It was definitely initiated from the top down I would say. But at the end of the day, whatever mass strikes, work actions, and army mutinies occured were not enough to stop Yeltsin and the west from dissolving the SU into what it is now.
I don’t want to mean this as blaming the average Soviet citizen but the fact is; whether from apathy with the old system, or naive hope that westernising would bring prosperity, or being outgunned by Yeltsins military, they and their organisations were sadly unable to defend the Soviet republics. All communists need to take sober lessons here. If it is the first task of the workers’ party to instill a revolutionary spirit in the working class, the second and even harder one must be to convert that spirit into a mass commitment to the socialist project.
Biggest L of the USSR in my opinion is its lack of democratization over the years. After WW2, the soviet government and institutions were very much respected by the people, and the country well established in time and stability, and top spheres of institutions being too independent and not committed to a more, well, soviet (as in workers council) form of government, is a huge loss that paved the way for Glasnost, Perestroika and eventually the dissolution. The book “Socialism Betrayed” makes a really good depiction of this in my opinion.
None of this, though, means that the dissolution of the USSR was desired by its peoples for the vast majority of the people, with some possible exceptions in the Baltics and Georgia due to a history of nationalism and Russophobia being exploited during Glasnost. It’s not a color revolution as happened in, say, Poland. It was a centralised, institutional process that didn’t even involve the people of the country. It’s because of this that it’s important to me to make a point not to use the word “fall” or “collapse” of the USSR, and to make very clear that the dissolution didn’t happen because of any economic failure or due to people’s will as so many people believe, but that it was dissolved top down by a minority of individuals in the government against the overwhelming majority in an antidemocratic fashion, with no economic crisis involved other than the small one generated by Perestroika itself.
Workers councils, led by who, though? United in what structures, along what lines, with what discipline to guarantee it; and what is the context and remnant class character and superstructural drives from which these executive-power worker-councils would emerge and lead if given full power? This would almost certainly just amount to ‘trade-union-consciousness-as-countries’ in the best case — in the worst case and almost assuredly eventually with the help of imperialist powers and the maneuvering of less idealist factions an active counter-revolution and re-establishment of right wing governance ruled by white terror.
Workers councils led by who? Solidarnosc et al. should have had equal power as the central Party power structures because of ‘democracy’? We must realize that a large portion of the eastern bloc states the west eventually helped pry off into capitalist abyss with the help of reactionaries (after having been building active networks to do so since even before WW2 ended, from gladio and propaganda stations and other intelligence operations) were many of them previously run by fascists. Like actual concentration camp death camp holocaust-by-bullets Nazis and collaborators. There were material reasons there was strict maintenance of Party discipline and organization in Eastern Europe like in the Baltics and Hungary etc.; These were political decisions gleaned from political lessons learned from the 1910s domestic revolutionary wars in these Eastern European countries and resultant white terrors in their failures, and the political realities manifested leading up to, through, and after WW2. Democratizing to the degree of ‘council communism’ would mean handing power back to the same people that the Hungarian rebellion in Hungary in 56 let out of prison en masse (arrow cross et al.) turning it into a fascist counterrevolution. The same people that Kruschev himself let out of prison all over the country while dumping as much blame as he could whether it was true or not on Stalin (and half of the things that were true or partially so Kruschev himself acted as a fore-running hatchet-man and architect).
The Great Patriotic War murdering 30 million Soviets including the vast majority of the most politically serious, motivated, and energetic working class youth who would have come up in the next generation had a larger effect than pretty much anything else, and is rarely talked about as being so for some reason. This being followed only a decade later (as Lenin reminds us in “Left-Wing” Communism — by the yardstick of world history a decade “is a trifle that cannot be considered even approximately”) by the Kruschev bloc using this circumstance, winning out in a violent power struggle (remember he shot and imprisoned his opponents and threatened the others into submission, very ironic) and giving amnesty to a HUGE amount of reactionaries including active fascist agitators and militant nationalist rebels from all over the Union, which predictably produced, and severely aggravated existing, contradictions in society when they immediately resumed all the activities they were put in prison for previously refusing to stop; all while severing the USSR from its material history and setting it afloat in idealism and revisionist complacency of “the fight is over, the bad man is gone” in this context, raising the new generations within this framework, and sustained to its demise by the pathological denialism of the nature and proper handling of the emergent second economy which found great advantage in all of this.
These and others are more of a factor than anything for why there was eventually such a complacent malaise in socialist construction, entrenchment of the gerontocracy of opportunists and cowards; and an inability amidst their own contradictions (which Kruschev worsened) to further democratize and open up as Stalin himself had been working toward with the ‘Stalin Constitution’ in the 1930s, before world circumstances became dire, and necessity called for centralized pushes for rapid industrialization, war preparations, rooting out the mass wrecking activities (which even US industrial advisors were shocked by, saying they’d leave a new machine and come back next day and its oil intake would be filled with sand, speaking of this as a commonplace not-at-all isolated incident) and needing to pre-empt and defend in general against 5th columns, which plagued every other nation when war broke out (half of France greeted the Nazis as friends and murdered their own people hand-in-hand with them, same with the Sudeten Henleins, Slovakian Tisos, Belgian De Grelles, Norwegian Quislings etc. which the Soviets couldn’t afford).
The situation wasn’t so simple as “just democratize and decentralize” because there were incredibly sharp and severe contradictions that made that untenable; which Kruschev’s dumbass policies, against which the will to resist was able to be reduced to a few people shot and imprisoned and its terror, and public opinion manipulated in vast broadcasts dumping real, invented, and his own dirt on the still-warm grave of Stalin, after a huge proportion of the most energetic youth were slaughtered in a genocidal imperialist war, worsened severely past the point of being able to handle it. If you let out all of the reactionaries, fascists, anti-Soviet liberal and zionist agitators, nationalist groups who had been armed-rebelling for a decade and a half including during WW2, and all the veterans of the fascist collaborator and fascist partisan groups out of prison who had also many been working with CIA ops facilitated by Gehlen and other US-hired Nazis; you then need to constantly deal with their subsequent activities, and you would be stupid to expand the realms of power to include them acting in these capacities openly. But also once you’ve done that, the contradiction doesn’t go away, so they instead include themselves acting covertly; and since the second economy was simultaneously facilitated-but-denied/ignored by the gerontocracy that was left, they became a match made in heaven together to spearhead the west-comprador-led teardown-and-selloff facilitated and bought-and-paid-for by neo-colonial bankers.
Your comment is a really good one, you make a ton of great points, and I really appreciate it. I never considered the loss of immense amounts of radical elements of the Bolsheviks in WW2 as something significant for the revolution, it’s surprising that I’ve never before seen that analysis, and it’s great that you point that out, making me think quite a bit.
As you make clear, the decisions made by the soviet administration, weren’t made in a vacuum. The conditions of the birth and development of the USSR make it basically a miracle that it lasted as long as it did, surviving extremely destructive events such as WW2, the collectivisation of land, or the cold war. My point isn’t to criticise the USSR itself, or to say that it was illegitimate, it’s just to place some criticism in order to learn from the past and to do better in the future. It’s a fact that political power of certain sorts was too centralised in the USSR, and its dissolution is the perfect example to me of that.
I’ll talk about an example of what I mean by a sovietization of political power. In the 90s, with the dissolution of the USSR, Cuba suffered the loss of its main trading partner. Being blockaded by the US, the island was very reliant on Russian oil and other exports, and the economy of the island took a massive, unprecedented hit, losing a huge portion of its GDP (I wanna say around 30% but don’t quote me on that) in the span of just a few years, in what’s known as the “periodo especial”. The response from the institutions was the opposite of what you’d expect in such a dire situation: the government willingly encouraged people, mainly through worker unions, to be involved in the economic planning and disaster management.
The unions were not only encouraged to promote meetings between workers and asked for policy and ideas to mitigate the effects of the crisis and to increase productivity: they were given power to choose which workers were carrying out redundant or inefficient work (or work that became unnecessary or impossible due to the crisis) and to move these workers to other parts of production or to fire them altogether for them to be relocated somewhere necessary. They were given nearby land upon request for workers to grow organic crops to rely less on purchase of food to sustain themselves, turning every leftover space in the city into an organic food garden. They were given the right to decide generally which sectors of the economy and society would suffer more the brunt of the crisis and the necessary reduction in expenditure to prevent shortages under the policy of controlled pricing. And while of course a lot of this policy was ultimately decided and detailed by authorities, they did so taking into account the democratic will of the workers union as well as the studies done by experts in the institutions. This is a stark difference, in my opinion, with the state-directed Perestroika for example. If you want to read on this issue, there’s a great book called “how the worker’s parliaments saved the Cuban revolution”, by Pedro Ross. Millions of people participated democratically and actively in the restructuring of the economy in one of the most all-encompassing examples of democracy I’ve ever seen.
Again, all of this isn’t to diss on the USSR, or to say that the reason why the decisions made by the country boil down to “soviets bad”, it’s a much more nuanced discussion and as you say there’s a huge variety of reasons why the democratization of the USSR wasn’t as intense as it should have been in my opinion. It’s just a good frame in my mind to analyse the reasons for the dissolution of the USSR, and to improve in future socialist societies learning from the mistakes of the past.
It was definitely initiated from the top down I would say. But at the end of the day, whatever mass strikes, work actions, and army mutinies occured were not enough to stop Yeltsin and the west from dissolving the SU into what it is now.
I don’t want to mean this as blaming the average Soviet citizen but the fact is; whether from apathy with the old system, or naive hope that westernising would bring prosperity, or being outgunned by Yeltsins military, they and their organisations were sadly unable to defend the Soviet republics. All communists need to take sober lessons here. If it is the first task of the workers’ party to instill a revolutionary spirit in the working class, the second and even harder one must be to convert that spirit into a mass commitment to the socialist project.
Biggest L of the USSR in my opinion is its lack of democratization over the years. After WW2, the soviet government and institutions were very much respected by the people, and the country well established in time and stability, and top spheres of institutions being too independent and not committed to a more, well, soviet (as in workers council) form of government, is a huge loss that paved the way for Glasnost, Perestroika and eventually the dissolution. The book “Socialism Betrayed” makes a really good depiction of this in my opinion.
None of this, though, means that the dissolution of the USSR was desired by its peoples for the vast majority of the people, with some possible exceptions in the Baltics and Georgia due to a history of nationalism and Russophobia being exploited during Glasnost. It’s not a color revolution as happened in, say, Poland. It was a centralised, institutional process that didn’t even involve the people of the country. It’s because of this that it’s important to me to make a point not to use the word “fall” or “collapse” of the USSR, and to make very clear that the dissolution didn’t happen because of any economic failure or due to people’s will as so many people believe, but that it was dissolved top down by a minority of individuals in the government against the overwhelming majority in an antidemocratic fashion, with no economic crisis involved other than the small one generated by Perestroika itself.
Workers councils, led by who, though? United in what structures, along what lines, with what discipline to guarantee it; and what is the context and remnant class character and superstructural drives from which these executive-power worker-councils would emerge and lead if given full power? This would almost certainly just amount to ‘trade-union-consciousness-as-countries’ in the best case — in the worst case and almost assuredly eventually with the help of imperialist powers and the maneuvering of less idealist factions an active counter-revolution and re-establishment of right wing governance ruled by white terror.
Workers councils led by who? Solidarnosc et al. should have had equal power as the central Party power structures because of ‘democracy’? We must realize that a large portion of the eastern bloc states the west eventually helped pry off into capitalist abyss with the help of reactionaries (after having been building active networks to do so since even before WW2 ended, from gladio and propaganda stations and other intelligence operations) were many of them previously run by fascists. Like actual concentration camp death camp holocaust-by-bullets Nazis and collaborators. There were material reasons there was strict maintenance of Party discipline and organization in Eastern Europe like in the Baltics and Hungary etc.; These were political decisions gleaned from political lessons learned from the 1910s domestic revolutionary wars in these Eastern European countries and resultant white terrors in their failures, and the political realities manifested leading up to, through, and after WW2. Democratizing to the degree of ‘council communism’ would mean handing power back to the same people that the Hungarian rebellion in Hungary in 56 let out of prison en masse (arrow cross et al.) turning it into a fascist counterrevolution. The same people that Kruschev himself let out of prison all over the country while dumping as much blame as he could whether it was true or not on Stalin (and half of the things that were true or partially so Kruschev himself acted as a fore-running hatchet-man and architect).
The Great Patriotic War murdering 30 million Soviets including the vast majority of the most politically serious, motivated, and energetic working class youth who would have come up in the next generation had a larger effect than pretty much anything else, and is rarely talked about as being so for some reason. This being followed only a decade later (as Lenin reminds us in “Left-Wing” Communism — by the yardstick of world history a decade “is a trifle that cannot be considered even approximately”) by the Kruschev bloc using this circumstance, winning out in a violent power struggle (remember he shot and imprisoned his opponents and threatened the others into submission, very ironic) and giving amnesty to a HUGE amount of reactionaries including active fascist agitators and militant nationalist rebels from all over the Union, which predictably produced, and severely aggravated existing, contradictions in society when they immediately resumed all the activities they were put in prison for previously refusing to stop; all while severing the USSR from its material history and setting it afloat in idealism and revisionist complacency of “the fight is over, the bad man is gone” in this context, raising the new generations within this framework, and sustained to its demise by the pathological denialism of the nature and proper handling of the emergent second economy which found great advantage in all of this.
These and others are more of a factor than anything for why there was eventually such a complacent malaise in socialist construction, entrenchment of the gerontocracy of opportunists and cowards; and an inability amidst their own contradictions (which Kruschev worsened) to further democratize and open up as Stalin himself had been working toward with the ‘Stalin Constitution’ in the 1930s, before world circumstances became dire, and necessity called for centralized pushes for rapid industrialization, war preparations, rooting out the mass wrecking activities (which even US industrial advisors were shocked by, saying they’d leave a new machine and come back next day and its oil intake would be filled with sand, speaking of this as a commonplace not-at-all isolated incident) and needing to pre-empt and defend in general against 5th columns, which plagued every other nation when war broke out (half of France greeted the Nazis as friends and murdered their own people hand-in-hand with them, same with the Sudeten Henleins, Slovakian Tisos, Belgian De Grelles, Norwegian Quislings etc. which the Soviets couldn’t afford).
The situation wasn’t so simple as “just democratize and decentralize” because there were incredibly sharp and severe contradictions that made that untenable; which Kruschev’s dumbass policies, against which the will to resist was able to be reduced to a few people shot and imprisoned and its terror, and public opinion manipulated in vast broadcasts dumping real, invented, and his own dirt on the still-warm grave of Stalin, after a huge proportion of the most energetic youth were slaughtered in a genocidal imperialist war, worsened severely past the point of being able to handle it. If you let out all of the reactionaries, fascists, anti-Soviet liberal and zionist agitators, nationalist groups who had been armed-rebelling for a decade and a half including during WW2, and all the veterans of the fascist collaborator and fascist partisan groups out of prison who had also many been working with CIA ops facilitated by Gehlen and other US-hired Nazis; you then need to constantly deal with their subsequent activities, and you would be stupid to expand the realms of power to include them acting in these capacities openly. But also once you’ve done that, the contradiction doesn’t go away, so they instead include themselves acting covertly; and since the second economy was simultaneously facilitated-but-denied/ignored by the gerontocracy that was left, they became a match made in heaven together to spearhead the west-comprador-led teardown-and-selloff facilitated and bought-and-paid-for by neo-colonial bankers.
Your comment is a really good one, you make a ton of great points, and I really appreciate it. I never considered the loss of immense amounts of radical elements of the Bolsheviks in WW2 as something significant for the revolution, it’s surprising that I’ve never before seen that analysis, and it’s great that you point that out, making me think quite a bit.
As you make clear, the decisions made by the soviet administration, weren’t made in a vacuum. The conditions of the birth and development of the USSR make it basically a miracle that it lasted as long as it did, surviving extremely destructive events such as WW2, the collectivisation of land, or the cold war. My point isn’t to criticise the USSR itself, or to say that it was illegitimate, it’s just to place some criticism in order to learn from the past and to do better in the future. It’s a fact that political power of certain sorts was too centralised in the USSR, and its dissolution is the perfect example to me of that.
I’ll talk about an example of what I mean by a sovietization of political power. In the 90s, with the dissolution of the USSR, Cuba suffered the loss of its main trading partner. Being blockaded by the US, the island was very reliant on Russian oil and other exports, and the economy of the island took a massive, unprecedented hit, losing a huge portion of its GDP (I wanna say around 30% but don’t quote me on that) in the span of just a few years, in what’s known as the “periodo especial”. The response from the institutions was the opposite of what you’d expect in such a dire situation: the government willingly encouraged people, mainly through worker unions, to be involved in the economic planning and disaster management.
The unions were not only encouraged to promote meetings between workers and asked for policy and ideas to mitigate the effects of the crisis and to increase productivity: they were given power to choose which workers were carrying out redundant or inefficient work (or work that became unnecessary or impossible due to the crisis) and to move these workers to other parts of production or to fire them altogether for them to be relocated somewhere necessary. They were given nearby land upon request for workers to grow organic crops to rely less on purchase of food to sustain themselves, turning every leftover space in the city into an organic food garden. They were given the right to decide generally which sectors of the economy and society would suffer more the brunt of the crisis and the necessary reduction in expenditure to prevent shortages under the policy of controlled pricing. And while of course a lot of this policy was ultimately decided and detailed by authorities, they did so taking into account the democratic will of the workers union as well as the studies done by experts in the institutions. This is a stark difference, in my opinion, with the state-directed Perestroika for example. If you want to read on this issue, there’s a great book called “how the worker’s parliaments saved the Cuban revolution”, by Pedro Ross. Millions of people participated democratically and actively in the restructuring of the economy in one of the most all-encompassing examples of democracy I’ve ever seen.
Again, all of this isn’t to diss on the USSR, or to say that the reason why the decisions made by the country boil down to “soviets bad”, it’s a much more nuanced discussion and as you say there’s a huge variety of reasons why the democratization of the USSR wasn’t as intense as it should have been in my opinion. It’s just a good frame in my mind to analyse the reasons for the dissolution of the USSR, and to improve in future socialist societies learning from the mistakes of the past.