By Renfrey Clarke and Boris Kagarlitsky
MOSCOW — Every year in Moscow, despite resistance from the authorities and condemnation from the official press, mass demonstrations take place on November 7. The anniversary of the October revolution remains a holiday; the authorities have not had the resolve to abolish it. In Moscow, the city government merely bans the holding of meetings in Red Square.
The betting is that the November 7 marches and rallies this year will be much larger than in the past few years. This is not because the organisers — the large, politically heterogeneous Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), and a range of smaller bodies, mostly of a Stalinist-nationalist stripe — have gained in popular authority. The central factors will be the same that have brought a dramatic increase this year in strikes and other protests by working people. Five years after socialism is supposed to have failed definitively in Russia, the country's population are living through the failure of socialism's successor.
The "barracks socialism" of the Stalin and post-Stalin eras in the USSR richly deserved to perish (the question of what should have replaced it is, of course, quite different). But when the Soviet system "failed" at the beginning of the 1990s, the figures for industrial and agricultural production in Russia were close to twice what they are now. True, much of the industrial production consisted of armaments that could well have been foregone, or of obsolete or defective output. But production of countless useful, necessary goods has now slumped to a fraction of its 1990 levels. Even in areas of the economy whose products enjoy a ready export market, production has often fallen steeply. Russian oil output, for example, now stands at barely half its 1987 peak. The areas of industry that have been hit hardest include high-technology, knowledge-intensive manufacturing. Russia is not merely being de-industrialised, but de-developed in the scientific, technological and educational senses.
Meanwhile, the "recessive stabilisation" promised for 1996 has not occurred. Russia's Gross Domestic Product and industrial output fell by 6% and 5% respectively in the first eight months of 1996 compared with the same period last year. The decay of basic infrastructure guarantees that even maintaining existing output levels will become more difficult and expensive. Investment in the economy as a whole is now just 20% of the 1989 level in constant prices, and is still falling.
As the economy drifts downward, the only strategy which Russia's capitalist "reformers" and their international advisers can come up with is more austerity. For ordinary Russians, the result is a profound, spreading collapse of living standards. In a country where many prices match Western levels, average incomes are the equivalent of about US$160 a month. A third of Russians earn less than the officially-designated subsistence level, which is to say that they and their families live in semi-starvation. Very often, workers are denied even the meagre earnings to which they are entitled. According to the newspaper Trud on October 2 some 16 to 18 million Russians, almost a quarter of the employed population, were owed back wages.
Not surprisingly, many millions of citizens regard the institutions and ideology of the "new Russia" with deep cynicism. The sense of having been swindled by the "reformers" is extremely widespread.
Is anger at the savage follies of the regime now about to merge with recollections of the goals and traditions of the October 1917 revolution to produce a new, radical popular consciousness? To cast light on this issue, it is necessary to reflect briefly on how the Bolshevik revolution is perceived in Russia today.
On the level of facts, there is enormous confusion about the train of events that made up the revolution. The heavily edited accounts that were propagated during the Soviet period have now been rewritten — often by former orthodox Communist Party historians — to match the needs of the new authorities. Russians usually find that their only sources of information on the 1917 events are rival exercises in schematism and tendentiousness. Understandably, most non-specialists put the task of deciding where they stand on the events of Russia's revolutionary history to one side.
Where ethical principles are concerned, the situation is different. Moral standpoints can be adhered to even if tangled historical skeins cannot be unravelled. Throughout the Soviet period, the ethical concepts underlying the October revolution were broadly understood and remained popular, even if private attitudes to the ruling authorities were often sharply critical. Soviet society was not egalitarian (though it was much less unequal than the capitalism of the West), but the popular consensus was that it ought to be. Working people did not rule the USSR, but the conviction was very widespread that they were entitled to. These moral concepts have retained much of their following despite the shocks of the post-perestroika epoch.
There is abundant evidence from the past few years that working people in Russia remain broadly attached to the principles of egalitarianism and collectivism. When the Soviet Union was demolished and socialised property relations were overthrown, the processes were not accompanied by huge outpourings of pro-capitalist sentiment. The largest anti-Communist demonstrations drew a few score thousand people in Moscow, a city of 9 million. Opinion surveys continued to show that clear majorities of the population thought that large enterprises should be publicly owned. When Yeltsin's officials launched their privatisation program, they were forced to pitch it in terms of the concepts of October. Dividing up the country's productive wealth through a voucher system, regime propagandists argued, was a socially progressive move because it put ownership of the means of production directly in the hands of the workers. Many people who received vouchers concluded that the intent of the program was socialist.
These illusions were, of course, soon dispelled. As the oppressions of capitalism hit the Russian masses, millions of people who had subscribed to the ethical principles of October in a general and abstract way discovered sharp personal reasons for maintaining their allegiance.
The affronts suffered by working people were not only material, but psychological as well. From being the heroes of Soviet propaganda, workers were banished beyond the margins of the new iconography, with its advertising agency images of business people enjoying their privileges without embarrassment or apology. Not only were the inequalities of wealth in the new society far greater than in the old, but privilege was no longer concealed. The flaunting of dubiously acquired wealth, something that earlier had been accounted a grave sin, had been inexplicably redefined as a virtue. For the mass of the population, whose living standards were tumbling, the new morality had the force of a personal insult.
The new regime in Russia has made relentless use of the media to plug the ethics and modes of behaviour of capitalism. There is no doubt that this has made an impact, especially among younger people. But propagandising capitalism as the road to abundance is difficult when the mass of the population must first take a detour through impoverishment. And not everyone in Russia has meekly accepted the inversion of the moral and ideological universe. Among many millions of Russians, from simple workers to highly-schooled intellectuals, the response to the developments of the post-Soviet epoch has been one of outrage.
The result is that in the visceral convictions of substantial numbers of Russians, it is right for the debilitated but still power-fixated Boris Yeltsin and his feuding courtiers to be swept onto the historical garbage-heap. It is right for the "new Russians", with their tax-dodging, bribe-giving and 12-room suburban "cottages", to be made to taste honest work and modest incomes — if not prison porridge. It is right for working people to create their own democratic assemblies in place of a eunuch-parliament helpless before the whims of a president elected once every five years by state television.
The incidence of such views is enough to guarantee that the final reconsolidation of capitalist power in Russia, if it occurs, will not be a simple or smooth process. Nevertheless, the sense that the October revolution was morally right, and that a present-day analogue of it would be a good thing, is not the same as a broad popular spread of revolutionary consciousness. The Bolshevik revolution was not made solely by moral outrage, though that was an important ingredient. The revolution occurred above all on the basis of a broad understanding among workers and peasants of what their social interests were, and of how these interests needed to be fought for. It also required a historically uncommon level of development of popular organisation and of mass involvement in the political process. Moreover, it required a leadership with a clear sense of political purpose and real authority among the population.
To say that these latter requirements are lacking in Russia today is an obvious understatement. The number of strikes in the country has tripled this year compared to last, but the psychological substrate has been one of desperation rather than of conscious labour militancy. The fact that one of the main weapons employed by workers has been mass hunger strikes testifies to the weak strategic position of Russian labour in an era of depression.
Nevertheless, a fight back is occurring, and in order to stage it Russian workers are having to re-invent many of the methods of organisation and struggle in which their forebears were expert 80 years ago. Stalinism was forced to reproduce the traditions of October in a formal, rhetorical manner, since it was on these traditions that it based its claim to legitimacy. But the Stalin regime deliberately destroyed much of the real essence of these traditions by slaughtering or terrorising into silence the militants who had direct experience of independent working-class organising.
Even the hazy memory of October, however, is an incomparable asset for Russian workers. Anyone who believed that these traditions were quite dead should have received a jolt during September when representatives of the labour collectives in the city of Prokopyevsk, in the Kuzbass coalfield in Siberia, declared themselves dissatisfied with their city authorities and the management of the main local coal company. The workers proceeded to set up a "Trade Union Centre with Emergency Powers", which they defined as an organ of participation and control. It was decided that the new body would lead a fight by the labour collectives to participate in the just distribution of funds accruing to the city budget, and to win the right to audit the financial accounts of the city administration.
The task faced by Russian workers of retrieving the political and organisational heritage of the Bolshevik revolution faces an obstacle, however, in the parties and groups that claim the mantle of October. The leaders of the KPRF use the revolution to raise the spirits of a rank and file disoriented and demoralised by the party's failures. But this is a dangerous tactic; the comparison with the revolutionaries of 1917 is an unflattering one for people like KPRF chief Gennady Zyuganov. Among today's Communist chiefs, the political clarity, principled motivations and links with the masses that characterised the earlier leaders have been lost.
Zyuganov and the people around him hope to win through ambiguity. They imagine that if they set out to be all things at once, their social base will broaden. But the effect of this strategy is simply to confuse the party's main potential source of support — the mass of workers and peasants — on the questions of what the KPRF is and what it proposes to do. The Communists at one point curse the anti-popular regime, and at another demand positions in the government. After first condemning Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, they vote to confirm him in office. After voting for a resolution condemning the war in Chechnya, they abstain from participating in the anti-war movement, dealing it a heavy blow. After that, they support the war in practice.
With its ardent support for Great Russian nationalism, the KPRF has leapt into a whole cauldron of political contradictions. It is impossible to support "one's own" state against neighbours and "aliens", while at the same time expounding on the anti- popular nature of this state. It is impossible to demand that the Chechens accept the rule of authorities whom the Communists themselves accuse of all imaginable sins.
Lenin understood that in a multinational state national rebirth was possible only on the basis of an internationalist ideology. Today's Communist leaders refuse to understand this. On all the basic questions of politics, the KPRF leadership by late 1996 had in practice embraced precisely those positions against which Lenin fought in 1917. In Chechnya, the KPRF leaders want to "pursue the war to a victorious conclusion", even though the army has been routed. They want national solidarity, even though society is deeply split. They reject class struggle, even though it is only the awakening of class feelings that can provide any hope for the self-organisation of the masses.
The KPRF, nevertheless, is by no means an insurmountable obstacle to the Russian working class regaining the political consciousness and organisation of 1917. There are many echoes in Russia today of past revolutionary epochs. Indeed, the crisis of today's Russia is strikingly similar to the ones which the country experienced in 1905 and 1917. Military defeats (in the Russian-Japanese, Russian-German and now, Chechen wars) have revealed the bankruptcy of the elites and the emptiness of "national" rhetoric. They have also shown the bankruptcy of the "patriotic" left. The crisis at the top is unmistakable.
Will this trend continue and deepen? The answer will depend largely on developments outside Russia. Rejoining the world capitalist economy, Russia will share its general fate. There are no profitable economic niches which a country of this size can occupy. Russia is not Poland or Hungary, on the immediate borders of the developed West, where relatively modest capital inflows can spur a turnaround based on the exploitation of cheap, highly qualified labour. Especially since Russia's own high-technology manufacturing potential has now largely been destroyed, the Russian economy will enter a period of sustained recovery only if world capitalism itself shows real long-term dynamism.
What are the chances of this? The figures suggest the exact opposite. So far, the international capitalist upturn of the 1990s has been much weaker than that of the mid-1980s. That recovery in turn was dramatically weaker than its counterpart in the late 1970s. Is this trend to stagnation going to be reversed, and profit rates revived? On what basis? Through further big cuts in working-class consumption? Who then will purchase the goods that need buyers? It will not be the mass of Russians, now largely outside the market for much besides bread.
Promising Russia a booming capitalist economy, the free-market ideologues forgot to look at the big picture. Or more accurately, they refused to look their own problems in the face.
For capitalist Russia, the prospects are not of recovery, but of bumping along the bottom. By the time neo-liberal austerity completes its work of destruction, and the Russian economy achieves the "stabilisation of the graveyard", the next international downturn will be just about due.
If Russia is to regain its status as an advanced industrial country, a new October is essential. Liberals who agitatedly recall the horrors of the Stalinist repression and cite the absurdities of the "command economy", are battering a scarecrow of their own making. Democratic rights are the only real gain the mass of the population in Russia made from the fall of "communism". After now acquiring a taste for civil freedoms, working people will not be a party to the systematic denial of these liberties. But Russia's capitalists, looking for ways to continue extracting labour from workers without paying wages, will take a different view of democratic rights.
Resurrecting the Soviet-style "command economy", meanwhile, is not among the serious options that leftists in Russia or anywhere else are advancing for the socialism of the future. The iniquities of the "command economy" are now no more than instructive footnotes to the debate within the international left on how to employ state, cooperative and small-scale private ownership, central planning and the use of indirect economic levers, so as to combine growth, social justice and environmental protection within a post-capitalist economy.
Russian society is now moving leftward, as the reconstituted bourgeoisie proves helpless to create a viable economy in an age of mounting capitalist entropy. But the current leaders of the Russian left are unprepared to take serious responsibility for society's future; their confidence in Russia's authentic socialist traditions has been too weak, and their accommodation to capitalist ideology too profound. People are looking for real change, not for re-runs of the past or for more sympathetic management of an odious present. If leftists do not recognise this, and fail to recast their political approach, they risk losing their next chance when it presents itself.