The death of the Soviet Union: Our Moscow correspondent reports in 1991

Members of the Soviet public marked the 74th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution by staging a protest on Red Square in Moscow, Nov. 7, 1991. They demanded the preservation of socialism and that the Soviet Union be saved from destruction. The writing on the placard featuring Mikhail Gorbachev reads: 'You ruined the country, hell awaits you.' | Boris Yurchenko / AP

This article is part of the People’s World 100th Anniversary Series.

On Dec. 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union, and the red hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin in Moscow for the last time. The next day, Dec. 26, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics officially ceased to exist.

The USSR’s quiet death in the last days of 1991 capped a tumultuous multi-year process of “perestroika,” or economic restructuring, that had been initiated by Gorbachev when he became leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985. Initially aimed at reforming Soviet socialism, within a short time, the process deteriorated into an all-out campaign to restore capitalism in the land of Lenin.

People’s World reporter Mike Davidow lived in the Soviet capital for almost 20 years, over several stretches from the 1960s to the 1990s, and observed the demise of the USSR up-close.

The following article is based on an address he delivered at a meeting in New York on Dec. 22, 1991 – just days before the Soviet Union’s final death. Though there would be more in-depth theoretical and practical research subsequently, this article marks one of the first drafts of a Marxist analysis of the fall of the Soviet Union. It was published in People’s Weekly World on Jan. 4, 1992.

After delivering these remarks, Davidow returned to Moscow, where he continued to report on the decline of living standards and mass desperation as capitalism was restored in Russia. Later, he was holed up inside the Russian parliament with Communist lawmakers in 1993 when President Boris Yeltsin sent in the tanks to blast away the last remnants of Soviet democracy. He died in Moscow in 1996.

Behind the headlines from Moscow: The Soviet people will prevail
By Mike Davidow
People’s Weekly World – Jan. 4, 1992

History is now punishing the Soviet people for the abandonment of socialism by their leaders. In the 14 years that I have lived in the USSR, I’ve seen all these things myself and experienced them.

Many of you visited the Soviet Union, and I know when you visited you said, “My God, how wonderful it is to be able to walk in the streets at night. No crime in the streets.” Well, with the first steps toward capitalism, there is mass crime in the Soviet Union today.

I remember during the Great Depression it was an inspiration to us that the USSR was a country without mass unemployment. This is also disappearing. There is already large-scale unemployment, and with the introduction of the market economy, there will be millions more unemployed.

On top of that there was no charge for higher education. Now, it is 40,000 rubles for a four-year term. They’re also beginning to lose free medical care. They still have free medical care, but side by side you have paid clinics, and some of the best doctors and nurses are leaving the polyclinics and going into the paid clinics because that is where the money is. This is the meaning of the abandonment of socialism in concrete terms.

Or take for example, stable prices. To me, that was one of the most valuable things in the Soviet Union. For the 14 years that I was there, the prices of meat, milk, and bread were generally stable. The inflation is now almost unbelievable.

Or you take the national picture. I visited all 15 Republics; I was in Nagorno-Karabakh, the area of the terrible warfare between Azerbaijan and Armenia which you read about. Hundreds have already been killed, but I was there when they lived peacefully, side by side. There was no question of any enmity.

So, when I speak of the abandonment of socialism, you have to understand that it means changing, in the worst possible way, the life of the Soviet people.

Why the setbacks?

Let me now turn to what are some of the reasons for this terrible setback. The last word on this has not been said. In my opinion, the Soviet Communist Party, which is now being reorganized, owe to the world – to us, to their people – a deep-going, fundamental, objective analysis of how this came about.

Every revolution, as Marx said, criticizes itself again and again, and corrects itself again and again. This is the historical process which every revolution goes through. The process began in a very big way with the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. I know of no ruling class which criticized itself as sharply as the Soviet Union did at the 20th Congress.

From the very beginning of perestroika, there appeared two trends. One was for correction, in line with what Marx said revolutions should do. The other was for rejection, to reject the course of the October Revolution. You can only understand perestroika if you understand this two-fold trend and the struggle between them.

Gorbachev can only be understood as one who vacillated between them and then surrendered to the rejection trend. That is the essence of it. The vacillation led inevitably to capitulation. The question is, why did the forces of rejection triumph, and what were the reasons that counterrevolution – which is what it is, full blown counterrevolution in the Soviet Union – why did it triumph temporarily?

Objectively, the main reason is that the revolutionary energy of the Soviet people was exhausted. Just think of what they went through in the course of an ordinary lifetime: a revolution, civil war, the Stalin period of repressions, in which many of the finest of cadre were killed, and the Great Patriotic War, where they lost 27 million people.

It’s not only the figures I’m speaking about, not only the destruction of the cities that took place, but you have to understand the moral and psychological scars this left on generations that followed. It was this exhaustion which provided soil for doubts on socialism. And let me say this,  much was done to discredit socialism during the last three years of the Gorbachev leadership.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the new reorganized party, has a tremendous job to do to regain the confidence of the Soviet people after this. And it will only be done through deeds, through struggle.

Gorbachev and Yeltsin

Gorbachev may have had the best intentions, but you have to be literally blind not to see that the result is a catastrophe, whatever he intended, whatever he wanted. He was the vehicle, the chief instrument for catastrophe for the Soviet people, for socialism.

Objectively, that’s the fact. He will have to live with it. If anyone wants to defend him as a person and say, well, after all, he did this and that, of course he did certain things that were positive. In the beginning, there were a lot of things that were positive. He opened up the democratization; that was a positive thing. But he let it run out of control to the point where it became its opposite and practically undermined the whole fabric of society.

Gorbachev’s – not only his but others like him – is essentially a social democratic position. In the West, social democracy wants to reform capitalism. In the Soviet Union, it wants to restore capitalism. That’s a horse of a different color.

To restore capitalism, you have to inevitably become anti-communist. If you were in the Soviet Union today, you would see that the anti-communism is more intense than we had under McCarthyism. It is anti-communism from the inside, anti-communism from former Communists.

Who do you think Yeltsin is, who now speaks about the destruction of communism? For thirty years he was a leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the leader of the biggest section of the C.P., the Moscow Party, a candidate member of the Political Bureau.

Yeltsin! Already they’re saying here that he’s unpredictable. But he’s predictable in a certain sense, and that is, he’s determined to eradicate socialism and restore capitalism. He’s going to have one hell of a job because it’s not just simply up to him.

But the socialist economic structure, and it is still socialist, constitutes the major problem that they have. Where the conflict is now going to take place, and this is where the mass of the Soviet people will be involved, is that they’re going to try to undo this socialist economic structure and replace it with the kind of capitalist structure that has just put 70,000 General Motors workers out of work.

Market economy?

There’s a lot of talk about the market economy in the Soviet Union. They talk about the market economy just like here they talk about free enterprise. They avoid the word capitalism like the plague, because if they said to the Soviet people, “We want to restore capitalism,” they would get little support.

Therefore, they speak about this mysterious, magical market economy which is a cure-all. But you know something? The Soviet people now are not buying it. From what they’ve already experienced with just the introduction of the market economy, they are very worried. There’s going to now be a very critical period in Soviet history.

Yeltsin realizes it, the ruling class in this country realizes it, and I would say there’s going to be a period in which those who have been talking about the non-existent class struggle are going to find out that the class struggle is very much alive.

I don’t want to give you any illusions that it’s going to be easy; it’s going to be a very tough struggle, but the struggle is going to take place because it’s going to be around fundamentals. It’s going to be a question of how the Soviet people live.

They already know how they’re living, and they don’t like it. They certainly don’t want to live worse, as they’re going to when prices are freed. The government hasn’t as yet fully freed prices, and they’re going to be ten, twelve times higher. Now, the trade unions are saying, “Market prices, we want market wages!” Well, of course that’s not going to be answered because with market wages, so-called, and with low productivity you’ll have more inflation, which you’ve already got plenty of right now.

Backbone of Soviet socialism

Now, I want to come to the present situation. First, let me say something about the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The CPSU historically played a role which we cannot conceive of in the ordinary terms of a political party. This was an historical development in Czarist Russia and also in the Soviet Union.

I’ll give you one example. When I was a soldier in the infantry, I never heard any of the officers say to me or to others, “Democrats and Republicans, Forward!” But this is exactly what happened during World War II. When the Red Army was in battle, the political commissars said, “Communists forward!” They had to lead the attack, and three million party members died in the course of the war.

It was this party that was the backbone of socialism in the Soviet Union. If there was not national strife in the 15 Republics, in the 120 different nations, it was because you had a Communist Party, based on internationalism, that kept in check the extreme nationalist forces now let loose by the Gorbachev “democracy.”

My opinion is that one of the big problems is that the Soviet Comrades ignored one of Lenin’s fundamental warnings: that in the period when the party is the state power, the main danger is careerism and corruption from within.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union has been outlawed by edict, by Boris Yeltsin. Do you know when he did it? On the eve of the October Revolution, November 6th. Before that, in the days following the so-called August putsch, he suspended the Communist Party – incidentally, in the presence of Gorbachev, who never raised his voice against it.

The General Secretary of the Communist Party deserted his post in that fateful moment, announcing his resignation and calling on the party to voluntarily dissolve.

So, you have a situation where the Communist Party is outlawed. It has been stripped of all its assets, its funds, its buildings, its schools, its press, even its typewriters have been taken away. It has literally no place to meet right now. No court decided this, no legal body decided it; one man!

Communist fightback

However, a movement has also emerged for the reorganization of the Communist Party. There is one group, which I would call the main one, that they call the Communist Party of Russia. This group is overwhelmingly working class. It has sections of the intelligentsia, but more than any other it is based in the working class. IT will have, in my opinion, about a million members in Russia.

A Communist Party must be reorganized in each republic because of the new situation. They’re not going to be like they were before, united in one Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Each party will be different, depending on the circumstances. While party organizations in Russia and some of the Central Asian republics are gaining strength, Communists in the Baltics, parts of Western Ukraine, Armenia, and Georgia are forced to operate underground.

In closing I want to tell you of the development which I think is most inspiring. This November 7th was the first time in 74 years that the anniversary of the revolution was not observed by the government. There was nobody on the podium of the Lenin Mausoleum. Everything was done to erase it from the memory of the people.

The Moscow Soviet of Workers, which was formed in July by delegates of 200 enterprises, issued a leaflet like we used to do and spread it all over the city. The result: over 100,000 people jammed Red Square.

There was such enthusiasm, there was such resolve, such determination. The slogans were, “Down with Privatization,” “Down with Capitalism,” “Down with Yeltsin,” and all that. When they streamed into Red Square they chanted, “Lenin, Lenin, Lenin.”

The reorganized Communist Party will be stripped of a lot of the negative features responsible for the collapse of the old Communist Party. It will be much smaller but it’s going to be much more like the Communist Party that historically played the key role in Soviet history. The great traditions of the Bolshevik Party and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union are not being lost.

If I were to leave you with the impression that it will be a one-way street, an easy victory, I would be deceiving you. How long there will be before this exhaustion of the revolutionary energy is revitalized I can’t answer. All I know is that the process is already taking place. Now the picture has become more or less clarified. The forces are more or less delineated.

What they need now is our support. There is a great debt that we owe to the Soviet people and to the Soviet Communists. Now is the time that I think we have to repay a little of it, but it would be a great inspiration to them. I know, because when I left they said, “Bring greetings to the American Communists.”

They have great respect and admiration for the U.S. Communist Party. The committee that was established, the Committee for the Defense for the Rights of Communists, needs to have solidarity committees established around the world. This is our fight as much as it is theirs.

We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!

---

CONTRIBUTOR

Mike Davidow

Mike Davidow (1913-1996) was a working-class journalist and lifelong Communist who served for many years as the Moscow correspondent for People’s World and its predecessor, the Daily World. He authored the weekly column, “Moscow Diary.” In the 1930s, he was an organizer with the Unemployed Councils and New York leader of the Workers’ Alliance. During World War II, he fought fascism and Japanese imperialism as part of the 165th Infantry. After the war, he was a Communist Party organizer in Ohio and later worked as a garment presser. He was a prize-winning playwright, whose works highlighted working class experience. He began work as a journalist in the 1960s, covering the burgeoning Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. He lived in the Soviet Union from 1969 to ’74, from 1982 to ’86, and then in post-Soviet Russia from 1991 until his death. In 1993, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin used tanks to blast away the last remnants of Soviet democracy, Davidow was holed up inside the parliament building with members of the Russian Communist Party. He survived the experience, but died three years later. He wrote many books, the last of which was titled Perestroika: Its Rise and Fall.