December 31 — It is now 11 days since the sudden resignation of Eduard Shevardnadze, the foreign minister of the USSR. As is well known, his departure not only stunned the public in the USSR but was regarded as a momentous development throughout the world. It led many, many people to wonder what had caused this surprising development.
In light of the precipitous decline in the world position of the USSR during Shevardnadze's tenure in office, one would think the very first thing on the agenda of the Congress of People's Deputies would be to call for a full and comprehensive investigation into the causes and consequences of his appointment as well as his departure.
In the last two years, the government of the Soviet Union has gone through a number of changes in form, making it more like a bourgeois government. The power of the executive has been strengthened at the expense of the Congress of Deputies, which has been remodeled to resemble a bourgeois parliament — that is, to be little more than a talk-shop.
In the early days of the Russian Revolution, the Congress of Soviets, whose deputies were directly elected by the workers, soldiers and peasants and were subject to recall, combined both the legislative and the executive in one body. This form of workers' state first emerged in history during the 1870-71 Paris Commune.
In a bourgeois democratic state, however, the powers are separated into the legislative, judicial and executive branches. What is significant in this form is not so much the diffusion of power but that both the executive and the judiciary are removed further from the masses than in a Paris Commune-type government.
In the structure of the U.S. government, the judiciary are generally appointed for life, removable only for cause (which rarely happens). In the imperialist epoch, especially, power is concentrated more and more in the executive branch.
Even in matters of war and peace, the legislative body in any capitalist country has little say. The parliament may occasionally complain, but most often becomes the cheerleader for imperialist adventures. For a parliamentary institution to stop a war is the rarest of political phenomena.
But a bourgeois parliamentary body does have the right — and occasionally uses it — to inquire into the activities of the executive branch. Indeed, it has the power of subpoena. Under these circumstances, it would have been quite proper for the Congress of Deputies to immediately launch a public inquiry into the basis for Shevardnadze's resignation. The congress could have demanded an accounting by Shevardnadze of his tenure in office.
Under his tenure, the USSR government renounced anti-imperialist support to oppressed countries. It encouraged if not assisted outright the hostile forces that overthrew the governments of the GDR, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, and conspired with bourgeois elements in the Hungarian government to open their borders, which ended in the swallowing up of the German Democratic Republic.
There is so much that Shevardnadze, and Gorbachev too, of course, have to answer to in matters relating to foreign policy. They must explain why and how they developed a cozy friendship with U.S. Secretary of State Baker. What if any secret agreements were made with respect to the developing war crisis over Iraq? They must explain how it happened that Shevardnadze (presumably with Gorbachev's blessing) agreed to co-sponsor with the U.S. — the avowed enemy of all the oppressed people of the world — the resolution in the UN that gives the U.S. the green light to attack Iraq on Jan. 15 if it does not unconditionally withdraw from Kuwait, a territory that Iraq has historical claims to.
As a Cabinet member, Shevardnadze had immunity from prosecution. On resigning, however, he loses that immunity. He is therefore subject to a subpoena from the Congress of Deputies to testify in any investigation conducted by a committee of the Congress, or be subject to contempt proceedings. That's the way it's done in most bourgeois parliaments, for instance, in the U.S.
He is also subject to possible criminal proceedings based on allegations made by the Minister of the Interior and also by the Defense Ministry, who have plainly stated that foreign intelligence agencies are at work in the USSR. The question is what Shevardnadze knows with respect to the operations of the CIA in the USSR.
For instance, there was an article in the New York paper Newsday on Dec. 30 on how "the Soviet Defense Ministry, responding to a question from deputies about `anti-Soviet subversive activity,' submitted a report noting that the U.S. congressionally-funded National Endowment for Democracy had given grants to the Inter-Regional Group of deputies, which considers itself a radical opposition, and to a research center belonging to Moscow News, also a radical publication. The report, according to the independent Soviet news agency Interfax, added that Vitaly Korotich, editor of the liberal weekly Ogonyok, had been a researcher at Columbia University's Gannett Center for Media Studies."
So, many of the people who are presented here as the new voices of freedom in the USSR, and who are often paraded on network TV as Soviet experts (as Korotich has done lately), really are paid agents of the U.S. government through the notorious National Endowment for Democracy!
It should be noted here that the U.S. capitalist media have long been deliberately confusing the issues in the USSR by labeling those supporting the bourgeois reforms as "liberals" and even "radicals," while those opposed to the reforms from a socialist direction are called "conservatives," "reactionaries" and "right-wingers." Who can all this be aimed at except those here who think of themselves as liberal and would find it harder to defend the forces pushing for a return to capitalism if they were called by their right name?
A large bloc opposed to capitalist market reforms has recently emerged in the Congress of Deputies. It is called Soyuz, and among its outspoken members is a young army colonel, Nikolai Petrushenko. According to the same Newsday article, Petrushenko "accused some of the political insurgents who favor free markets and an end of Communist rule of being agents of the CIA. He said he had learned in his political classes years ago of how the CIA would destroy the Soviet Union. `They said the Communist Party would be destroyed, the army would be undermined, there would be calls for private property and national rights,' he said. `All of it has come true. So why should we trust the United States?'"
This is what many in the USSR must be asking themselves. How could a socialist country get into such a deep foreign policy alliance with the imperialist U.S.?
And how did things get to the point where the Pentagon actually was able to reach out to the Soviet military, inveigling General Mikhail Moiseyev, the chief of staff of the USSR, to visit the U.S. in early October when they hoped to get him to give his blessings to the imperialist adventure in the Middle East and agree to cooperate militarily with the U.S. forces? Fortunately, General Moiseyev turned down the Pentagon.
It should now be clear that Shevardnadze's resignation was not solely a foreign affairs matter. Nor was it due entirely to the imminence of a U.S.-engineered attack against Iraq.
Shevardnadze's departure has deep roots in the soil of the Gorbachev administration's capitalist economic reforms. After more than five years of experimentation, these reforms have brought about the near collapse of the economic structure of the USSR. They have also brought in their wake social, political and ethnic consequences that threaten the breakup of the USSR altogether.
It is not the socialist ownership of the means of production, the centralization of industry or the lack of a capitalist market that have brought the country to the abyss. It is the accumulation of anarchic, market-oriented, capitalist experimentation with the economy which is the real culprit for all the chaos in the USSR today.
This is especially evident in privately conducted trade and commerce in the food distribution industry, and has brought about the familiar phenomena of capitalist speculation, hoarding, outright theft and embezzlement. These ugliest characteristics of capitalist society are now widespread in the USSR.
After five years of capitalist experimentation and wearied waiting by the masses for the promised improvement in their material well-being, a revolutionary communist opposition to the bourgeois reforms is developing. This is revealed in the weekly Moscow News, which is these days an organ of the bourgeois critics of the Gorbachev administration.
Moscow News of Dec. 2-9 asks whether "neo-Bolshevism" is on the rise. It refers to the growth of many political organizations which go much further in attacking the capitalist restorationists than do the Communist deputies in the Soviet parliament.
In fact, Moscow News notes a virtual "kaleidoscope of newly emerging parties and movements" and an "angry buzz from crowds rallying in city squares. What are they? Repercussions of the 70-year-long past [or] is it an emerging neo-Bolshevism which is dangerous if only because it has taken from its predecessor the idea of social equality which is particularly attractive during any crisis?"
Social equality! At last Moscow News, which has been so vociferously pushing the bourgeois reforms and masking them as freedom and democracy, has finally come out and named what it fears most: a renaissance of revolutionary communism, the communism of Lenin, that is, of the early Bolshevik period.
The issue is the struggle for social equality, not, of course, petty-bourgeois egalitarianism, but the social equality of which Marx spoke in the Gotha Program and which Lenin further developed in his State and Revolution. It is basically a struggle against the growth of privilege, the growing differentiation between rich and poor.
So it is no wonder that Moscow News quotes a writer who says, "We face a paradox. An actual ban on the class approach and its false contrast with universal human values is happening at a time when social and economic differentiation is growing and the gap between the rich and the poor is widening ... [W]e are stubbornly being told there is a need for fraternization between the striking coal miners and the growing ranks of millionaires, a need to gloss over the enmity between the two, despite the fact that our entire historical experience is literally crying out about the inevitability of a conflict." The writer is Richard Kosolapov in Moskovsky Stroitel, #36, 1990.
The same issue of Moscow News quoted from a leaflet addressed to workers and intellectuals, distributed by blacksmiths from a machine-building factory in Sverdlovsk. It reads in part: "The Soviets of all levels, the government and its economic advisors are now drumming it into our heads that the market is for the benefit of us all, making all kinds of promises about charitable meals, universal human values and so on, doing their best to exterminate our class consciousness. ... Do we really need such Soviets? What will they bring to our people, except poverty and animosity?"
"Neo-Bolshevism," continues Moscow News in another article, "represented in this country by the United Working People's Front and similar organizations, is also dangerous because it strikes the right chords under the banner of communism, winning over a sizable section of the population. These are mostly those who fear the market. ... Another type of neo-Bolshevism is to be [found] in the Marxist Workers' Party — the Party of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, as well as in several socialist parties and movements within [our emphasis-SM] the Soviet Communist Party."
The Communist Party as such is no longer the monolithic organization it once was. Now it contains a variety of different factions, from those that are extremely conciliatory if not totally obedient to the Gorbachev reformists, to a great many opposed to Gorbachev on the basis of revolutionary communist principles.
The attacks that have been given most prominence, however, are those that emanate from Soyuz, the national association of people's deputies already referred to, which began last February. This group of deputies is bound together on the basis of averting the disintegrationist character of Gorbachev's nationality policy, which has led to ethnic strife and threatens the very existence of the central government.
But some go much further and also oppose the capitalist market schemes of the current governing group.
Look what happened when Veniamin Yarin, a Presidential Council member, made a speech to a Soyuz congress and accused the opposition of conducting a witchhunt against the free marketeers. Yarin was greeted with a virtual tempest of indignation. People's deputies shouted him down with cries of, "He wants to turn us capitalist!" (Moscow News, Dec. 16-23.)
Yarin was roundly attacked by the chairperson of Moscow's United Workers' Front. This speaker, according to Moscow News, "called perestroika a premeditated counter-revolutionary coup and demanded Gorbachev's dismissal from all his current posts. He called for tough measures against the bourgeoisie and for the organization of a communist resistance movement throughout the country. The presidium doggedly reminded the speaker that his time was up. But the audience demanded that he continue."
No longer can it be said that the only progressive opposition to the bourgeois reforms comes from the ranks of the Congress of Soviet Deputies. There is mass opposition that goes much, much further than the traditional "conservative" communist opposition in the congress. Whatever opposition exists in the congress is reflective of what is happening among the masses at large. And now we see it is beginning to take on a revolutionary communist character.
Last updated: 19 February 2018