National movements keep pressure on crumbling Soviet state apparatus

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SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 1991 11 Since the failure of the coup at the end of August, the structures of the Soviet state have continued to crumble.

Turmoil and tensions have grown among the peoples of Muslim tradition, threatening to open up a major new front of the national democratic struggles. There have been blowups in Tazhikistan, for example, where the local neo-Stalinists tried an adventure of their own, as well as among the Chechen-Ingush and the Tatars.

But even where the old party leaders remained firmly in control—in Azerbaijan and, in particular, in Ukraine-they have been forced to maneuver in such way as to weaken the Stalinist state as a whole. Thus, before the failed coup, nine republics were prepared to sign the new Treaty of Union, and a tenth, Armenia moved toward a new association.

But now, both Azerbaijan and Ukraine have even refused to sign the new treaty for economic cooperation among the republics, which involves far fewer commitments than Gorbachev's shipwrecked new Treaty of Union. On Oct.18, representatives of only eight repub- lics—Russia, Armenia, Tazhikistan, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Byelorussia, Turkmenia, and Uzbekistan— finally put their signatures to the economic treaty.

Where is Ukraine going?

The most serious defection is that of Ukraine, the second largest Soviet republic and a vital source of foodstuffs. On the front page of Pravda of Oct. 21, Aleksandr Chernyak commented:

"In the new home, there are so far eight rooms. Not all the republics adhered to the treaty. It is impossible to conceive of the Union without Ukraine. But the representative of Ukraine at the ceremony, Ivan Plyushch, said that Ukraine does not want to 'slam the door.' It will be a member of the economic commonwealth, and will certainly sign the treaty, after bilateral negotiations are completed with the other republics. In Moldavia also, there is a desire to come into economic union. In Azerbaijan, the debates are continuing."

Gorbachev himself subsequently stressed that the economic union was unthinkable without the participation of Ukraine.

Western experts, according to Serge Schemann in the New York Times of Oct. 30, have also expected Ukraine to eventually go into the economic union. After all, the great majority of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet deputies were members of the Communist Party until it was suspended after the coup—as was the president of the republic, Leonid M. Kravchuk.

Until they were thrown off balance by the failure of the neo-Stalinist coup, they were fervent opponents of "separatism." Once their fright is over, they might be expected to settle back into their old ways.

In particular, Kravchuk has to try to hold onto the stolen clothes of the national democrats until after the Ukrainian presidential election of Dec.1, in which he faces a strong challenge from the national democratic movement, Rukh. Schemann noted that in the presidential race, "former Communists have emerged as some of the most ardent supporters of independence."

However, according to Schemann, both Western governments and the Soviet political leaders are beginning to come to the conclusion that it will be difficult to stop the momentum toward independence in Ukraine.

Up until now, the West has looked with alarm at the motion toward independence of the second Soviet republic. On his trip to the USSR in July, Bush even warned against a drive to independence, and earned the denunciation of Rukh leader Ivan Drach.

More recently, the British business magazine The Economist called for putting economic pressures on Ukraine to prevent it from building its own army.

Ukrainian "separatism" remains a prime target of the slightly reconstructed Pravda. But whereas before the coup failure, its denunciations were threatening, now they have taken the form mainly of lamentations about the "sad" state of affairs in Ukraine.

CP officials attack Gorbachev Symptomatic of these tensions is the fact that the leadership of the now suspended Communist Party of Ukraine has expressed the sharpest criticism of Gorbachev since the failure of the neo-Stalinist coup. Thus, in its Oct. 22 issue, Pravda ran an interview with Stanislav Gurenko (beginning on the front page), in which the discomfitted party boss said:

"The party has been dealt a heavy blow. But the most terrible thing, perhaps, is that it was sacrificed by the leadership of the CPSU. In the political history of the world, has there been an instance when a leader abandoned his party in a difficult moment without even calling a Central Committee plenum, and did not just leave but, using the position of the president of the country, actually gave his blessing to the destruction of the party structures, the seizure of the party property, and did not even permit the calling of a congress or a Central Committee plenum to determine the future fate of the party? A lot of people are asking whether the former general secretary is still a Communist."

Gurenko went on to say that the ban on the Communist Party was designed to keep it out of the electoral campaign. The fact of the matter is that the enlightened leaders of the bureaucracy could see that the CP was certain to decline and drag the bureaucracy down with it. They are seeking new means, such as presenting the now "nonparty" Kravchuk as a moderate champion of independence.

The poet Boris Oleinyk, another figure pushed forward by the bureaucracy as a "moderate," has proclaimed the formation of a new party, the Union of Democratic Forces of the Odessa Region, which may be intended as a model for forming a Ukrainian equivalent of the Movement for Democratic Reforms, the all-Union bureaucracy's main attempt so far to find a substitute for the CP.

Odessa is a logical place to start such an effort, since it is the most Russianized center in the republic.

National movements on rise However, whereas in most of the old Soviet Union the old Communist Party bureaucrats can afford to lay low for a while, in Ukraine they face the immediate threat of the rise of the national democratic Kravchuk and the dominant section of the bureaucracy have clearly decided to try to ride the wave, but it is understandable that another section-those directly responsible for the CP apparatus-think that this is too dangerous a game. According to all experience so far, it is.

For example, the sectors of the CP in the Baltics that tried to ride the national democratic wave there opened the way for the splintering of the CP and its disappearance as a major factor in political life. In Lithuania, the last Moscow loyalist CP leaders barely had time to make their getaway after the failure of the August coup before being arrested by Lithuanian forces.

In Ukraine also, the national democratic movement has a radical anti- bureaucratic tendency, reflected by the keynote speech of Drach at the Second Congress of Rukh in November, in which he denounced the bureaucracy as exploiters of the workers and perestroika as a plan to increase the exploitation of the working people and allow the bureaucrats to assume the position of outright owners of the enterprises. (See International Viewpoint, Dec. 10, 1990.)

The Ukraine includes important centers of a new radical workers' movement as Ukraine.

In the aftermath of the victory of the Soviet working people over the attempted coup, Socialist Action sent staff writer Gerry Foley on a speaking tour of 13 cities.

He spoke at forums and college campuses in New York; Boston; Baltimore; New Brunswick, New Jersey; Colombus and Cleveland, Ohio; Chicago; Milwaukee; Minneapolis; Kansas City; Los Angeles; San Francisco; and Portland, Ore.

Foley explained that the revolutionary process in the Soviet Union was objectively part of the worldwide fight for working-class power-that is, socialism-and in fact, the most advanced part at the moment. The victory of the Soviet workers, he said, should be an inspiration to working people in other countriesand in the United States, in particular, where workers have suffered a long series of defeats in the last decade.

Far from being a counterrevolution, in which the working people and the masses are reduced to passivity and despair, the process in the USSR was marked by the activity of the Soviet masses and workers, by their gaining confidence in their ability to change society. Their struggle against the bureaucracy's concrete steps to restore capitalism was more important than any ideological confusion that might exist in their heads because of the experience of Stalinist dictatorship.

Foley hailed the role of the national democratic movements in driving breaches into the totalitarian system and opening the way for a new workers' movement to arise.

The view of the Soviet developments presented in these talks was thus fundamentally different from that in the capitalist media, as well as that of the reformist and Stalinist-influenced left.

During the question period in some cities, there were debates with representatives of currents that believe that the Soviet Union has been capitalist for a long time and that, consequently, there is no fundamental change now. In New York, there was an exchange with neo-Stalinists who consider the national movements reactionary and anti-Semitic.

lu Boston and New York, representatives of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency spoke along with Foley. •

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The South African ruling class has decided that apartheid must go. The Black revolt of the mid-1980s, as well as international sanctions, were proving too costly. The government of President the conference, however, an ANC-PAC liaison committee informed reporters that AZAPO would be excluded from the committees set up to prepare for the conference. The decision to exclude AZAPO came about on the urging of two of the

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Gerry Foley completes national speaking tour