Introduction: the Deconstruction of Communism

CONTENTS

Foreword

1. Introduction:  the Deconstruction of Communism
2. Midnight, 1989:  the Crumbling Empire
3. The Goskomstat Report for 1989:  an economy out of control
4. Soviet agriculture in 1989:  a third year of near stagnation
5. Goskomstat Report on social conditions in 1989
6. Moscow's nationality problems in 1989
7. Worker unrest in 1989
8. The Soviet armed forces in 1989
9. The Church in 1989
10. What Glasnost has Destroyed
11. Poland, Totalitarianism's Playground:  an Exemplar
12. Waiting for Yeltsin:  Is Boris Good Enough?
13. Annus MCMXIX mirabilis -- and Australia

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FOREWORD

The German historian Theodor Mommsen once observed how wonderful it would feel to be present when world history "turned the corner".  We should recall also, however, the old, famous Chinese curse:  "May you live in interesting times".  It is safe to say the year 1989-90 provided both such excitements.

Some historians, witnessing the recent unfolding of European events, not surprisingly drew analogies with 1789.  Michael Howard, the British scholar, wrote that "In 1989, while the nations of Western Europe celebrated the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the nations of Eastern Europe re-enacted it."  The revolution, Howard said, reached its climax on 9 November 1989, when the Berlin Wall, like the Bastille two centuries before, collapsed, "pierced by crowds ... dancing, singing and weeping" -- that infernal wall which, some callous Western observers believed, epitomised the peace of Europe.

In but a few months, the northern world was turned upside down.  "Pray, father, what happened?"  "Why, my son, there was this great systemic collapse!"

That great, capacious, (even evil!) communist empire, which for four decades had loomed over the West, suddenly began to fall apart.  Its massive joints, wheels, struts, its very cross-tree -- the gig all of a sudden gave way in a manner akin to the swift collapse of Oliver Wendell Holmes's "wonderful one-hoss shay".  We had all grown very accustomed to its presence -- a kind of permanent "black hole" in our universe.  All competent Cold War historians know the prophecy that Alexis de Tocqueville made in his Democracy in America:  the civilised -- European -- world was destined to be overwhelmed by two great marginal empires, America and Russia.  That would be real Weltgeschichte!

Tocqueville, our mentor, said it would happen.  Some of us even welcomed it.  Some post-1945 "high theorists" judged bipolarity more stable than, and preferable to, multipolarity, because major war-and-peace decisions would be concentrated in fewer hands.  Such theorising, of course, ignored the immense political and moral differences between the USSR and the US, and the fact that bipolarity can be quite dangerous, depending on situations.  Before 1860, it should be recalled, the relation between the states of America, North and South, were "bipolar", as were, in their time, those of Rome and Carthage.

The vocabulary we use to describe recent political happenings poorly suits these particular events.  Since the late eighteenth century, the word revolution has always implied one strong ingredient:  great violence.  Thus far, however, the peculiarity of recent events is the relative absence, to date, of political violence in central (eastern) Europe and in the USSR.  The uprisings of 1789, 1848 and 1917 were violent, as were the abortive eastern and central European revolts of the 1950s and 1970s and the European civil wars of the early 1920s.  (The first casualties of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 were the infamous Rakosi secret police, many of whom were unceremoniously hanged from Budapest lamp-posts.)  In East Germany, in 1989, only days after the fall of the Wall, the Stasi (whose snipers had for decades shot fellow-countrymen fleeing to the West) were seen amicably fraternising with their one-time targets.  It may be that this most momentous "revolution" may turn out to be the most peaceful.  But, on the other hand, and considered as a whole, the Revolution -- as I shall soon describe it -- may by no means be over.

When we observe the events of "eastern" Europe and the Soviet Union, in all of their possibilities, we see their most bizarre and striking historical feature:  in the recollection of historians there has never in modern times been an occasion when, in peacetime, one hegemonic power in contest with another simply threw in the towel.  Yet this is what the Soviet Union under Gorbachev seems to have done.  With a wave of the hand, the USSR has said goodbye to the Cold War, hoping that the Americans, and others, will help cure its many afflictions.  The immense repecussions of all this upon world politics remain to be assessed.  But its immediate effect is to leave the United States of America alone (for the time being) in the world as the one full-fledged superpower:  an awesome historical event.  How liberal America will accept this astonishing monopoly of power remains to be seen.

Let us now turn to the "parts" of this immense sea-change.  First we have the swift, nearly simultaneous, collapse of the Soviets' puppet regimes in eastern (now read central) Europe;  we see the collapse of communism as an operational system in each of them;  we see the disintegration of the Communist Party within the USSR;  we witness the sudden demoralisation of the Red Army;  the profound crisis which grips the Soviet economy;  and the resurgence of hopes for self-determination among nearly all the USSR's nationalities, including, of course, the Russians.  We now face the prospect that the USSR as a whole empire may actually fall apart -- the last of the huge empires -- with incalculable consequences.

For Westerners, and for Europeans in particular, these great events have meant not only the resurrection of a continent believed to have been permanently frozen in two parts, but also a continent that would be free.  In the first weeks of freedom, joy was unbounded.  In Berlin on Christmas day 1989, a "festival of jubilation" -- Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, conducted by the American Leonard Bernstein -- united orchestras and choruses from both East and West Germany, as well as from countries alllied against Germany in the Second World War.  Beethoven's text (from Schiller's Ode to Joy) was altered for this "celebration of freedom".  "Joy" was replaced by "Freedom", a somewhat different concept.  But we have Bernstein's word that this was:

a heaven-sent moment to sing Freiheit wherever the score indicates the word Freude.  If ever there were an historic time to take an academic risk in the name of human joy, this is it, and I am sure we have Beethoven's blessing.

Ironically, perhaps, among the choruses and orchestras assembled to celebrate the new freedom was the Kirov Theatre Orchestra of Leningrad -- named after a Soviet boss whom Stalin murdered and then cynically "honoured" by naming many Soviet towns, cities and cultural groups after him.  (Stalin used the murder as occasion to launch a gigantic purge of Kirov's opponents.)

Freedom unleashes many responsibilities.  As the French poet Paul Valéry wrote, when Paris was liberated in 1944:

Freedom is a kind of sensation.  It can be breathed.  The notion that we are free expands every moment's future.  The very idea gives us strange inner wings that stretch their widest in our breast, lifting us in their intoxicating rise. ... [T]he whole liberated human being is invaded by a delicious revival of his authentic will.

And so it was, briefly, in those days of great excitement, when in Warsaw, Prague, Berlin, Budapest and Bucharest the tyrannies toppled one by one;  and when stirrings of freedom and independence ran through Riga, Tallinn, Kiev, Leningrad, Moscow and points east.

New freedom means new possibilities;  it rekindles old memories and it inspires new ambitions and aspirations -- and fears old and new.  Valéry's excited comments on "liberation" were those of a Frenchman whose freedoms had been taken away for only four years.  For many Europeans, freedom had been nonexistent for many decades.  Whole generations had never known freedom in any meaningful sense.  Also, in an old continent such as Europe, the firmness of the Cold War division during forty years had frozen aspirations, ambitions, memories and fears.  Afterthoughts soon followed the Bernstein-Beethoven concert;  would the New Freedom mean the renaissance of old rivalries and insecurities?  Would the New Freedom exact severe penalties and prices, especially among those in the Soviet East who, under socialism, had almost never known or experienced freedom, but had "enjoyed" the predictabilities of Marxist socialism -- stable bread prices, stable rents, stable sloppy inefficiencies, guaranteed jobs, and so forth!  For them, freedom means a challenge:  from now on, you are on your own!  (One especially "disadvantaged" group in East Germany consists of long-subsidised Soviet-style writers, whose publishing careers have been cut short by the new events.)

The Cold War abruptly ended in those heady weeks of 1989-90 when the Wall tumbled down.  A very long era of modern power politics, focussed upon (and emanating from) Europe, seemingly came to an end.  In our rejoicing let us not beguile ourselves into believing that history has done the same, or that the world will necessarily remain a nicer or a safer place.

Paul Seabury

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CHAPTER 1

The year of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution brought with it the non-violent collapse of the anciens regimes of Eastern Europe which ... had been a fulcrum of Jacobin manifestations.  The expiation of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union which prompted a lurching rescue operation to preserve the leading role of the Communist Party by alternative means, led to Soviet withdrawal of support mechanisms for East European satellites. ... [Gorbachev's] plan backfired because he underestimated the consequences of letting the genie out of the bottle.

Dan Rabinovici

As its title suggests, this book examines the dramatic events of 1989, which destroyed the communist imperium in eastern and central Europe, and have fractured it in the USSR.  The collapse of a mighty empire is always a matter of world-historical significance.  It is accompanied by new national constellations and political orders, shifts in the balance of power, and often by violence and civil war.  It brings high expectations, great uncertainties and the need for new thinking.  There are new economic challenges, opportunities and, for some, losses.  Already, the euphoria of liberation in central Europe is fading as people realise the magnitude of the problems they still face and as the tasks of social, political and economic reconstruction begin in earnest.

One thing is certain.  In the outer rim of the Soviet empire, communism is dead, killed off by the people.  Within the empire's inner rim, it is dying.  Ever since 1917, communism and Russian imperialism have been inextricably linked.  What Lenin and his successors did was to totalitarianise the power structure and restore the empire which had effectively ceased to exist in February 1917 when the Tsar abdicated, the heir to the throne refused to accept it, and a provisional, democratic government vowed to grant independence to all the nations who wanted it.  In overthrowing the one democratic government Russia had ever had in their coup of November 1917, ⁽¹⁾ the Bolsheviks destroyed an economy which at the time, despite the damage caused by the Great War, was poised to become the second or third strongest in the world.  Far from fulfilling their promise to dissolve the empire, by the early 1920s Lenin and his Bolsheviks had strengthened its chains.  In the name of "socialist internationalism" the Bolshevik venture was given world-wide ideological appeal, particularly to that stratum of the Western clergy and intelligentsia that was seeking simple solutions to complex problems, psychological and ideological certainties, and utopias to save the world from liberal democracy and socialism.

Communism promised salvation for all in the joint names of history and the working class.  Soviet power and ideology would build a new and better society and conquer the world through both the word and the sword.  Whatever its founders intended it to be, in reality Soviet-style communism proved to be an ideal method -- perhaps the only method -- of imposing the rule of a morally, technologically and economically inferior state over a conglomerate of states superior in all those respects.

Seventy years later, however, democratic capitalism has triumphed over communism and sovietism.  It has done so through the conduct of peace and not war, thus adding further to its moral strength and material success.  The democratic capitalist means of production has in the space of fifty years, in war and in peace, brought to an end the two great totalitarian empires, Nazism and communism.  Having first forcibly liberated, and then magnanimously rehabilitated, Western Europe from the scourge of Nazism, the democratic capitalist world, has also made its contribution to the liberation of the "other" Europe from communist totalitarianism.  Now, it has the opportunity to help rehabilitate the shattered societies and economies of central and eastern Europe while broadening the concept of a "united" Europe.

If nothing else, Western complicity in imposing Soviet imperialism on the "other" Europe through the Yalta and Potsdam treaties demands it.  Morality and ethics rest upon justice as much in international affairs as they do in domestic ones.  The appalling consequences of the unjust peaces of Versailles and Yalta/Potsdam are finally being put behind us.

HOMO SOVIETICUS

The Soviet empire was "justified" by ultimate goals:  namely, in this case, the fulfilment of History (or, if you prefer, "the end of History") through "proletarian" man's mastery of nature and the social engineering of a new species of Homo sapiens, not "Aryan man", but something suspiciously like it, "Homo Sovieticus" -- the new man, the original and unique product of communism.  Thus, according to its own highly-mythologised ideology, communism was to replace God or the gods as the creator/s of being, and was projected as the fulfilment of the evolutionary and creative processes.  This hubristic claim led to an onslaught against all forms of religious, spiritual, cultural and civic life not controlled by the one-party state.

As late as 1988 Soviet medical students began their Latin course with the sentence, "Homo Sovieticus sum" -- "I am Soviet man". ⁽²⁾  The official ideologist Suslov declared that:

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union proceeds, and has always proceeded, from the premise that the formation of the New Man is the most important component of the entire task of Communist construction. ⁽³⁾

According to Mikhail Heller, author of the splendid volume, Cogs in the Soviet Wheel:

A list of the basic attributes of Soviet man was given in the introduction to The Soviet People, headed "Homo sovieticus":

The first and most important quality of a Soviet man is his total commitment to Communist ideas and his devotion to the Party. ... Whether or not he is a member of the CPSU, his Party-mindedness manifests itself in his entire world outlook, his clear vision of the Ideal, to which he is selflessly devoted.

The authors are at pains to give as detailed a picture as possible of this fruit of so many years' labour on the refashioning of human matter:

[W]ords are not enough, for this human being cannot be made to fit into mere formulae. ... He is, first of all, a Man of Labour ... he regards work as the most important thing in his life. ... He is also a man of the Collective ... infinitely loyal to his socialist multinational fatherland. ... He is a man who feels responsible for everything. ... There is nothing that does not concern him, be it an event of global significance or simply the life of his neighbours on the same landing. ... He is a man of lofty ideals. ... He actively champions the ideas of the Great October. ... He is a harmoniously developed human being. ... He is a man about whom the state cares a great deal. ... The state's concern for him is tangible and visible.  His comrades, whom he has elected to governmental bodies, decide matters of state, and he knows that this is done in his name, for his benefit. ⁽⁴⁾

In reality, however, "Homo sovieticus" became "Homo patheticus".  In the words of the Soviet satirist, Alexander Zinoviev, he "has been trained to live in comparatively foul conditions ... is ready to face adversity and constantly expects even worse. ..." ⁽⁵⁾  Ill-housed, ill-fed, underworked and underpaid, but no longer totally suppressed, "Homo sovieticus" throughout the Soviet empire is rising against both his creator (the Soviet state) and its charter myth (Marxist-Leninist ideology).  Prometheus is flexing his muscles.

So what was this ideology which attempted to justify the most extreme totalitarian measures in the name of manufacturing the "new man", "the new order" and the "new morality"?

MARXISM IN PRACTICE

Translated into action, Karl Marx's political philosophy amounted to a historically-unprecedented grab for power.  The kernel of the Marxist idea, particularly as expressed in Marx's The German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto, is that whoever owns and controls the means of production controls everything, including the forces of nature.  Thus Marxism, when stripped of its philosophical embellishment, fed the temptation to power.  Working on this assumption and employing the methods of the nineteenth-century conspiratorial terrorist, the "unmentionable" Nechaev, communists took control of all the means of production, distribution and exchange wherever they came to power.  This control required total political power, with the same results everywhere -- the destruction of liberty and progressive economic decline.

Total power corrupted totally.  The regime used and was used by brutal psychopaths such as Felix Dzierzynski, ⁽⁶⁾ founder of the first Soviet secret police apparatus, the Cheka.  Without the Cheka, Lenin admitted, Soviet power would have been meaningless -- a statement confirmed by the fact that the abandonment of "Iron Felix's" methods has rapidly been followed by the collapse of communism.  Terror was indeed the lynch-pin of Soviet power at home and abroad.

Without the backing of Soviet power, communism in Eastern and central Europe and the Balkans is now dead.  It is also dying in the USSR itself.  A domino effect is at work.  However, not only is communism dying, so is the USSR as a political entity and as a multi-national empire.  Forced to face economic realities by President Ronald Reagan's reversal of President Carter's policies of indirectly subsidising Soviet economic inefficiency, Mr Gorbachev, like Peter the Great, came to power believing that changes in attitudes (glasnost) could help modernise and save the system.  He soon discovered, however, that the principal fashioners of those attitudes -- and hence the principal stumbling blocks to the necessary changes -- were the very Party-state structures which he had set out to refurbish and modernise.  At the heart of this system of social and political control lay the nomenklatura -- that nexus of officials who had fashioned and controlled the state as the means of producing for themselves a vastly superior lifestyle to that of all other Soviet subjects, including communist party members not on the privileged lists.  It is not an exaggeration to claim, as has Professor Robert Miller of the ANU's Soviet research unit, that the economies of the USSR and central Europe were primarily geared to fulfilling the needs of these people, amounting to 15-20 per cent of the population. ⁽⁷⁾

Gorbachev, in other words, was forced to the realisation that the Party was a hopeless case.  His initial attempts to reform it necessarily sowed the seeds for its decline, and consequently that of the totalitarian structures and Party-KGB-run empire.  In brief, Gorbachev is presiding over the dissolution of the very order which he set out to save through the three-pronged policy of glasnost, democratsiya and perestroika.  What matters here is not intentions but the consequences of action.

REJECTION OF SOVIETISM

A trend has been established which Mr Gorbachev, even with his draconian powers, will find difficult to contain.  We have now seen a complete and utter rejection of Sovietism by large numbers of the people in all the constituent republics, including the Russian republic, the Soviet heartland itself, under its radical president, Boris Yeltsin.  Thirteen of the fifteen republics -- including the two most important, the Russian republic and the Ukraine -- have officially asserted their sovereignty and formally claimed rights to varying degrees of autonomy, up to and including foreign and defence policy, economic affairs and intra- and international trade.  If they are not in a majority at the moment in the republican parliaments, anti-soviet, nationalist, secessionist and democratic representatives and candidates (most of whom are also committed to free-market economics) are certain of gaining majorities in future elections -- unless, of course, there is a swift counter-revolution enforced by the all-Union organs of repression.  However, as anti-"democratic-centralist" measures are being progressively institutionalised in the republics the probability of such an outcome is diminishing despite the Gorbachev regime's violent reimposition of communist rule in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, earlier this year.  Internal systems of checks and balances against the arbitrary assertion of central power are thus no longer merely embryonic.  By responding to Lithuania's declaration of independence with economic sanctions and military force -- and not compromise -- Mr Gorbachev reverted to Leninist solutions, thus failing his "Rubicon" test in the vital area traditionally known as "nationality policy".  Since that time, he and his court have been reacting to the initiatives of the governments and parliaments of the republics in desperate, Canute-like, attempts to save the USSR from the tidal, "deconstructionist" wave.

The nationalist, republican, constitutional, social and economic disarray that now constitutes the affairs of the USSR is such that it is difficult to ascertain just what it is over which Mr Gorbachev now officially presides and over which -- on paper -- he has draconian powers.  The economic situation is so bad that one of the principal challenges confronting what was one of the world's most potent political machines is -- as was the case in Poland in the 1970s -- the containment of bread riots.  In the nineteenth century, historians described "the Russian problem" as the "land" problem.  A hundred years later and after 73 years of communist rule it has degenerated into the bread problem.  That is the measure of the regress brought about by the nationalisation of industry and agriculture and the deliberate destruction of civic culture and market exchange.  In the words of leading Soviet economist Abel Aganbegyan, "the economic situation in the country is catastrophic.  [It is] much worse than appears on the surface."

The nationalisation of the means of production meant the nationalisation of each and every individual's labour in a poverty-stricken society of state-owned serfs.  Thus communism was feudalism totalitarianised;  or as some authors have described it, a kind of neo-feudalism.

The current turmoil begs the question whether the USSR remains a viable political entity.  Mr Gorbachev has argued for a new union treaty, in which sovereign soviet republics would refer some powers to the centre.  However, it is simply too late to play word games:  the centripetal forces that once held the USSR together -- the Communist Party, the security apparatus, the Army, and Russia -- no longer exert their pull.  Consequently the USSR is perilously approaching critical mass.  If it fissions, the fall-out will be massive, unsettling world trade and disturbing the factors that maintain a precarious world peace in an increasingly multi-polar and unpredictable international environment.  From his exile in Vermont, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has proposed that the USSR be succeeded by a democratic Russian Union consisting of the present Russian republic plus the Ukraine, Belorussia and the Russian part of Kazakhstan, adding the rider "unless the Ukraine truly wants independence".  The remaining republics would be free to become independent nation states.

With the abandonment of Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution -- which guaranteed power to the Party -- and the refashioning of Party organisational structures, Mr Gorbachev is the sole member of the Party's ruling body, the Politburo, who is also a member of the central government.  In the past, Politburo members generally also held senior government posts in the system of "interlocking directorships" linking party, executive, parliament and all organs of the state including the KGB.  The KGB is now under the direction of the new Presidential Council and no longer structurally the servant of the Party (although elements of it remain loyal to sectional or regional party bosses);  its mandate is now to serve the Soviet state.  (But what is that, and who now defines its interests?)

The army is also under the direction of the Presidential Council, but can no longer be entirely trusted to do the will of the central political leadership.  It too is divided, with some regional commanders expressing loyalty to republican, and not central, authorities, and others privately backing Mr Gorbachev's arch-rivals.  Moreover, with officers now elected in considerable numbers to the Supreme Soviet and republican Soviets (parliaments), a political chemistry of fissiparous reactions has been triggered with the army engaging openly in the endemic political warfare that is beginning to characterise the Soviet imperium.  Several of the USSR's most highly-ranked commanders, including the former commander-in-chief in Afghanistan, have publicly declared that the Red Army's role is the defence of the Motherland and not to provide para-military support for the political leadership of the USSR.  Such statements would have been unthinkable pre-Gorbachev, and would unquestionably have earned a death sentence under Stalin.

The position of Russia in this nexus is vital.  In many respects, the outcomes for the whole of the USSR are, for the reasons alluded to above, dependent on what occurs in the Russian republic.  If the outcome there is more towards democracy and a peaceable settlement of difference, particularly as they affect the all-important nationalities issue, then the outcome for the whole of the USSR (with the possible exception of the Islamic-dominated central Asian republics) is likely to take a similar turn.  If not, then the general prognosis looks bleak.  At the time of writing (October 1990), the signs look emcouraging.  Under the presidential guidance of Mr Boris Yeltsin, elected officials of the Russian republic have drafted a new, fully democratic constitution and adopted a program of radical economic reform to bring a final end to Soviet-style socialism, replacing it with a market-driven economy.  In brief, they are opting for, and institutionalising, both democracy and free-enterprise capitalism.  They are ready and prepared to stand alone if that is their people's wish.

Lenin once referred to the Russian Empire as a "prison of nations".  Instead of releasing the inmates he and his successors extended their sentences and enlarged the prison.  Now, however, the walls are crumbling where they have not actually been demolished.  In the 1920s, justifying his New Economic Policy to dissident Bolsheviks who saw it as a return to capitalism, Lenin declared that it would take fifty years for the proletarian state to wither away, that is for it to consign all bourgeois remnants and relics to the "dust-bin of history".  His timing was just about right but his reasons thoroughly wrong, as Mr Gorbachev has discovered.  The people want all that Marx, Engels and Lenin taught was most pernicious about so-called "bourgeois" values:  the nation-state, market economics and democracy.  But will they get these things?  As Leon Aron says, "What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Moscow to be born?"

The "salami" -- slice by slice -- tactics employed by communists to establish their power in the first place are now being used to disestablish thai power and with it the party and the union they forcibly created -- however, with a vital difference:  this time it is being done, so far at least, principally with ballots and not with bullets.

The remainder of this volume is an examination of the dramatic changes that occurred in 1989 within both the inner and outer rims of the Soviet empire.  Peter Hruby documents and analyses in detail the formation of the "outer" and "inner" rims of the Soviet Empire and the stresses and strains that the empire has been experiencing in recent years leading up to the present situation whereby the nations of the "outer" rim are now re-establishing their independence whilst the nations of the "inner" rim are struggling to establish theirs.  Analysts from Radio Liberty provide summaries of the present state of Soviet society and the Soviet economy.  Leon Aron examines the myths and realities of communism as revealed by "glasnost".  The present author, following a recent visit, looks at Poland and the legacies of communism.  In a second piece, Leon Aron assesses the career and potential of Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic and a key figure in today's USSR.  Finally, John Nurick looks at some of the implications of the great collapse of 1989 for the West and for Australia.

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ENDNOTES

1.  The so-called October Revolution.  Russia had not adopted the Gregorian calendar.

2.  Heller, M. Cogs in the Soviet Wheel, London, 1988, page 43.

3.  Ibid., page 43.

4.  Ibid., pages 46, 47.

5.  Ibid., pages 47, 48.

6.  Often spelt Dzerzhinsky after transliteration from Russian to English.

7.  "Eastern and Central Europe", paper presented to University of Western Australia Politics Club Annual Conference, 11 August 1990.