Old-line Stalinists try to redecorate themselves as defenders of masses

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5000 military officers meet at the Kremlin to demand that armed forces stay intact.

"Soviet workers are unlikely to follow a leadership composed of 16 SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 1992 Since the wreck of the Communist Party in August 1991, the various factions of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the republics of the old USSR have been trying out new instruments and new formulas in an attempt to regain some political credibility. The old Soviet CP central organ Pravda, representing the wing of the bureaucracy hostile to Yeltsin, has become a sounding board for such operations.

These maneuvers pose special problems for fighters seeking to organize opposition to Yeltsin's attack on the living standard of the masses, and in general for revolutionists trying to offer a socialist way forward out of the collapse of Stalinism.

According to the standard Stalinist modus operandi, these maneuvers point to the left and right at the same time, but the underlying direction is rightward. Pravda has been indulging in radical-sounding condemnations of the effects of Yeltsin's policies on the working people. After all, there is no honor among thieves.

Thus, the headline of the Jan. 13 Pravda was: "When the emperor has no clothes, the people are also undressed." The problem is that when this faction of bureaucrats sat on the "imperial" throne, they were no better draped than Yeltsin, and the people's clothing, such as it was, was already being stripped from them.

While claiming to defend the "working people," Pravda seems to have started to orient increasingly-and on a chauvinist basis-to the discontent of the military officers. The sinister implications of this are highlighted by the signs appearing in demonstrations organized by oldline Stalinists calling on the army to "save the people.' "A great people's The general orientation was expressed quite clearly in an article from Moscow by veteran Stalinist hack Mike Davidow in the Jan. 18 issue of the People's Weekly World, the paper of the old-line Stalinist U.S. Communist Party.

"The soil is being prepared," Davidow wrote, "for a great people's movement uniting two powerful forces—patriotic and socialist—for the restoration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."

He pointed to a demonstration in Moscow on Jan.12, whose participants "shouted slogans demanding strict price controls supervised by workers' committees and a united Soviet army in a united Soviet Union." Davidow hailed the formation of a Union of Officers, whose mood "can be summed up in one word: ACTION."

He described the forces organizing the rally as follows: "The mass meeting was a vivid demonstration of the Left Bloc. Its organizers included the newly-formed Russian Communist Workers Party, which played a leading role in the formation of the Bloc; the Union of Communists; the Socialist Working Peoples Party; and the Initiative Committee for the Formation of the Komsomols, the communist youth organization."

However, Davidow exposed the real character of this movement of "patriotic and socialist" forces by ending his article with a quote from the sinister Colonel Victor Alksnis, leader of the chauvinist Soyuz [Union] bloc in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Alksnis said: "The officers and soldiers will never accept the dismembering and destruction of the Soviet armed forces."

Most recently, Alksnis has gained attention by proclaiming that the recognized independence of the Baltics remains unreal and unrealizable. And this is in a situation marked by the reluctance of the Russian authorities to withdraw the large military forces still stationed there.

Appeal to the rightists The rightist, Great Russian (Soviet) chauvinist direction of Pravda is further confirmed by its interest in the group of right-wing procapitalist leaders who broke from Yeltsin's coalition, Democratic Russia, because the coalition's majority was unwilling to defend the "indivisibility" of Russia.

One of them, the chief of the rightwing pro-capitalist Democratic Party, Nikolai Travkin, was offered the columns their past jailers."

of Pravda so that, among other things, he could denounce the majority of Democratic Russia for being "left liberals."

It is in this context that Pravda published a long article in its Jan. 6 issue on a so-called left alternative to the Yeltsin government. In fact, this article by Boris Slavin defined the context as follows:

"After the statements of [Yeltsin's vice president] A. Rutskoi, the departure of N. Travkin from the congress of Democratic Russia and the sensational statements of G. Popov at the congress of the Movement for Democratic Reforms, we can talk about a split in the ruling coalition of right-wing political forces and about the formation of an opposition within the ruling class [that is, the ruling political forces, who are in fact not necessarily any more procapitalist than Pravda and the forces it represents— GF].

"This opposition," Slavin continues, "is not over the substance but over the forms and methods of carrying out Yeltsin's reforms. It is largely conditioned by fear of the people, who are instinctively rejecting uncontrolled privatization, which they call 'grabbing' [a pun in Russian], as well as the freeing of prices, which is reducing them to absolute beggary."

It should be noted at this point that Pravda has also been very friendly to Rutskoi. It published an interview with him in its Dec. 17 issue, which was his major statement of opposition to the Yeltsin government's policy.

Left-wing alternatives?

Then, in its Jan. 17 issue, Pravda published an article by him on its front page, under the banner: "Hero of the Soviet Union." (Rutskoi was a pilot in the Afghan war.) In this piece, Rutskoi assumed the defense of the army and denounced the Yeltsin govemment for failing to defend the Russian minorities in the "independent republics."

However, Slavin's article went on to lay out a perspective of a principled "left" alternative, a "Bloc of Left Forces." It would include Rutskoi's People's Party of Free Russia (formerly Communists for Democracy) and the Socialist Working People's Party (SWPP), whose most prominent representative is Roy Medvedev. Slavin considered these parties Social Democratic.

Medvedev is a veteran dissident, who has consistently followed a Khruschevite line—a variant of Stalinist reform. He emerged already as a frequent contributor to the Communist Party theoretical journal Kommunist long before the August coup.

Medvedev's party, Slavin wrote, "may represent not only the interests of wage workers, the 'collective producers and individual producers,' as its program says, but the old party bureaucracy seeking to make a comeback."

Slavin tried to present this whole spectrum of "left forces" as something new. Yet he had to acknowledge at least a doubt about the SWPP-which is commonly referred to in Pravda as one of the successor groups of the CPSU.

Slavin also expressed pessimism about the ability of Medvedev's party to become a mass force. But he thought that the new Labor Party, supported by forces that have taken more distance from Stalinism (like Boris Kagarlitsky's Socialist Party and some leaders of the old Marxist Program in the CPSU, such as A. Buzgalin and A. Kolganov), did have that capacity.

Slavin included the Labor Party in the new "left movement" that should unite in a "Block of Left Forces."

Among the "Communist-Radical" components of this prospective Bloc of Left Forces, Slavin included the Union of Communists, founded by another group from the Marxist Platform, and the Russian Communist Workers' Party. He linked the two closely.

Looking for orthrodox communists The Union of Communists, Slavin wrote, "stands very close to the 'orthodox' Communists of the most recent period. Its natural desire was to go into the Russian Communist Workers Party formed in November in Ekaterinburg [Sverdlovsk) as a faction, but this did not come to pass."

The RCWP, "in the tradition of Leninism," Slavin continued, bans "factions." He wrote that the RCWP was the "most representative" of the various "Communist parties" and might grow out of the protests against Yeltsin's economic policies. "Despite its Communist fundamentalism," he said, "this party is quickly developing modern forms of political struggle. Its supporters can be seen continually among the defenders of the Lenin Museum and Mausoleum, in the participants in the November demonstration [to commemorate the Russian revolution], in the December hunger march, and in the newly formed Workers Soviets in Moscow and other cities."

Interestingly, Slavin, like other writers in Pravda has said that the Movement for Democratic Reforms, which was the reform bureaucracy's major attempt to develop an alternative instrument to the old CPSU, has been stillborn as an organization. Thus, obviously, new experiments are necessary.

Slavin complained that "official propaganda," presumably that of the Yeltsin government, is trying to present this whole "left" as "neo-Stalinist." He claimed, to the contrary, that all these forces were "resolutely anti-Stalinist."

But that is obviously untrue.

Some of them are notoriously old-line Stalinist, like the group of Nina Andreeva, which he mentioned among the smaller components of the "new left movement," or the Front of Working People. Others, like Kagarlitsky's party and the Buzgalin wing of the Marxist Platform have more left positions.

Overall, Slavin's proposal for a "Bloc of Left Forces" seems to be part of an operation by a wing, or perhaps the bulk, of the Stalinist bureaucracy to slow the breakdown of its domination or to reconsolidate it. It indicates how tricky the political situation is in the old Soviet Republics, in Russia in particular, for genuinely revolutionary forces that want to fight capitalist restoration.

The neo-Stalinists formally espouse many of the ideas of the Russian Revolution and are trying to exploit well-founded protests against the effects of the market reforms. But unless revolutionists can differentiate themselves from these redecorated Stalinists, they will not win the support of the masses and the participants in real struggles.

It seems clear that, although the credibility of the "democrats" is fading rapidly, the neo-Stalinists-even when they protest hated policies—are repugnant to the masses.

In fact, the attempt by the Russian neoStalinists to exploit for their own purposes the revulsion against Yeltsin's economic policies may be one factor that has inhibited a mass fightback. Soviet workers are unlikely to follow a leadership composed of their past jailers.

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SOCIALISTACTION FEBRUARY 1992 17 Fear of a mass revolt against the brutal price rises launched at the beginning of January is already dividing the dominant political forces in the republics of the former Soviet Union-including the preponderant and still relatively backward Russian Federation.

Even those bureaucrats most sanguine for restoring capitalism and "real prices, like Russian President Boris Yeltsin, have to face the fact that the price increases are a terrible goad to a people whose standard of living has already declined disastrously.

The increases are so steep that the Parisbased Russian language weekly, Russkaya Mysl' reported on Jan. 10 that most Russians are still not buying anything except bread and milk, and a lot of products are being sent back to suppliers. Consumption of meat, for example, has already dropped about 20 percent.

Even if the population in the largest republic, Russia, still seems relatively passive, as if struck dumb by these blows, the politicians know that its anger could overflow rapidly.

And in the republics where an independent democratic movement has developed, where the Stalinist bureaucracy suffered its first major defeats, this anger seems already to be finding some expression.

Bureaucrats begin to squabble The well-justified fear of the Russian politicians is shown by their fevered maneuvering. Among the Russian political forces, the first division is between those sections of the Stalinist apparatus who wanted a more cautious approach to the reforms "especially in regard to maintaining "order"-and those sections that are trying to ride the wave of antibureaucratic sentiment.

The former are represented by the bureaucrats dependent on their position in the Communist Party and the military, the latter by the more venturesome (or even adventurist) storm birds of the bureaucracy, personified in the first place by Boris Yeltsin himself.

But now Yeltsin's government also has split. The first to break ranks was his vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoi, who gave a long interview to Pravda denouncing the price rises. It was published in the Dec. 27 issue of the old Communist Party central organ, which now claims to be independent but clearly represents the continuity of the party milieu.

Rutskoi violently condemned the way that the whole reform project has been carried out: "We have chaos in the full sense of the word."

The Russian Federation vice president claimed to be lamenting the fate of the poor working people. But his real concern showed through quite clearly: "I don't want a social explosion. I don't want people to shout, 'Out with the democrats!' the way they shouted at the Communists before. I do not want a new dictatorship to come to power."

The chair of the Russian parliament, R. Khasbulatov, one of Yeltsin's main lieutenants, also broke from his mentor, demanding the resignation of the Russian government and a retreat on the price rises.

In its Jan. 16 issue, Pravda printed a resumé of an interview Khasbulatov gave to the British Financial Times on its front page. He said: "Everyone is calling for a change in the present program of economic reforms-many deputies, including both democrats and non-democrats, specialists, and factory managers."

Both Khasbulatov and Rutskoi claimed to still be loyal supporters of Yeltsin, despite having received resounding kicks in the pants from their boss. In fact, Rutskoi claimed that he was not against the price rises in principle but only thought that they should be postponed until October. In this respect, his position was similar to that taken by Yeltsin before the mass Front page of Pravda illustrates how bare movement against Gorbachev's price rises in April put him on the top of the bureaucratic heap.

In his long report to the Russian parliament at that time, Yeltsin said that he opposed such price rises because, unless they were prepared for by other changes in the economic structure, they would lead to hyperinflation. He also said that he would never try to ban strikes. Then, he made a deal with Gorbachev to end the April mobilizations, which included a strike ban.

And now Yeltsin is applying the same policy as Pavlov, Gorbachev's premier, did in April. In the meantime, although the agreement held out the promise of revising the price rises, they have not been lowered but increased many times.

"Facing total collapse"

One of Yeltsin's closest economic advisors, Oleg Bogomolov, said in an interview in Der Spiegel of Jan. 6 that he expected the price rises to lead to disaster. "The economy is facing total collapse," he said. "I see no incentive for the factories to produce more. To the contrary, production will fall further. That has, in fact, happened everywhere prices have been freed before privatization, as in Poland and Czechoslovakia."

Bogomolov stressed that it was essential to give the people some assurance that they had a stake in the economy. "The most important thing is not to demand more sacrifices from people, but finally give them something-their home, land, a share in the factories, natural resources, and all this without a price or only with a symbolic one. Otherwise, there will be explosions, mutinies, uprisings, plundering."

This puts in context the many schemes being floated in East Europe and the republics of the former Soviet Union for giving the people shares in the economya totally illusory ownership.

The privatization of housing in Moscow PRAVDA the cubbard is for workers.

as a tribune for protests against Yeltsin's economic policies.

has already been a political disaster for the "democratic" Mayor Popov. In the first place, it perpetuated the privileges of the bureaucrats, who got title to their nice flats, while the masses only got claim to their cramped holes.

Secondly, taxes and charges amounted to as much or more than rent. This scheme has become an easy target for Pravda, which nonetheless leaves no bones about the fact that it favors privatization of housing in principle.

In the first phase after the failed oldStalinist coup in August, the old CP organ contented itself with cynical sniping at Yeltsin, suggesting that he had previously sabotaged poor Pavlov's attempt to raise prices and that now he would get a taste of his own medicine. In recent weeks, Pravda has tried to present itself as a tribune for protests against Yeltsin's economic policies.

Pravda was a great defender of Pavlov's price rises last April, while it decried and continues to decry such measures in the "separatist" republics, such as Estonia. Moreover, it featured a condemnation by the Financial Times of Ukraine's using coupons to cushion the shock of the price rises National-democratic movements At the same time, Pravda has not reported on the resistance to market policies in Estonia, which has led to the resignation of Estonian Premier Edgar Savisaar.

Savisaar is an economist of the Gorbachev school, as well as a leader of the Estonian national-democratic People's Front (Rahvarinne). Because of both these hats, his discomfiture has far-reaching implications. It seems to reflect the social differentiation that could be expected in the national democratic movements after they assumed full formal govemmental power.

The New York Times correspondent, Serge Schmemann, reported gloomily and disparagingly on Jan. 21, "The faction-ridded [Estonian] Parliament is paralyzed by internal dispute and the Government is in disarray."

In reality, the fact that the Estonian parliamentary majority has fragmented in the face of having to carry out an undemocratic and antisocial program is a healthy sign. It reflects the development of independent democratic organization.

In Lithuania, the national-democratic government has adopted a law prohibiting government officials from being the beneficiaries of privatization, offering a limited but good example for the other former Soviet republics.

In Russia, on the other hand, mass democratic organization is much less developed. Yeltsin's coalition, Democratic Russia, has far more continuity with the old political bureaucracy than the national-democratic fronts that exist in many of the old republics.

This lack of democratic organization is probably the main, or at least a principal factor, explaining the lack of widespread protests so far in Russia against the price rises. Some protests have been carried out by the unions, which for the most part are only slightly refurbished versions of the old Stalinist ones. Independent unionism has gone furthest among the coal miners, but there also, some of the structures have been absorbed into the old setup.

Democratic Russia is beginning to divide, as the split in Yeltsin's government testifies. At its congress in November, the majority refused to support Yeltsin's attempt to crack down on the national movement of the Chechen people, one of the many small nations incorporated into the Russian Federation.

The role of the national movements had made this question clear for the Russian democratic movement. But understanding has not yet developed within it of the antidemocratic nature of the capitalist restoration policies.

Protests in Uzbekistan

The biggest blowup reported so far against the price rises has, come, symptomatically, in Uzbekistan—where the old Communist Party and leadership remained intact but assumed Uzbek nationalist trappings. Their declaration of independence in the wake of the failed old-Stalinist coup in August was accompanied by a crackdown on the real national-democratic movement in the republic-Birlik, an organization modeled on the Baltic people's fronts.

Thousands of students started violent protests. On Jan. 16, they demanded the resignation of the government. Demonstrations and clashes continued for some days, according to the New York Times of Jan. 18, which also reported that the national-democratic movement was supporting the students.

The process of differentiation in the existing democratic movements and the growth of democratic and workers organizations in the Russian Federation will certainly take some time and be uneven.

In Ukraine, for example, where the national-democratic leadership has expressed radical social positions, it seems that the victory of the Stalinist boss Kravchuk in the presidential elections and his confrontation with the Russian authorities has led these leaders-for the moment at least—to rally around the "independent" Ukrainian government.

But the pressures for differentiation and for the emergence of leaderships that will express the desperation of the masses of people are certainly very strong. This, among other things, is reflected by the generally gloomy prognoses for Yeltsin, both in the Western capitalist press and among his own lieutenants, some of whom are starting to make motions that look like jumping ship.

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"In recent weeks, Pravda has tried to present itself