, even at our current size and strength, cannot be predetermined in some absolute terms. What we can accomplish is always relative to our leverage within the vanguard of the working class, and the size and activity of that vanguard. It is always relative to the strength or weakness of historic obstacles that make it difficult to get communist ideas to the working class. Being right on all the fundamental questions of world politics is not enough, in and of itself; we have been right since 1928 and before. Nor is there any guarantee of success for communists just because the working class and its allies are in a fighting mood. Stalinism has dealt many of its biggest blows during big class battles and in the midst of historic revolutionary developments."

"It took the events of the last several years, however, for our movement to fully absorb the consequences of the fact that communist continuity in the working class of these workers states had been completely broken at least by the 1960s if not earlier. The communist vanguard had been physically liquidated in the purge trials, labor camps, and post-World War II witch- hunts. The working class in these countries had been pushed out of independent political life for decades, and blocked off from struggles by workers in other parts of the world." "Given this vacuum of proletarian leadership, the breakup of the political apparatus of these Stalinist regimes necessarily had to come before the possibility of political revolution would again be on the agenda. That, in turn, meant the objective opening up of these workers states to greater dangers of capitalist restoration. But the belatedness of the political revolution because of the limits of the extension of the world revolution determined that this was the only way the working class in these countries could begin going through the kinds of experiences once again that can and will give rise to revolutionary currents and a new openness to communist ideas."

Sorry for the sheer number of paragraphs Jay, but I think they are helpful in giving concrete meaning to any scientific and not teleological "definition" of the history of what constitutes a workers state and its prospects for communists Today.

Very helpful.

Jay Rothermel
2 February 2014

Whither Ukraine?

Ukrainians defy new law attacking right to protest
Fight against Russian boot fuels ongoing actions 

BY SETH GALINSKY 

Some 100,000 people demonstrated in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, Jan. 19 to demand repeal of new laws that curtail the right to protest. Underlying months of anti-government protests are national aspirations of the Ukrainian people, who — with the exception of the early years of the Russian Revolution — have lived for centuries under Russian domination.

Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovich pushed through the law in an attempt to undercut protests that began in November when he backed out of a deal to sign a trade and “association” agreement with the European Union and instead moved to maintain close economic and political ties with the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

At the time hundreds of thousands took to the streets, demanding that Yanukovich resign. A central slogan at opposition demonstrations has been, “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the nation! Ukraine above all!”

The leadership of the protests comprises a heterogeneous coalition of bourgeois parties pressing for integration into the EU. Three of these parties have seats in Parliament: Fatherland, led by jailed former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoschenko; UDAR — punch in Ukrainian — led by Vitali Klitschko, a former heavyweight boxing champion who campaigns on an anti-corruption platform; and ultrarightist Svoboda (Freedom), which scapegoats Jews and has introduced bills to ban abortions and “communist ideology.”

The new law passed by Parliament last week bans the unauthorized public installation of tents or stages and the use of loudspeakers in public and imposes jail terms for participating in “mass disorder” and wearing balaclavas or helmets.

Some protesters who fought with police defiantly wore saucepans and colanders on their heads. Some 1,500 protesters needed medical attention after the clashes.

Centuries under Russian boot
The suppression of national rights in Ukraine goes back centuries. Eastern Ukraine became a possession of the Romanov Dynasty in 1654 and from that time on the feudal monarchy carried out a policy of Russification there. While rule over the western part changed hands between Austria, Poland and Russia over centuries, the tsars banned the Ukrainian language, suppressed the Ukrainian church and promoted Russian colonization, in the areas under its control.

By the early 1900s Ukraine made up 20 percent of the population of the Russian empire, which at the time was comprised in its majority of non-Russian peoples who faced varying degrees of subjugation. It was a “prison house of nations,” in the words of V.I. Lenin, central leader of the Bolshevik Party and 1917 Russian Revolution.

The Ukrainian bourgeoisie remained small and weak. The ruling class and urban middle classes were drawn from Russia and other nationalities. “In the Ukraine and White Russia,” wrote Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky in 1932, “the landlord, capitalist, lawyer, journalist, was a Great Russian, a Pole, a Jew, a foreigner; the rural population was wholly Ukrainian and White Russian.”

At the same time, Ukraine was a key conquest of the empire, serving as a breadbasket for Russia and major source of its coal and iron production.

Among the central tasks of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution under Lenin’s leadership was the emancipation of tens of millions of oppressed peoples — from the culturally more advanced people of the Baltic region to the Muslims of the Caucasus to nomadic tribes of the Far East.

The Bolshevik Party’s championing of the right of oppressed nations to self-determination leading up to the revolution was decisive in uniting, educating and organizing the working class to take political power, which included forging an alliance with the peasant majority from all backgrounds.

The Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party stated in November 1919 that Bolsheviks in Ukraine “must put into practice the right of the working people to study in the Ukrainian language and to speak their native language in all Soviet institutions; they must in every way counteract attempts at Russification that push the Ukrainian language into the background.”

The new policy of Ukrainization helped the Bolsheviks win over the Ukrainian Borotba (struggle) Party, which merged with the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1920.

Stalin murder machine
But by the early 1920s the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party had begun, personified by the rise to power of Josef Stalin after the death of Lenin in 1924. Stalin headed a counterrevolution representing the interests of a growing privileged social layer centered in the increasingly bureaucratic state apparatus. This reactionary caste reversed the Bolshevik’s course and resurrected the Great Russian chauvinism of the empire, including the re-subjection of oppressed people, this time under the false banner of “communism.”

“Nowhere did the purges and repression assume such a savage character as they did in the Ukraine,” Trotsky wrote in 1939.

Russification of Ukraine was revived. From 1959 to 1989 the number of Russians rose from 16.9 percent of Ukraine’s population to 22.1 percent.

When the Stalinist regime in Russia and Eastern Europe finally collapsed under pressure of growing social contradictions in the early 1990s, the new regime continued to dominate Ukraine, whose industry remained closely linked to that of Russia. Moscow supplies 60 percent of gas used in Ukraine and has turned off the spigot twice to force compliance with the Putin government’s demands.

Competing factions of emerging and aspiring capitalists arose following the collapse of the Soviet Union, drawn largely from remnants of the Soviet bureaucracy. In Ukraine, the factional contest was partially based on divisions of east and west, Russian and Ukrainian, orientation toward Moscow and the West. Meanwhile, the national aspirations among Ukrainian working people against the Russian boot remain strong.

At the end of 2004, in what became known as the Orange Revolution, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from the western part of the country took to the streets to oppose the continuing Russian domination of the country and what they saw as a rigged election that gave the presidency to Yanukovich, who was then prime minister.

As a result, a new election was called and bourgeois opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko was elected president, taking office in 2005, but a series of corruption scandals left him with little support by the end of his term.

Today about four out of every six people in Ukraine are ethnic Ukrainians and speak the Ukrainian language. One in six are ethnic Russians who speak Russian and roughly one in six are ethnic Ukrainians who speak Russian. Russian is the main language in much of the eastern and southern part of the country, areas which are more economically developed.

Yanukovich returned to the presidency after winning elections in 2010. In July 2012 his Party of Regions successfully passed a language law that encourages making Russian an official language in some regions.

The Ukrainian Week reported in March last year that the top eight Ukrainian TV stations broadcast less than a quarter of their prime-time content in Ukrainian. Less than 5 percent of the songs on the top six radio stations were in Ukrainian. 

http://www.themilitant.com/2014/7804/780402.html

95th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution

Bolshevik Revolution: 95 years on
Written by Lal Khan
Wednesday, 07 November 2012


Sometimes decades pass and not much happens. At other times more events take place in days than those that occurred in decades. After the collapse of the Soviet Union twenty years ago we were relentlessly told the great political and economic questions had all been settled and that liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had triumphed. Socialism had been consigned to the dustbin of history. The strategists of capital were exultant. The “end of history” was proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama.

alan-woods-on-the-russian-revolution-2The events on a single day on 15th September 2008 were a watershed. The collapse of Lehman Brothers glaringly exposed a voracious model of capitalism forced down the throats of the world as the only way to run a modern economy, at the cost of grotesque inequality, exploitation, wars and colonial occupations; it has now come down crashing. The baleful twins of neo-conservatism and neoliberalism had been tried and tested to destruction. The Arab revolutions in 2011 not only engrossed one country after another in the Middle East but gave rise to more convulsive events around the globe than in the preceding two decades.

The intensity and ferocity of these events was such that it sent shivers down the spines of the ruling elites across the world. Innumerable comparisons were drawn of these revolutions with the revolutions of the 19th and 20th century yet the single greatest event of the 20th century, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was conspicuously missing from the analysis and reports of the media. And this is neither an accident nor a coincidence. It was by design which reflects the fears that even the name of this revolution instil in the hearts of the ruling classes the world over. And this is in spite of the relentless din of the voracious chorus that ‘socialism’, Marxism’, ‘communism’ are dead.

Of all the parodies of popular representation in which history is so rich, Pakistan’s political elite is perhaps the most absurd. On the one hand they reverberate the cliché that ‘socialism is dead’, while at the same time mostly the right wing politicians are frighteningly warning about a bloody revolution. Awkwardly some present the French revolution as a solution to the crisis without even knowing which one. From 1789 till 1968 there were five bourgeois revolutions and two proletarian revolutions in France. The victorious Paris Commune of 1871 was the first revolution in history in which the working classes took power and held it for more than seventy days while the May 1968 upheaval in France was even larger in comparison to the Russian revolution of 1917 but was defeated by the betrayals of the leaders of the traditional workers parties in France. But such is the deafening silence on the Bolshevik Revolution as if it never even happened. If one dares to mention it the abrupt reply of the political overlords and their intellectual geniuses of today is “Oh! That failed in Russia.” The relative weight of slander in a political struggle in society still awaits its sociologist.

The Russian revolution of October 1917 changed the course of history. The American journalist and socialist who witnessed the events of the revolution at first hand wrote in his epic book, Ten days that shook the world, “No matter what one thinks of Bolshevism, it is an undeniable fact that the Russian revolution is one of the greatest events in human history, and the rule of the Bolsheviki is a phenomenon of worldwide importance.” According to the Russian orthodox calendar, the revolutionary insurrection and the capture of power by the Bolsheviks took place on the night of October 26, which falls on November 7 in the modern Christian calendar.

This revolutionary victory appropriated rulership from one oppressor class in a tiny minority and transferred it to the vast majority of the working classes in society. The process of the overthrow of the bourgeois state and capture of power by the leading party of the proletariat had a massive conscious involvement and participation of the vast majority of toilers. It is the only revolution hitherto that took place on classical Marxist lines. Lenin explained what real change this revolution ought to bring. He wrote in December 1917, “One of the most important tasks of today, is to develop [the] independent initiative of the workers, and of all the working and the exploited people generally, develop it as widely as possible in creative organisational work. At all costs we must break the old, absurd, savage, despicable and distinguishing prejudice that only the so-called upper classes, only the rich, and those who have gone through the school of the rich, are capable of administering the state and directing the organisational development of socialist society.”

The most distinguishing feature of the Bolshevik party was that they subordinated the subjective goal, the guarding of the interests of the toiling people, to the dynamics of the revolution as an objectively hardened course. The party’s strategy was based on the scientific discovery of the laws that govern mass movements and upheavals. The muzhiks (poor peasants) had not read Lenin, but Lenin knew how to read the minds of the muzhiks. The oppressed and exploited masses are guided in their struggle not only by their demands, their desires, their needs but above all the experiences of their lives. The Bolsheviks were never under any snobbish prejudice or held any patrician derision for the independent experience of the people in struggle. Conversely they took it as their starting point and built upon it. Where the reformists and the pseudo-revolutionaries moaned and groaned about the hardships, obstacles and difficulties, the Bolsheviks took them head on. Trotsky defines them in his epic work, History of the Russian Revolution: “The Bolsheviks were revolutionaries of deed and not gesture, of the essence and not the form. Their policy was determined by the real grouping of forces, and not by sympathies and antipathies...Bolshevism created the type of authentic revolutionist who subordinates to historic goals irreconcilable with contemporary society the conditions of his personal existence, his ideas, and his moral judgements. The necessary distance from bourgeois ideology was kept up in the party by a vigilant irreconcilability, whose inspirer was Lenin. Lenin never tired of working with his lancet, cutting off those bonds which a petty bourgeois environment creates between the party and official social opinion. At the same time Lenin taught the party to create its own social opinion, resting upon the thoughts and feelings of the rising class. Thus by a process of selection and education and in continual struggle, the Bolshevik party created not only a political but a moral medium of its own, independent of bourgeois social opinion and implacably opposed to it. Only this permitted the Bolsheviks to overcome the waverings in their own ranks and reveal in action the courageous determination without which the October victory would have been impossible.”

After the victorious insurrection, Lenin spoke to the All Russia Congress of the Soviets: “We shall now proceed to build, on the space cleared by historical rubbish, the airy, towering edifice of socialist society.” The revolution ushered in a new era of socioeconomic transformation. Landed estates, heavy industry, corporate monopolies and the commanding heights of the economy were expropriated by the nascent workers state. The dictatorship of the financial oligarchy was broken; the state had a monopoly on all foreign trade and commerce. Ministerial perks and privileges were abolished and the leaders of the revolution lived in most modest conditions. Victor Serge in his, Memoirs of a Revolutionary wrote: “In the Kremlin Lenin still occupied a small apartment built for a palace servant. In the recent winter he, like everyone else, had no heating. When he went to the barber’s he took his turn, thinking it unseemly for anyone else to give way to him.” Initially the new government was a coalition of the Bolsheviks, Left Social Revolutionaries and the Menshevik Internationalists. Only the fascist Black Hundreds were banned and even the Kadets, the bourgeois liberal party, was allowed to operate after the revolution. The new government was based on the most democratic system ever seen in history, the soviets, i.e. workers, soldiers and peasants councils at grassroots level that were devised to manage and democratically control the economy, agriculture, industry, army and society. The main guiding principles of this soviet system of governance were the following:

    Free democratic elections to all positions in the soviet state;
    Right of recall of all officials;
    No official to receive a higher wage than a skilled worker, and
    Gradually, all tasks of running society and the state to be performed by everyone in turn.

What this revolution really meant for the oppressed and exploited working classes of Russia was portrayed in an inspiring anecdote by John Reed: “Across the horizon spread the glittering lights of the Capital, immeasurably more splendid by the night than by the day, like a dike of jewels heaped on a barren plain. The old workman who drove the wheelbarrow held in one hand, while with the other he swept the pavement, looked at the far gleaming capital and exclaimed in an exulted gesture, ‘Mine!’ he cried, his face all alight. ‘All mine now! My Petrograd!”

If the revolutionary victory has to be explained from a scientific analysis, the Marxists also have a historical responsibility to give a scientific explanation of the degeneration and collapse of the Soviet Union. But Marxism is a science of perspective and it is a mediocrity of knowledge to analyse events after they have taken place. The Marxists had predicted the fall of the Soviet Union far in advance, starting with the leader of the revolution Vladimir Lenin, who from a Marxist standpoint had never ever envisaged the accomplishment of socialism in a single country. On March 7, 1918, Lenin weighed upon the situation, “Regarded from a world-historical point of view, there would be no hope of the ultimate victory of our revolution if it were to remain alone, if there were no revolutionary victories in other countries... our salvation from all these difficulties is an all-European revolution. At all events, under all conceivable circumstances, if the German revolution does not come, we are doomed.” Leon Trotsky wrote an epoch making book, The Revolution Betrayed in 1936 in which he scientifically predicted more than fifty years before the events took place that why and how the Soviet Union will collapse if the revolution in the advanced countries is not victorious and a political revolution of workers democracy doesn’t take place in the USSR. Ted Grant in his outstanding 1943 work, Marxist theory of the state, further elaborated and analysed this process. His perspectives, albeit in a negative sense, were vindicated by the events around the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The Russian revolution of 1917 was not an isolated national event but had immense international repercussions. It not only overthrew capitalism and landlordism in Russia but also smashed the shackles of the imperialist stranglehold. This triggered revolutionary upheavals far beyond the frontiers of the USSR, particularly in Europe. The imperialist masters were terrified by these mass revolts that threatened capitalism in its citadels. The British Prime Minister Lloyd George wrote in a confidential memorandum to Clemenceau, his French counterpart at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference: “The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent but of anger and revolt amongst the workmen against the present conditions. The whole existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other.” To crush the epicentre of the rising tide of the revolutionary upheavals they launched a massive attack on the nascent Soviet state with twenty one imperialist armies. Although the revolution itself was a relatively peaceful affair as only nine people died during the actual insurrection, the imperialist attack supporting the reactionary white armies brought drastic carnage, bloodshed, mayhem, starvation and destruction to a backward country already devastated by the first world war.

On the basis of extreme deprivation and pulverisation of the masses aggravated by the civil war and the blockade, the “struggle for individual existence”, in the words of Karl Marx, did not disappear or soften, but assumed in the subsequent period a ferocious character. The defeats of the revolutions in Germany (1918-19 and 1923), China (1924-25), Britain (1926) and several other countries were a fatal blow for the Bolshevik Revolution. They intensified its isolation and induced nationalist degeneration. The imperialist aggression was defeated by the combination of the heroic fight by the Red Army and the support of the proletariat and the soldiers of the imperialist countries and armies. Trotsky raised a revolutionary Red Army of five million from a war-torn Russian army of three hundred thousand. Innumerable Bolshevik cadres perished in this imperialist civil war. This created a vacuum in which the opportunist and the careerist elements penetrated the Soviet government. The shortages and dearth of commodities, the collapse of industry and agriculture due to the war brought a generalised misery that played an important role in the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution.

Lenin struggled against this degeneration before his early death in 1924. Lenin’s last testament which criticised and called for a struggle against this bureaucratic deformation was concealed in the iron vaults of the Kremlin, and finally exposed in 1956 at the 20th Congress of the CPSU. But the hostile objective conditions, the exhaustion of the proletarian vanguard due to war and revolution created a situation where a bureaucratic regime began to emerge around Stalin in the Soviet government and the state. Trotsky created a left opposition and put up a valiant resistance against this degeneration but that was crushed because of the ebbing of the revolutionary tide. This led to the consolidation of a bureaucratic totalitarian apparatus with huge perks and privileges. The maximum wage differentials of 1:4 were abolished. This political reaction against the October revolution was so repressive that by 1940 there was only one survivor, apart from Stalin of the central committee of the Bolshevik Party that had led the revolution in 1917. All others were either exterminated, died, committed suicide, were incarcerated or exiled.

In spite of this Stalinist degeneration of the revolution, the economy remained a planned one. The bureaucracy was not a class that owned the means of production but was a caste or a clique which controlled and usurped the surplus. Inspite of these severe setbacks the economy of the USSR grew at a pace that capitalism never achieved anywhere. Ted Grant wrote in his brilliant work, Russia — From Revolution to Counter Revolution, “In the fifty years from 1913 (the height of pre-war production) to 1963, despite two world wars, foreign intervention and civil war, and other calamities total industrial output rose more than 52 times. The corresponding figure for the USA was less than six times, while Britain struggled to double its output. In other words Soviet Union was transformed from a backward agricultural economy into the second most powerful nation on earth, with a mighty industrial base, a high cultural level and more scientists than the USA and Japan combined. Life expectancy more than doubled and child mortality fell by nine times. Such economic advance, in such a short a time, has no parallel anywhere in the world.” The equality and full involvement of women was ensured in all spheres of social, economic and political life — the provision of free school meals, milk for children, pregnancy consultation centres, maternity homes, crèches and other facilities free of cost were provided by the workers state. The superiority of the planned economy was proved to the world not in the language of dialectics but in the language of unprecedented social and material advances.

However as the economy expanded rapidly it became more sophisticated, complex and advanced. An economy producing one million commodities cannot be run by the same methods as those for an economy producing 1,500 items. Trotsky had once said that, “For a planned economy, workers democracy is as essential as oxygen is for the human body.” By the late 1960s the economic growth had begun to falter. By 1978 it plummeted to zero percent. The dead weight of mismanagement, waste, corruption and bureaucracy weighed down heavily on the economy, eventually dragging it to a standstill. The isolation of the revolution, nationalist caricature of socialism and the lack of workers democratic control and management of the economy and society were the real reasons for the degeneration of the Russian revolution, not the so-called ‘failure of socialism’. What actually existed in the Soviet Union at the time of its collapse was not socialism or communism but its caricature, Stalinism.

Today with the crisis of capitalism on a world scale there have been massive upheavals against this harrowing system that has plunged the vast majority of mankind into the pit of misery, poverty and disease. It is a historically doomed system and can only cause more pain, agony and grief to the human race. Marx and Engels understood from the beginning that the crisis of the capitalist system is the crisis of overproduction or overcapacity. Even the most far-sighted bourgeois economists acknowledge this crisis and how it has brought the capitalist system into extreme crisis at the present time. The Economist bemoans in its analysis of the world economy, “Modern politics needs to undergo a similar reinvention — to come up with ways of mitigating inequality. Some of those at the top of the pile will remain sceptical that inequality is a problem in itself. But even they have an interest in mitigating it, for if it continues to rise, momentum for change will build and may lead to a political outcome that serves nobody’s interests”.

The mass revolts of a renewed class struggle arising around the world in the present epoch that is dawning are clearly rejecting capitalism. The most daunting problem for these movements is the determination of an alternative system. Most of the ex-socialists and ex-communists are in the forefront of condemning revolutionary socialism as a scientific alternative to resolve the crisis. They have capitulated to the reactionary theories of ‘end of history, etc’, i.e. capitalism. But the greater damage being done by these intellectuals is trying to ‘modernise’ Marxism by venomous revisionism. However the only road to the salvation of mankind still today is revolutionary Marxism. Ninety five years later, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 is the only way forward for the accomplishment of this historic task. In 1917 it took about two weeks for the news of the Russian revolution to reach the leftwing activists in the Indian subcontinent. Now the masses can watch revolutions live on television. In more than nine hundred cities of the five continents there were mass demonstrations in support of the ‘Occupy Wall Street movement’. This is the internationalism that Marxism anticipated and strived for by creating the First International. At this juncture in human history if there is another October it would not and could not be confined to any national frontiers. A socialist revolution in any major country today shall redeem Lenin’s pledge that the whole world will develop into a USSR with a mighty revolutionary storm transcending the planet. Thus the process of the conquest of universe by the human race shall commence.

This article was originally published in the Pakistan Daily Times in three parts November 4-6.

http://www.marxist.com/bolshevik-revolution-95-years-on.htm

A Marxist view of Vladimir Putin

Russia: Putin - ten years of the man that no-one knew

WHEN BORIS Yeltsin, Russia's first post-Soviet president, greeted revellers in his traditional New Year's Eve broadcast in 1999, he surprised the country by resigning and appointing Vladimir Putin, then prime minister, as his acting replacement. In the presidential election of March 2000 Putin won 52% of the vote.

Rob Jones, Moscow

"Who is Mr Putin?" was the question on the lips of many commentators and world leaders, wondering whether they would be able to work with the new man in the Kremlin.

A more stark contrast between the outgoing and incoming presidents would be difficult to imagine. Yeltsin, a communist party official, came to the fore campaigning against the old Soviet party nomenclature [elite].

He presided over the re-introduction of capitalism in Russia and, following the deepest collapse of production in history, ethnic chaos and the disintegration of the state, ended up an embarrassing alcoholic.

Putin on the other hand is a former spy and head of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, (the successor to the KGB) and a fit teetotaller who enjoys judo, horse-riding, fishing and apparently any other sport that allows him to bare his chest in public! Since taking power, Putin has presided over considerable growth in the economy, restored the centralised state and raised Russia's profile on the world stage.

Background

During the 1980s Putin was a KGB agent in East Germany. In 1990, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, he returned to his native city, Leningrad, where he was made responsible for overseeing the political views and activities of students and staff at Leningrad University. There he linked up with a group of professors around Anatoly Sobchak, who soon became the city's pro-capitalist mayor.

By 1996, Sobchak was voted out of office after his group lost support and had become shrouded in scandal. The next year, Putin was called to Moscow - where within a year he became head of the FSB.

The ruling elite were worried about who would succeed Yeltsin. To enable the speedy restoration of capitalism, the Yeltsin epoch had seen the break-up of the Soviet Union's centralised state apparatus, growing separatist movements and even the de facto breakaway of Chechnya, following the disastrous first Chechen war.

The economic collapse and hyperinflation in the first half of the 1990s was topped by the spectacular collapse of the rouble in 1998, when it was devalued by over 70% in six months.

By the end of the 1990s, Russia's new capitalism had spun out of control and the country's ruling elite required not further decentralisation, but on the contrary a reversal of the process, leading to the establishment of a new centralised capitalist state.

This was the background to the discussions within "The Family", the clique running the country, as Yeltsin was approaching the end of his second presidential term.

"The Family" was based on Yeltsin's daughters, a number of key advisors such as former KGB general Alexander Korzhakov and FSB chief Mikhail Barsukov, and leading oligarchs such as Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich, who even lived in the Kremlin for a period. As Yeltsin degenerated into alcoholism, "The Family" took over the running of the state.

To this clique, Vladimir Putin seemed the ideal candidate. Little known, and therefore not as widely hated as some other possible candidates. Not only did he have a background in the security services but it was also clear that he would use a firm hand to restore key elements of a centralised state.

Some elements of the ruling elite around politicians such as Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov did oppose him, not for ideological reasons but because they were concerned that their business empires would be threatened. One of the first acts of the new president was to grant immunity from prosecution to the outgoing Yeltsin who was being investigated for corruption.

Chechen wars

But first Putin had to be elected. Key to his success (apart from the clear bias in the media and the sudden mysterious increase of the electorate by 1.2 million people), was the launching of the second Chechen war in August 1999.

The first Chechen war, launched by Yeltsin in 1994, had been a complete disaster. Conscript troops had been unprepared to fight, and the Chechen rebels were determined to hold onto their land, buying their weapons from the demoralised Russian troops.

The battle for Grozny, the Chechen capital, in August 1996 saw the Russian army humiliatingly driven out of the city. The resulting ceasefire left the republic a de-facto independent statelet.

The second war was launched after a series of terrorist attacks, including the blowing up of two apartment blocks in Moscow. Many Russians believe these attacks were organised by the FSB to justify the war.

Whatever the truth, Chechnya was brutally attacked, using such devastating weapons as vacuum bombs. Following a two-month siege of Grozny, which left tens of thousands of civilians dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees, federal rule was restored.

A former rebel and religious leader, Akhmad Kadyrov, was installed as pro-Kremlin Chechen leader, and after his assassination in 2004, his son, the brutal warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, was eventually installed as Chechnya's president.

Taking control

Having been pushed into power by "The Family", Putin moved to clip the wings of the oligarchs who had grown all-powerful under Yeltsin. Berezovsky, the former kingmaker, was hounded into exile. Khodorkovsky, who toyed with creating a parliamentary majority from the neo-liberal and Communist opposition to challenge Putin, was sent to jail.

Those oligarchs such as Roman Abramovich who restricted their interests to sport and kept out of politics were allowed to stay. In the place of the ousted oligarchs, a new layer of "state oligarchs" arose. A certain redistribution of wealth has taken place with the creation of a number of "state corporations" - not a form of nationalisation, but a concentration of key stake-holdings in strategic companies under the patronage of the state.

A so-called managed democracy based on the "power vertical" was introduced. Increasingly, the democratic rights introduced in the early 1990s were taken back. For example, following the 2004 terrorist attack on a school in Beslan, North Caucasus, the election of regional governors was abolished.

The only opposition parties tolerated are those set up by the Kremlin (Just Russia and Zhirinovsky's ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party) and the tame Communists.

Even these parties experience difficulties in being allowed to participate in all elections if they pose any threat to the monopoly of power held by the ruling United Russia party. Anyone wishing to protest faces harassment and bans. Now activists are even being told that their children will be put into care as they are not suitable parents.

Bureaucracy

In the 1980s, Soviet workers grew fed up with the number of bureaucrats who sucked the lifeblood from the planned economy like parasites. They were led to believe that a capitalist economy would get rid of these parasites, but they were cruelly mistaken.

In Leonid Brezhnev's times [he was Soviet Communist Party leader from 1964 to 1982] there were one million bureaucrats in the whole USSR - now there are 1.6 million, just in Russia alone!

As Alexei Arbatov, an analyst at the Russian Academy of Sciences, pointed out: "Soviet bureaucracy was confined to a non-cash command economy: there were few financial incentives but significant perks (however modest by present standards). By contrast, Russian bureaucracy today is sponging off the privatised/over-monopolised economy with its astronomical profits."

In the first five years of Putin's rule, the amount of bribe-taking in Russia grew by nearly ten times - from $36 billion to $316 billion a year. There is little evidence to indicate the pace of growth has slowed.

In 2008, Putin was constitutionally bound to give up the presidency after two consecutive terms, and so he handed over the mantle to his protégé and close ally Dmitry Medvedev. Putin simply moved chairs to become prime minister, and today runs the country as Medvedev's senior partner.

The sheen on their joint rule is beginning to fade, however. Russia has suffered more from the world crisis than many countries (last year's fall in GDP was over 8%). Splits are beginning to appear in the state apparatus, and despite widespread repression the number of people prepared to participate in protests is growing.

One Kremlin spin-doctor even warned recently that the regime has such a weak base that conditions are beginning to mirror those at the beginning of 1917. It is therefore an open question whether in the 2012 election Putin will attempt to return as president or whether there will be an open split between the different wings of the ruling elite.

There is only one thing that is certain - the working class needs to urgently develop a political alternative to this corrupt and bureaucratic capitalism.

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Bust, boom and bust

PUTIN'S COMING to power coincided with a new stage in Russia's economic development. The early 1990s saw a collapse in GDP of about 50%. Paradoxically, the collapse of the rouble in 1998, by making imports too expensive, caused a strengthening of demand for domestically-produced goods. This demand was turbo-boosted by the price of oil on the world market. From a low of $17 a barrel in January 1999, it increased steadily over the next eight years, eventually topping $140.

These two factors fuelled a rapid growth in the Russian economy. Production was restored to close to pre-1990 levels, incomes grew relatively quickly, and stock market and housing bubbles grew in parallel with those in the rest of the world.

For the mass of the Russian population, which had lived through the stagnation of the late Soviet period before experiencing the collapse of industry and living standards with capitalist restoration, this period appeared to be one of increasing prosperity. That was before everything started tumbling again in 2008.

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