Learning From Mistakes?

 “The End of the Beginning – Lessons of the Soviet Collapse” by Carlos Martinez, 2019

This book is one of a series that attempts to explain the internal contradictions that led to the collapse of the USSR and its allies / satellites.   It’s written from a familiar Brezhnevite / Zyuganov point of view, attempting to explain how the Soviet political economy failed.  

It starts with a long list of achievements of the people of the USSR which should be familiar to most socialists – getting rid of the capitalist and landlord classes, social equality, industrialization, defeating fascism, achievements in science and technology, a comprehensive welfare state, aiding national liberation movements.  This was under years of extreme external pressure.  There is no theoretical background to any of these gains by the author, just a list. 

PROBLEMS in PARADISE

Then Martinez tries to detail the problems, which he says started to show up in the late 1950s – slowing productivity, inability to use technical advances like computers and the flaws of prior methods of central planning as society and production became more complex. The USSR reached peak productivity in the mid-1970s, then began to decline.  Easy oil, coal and gas production declined on the European side of the Urals, so production had to be moved farther east, which cost more.  Quality was secondary to ‘meeting the numbers’ of the plan, especially on consumer goods.  A secondary black-market economy developed because of consumer shortages, engendering a sort of lumpen petit-bourgeoisie.  Martinez also cites “poor labor discipline” as workers saw less and less value to their labor.   

These are all supposedly ‘technical’ economic issues but they relate to political ones - the falling support of the population.  Or as others he quotes call 'the masses.' Martinez tries to explain this lack with a section on foreign problems – Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the break with China, the CIA’s backing of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, the collapse of the associated workers' states in east and central Europe.  He has a special focus on Khrushchev’s denunciation of the euphemistic Stalin ‘personality cult,’ which he thinks was a mistake even though it was real. An earlier “necessary repression” is mentioned, but as to ‘who’ was repressed is left vague.  He mentions the Soviet fear of extending revolutions across the world so as not to anger the West.  The phrase ‘workers democracy’ is never used.  Martinez finally tiptoes up to the existence of a bureaucratic “state-party elite” which would gain from final ‘enterprise autonomy’ and capitalist restoration.  

Martinez covers the endless military, economic and nuclear aggressiveness of the U.S. and its allies against the USSR.  While the latter wanted peace, the former wanted counter-revolution.  So 30% of Soviet GDP went to military spending, which did not benefit the population.  Although as history notes, the greatest danger was from within.

Russian poverty in 2015 at 20 million / 21 million in 2021

GORBACHEV

Martinez shows how Gorbachev’s pursuit of perestroika and glasnost was carried out in a way that undermined the state-owned economy, leading to a counter-revolution led by Yeltsin and 15 years of incredible economic darkness due to capitalist ‘shock therapy.’  This was accomplished in spite of a referendum where voters chose to continue the USSR by more than 2-1 - though the Baltic Republics did not allow a vote. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was accomplished by the leaders of only 3 of the 15 Republics – Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia - initiated by Yeltsin. The prelude to this was Gorbachev allies attacking Marxism and socialism; they got rid of national planning, increased market relations, allowed runaway private enterprise and made a 50% reduction in state spending.  This created chaos and shortages, even of soap.  A first-ever recession occurred under Gorbachev.  After his removal the economy had a 40% decline in GDP under Yeltsin, in what has been called 'the worst depression in world history.'  The U.S. and its allies were intent on dismantling the Soviet economy and they succeeded in handing it over to a new bunch of crony capitalists.

In the process Martinez defends a ‘one party state’ not a workers democracy – even though he blames a large section of the bureaucracy for supporting capitalist restoration.  Go figure.  Now former apparatchik Putin rides this capitalist beast, made up of equal parts crony capitalism, repression and Great Russian chauvinism.  Putin was a member of the ‘state-party elite’ intent on privatization.  Martinez doesn’t mention him as Yeltsin's more competent successor, probably for political reasons.

The author is a British member of “The Friends of Socialist China.” Of interest is his unintentional comparison of the USSR to China.  The latter made a cross-class block with the U.S. and its allies in 1971, and achieved technology transfers by renting its working class out to the capitalists after 1978 when actual Maoism was abandoned.  He celebrates the CCP for not dissing Mao, even though the new leadership opposed many of Mao's ideas and methods like the GPCR. On the other hand the USSR  did not make a ‘deal’ beyond détente, nor could it, as it was the main target of the international capitalists.  Also unlike the USSR, China did not have a global role in financially supporting national liberation and ‘socialist’ movements and governments across the world, but kept itself in national isolation - running publishing houses and friendship associations but little else.  To this day the CCP is still in an alliance with a huge sector of Chinese domestic and “Western” foreign capital, running a version of authoritarian social-democracy -  something Martinez seems to favor.  

Martinez ends by suggesting that the USSR should have followed what China and Vietnam did in liberalizing the economy, but doing it slowly, with care.  As part of this he advocates increasing material incentives, but oddly, doesn't explicitly say that.  He is still flummoxed why a majority of the Soviet bureaucracy chose capitalist restoration... but perhaps they too wanted more 'material incentives.'  This was actually predicted long ago.  Now China itself faces a new cold war and a break in that 51-year long alliance with world capital that started in 1971.  

This is a familiar book which retro-actively explains the past but has no real clues as to the future.  It is a partial history of what happened and an incomplete understanding of what went wrong.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Secondhand Time – the Last of the Soviets” (Alexievich); “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives” (Cohen); “The Contradictions of Real Socialism – the Conductor and the Conducted,” “Unlearning Marx – Why the Soviet Failure Was a Triumph for Marx,” “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism,” “Blackshirts and Reds” (Parenti); “Fear” (Rybakov); “Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking,” “Reinventing Collapse” (Orlov); “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Soviet Women – Walking the Tightrope,” “Russia and the Long Transition From Capitalism to Socialism” (Amin); “The Red Atlantis,” “From Solidarity to Sellout – The Transition to Capitalism in Poland.”   

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 13, 2022