New stage for the anti-Stalinist movements in the ex-USSR

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Russian officer at pro-Communist Party demonstration in Moscow. The old-line CP has made a bloc with national chauvinists. 10 SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 1992 Socialist Action correspondent Gerry Foley has just returned from a six-week visit to the ex-Soviet Union and Poland. Beginning with this issue of Socialist Action, we will be publishing a series of articles based on Foley's impressions and observations of the new situation in Eastern Europe. In this issue, Foley analyzes the break-up and contradictions of the various popular fronts that were formed to oppose the Stalinist hierarchy.

The first elections in the Baltic states since the breakup of the USSR seemed to have opposite results. On Oct. 25, in Lithuania, the Democratic Party of Labor, the successor of the "national" wing of the Lithuanian Communist Party (and the model for CP successor parties in the other Baltic countries), won a smashing victory over Sajudis, the national-democratic front that won independence for Lithuania.

The face-lifted Stalinists got over 44 percent of the vote, and should be able to form a government in which they will be the dominant partner. Sajudis leader Vytautas Landsbergis reportedly announced that his organization will go into opposition.

This is the first time in Eastern Europe that an anti-Stalinist movement has been ousted from power electorally by the successor organization of a Communist Party.

In the Sept. 20 vote in Estonia, on the other hand, a coalition of ideologically rightwing anti-Communist parties emerged as the winners.

The Isamaa [Fatherland] won 30 out of a hundred seats in the Estonian parliament. The Popular Front (Rahvarinne), which had been the principal political force in the struggle against the ruling CP, got only 12 percent of the popular vote and 15 seats in the parliament. The party of the big factory managers, "Safe Home" (Kindel Kodu), got 18 seats, the second largest bloc.

In reality, both the Estonian and Lithuanian elections reflect the same process, the erosion and breakup of the national fronts that led mass movements against Stalinist rule in a number of republics of the exUSSR.

Anti-totalitarian fronts break up The old anti-Stalinist front in Russia itself, Democratic Russia, is experiencing a similar process, but it is not so well developed because the Russian front was never a mass movement on a national scale, and it has never held a parliamentary or electoral majority. Although it is Yeltsin's principal political supporter, it does not control him, nor he it.

Effects of the same process can be seen in the Ukrainian and Byelorussian national fronts, respectively Rukh and Adradzhenie, which have remained minority movements unable to break the continuity of Stalinist rule in their countries.

These movements, however, still have a strong unifying focus: Opposition to Stalinist governments still in power. They are concentrating on campaigns to force referendums to get new elections.

However, the fact that the old party bosses have taken over an important part of the program of the national fronts means that the fronts' old program of all-inclusive unity for national independence is no longer sufficient for mobilizing opposition to the rule of the bureaucracy.

In general, the anti-totalitarian fronts, which in past years have dominated the struggle against the rule of the bureaucracy, are now breaking up, like the system that they were organized to fight.

The repression of all dissent under the old system determined the all-inclusive form of opposition to it—fronts of all dissenters-united on the basis of a general democratic program. The fundamental task of these fronts has now been accomplished. They opened up the way for the development of politics, for political debate, and the practical political experience of different views.

In the case of Democratic Russia, the first open break came when the majority of the movement opposed Yeltsin's attempt to remove the independent government of Chechen-Ingushetia, an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation.

A reactionary wing split away to ally itself with neo-Stalinists in an ultra-chauvinist opposition to the Yeltsin government, which has become known as the Red-Brown alliance, that is, a bloc of Stalinists and fascistic forces.

The process of the breakdown of the national fronts in the other republics is more complex than that of Democratic Russia.

These former groups, which existed for years as mass political movements, defeated the local Communist parties on a national or at least regional scale, and took responsibility for national or regional govemments. They were based on the national intelligentsias of their respective republics. It was the support of these intelligentsias that enabled the fronts to become mass address a mass audience immediately through the organs of the writers' and other creative workers' unions.

The national intelligentsias split The national intelligentsias were a privileged layer; in a general sense they were part of the bureaucracy. But they represented a contradiction within it, inasmuch as they had a vested interest in opposing "Russification," which was the policy of the bureaucracy as a whole.

The national intelligentsias represented a heritage of the national policy of the revolutionary Soviet state that Stalinism had been unable to liquidate; that is, the right of every nationality to have a national culture and therefore the essential apparatus of a national culture, a press and a literature in the local language.

Once Gorbachev's reform policy and the divisions in the bureaucracy over it weakened Moscow's grip, the national intelligentsias launched a battle for the national rights of the nations on which they depended.

Thus, in a number of republics, totalitarian rule was shattered, and a relatively free political debate became possible. In the process, the national intelligentsias themselves split, with most of the intellectuals recoiling from the radicalization of the fronts or being marginalized by their increasing programmatic emptiness.

Already two years ago, when I first visited the Baltic states-before independence and when Moscow was still trying to crack down—a wide spectrum of political views was represented in the press, and there was