[Newspaper of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) The…]

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Newspaper of the International Socialist Organization (ISO)

The September issue hails the defeat of the coup attempt, and in a front page headline says that the "regime's fall opens up new period of struggle. »9 "What we are seeing," the lead article states, "is the final failure of Stalinism-the repressive bureaucratically controlled, capitalist system that rose on the ruins of a workers' revolution."

The ISO thinks that the system in the USSR is and has been capitalist, what they call "state capitalist."

This current looks to the Socialist Workers Party in Britain for guidance. The British SWP is led by Tony Cliff, who developed the view at the end of the 1940s that the USSR, Eastern Europe, today. But this is not really surprising, since they reject the concrete struggles of the Soviet masses as illusory. For example, the opposition to the privatization of the means of production-which is deep in the Soviet working class—is dismissed as meaningless since capitalism already exists. At a recent forum in San Francisco an ISO spokesperson stated this position.

They refuse to recognize and defend the remaining conquests of the 1917 revolution-that is, the planned economy, nationalized property, and the monopoly of foreign trade—which the bureaucracy and world imperialism have not yet succeeded in overthrowing on the grounds that these conquests simply don't exist!

How can there be capitalist restoration if capitalism has already been restored? worth celebrating. Since the counterrevolution led by Joseph Stalin in the 1920s the CPSU has been an integral part of the bureaucratic machinery designed to guarantee the perks and privileges of the parasitic ruling caste. As such the CP was a tool of anti-working-class terror— at home and abroad. It has misled millions of revolutionary-minded workers around the world.

"The murder machine of Stalin and his successors drove workers out of politics for more than six decades. By repulsing this coup, working people in the Soviet Union have taken a giant step toward once again finding their way, through struggle, to their own organizations and revolutionary leadership.

"In the course of the fights to come they will debate ideas, link up with fellow fighters around the world, and absorb the revolutionary experiences of the world working-class movement. They need to deepen their struggle and reconquer political power.

"The sight of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people routing this coup will SOCIALIST ACTI

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No one should have been surprised that the Stalinist regime in the USSR shattered on the the reefs of the national question. Despite a rollback of the rights of the nations and nationalities under Stalin and the reimposition of national oppression, the bloody dictator and his heirs were unable to totally liquidate the heritage of revolutionary years with respect to national rights.

In 1978, when the Stalinist rulers tried to push through new constitutional provisions reducing the status of the languages of the non-Russian republics, they faced mass demonstrations in the Georgian and Armenian capitols, and were forced to back off. Before the present breakdown of bureaucratic control, however, it would be hard to find another example of the mass mobilizations dealing a direct defeat to the totalitarian state machine.

The very existence of the republics with their formal right to sovereignty (and even to secede from the USSR) represented a historic defeat for Stalin. At the Twelfth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1922, he tried to have all the republics reduced to the status of the autonomous units of the Russian federation. A dying Lenin's last efforts defeated this project.

In fact, Lenin's last letters attacking Nationalities or "Autonomization," in December 1922, Lenin opposed Stalin's rationalization for his policies:

"In my writings on the national question I have already said that an abstract presentation of the question of nationalism in general is of no use at all. A distinction must necessarily be made between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and that of an oppressed nation, the nationalism of a big nation and that of a small nation.

"In respect of the second kind of nationalism, we-nationals of a big nation-have nearly always been guilty in historic practice of an infinite number of cases of violence; furthermore, we commit violence and insult an infinite number of times without noticing it.

"That is why internationalism on the part of oppressors or 'great' nations, as they are called (though they are great only in their violence, only great as bullies) must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but even in an inequality of the oppressor nation, the great nation, that must make up for the inequality which obtains in actual practice.

"Anybody who does not understand this has not grasped the real proletarian attitude to the national question; he is still essentially petty bourgeois in his point of view and is, therefore, sure to descend to the bourgeois point of view " lowing terms:

"The colonization of the borderlands is not simply the work of a few months, but of whole decades. For whole decades, Russian imperialism colonized these borderlands. If we admit that economic development is reflected and manifested in various spheres of social and economic life, we must admit that the colonization of the borderlands by Russian imperialism created a colonialist ideology and a definite colonialist attitude of mind among Russian elements living in these borderlands. ... And until we rid ourselves of this ideology ... we will not achieve anything. We must launch a struggle against colonialism as such." (Quoted in "Internationalism or Russification," p. 62.)

Espousing the cause of the oppressed nationalities in Central Asia won over to the Bolsheviks the most radical fighters for national liberation-such as Sultan Galiev, who rebelled later against the revival of Great Russian chauvinism under Stalin.

Bolsheviks' policy gained allies Objective pro-bourgeois nationalists, such as the Tatar Tamurbek Davletshin, admit that once the Bolsheviks won the confidence of the oppressed peoples with their recognition of their national rights, the latter followed them on social quesV.I. Lenin in 1921 The Ukrainian nationalists, for example, called only for autonomy and adopted a program of independence only when the Provisional Government in St. Petersburg, headed by Alexander Kerensky, refused to give it to them.

Lenin on the Ukraine Despite the spiteful language he employs about the Bolsheviks in his classical nationalist history of Ukraine, Mikhailo Hrushevsky, a member of the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist govern-