Afterword: The Collapse of Stalinism¶
Core Argument¶
The bureaucratic impasse of the late 1980s generated profound working-class disillusionment, creating fertile ground for market illusions among the bureaucracy and intelligentsia. Yeltsin's Russian Federation government became the cutting edge of the pro-bourgeois wing, drafting the 500-day programme for capitalist restoration through privatisation, price liberalisation and subsidy cuts. Gorbachev's hesitation over shock therapy, fearing strike waves, proved insufficient to halt the slide. The Supreme Soviet's law on property ownership, permitting citizens to inherit property including mineral resources and shares, confirmed Trotsky's analysis in The Revolution Betrayed: the bureaucracy's privileges were non-inheritable state property, driving the caste toward private ownership. Most Russian workers remained suspicious of the market economy; over forty per cent preferred centralised management.
The August 1991 coup was a power vacuum, not a popular revolution. The rotten clique collapsed with minimal democratic resistance. Most workers distrusted Yeltsin as much as Yanayev or Gorbachev. Only fifty thousand from a city of ten million demonstrated for democracy; many felt the coup leaders could hardly do worse. Those rallying to Yeltsin were mainly qualified people, students, engineers, speculators and black marketeers who saw marketisation as a route to power. The coup failed through the plotters' indecisiveness, not popular resistance. Gorbachev was forced to resign; the Communist Party was banned without resistance. Yeltsin seized KGB headquarters, purged the security apparatus, and banned political activity in workplaces.
Capitalist restoration brought destitution, homelessness, unemployment, violent crime and increased alcoholism. Real wages fell by half; by 1996, almost 32 million people lived below minimum subsistence. Production plummeted around sixty per cent between 1990 and 1995, a collapse without parallel in modern peacetime history. Women were the main victims of unemployment; their wages fell from seventy per cent of men's to forty per cent. Life expectancy for Russian men fell to 59 years; death rates soared thirty per cent after 1989.
Embryonic soviets emerged in response. Miners picketed the White House demanding unpaid wages and Yeltsin's resignation. In Tula, a strike committee chairwoman effectively ran a military plant, exercising de facto workers' power. Salvation committees in the Kuzbass region coordinated protests and took over local government functions. However, these movements lacked organisation, leadership and a clear programme. Without a revolutionary party, the embryonic soviets proved ephemeral. The subjective factor was decisive: decades of totalitarian rule had thrown back working-class consciousness. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, despite 500,000 members, was a bureaucratic shell incapable of leading, its bureaucratism and orientation toward 'people of the past' making it weak.
The collapse of Stalinism was not the end of history. World capitalism is in deep crisis, with war, instability and terminal decay. The Russian proletariat, which invented soviets spontaneously in 1905, will rise again like the giant Antaeus, drawing renewed strength from struggle.