Post -Perestroika:
Revolution from
above vs. Revolution
from below
THE political changes that have occurred in the Soviet Union since the elections of the early spring of 1990 to local and republican soviets, and which were greatly accelerated by the failed conservative coup of August 19-21, have brought to a close the "perestroika chapter" of Soviet history initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev.' It is no longer a question of "restructuring" the old economic system but of replacing it wholesale by what is termed a "normal". that is, capitalist, economy. Those in power no longer go by the name "Communists" — the party has been banned by executive decree — but call themselves "democrats".
Despite these momentous changes, no less striking are the elements of continuity that link the two periods. The most important of these is the absence of democratic debate and control from the crucial area of economic reform, reform that is called upon to remake the very fabric of the society and determine its path of development for decades to come. The official reform project, which has evolved radically over the past two years, continues to be presented as the only possible one. The idea of an alternative that would be neither capitalist nor "command-administrative" (bureaucratic) is derisively and unanimously dismissed as utopian and pernicious by politicians, "prominent intellectuals" and journalists, who tirelessly cite the experience — real
6 International Marxist Review or imagined — of the "civilized" world to support their position. Yet not long ago, many of these same people with no less self-assurance painted the capitalist world in the bleakest of colours and portrayed Soviet reality as the successful realization of "scientific socialist theory".
Though the Western liberal media and politicians persist in regarding democracy and "market reform" (a euphemism for capitalism) as virtually synonymous, many of their Soviet counterparts have long since concluded that the transformation of their economy along liberal lines requires a "strong independent executive regime" capable of imposing "harsh and unpopular measures". • The tendency today is increasingly toward the reintroduction of authoritarian political structures and practices that the "democrats" now at the helm of the state vigorously condemned when the "Communists" occupied the halls of power and they stood on the outside looking in.
Liberal luminary Anatolii Sobchak, mayor of St. Petersburg, fulminates against those "who hinder our work", although not so long ago he himself stood at the head of the "hinderers". The slogan "All power to the soviets" upon which many liberals road into elected office in the spring of 1990, has since been declared by Ilya Zaslavskii, former chairman of the October district soviet in Moscow, to have lost its progressive content. In accordance with this revelation, Yeltsin and his allies have moved to appoint prefects and governors, effectively transforming the soviets into appendages of uncontrolled administrative power. As for Zaslavskii, he was ousted from his post at the head of the October district soviet in the spring of 1991 by the soviet's deputies for abuse of office: he, together with some other members of the soviet and its executive, had been involved in transferring the district's real estate holdings to companies in which they were officers. Gavriil Popov, liberal mayor of Moscow, subsequently dissolved Moscow's district soviets by executive decree (the deputies in the October district barricaded themselves inside when the police came to remove furniture and documents) and is lobbying for Zaslavskil's appointment as chief prosecutor of Moscow. "Revolution from above" vs. "Revolution from below" This continuity amidst change can best be understood in terms of a "revolution from above". The historical role of such transformations is to preserve the power and privilege of at least a part of the old dominant class, in this case the party-state bureaucracy or "nomenklatura". (In fact, it is more a social stratum than an historical class; indeed, it is now seeking at last to
Post-perestroika USSR 7 transform itself into a bona fide propertied class.) Such transitions are initiated by the more farsighted elements of the old class, who have realized that the old mode of domination has exhausted itself and that to persist in defending it would invite revolution from below, that is, a popular, genuinely democratic uprising.
Although the situation has evolved far beyond what the initiators of perestroika originally envisioned (a rationalized bureaucratic system still based predominantly upon state-owned property), its basic character as an anti popular "revolution from above" remains. Large segments of the old bureaucratic stratum have shifted into the burgeoning private sector or have been integrated into the "democratic" state structures. At the same time, new elements, recruited mainly from the former "shadow (illegal) economy" and from the well-connected, "enterprising" segment of the intelligentsia, have also moved into open, more-or-less legal positions of power and wealth.
But although this "revolution from above" has made impressive progress, it is far from completed, and its ultimate success is by no means assured. A popular revolution, one from below, cannot be ruled out, though it today exists only in potential. In the shorter term, a more likely development is a political stalemate in which popular forces block the "revolution from above" without, however, being capable of effecting a democratic transformation corresponding to their own interests. Such an impasse could last for several years.
The aim of this essay is to analyze the main socio-political interests and forces at work within the framework of these contending revolutions from above and below. It by no means pretends to offer a complete portrait of the society in this turbulent period of transition. Limitations of space as well as of knowledge rule this out. In particular, there is no analysis of the very important national issue. The focus is mainly on the Russian republic, though in its basic outlines the analysis can be applied throughout the territories of the former Soviet Union. Despite the above limitations, the proposed framework is an important tool for making sense of the seemingly chaotic succession of events.
In the Soviet context, "revolution from below" would signify the mobilization of the popular classes, of workers, peasants and the basic mass of the intelligentsia, that is, of those today without political power and property of the means of production, with the aim of placing these under democratic control. It would also mean a voluntary, democratic union of nationalities and ethnic groups with a commitment to social and political equality among them. A successful popular revolution would, in essence, amount to the
8 International Marxist Review transformation of the old bureaucratic system in a socialist direction.
If the concept "revolution from below" is relatively straightforward (this, of course, is not to minimize the difficulties and unresolved problems facing its practical realization), the use of the term "revolution" to characterize the programme of the currently dominant socio-political forces in the Soviet Union is admittedly dubious. It is used here for the sake of convenience, without any pretence of scientific precision. Revolution, at least in Marxist usage, is a qualitative, progressive, socio-political transformation that results in increased human freedom. There is no doubt that, compared with what preceded it, perestroika and post-perestroika, so far at least, have had a number of progressive aspects, especially in the political sphere. At the same time, the socio-economic situation of the mass of the population has deteriorated and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, if the forces of the "revolution from above" 'remain dominant.
A parallel from Russia's own history is the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. In its conception, it was an anti-popular response to the crisis of the old order, an avowed effort to avoid revolution from below. Nevertheless, despite its contradictory and limited nature, it did immediately improve the situation of a large part of the peasantry (they themselves referred to the Aleksander II as "Tsar Liberator"), though ultimately this "revolution from above" contributed directly to the popular revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Perestroika or the "socialist" phase of the "revolution from above"
At the end of 1987, a visiting Central Committee secretary told a gathering in the southern Russian town of Shakhty that if the party had not announced perestroika in time, the people would have taken to the streets. While it is difficult to judge the immediacy of the threat at that time, there is no doubt that by 1985 the depth of popular discontent with stagnant living standards and with the corruption that infected all levels of government had finally convinced a majority of the political leadership that the system Brezhnev had bequeathed them was no longer capable of maintaining either the internal stability of their regime or its great power status (the first consideration being by far the weightier). The roots of this crisis lay in the contradictory nature of the bureaucracy itself, a ruling stratum whose interests are in conflict with the very logic of the socio-economic system it administers. The Soviet bureaucracy did not
Post-perestroika USSR 9 make the October revolution of 1917. It was its product, and its rise to power was an unintended consequence of the backwardness of Russian society and of the socialist revolution's isolation in a hostile capitalist world. But the extreme deformation that the revolution underwent in the 1920s and 1930s under the bureaucracy's leadership did not lead to the restoration of capitalism. It led rather to the establishment of the "command economy" and to the totalitarian attempt to control all aspects of social life. The problem with such a regime is that, once established, it tends to be an inherently conservative and wasteful manager and itself to divide along functional, regional and mafia-type, "clan" lines, as each group pursues its narrow interests at the expense of national goals. Moreover, a regime whose basis lies in the usurpation of power and illegitimate appropriation of material privileges finds it very difficult to keep corruption and abuse of office within "acceptable" limits, as functionaries constantly seek to draw additional benefits from the spheres entrusted to them.
The unfettered pursuit of their interests by the members of the bureaucracy thus leads paradoxically to the undermining of bureaucratic power. The survival of this system calls for a strong leader to protect the bureaucracy from itself. Stalin kept the bureaucracy — and society — in line through a terror apparatus that he personally controlled. Khrushchev used non-terroristic measures to maintain the bureaucracy in a state of insecurity, while he tried to build an independent political base through a mixture of populist politics and improvements in mass living standards. This strategy failed, and the bureaucracy replaced him with their own man, Brezhnev, who was content to let matters drift, taking as his slogan "après moi, le déluge". His regime led to the profound systemic crisis of the late 1970s. Andropov at the start of the 1980s attempted to reimpose discipline without fundamentally changing the nature of the system. He, however, died soon after coming to power and was succeeded by the even more short-lived reign of Chernenko, a Brezhnev disciple.
When Gorbachev was chosen General Secretary of the CPSU in 1985 by the handful of old men that made up the Politburo (officially, he was elected by the several hundred members of the Central Committee, a largely honorific gathering of the elite of the bureaucracy), they saw his task as one of merely pursuing the unfinished work of Andropov. Gorbachev accordingly launched anti-corruption and disciplinary campaigns as well as a programme of industrial restructuring ("acceleration") focused on the engineering branch as the lever of rapid technological and economic modernization.
The relatively modest nature of these initial efforts was dictated by the
10 International Marxist Review interests of the bureaucracy, which was, after all, Gorbachev's social base as well as the instrument of his reforms. As such, they were probably foredoomed, in much the same way as the five-year plans of the past three decades had all failed to achieve their principal goals. Although the economic performance indicators of 1986 were relatively good, this was largely a consequence of the popular enthusiasm evoked by the promise of change, by Gorbachev's more populist and forthright leadership style, as well as by the initial fright that his campaigns instilled in the bureaucracy. But the effect was necessarily short-lived, and by the following year, the signs of stagnation reappeared
Although as late as the summer of 1987, Gorbachev was still reassuring the Central Committee that there would be no market reform, he had already decided that more fundamental change was needed, in fact, a "revolution from above". And market reform appeared was the only path that held out some hope of success. Back in the 1960s, such a reform had been openly discussed in the Soviet Union, and a very timid version of it was even initiated until a conservative bureaucratic reaction cut it short. Market reform was also the path taken by all the reform regimes in Eastern European regimes and by China in the 1970s. In the Soviet Union, many "closet marketeers" remained in the social science institutes, and once "glasnost" and "perestroika" became official policy, they quickly moved to occupy government advisory positions and to popularize their ideas in the mass media. The guiding principle of perestroika's market reform was the replacement of the centralized "command economy" — which in theory (though practice was far from this) treated the economy as a single giant enterprise — by one in which relations among enterprises would no longer be based on administrative order from above but on freely concluded contracts. Vertical coordination by the huge party-state bureaucracies would give way to horizontal economic co-ordination through the market. Overall planning and regulation would be achieved mainly by means of indirect, economic levers, such as interest rates and taxation, which would set the parameters within which autonomous, competing enterprises would make decisions. The central state's economic role would be limited to regulation of the market and longterm planning as well as to managing those sectors, such as defence, health and education, that could not be left to the regulated market. Official rhetoric about a "socialist market" aside, it soon became clear that this reform concept meant a retreat from the traditional socialist vision (again, practice had always been rather different, though the ideology was not entirely without a basis in reality) of an increasingly egalitarian society
Post-perestroika USSR 11 with firm socio-economic guarantees for all its members. The ideologues of perestroika declared such ideas to be outmoded and condemned them as the main source of the inefficiency of the old "command" system. "Levelling" tendencies, they argued, had to be abandoned if enterprises and individuals were to have the incentive to produce efficiently goods and services that society values. And the market was proclaimed the only proven mechanism through which society could effectively express such judgements. At the same time, restrictions were lifted on private economic activity by self-employed individuals and co-operatives. These were to help fill the gaping holes left by the state sector in the provision of consumer goods and services. Bureaucratic resistance to perestroika
Apart from the purely economic and technical problems posed by this reform, it faced a major political obstacle in that it lacked significant support in society. One of its central contradictions was that the bureaucracy that was called upon to administer the reform was in its mass hostile to this effort by Gorbachev to "save it from itself". There were good reasons for this hostility. On the most general level, structural reforms are risky undertakings whose consequences can never be fully predicted. The limited political liberalization under "glasnost" quickly revealed the depth and extent of popular hostility toward the "bureaucratic parasites". The reform could well lead to a direct threat to bureaucratic power itself, as had occurred in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Nor was it evident that the risk was justified by the contribution that improved economic performance could eventually make to political stability. Although market reform in other Soviet-type societies had initially produced rapid growth, by the second half of the 1980s, most of them were mired in foreign debt, high inflation and a renewed tendency toward stagnation.
The establishment of the "command economy" in the late 1920s was the bureaucracy's response to the crisis of the mixed economy of NEP (the New Economic Policy). Thereafter, administration of the "command economy" became the main raison d'être of the huge party and ministerial apparatuses, estimated by some at 18 million people in 1987. The market reform as officially conceived confronted them with the prospect of losing much of this economic power. Moreover, entire administrations, hundreds of thousands of positions, would be abolished. The available jobs in industry and services offered neither the status, conditions nor remuneration comparable to those being lost.
12 International Marxist Review
But even for those whose positions were not directly threatened, perestroika opened a period of heightened insecurity. Gorbachev's early purges were undoubtedly welcomed by middle-aged and younger members of the bureaucracy, who had found their careers blocked by Brezhnev's gerontocracy. (Brezhnev's hallmark had been "respect for cadres".) But functionaries would not be functionaries if they did not yearn for job security. Perestroika was directed against this fundamental interest. It was to make job tenure dependent upon strict, regular evaluations of job performance. What was even more distressing was that these evaluations were no longer to be made only by administrative superiors but also by rank-and-file workers and employees. Even the most honest and competent Soviet administrators felt that public scrutiny and control only complicated an already difficult job.
But, in fact, competent and honest administrators were few and far between. The system, especially as it had evolved under Brezhnev, was very efficient in breaking down such administrators or, failing that, in weeding them out. Moreover, even those privileges of administrative office sanctioned from above — special access to housing, to scarce and/or high quality services at low prices — were, as far as the population was concerned, a form of corruption. This became abundantly clear in letters and exposes published in the liberalized press under glasnost. The sad fact was that, unlike the bourgeoisie in developed capitalist societies, the bureaucracies of the Soviet type systems, forced to pose as the heirs and guardians of the socialist revolution, had been unable to legitimize their power and privilege. They, therefore, could not help but feel uneasy about any relaxation of bureaucratic control over society.
The same basic attitudes and interests were shared by functionaries in the repressive agencies of the state, the police, army and KGB. The army, in particular, was due for major cutbacks, as was military industry. Gorbachev's "new thinking" de-emphasized the role of military power in foreign policy. Moreover, in practice, it often amounted to unilateral concessions to the United States and its allies. Public criticism of the army was leading to a decline in its prestige (very high under Brezhnev), especially among the youth, among which draft-dodging soon became a serious problem. As for the KGB, it was a hated institution that was being deprived of one of its key functions — repression of political and cultural dissent. Officers in both organizations were deeply alarmed by the decline in the Soviet Union's great-power status and by the threat to its territorial integrity from the rising national movements. Genuine, active support in the bureaucracy for perestroika was, therefore,
Post-perestroika USSR 13 very thin. There were, of course, very competent, energetic and enlightened elements in all branches of the party-state apparatus that understood the necessity of far-reaching reform and welcomed the challenge. But nowhere were they a majority. Not even enterprise managers, who were to be freed from bureaucratic tutelage, were always enthusiastic about the reforms. Those who had been successful in the past owed much of their success to relations they had developed with superiors in the state and party bureaucracies. A consistent market reform would have made these irrelevant and demanded very different talents. It was also necessary now to deal with the workers who were losing their deference and fear of management. Even if the promised workers' self-management, which administrators abhorred, never materialized (in this area, the management lobby was eventually able to get Gorbachev's ear), the work force was sure to be much less malleable than before.
Formally all elements of the bureaucracy were enthusiastic supporters of perestroika. As a social stratum, the bureaucracy is organized hierarchically and so it could not openly challenge the more-or-less unified leadership that existed in the first phases of perestroika. But opposition did express itself in passive resistance and in behind-the-scene pressure that resulted in inconsistent or toothless laws and measures. Eventually however, open political challenges to Gorbachev were mounted at various top party gatherings as well as in the Supreme Soviet. These were generally preceded by a flurry of media reports alerting the public to a grave conservative threat. But in each case, these offensives, half-hearted affairs in any case, were handily beaten back by Gorbachev. The conservatives did not dare to remove Gorbachev, in whom they still saw a bulwark against the liberals and the people. Nevertheless, each failed counteroffensive had the effect of strengthening the "radicals", mostly intellectuals but already joined by some bureaucratic defectors, who were moving in an increasingly open liberal direction.
The bureaucracy thus revealed its extreme political weakness. Deeply divided along sectoral and regional lines, it was unable to act on its own without a strong, decisive leadership at the top. But the main sources of its weakness were its lack of any positive programme to get the country out of the deepening crisis and its almost complete social isolation: it and its system had been totally discredited among the vast majority of the population by the "period of stagnation". Already in the second and third years of perestroika, and especially after the fall of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the most clear-sighted and self-assured elements of the bureaucracy, epitomized by people like Boris Yeltsin and Ivan Silaev (a life-long functionary who
14 International Marxist Review headed Yeltsin's first cabinet), realized that the system was doomed and tied their stars to the introduction of a market system based predominantly upon full fledged private property. Significant numbers of the functionaries and former functionaries began themselves to participate in the process of "primitive accumulation" of capital. Popular resistance to perestroika
Despite the initial upsurge of popular enthusiasm evoked by the prospect of positive change after the stifling "regime of stagnation", reaction to perestroika in the general population was cool and mistrustful. Soviet social scientists and journalists attributed this to workers' alleged penchant for the easy life they enjoyed under the old regime. In fact, real wages, modest to begin with, had stagnated over the previous 18 years; health and safety conditions were abysmal; and the reigning chaos in production wreaked havoc with workers' lives, alternating periods of enforced idleness with "storming" and massive overtime at the end of the quarters, including frequent "black" Saturdays and holidays. Trade unions were the obedient tools of management, leaving workers with little effective recourse against arbitrary management decisions. Worst of all, perhaps, was the demoralizing daily experience of the incredible waste and irrationality of a system that deprived workers even of the satisfaction of doing good, useful work.
Soviet workers had a healthy mistrust of reforms from above based upon bitter historical experience: bureaucratic campaigns, launched without genuine popular consultation or open debate, had tended to fail miserably with the workers forced to assume the costs. Moreover, from the workers' point of view, there were many negative sides to the reform Gorbachev was proposing. They were being told that to have a better life they would have to give up key social rights. Most important among these was the de facto job security. Subjected to market discipline, enterprises would be forced to shed excess manpower and also run the risk of bankruptcy. Although Soviet enterprises are clearly overstaffed and economic restructuring requires a sectoral redistribution of the labour force, in the absence of democratic trade unions or real self-management, workers would have no protection against managerial abuses. More generally, the ending of job security and the threat of unemployment would radically alter the correlation of forces in the enterprise, giving management effective new means to enforce its will. Even if there was little
Post-perestroika USSR 15 immediate threat of an overall labour surplus, the threat of being made redundant would be a real lever in management's hands, since most of the available jobs would be in unattractive sectors (especially services) and regions. In addition many social benefits, for example one's place in the queue for housing, are related to length of service at the enterprise. Despite official denials, many economists were quite frank about the utility of "a small reserve army of labour" for enforcing discipline. If this army is to play its assigned role well, life within its ranks cannot be too comfortable. The slowness with which the Gorbachev regime moved to establish a job-placement and retraining system spoke loudly of the low priority assigned to so important an issue for workers.
The reform would also eliminate the de facto guaranteed wage, since wages were to be made dependent upon enterprise profitability. At the same time, the "social wage" (free or subsidized housing, health care, public transport, education, etc., as well as subsidized basic goods), which made up a significant part of workers" income, was to be cut in an effort to increase the incentive role of the individual wage. A significant rise in inequality became official policy, as income "levelling" (which had never affected the bureaucracy) was condemned as a major obstacle to efficiency. Moreover, wages were to be made dependent upon enterprise profitability over which workers had virtually no real control.
It was not reform as such that made workers uneasy. They were at least as disgusted with the old regime as the intelligentsia. What worried them was the specific nature of the proposed reform which asked them to give up important social rights (even if these were enjoyed at a mediocre level) in return for the mere promise of a higher living standard at some time in the future. Workers knew well the real value of such promises.
Gorbachev seemed to understand this. The originality of perestroika, when compared with earlier efforts at market reform by Soviet-type regimes, was to link openly economic with political reform. Market reforms elsewhere had been conceived largely as a means to forestall threats to bureaucratic dictatorship. But Gorbachev declared that "democratization", on both the state and enterprise levels, was an integral part of the economic reform. This was, at least formally, an offer of popular control over the reform process, and as such, it was intended to win support for the economic reform among a population that in its mass was mistrustful, all the more so as the economic situation • in the country began to deteriorate. Similarly, enterprise self-management was designed to win workers' acceptance of the far-reaching changes in relations within the enterprise that the economic reform would
16 International Marxist Review bring about. It was also a precondition for workers assuming responsibility for the enterprise's market performance, which was to become the principal determinant of their incomes.
"Democratization" was also intended to mobilize popular hostility to the bureaucracy as a means of neutralizing the latter's resistance to reform. cratic conservatism and inertia. In this area, Gorbachev was following in Open, legal pressure from below would serve as a counterbalance to bureauKhrushchev's footsteps, only much more boldly, in an effort to free himself from the conservative embrace of his bureaucratic base. He also understood that open debate and criticism were essential elements of efficient policy making.
However, "democratization" was never intended to go father than limited political liberalization and the establishment of a circumscribed parliamentary system that would leave the ultimate levers of power in the hands of what was still essentially a bureaucratic elite headed by Gorbachev. Genuine democracy would have entered into direct conflict with perestroika's real goal - "revolution from above", whose task it was to prevent a popular, democratic revolution. This was a central contradiction of perestroika.
Nowhere was the limited nature of the political reforms more evident than in the area of the economic reform, whose every phase was decided "on high" behind closed door and only subsequently submitted to "popular consultation", where at best minor details could be changed. For example, in March 1990, Gorbachev told a meeting of workers in the Urals, a centre of heavy and military industry, that "your cries of alarm have reached us," that he had come to "verify together with the toilers ... the course of the ship of state before the major choice that lies ahead." Yet again, he pledged to "consult the working class on all major elements of the reform." But he also made it clear that there would be no retreat from the basic conception of the reform as he conceived it: "Let us think about how, when and what to do, to what to give priority, from what to begin. I...] But as concerns the strategic choice, the direction of our policy, no one has yet proposed anything else serious, fundamental." He failed only to mention that he alone was the arbiter of what was "serious and fundamental" and that his own "strategic conception" "only serious one", had itself fundamentally changed more than once since he told a Central Committee meeting that there would be no market reform. Even the self-management reform in the enterprises was parachuted from above without any real consultation with the workers. Along with the fact that nothing concrete was done to help the workers free themselves from the very significant levers of power that the enterprise administration still wield-
Post-perestroika USSR 17 ed. For example, there was no move to eliminate the widespread practice of piece-work, a highly reactionary and divisive wage system. Nor was there any attempt to provide effective legal protection for elected trade-union officials, who remained highly vulnerable to management pressure. This ensured that self-management, with rare exceptions, would remain a dead letter. Moreover, since the economic structures standing above the enterprise remained intact and beyond democratic control, the entire operation appeared to the workers as a trap to lure them into assuming responsibility for a declining economic situation over which they had no control. Perestroika collapses under its own contradictions
This half-hearted "democratization" was unable to win active popular support for the economic reform, especially as the economic situation began to decline. A temporary halt in growth and some decline is to be expected in the course of major economic restructuring. People might have accepted this if they had had any faith that the burdens were being shared equally and that their sacrifices would not be in vain. But none of this was the case. Bureaucratic privilege remained essentially in tact and was now joined by the fantastic profits of yesterday's "shadow businessmen" turned "co-operators", who were making huge profits mainly through the purchase or theft and resale at high prices of cheap goods produced in the state sector. Moreover, the economic decline was not the result of a genuine economic restructuring that held out the promise of renewed expansion on a qualitatively new basis. It was rather the direct consequence of a flawed reform programme.
The aim of the "cost-accounting" (khozraschet) reform introduced in 1987 was to reduce the role of centralized economic administration and regulation and to increase the autonomy of the enterprises with a view to activating their market-oriented activity. However, this ignored the fact that the highly concentrated Soviet economy was (and remains) dominated by monopolistic structures in the form branch ministries and giant enterprises that are often the sole producers of particular goods. These in turn were often linked with shadowy, "mafia"-like structures that permeated the distribution sector. Over the preceding decades, and especially under Brezhnev's regime of bureaucratic laissez-faire, the central government had increasingly lost its ability to impose national goals on these bureaucratic fiefdoms and clans. Indeed, this had been a basic underlying cause of the stagnation.
Now, in the name of market reform, Gorbachev weakened even further
what remained of political control of the economy and gave a major new impulse to the existing tendencies. Ignoring formal restrictions and contract obligations, enterprises exploited their monopolistic positions quite "ration-
', using their expanded autonomy to raise price, even as they cut back on production. The main effect of the legalization of private enterprise, the sothe state commercial network, where prices were controlled and accessible to the average consumer. As one analyst put it in 1990, "although we often say in anger that nothing has changed over the past four years, nevertheless, our economy is different. It is capable of beating back directive attacks from the
Gorbachev's government found itself in the contradictory position of decrying the "group egoism" of enterprises and local governments, while at the same time condemning "ministerial dictates" and exhorting enterprises to fight for their autonomy, as promised by the 1987 Law on the State Enterprise, to retain a greater part of their "cost-accounting" income. The centre was fast losing what had remained of its power to growing centrifugal, regional and corporatist tendencies. Although on one level this might appear as the consequence of a series of policy errors and half-baked measures, on another level, it was the inevitable result an attempt to reform the economy without democratizing the central power. This was a policy ultimately dictatreformist wing of the bureaucracy in loose alliance with the liberal intelli-
The "radicals", who had themselves vociferously promoted the "cost an even further weakening of central regulation of the economy, arguing that the crisis was the result of the fact that the economic reforms were half- hearted and failed to create a "real" market, as if a monopoly-dominated market was somehow less than real. They were silent on the fact that the Polishstyle "shock therapy" they demanded would lead to an even swifter economic decline and impoverishment of the mass of the population. Exploiting growing popular discontent with the state of the economy, they presented themselves as the most consistent democrats, opponents of the authoritarian, hyper-centralized, bureaucratic regime, and the market as the magic antidote, the only solution to the crisis of the administered economy that was collaps-
The liberals' appeals found a strong resonance in the profound anti- bureaucratic sentiments of the population. Their anti-bureaucratic appeals
18 International Marxist Review ally"
called "co-operatives"
centre, of subordinating any laws to group egoism."
ed by the interests of the "revolution from above", gentsia and the growing private sector.
accounting reform"
ing before the people's eyes.
', was to drain an even larger share of production from
, whose social basis was the
', now exploited the deepening economic crisis to push for
Post-perestroika USSR 19 and soft-pedalling of their social programmes enabled them to win a number of key positions in the spring of 1990 and to push Gorbachev toward increasingly liberal positions. Yet, the majority of the Soviet people, and the workers first of all, while on the whole supporting an expanded role for market relations (about which they generally have only the vaguest and often very confused understanding), did not, and do not, in practice, favour the liberals' project, that would subordinate the economy to market forces. As liberal publicist Klyamkin ruefully noted in 1989, the people want efficiency as well as social justice, including economic security, full employment, price stability, a guaranteed decent minimum living standard for all, as well as strict limits to socio-economic inequality. This implied a strong democratic central economic power capable of submitting the market mechanism to these social goals.
Although the original conception of perestroika was some sort of "planned market economy", Gorbachev, under pressure from the "radicals", eventually concluded that was an impossible combination. This conclusion was not in the nature of things but flowed directly from his refusal to entertain genuine democratization of central state power. As long as the centre that planned and regulated remained undemocratic, its directives and regulations would necessarily be perceived as oppressive and exploitative by the producers who would resist them. The centre's inability to motivate economic actors at the various levels to behave in a manner consistent with centrally set goals had always been the fundamental contradiction of the bureaucratic economy. The introduction of market relations into such a bureaucratic context, as the Yugoslav and other "market socialist" experiences showed, merely strengthened existing centrifugal tendencies.
Ultimately, the only way to overcome this contradiction without riding roughshod over popular interests and democratic process would be to combine democratization at the enterprise and local levels with democratization of the central power, that is to create a self-management system at all levels of economic and political decision-making. This is not in itself a magic formula for a workable balance between centralization and decentralization, between administrative regulation and enterprise autonomy, but it does provide a real basis upon which a solution corresponding to popular interests can be sought. The point is that the liberals" answer to the crisis of the Soviet economy is by no means, as they claim, the only possible one, all the rest being "merely more experiments". The real "experiment", one in true Stalinist tradition, is to impose upon a reluctant population a reform that takes into account neither their interests nor the real, objective socio-economic condi-
20 International Marxist Review tions of the society. Certainly, the experiences so far of Poland and other former Soviet-type societies, which have gone much further that the Soviet Union in their attempts to "build capitalism", are not at all encouraging, at least from the point of view of the vast majority of the population. The advent of the post-perestroika phase of the "revolution from above"
Soviet liberals were generally quite candid in admitting that the last thing they wanted was a popular revolution. They often pointed to the October Revolution, which they considered a national tragedy. (This did not prevent them at the same time from portraying October as the opposite of a popular revolution, a military putsch directed against the people.) In an article at the end of 1990, Gavriil Popov made this position very clear: the worst scenario, in his view, would be for the liberals to come to power on a wave of popular mobilization directed against the ruling bureaucracy, since this would effectively make the liberals prisoners of popular prejudices, holdovers from the old system. (Like other liberals, he refused to entertain the possibility that these "prejudices" might in fact be quite rational class interests. The Stalinist nature of his argumentation is especially striking here.) In particular, values of social justice were still firmly anchored in popular consciousness and, if given effective political expression, they would constitute insurmountable obstacles to the liberal project. He argued, therefore, for an "strong independent executive regime" ', free from control by the soviets, whose deputies were too open to the influence of popular moods. The best political basis for the liberals' project of "democratic" transformation was, therefore, not genuine democracy at all, but an alliance of "market democrats" with reformist bureaucrats. Excluded from the coalition would be not only conservative bureaucrats, but "populist democrats", those who took democracy too literally.
Put more simply, the liberals" project, like that of Gorbachev and the reformist wing of the bureaucratic elite, was also "revolution from above" but a more radical, openly capitalist one that required a fundamental change in property relations, from state to private ownership. The liberals' strategy seemed to be bearing fruit when in the summer of 1990 Gorbachev reached an accord with Yeltsin on the introduction of a "radical market reform" There was no longing any pretence of it being "socialist" or retaining any element of planning. However, in the fall of that year, Gorbachev appeared to
Post-perestroika USSR 21 have second thoughts. He rejected the liberal "shock therapy" in the form of the "500-day Plan" and, without renouncing market reform, announced a period of economic stabilization. He appointed conservative figures from the army, KGB and trade-union apparatus to his cabinet, attempted to reinforce central economic regulation, and made some feeble attempts to rein in glasnost.
The reasons for this retreat are still not entirely clear, but it appears that Gorbachev came under pressure from conservative forces (the threat of a coup?) who were reacting particularly against the danger of the dissolution of the union. Gorbachev, as president of the USSR, himself, of course, shared an interest in maintaining the country's integrity. Moreover, any minimally sober evaluation of the "500-day Plan" revealed it to be an adventurist project with predominantly political goals — the swift creation of faits accomplis in the area of price liberalization and property relations — that would very likely have provided the spark for the long-predicted and much feared "social explosion"
After much hesitation, and with his popularity declining, Yeltsin, who had become the recognized leader of the liberal camp, finally "declared war" on Gorbachev in January 1991, demanding his resignation. In March and April, a wave of strikes in the coal regions, as well as in Byelorussia and elsewhere, demanded the resignation of the central government and the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. The strikers put forward no social programme of their own, but their political motives were quite straightforward and justified: the central government and parliament had not been democratically elected; they did not enjoy popular confidence, having led the country into an unprecedented crisis for which they could offer no solution; they should be replaced through new democratic elections. These motives, however, were not shared by the Yeltsin and his liberal colleagues, who exploited this popular movement (which at the same time they feared) to pressure Gorbachev into renewing the alliance he had broken off with the liberals, bringing along with him the bureaucratic forces that he commanded.
The liberal strategy succeeded when at the end of April Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the heads of eight other republics signed a protocol that gave greatly reinforced powers to the republics and provided for a new constitution. The reaction among the miners, who had been kept in the dark about these negotiations, was one of having been betrayed. Yeltsin tried to placate the Russian miners by arranging the transfer of their mines to Russian jurisdiction and promising them that a greater share of the coal output that would be left at their disposal. But this apparently did not make much of an impression.
22 International Marxist Review In the Kuzbass, the largest Russian coalfield, where Yeltsin had been very popular, he received only 23% of the ballots cast in the June 1991 Russian presidential elections, while Tuleev, chairman of the regional soviet, who had opposed the spring strikes, won over half the votes. (Pressure from Yeltsin, later forced Tuleev's resignation.)
Since Gorbachev had made common cause with the liberals, he lost his usefulness for the conservative elements of the bureaucracy as a bulwark against the liberal version of the "revolution from above" or against revolution from below. It was in this context, that they handed the liberals a final victory beyond their boldest dreams. Many unanswered questions remain about the abortive coup of August 19-21, certainly one of the most bizarre and inept attempts to seize power by men already occupying top positions in the state. It is a measure of "democratization" that upon returning to Moscow after the coup's defeat, Gorbachev unashamedly declared that he would never reveal the whole truth. Despite the official version of the coup's defeat as a "popular revolution" ', the "genuine October revolution", popular mobilization against the putschists was quite limited. Yeltsin's call for a general strike went largely unheeded, and he himself took no concrete measures to organize it. The weak popular mobilization was probably due to many causes, the chief one being that the few people saw any reason to act, given the unreal nature of the coup: in most places, absolutely nothing had changed, and the coup's leaders themselves did everything possible to maintain a facade of legality and normality. But popular indifference also played a role, since many saw the coup as just another squabble among elites, none of which had anything to offer.
The coup collapsed essentially from within, as key elements of the repressive apparatuses (army, KGB, Ministry of Internal Affairs troops) refused to participate in it. Moreover, the putschists themselves showed no inclination to use even the force that was available to them. The whole episode was a godsend to the liberals (in particular in Russia), who exploited the failed coup to stage a coup of their own, extending and consolidating their power without any recourse to popular mobilization. Yeltsin, without any regard for the existing laws and constitution, used the "emergency situation" (which had already passed) quickly to take over Union ministries, to get control of the repressive apparatuses, to appoint prefects to regions, to remove troublesome local leaders and effectively to usurp the powers of the elected (though, admittedly, ineffective) soviets. In October, Yeltsin used his immense presidential power to veto the Russian Supreme Soviet's decision to hold elections in December to the heads of local executives (the Soviet had rejected Yeltsin's request to postpone these elections). The liberal press justified this
Post-perestroika USSR 23 veto with the interesting argument that "democrats" would probably lose these elections. The words Bertholt Brecht, attributed to the leaders of the former GDR after the popular revolt, come to mind: The people have lost confidence in the government; it is necessary to elect a new people.
The coup's defeat also greatly increased the confidence, and accelerated the open political organization, of the new entrepreneurial class, which consists largely of former and current officials or of people with connections to, and the protection, of such officials. If most people remained spectators to the coup, Moscow's entrepeneurs at once saw the threat to their interests and sent their large corps of bodyguards to defend the "White House", which they barricaded with their fleet of cars, and placed large sums of money at Yeltsin's disposal. In the mass media, and particularly radio and television, "entrepreneurial" themes now occupy the place once assumed by "Communist" propaganda. However, the style is strikingly similar: one-sided information, distorted interpretations of Western and Soviet reality, stock phrases and ideas repeated ad nauseum. It is only in the printed media that small critical islands remain.
The new entrepreneurs, despite their aggressive self-confidence, are in a fact largely parasitical group, raking in enormous profits from speculative trade in goods produced almost exclusively by the state sector. Seats on the various commodity exchanges are regularly advertised on television at the price of one and a half million rubles. Consumer goods and services accessible to the mass population, needless to say, are not advertised. According to one report, there are more commodity exchanges (which trade anything from rolled steel to pantyhose and sneakers) in Russia than in all the capitalist world combined.
As this essay is being written, the Russian government stands poised to push through its radical liberal programme of price liberalization, curtailment of the state supports for industry, rapid privatization and opening the economy to the world market. It has made quite clear that only the "neediest" can expect any measure of protection. The vast majority of the population will have to fend for itself. The "revolution from above" is moving into high gear. The forces of the revolution from below
Among workers (less so among white-collar employees and intellectuals), illusions about Yeltsin and the interests he represents are quickly dissipating
24 International Marxist Review and will not likely withstand even the first stages of the liberal reform. In conversations with the author, leaders of the Independent Miners' Union and worker activists in other sectors made clear their view that the proposed reform programme, which they characterize as little more than a hodgepodge of adventurist measures, will crush the mass of the population like an economic steam-roller, unless workers are able to organize around a programme of their own.
At the present moment, however, the workers are far from being able to do that. The only mass popular organizations are the Independent Miners' Union (IMU), and the Inter-republican Union of Work Collective Councils (LUWCC). The IMU has approximately 55,000 members, though its real influence among the miners is much broader. Its stand is one of strict independence both from management and as well as from the state. Although formally a trade-union organization, virtually all of the collective actions it has led have been political. Although it had fallen under considerable liberal influence, after the spring 1991 strikes, the IMU leadership has concluded that the labour movement must develop its own programme of political and economic transformation if it was not to continue to find itself at the tail end of events, manipulated by alien interests. However, this movement has so far not been able to spread outside the mining sector, and the miners' own unity itself faces serious challenges from the divisive forces of the market and national separatism.
The Work Collective Councils (self-management bodies) held their first congress in December 1990. The main goal of the Union that was founded by representatives from enterprises employing some eight million people, is to fight for self-management and the transfer of the enterprises to the work collectives, against "nomenklatura privatization". Despite a promising start, its leadership has been relatively inactive and has apparently been co-opted by the Yeltsin forces. This was certainly the impression given by its second congress in October 1991, where most of the time was spent hearing government officials make empty promises. The Union's leaders themselves admitted that the Russian government had already passed a series of laws and resolutions basically hostile to the Union's goals. Silaev, then Yeltsin's prime minister, declared in New York in the spring of 1991 that the government was staking Russia's future on the private entrepreneur, not the workers.
With the exception of some trade-union locals, individual activists and officials, there are no signs of more than cosmetic change among the "official" trade unions. Even where these unions have formally adopted an oppositional stance, it has been along strictly "trade-unionist" lines, that is, they con-
Post-perestroika USSR 25 cede the inevitability of the "revolution from above" but demand that the population be protected from it, as if the two were really compatible. Moreover, these demands are never backed up by serious attempts to encourage rank-and-file mobilization.
As for overtly political organizations, so far none have been able to attract more than a few dozen active members in any major industrial centre. The mass of workers are very cynical about parties, in large part as a reaction to their experience with the CPSU.
There are two principal obstacles before the mobilization of the forces of the revolution from below. The first is ideological. On concrete issues of living standards, social rights and guarantees, property and power relations, workers are clearly opposed to the liberal programme. But to the degree that the old regime is identified with socialism (and both conservative and liberal propaganda has been at pains to drive this idea home), the rejection of the past becomes a rejection of socialism, and with it of any qualitative alternative to the programme of "revolution from above". At the same time, workers themselves are increasingly aware that the struggle around partial demands in a time of deepening crisis is futile. The result is demobilizing.
The other major obstacle is the workers' atomization internal divisions (assiduously maintained by management through the piece-work system and other less refined mechanisms) and, concomitantly, their continued dependence on enterprise management. After a brief period at the start of perestroika, when the correlation of forces shifted in favour of the workers, management has been able to win back much of the ground lost and even to reinforce its positions. This is due in large part to the deepening economic crisis, which has generally had a dampening effect on shopfloor activism, as well as on the greatly increased dependence of workers over the past two years on the enterprise for consumer goods that are no longer available in state shops. These goods are often doled out in a way calculated to undermine worker solidarity and assertiveness.
At the same time, there are numerous small exceptions (apart from the major exception of the miners) to this general picture. Scattered about the industrial centres of the former Soviet Union, in virtually every large enterprise, are small groups of activists, often very capable organizers and politically conscious workers. While many these are relatively isolated, others enjoy the organized support of the workers of their shop or department. In addition, small socialist organizations, consisting of workers and intellectuals, exist in virtually every city. Despite tremendous material obstacles, they have begun to put out their own weekly or monthly papers and have played
roles in conflicts over wages and privatization in individual enterprises.
There is also the project of forming a Party of Labour, which has some support from people in the Moscow ("official") Trade-Union Federation, and which might play a role in uniting the scattered forces of the left.
Emerging from seventy years of extremely repressive bureaucratic rule that gentsia of a liberal or "Communist" orientation (the latter a small minority), the process of working class formation was bound to be slow and tortuous.
The mass of the population of Eastern Europe has remained a relatively pasfor the Soviet people, though historically, despite important similarities in social and political structure, Russia's trajectory had always been quite dif-
If the revolution from below does succeed in mobilizing itself, it will most likely begin by following the path taken by the coalminers: from spontaneous strikes provoked by the liberal reform over issues of wages, prices, social rights and privatization to the formation of strike committees that become permanent workers" committees; these soviet-type organizations, at once trade-union and political, then would unite on city, regional and finally national levels. The emergence of such a credible organizational and political alternative would provide the conditions for the elaboration, with the help of the now scattered socialist intelligentsia and political activists, of a programmatic alternative corresponding to popular interests. The miners' leadership is already working on such a programme for the labour movement as a
As noted earlier, a more likely scenario for the immediate future is something between the two outlined above: a period of intense social conflict, with popular opposition blocking the most extreme liberal measures but inca-
Any attempt at more precise prediction would be foolhardy. There are no historical parallels to what is happening today in the territories of the former
Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. What does seem certain, however, is that the liberals" plan of forced "building of capitalism" is likely to prove at least as difficult as the attempt at the forced "construction of socialism" that
1. The terms "Soviet" and "Soviet Union" will sometimes be used here for the sake of conven-
26 International Marxist Review wrapped itself in the banner of "socialism"
sive spectator to the "revolution from above".
ferent from that of its more westerly neighbours.
whole.
pable of imposing a solution of its own.
preceded it.
ience to designate the republics of the former Soviet Union.
", and with the bulk of the intelli-
' This is also a possible scenario
November 1991
UNITED SECRETARIAT