:USSR:
Yesterday @CoralMarks made a great reply on Andropov and how his approach to reforms and party work might have saved the USSR, had he lived long enough. I think analysing the downfall of the USSR is of great importance to us as leftists. The Soviet Union was an immense achievement but ultimately it failed and capitalism was restored. Future socialist projects need to learn from this to avoid making the same mistakes and to effectively debunk bourgeois “socialism always fails” propaganda.
On the top of my head a few points seems to be obvious:
- The people in charge were too old. The system failed to include younger generations which made it lose touch with the people and made it harder to keep developing Soviet society
- The development of the nomenklatura as a new bourgeoisie within the party made the system lose track of revolutionary goals and opened up for corruption
- The Sino-Soviet split is one of the great tragedies of the communist movement as it prevented a strong communist block from forming. I don’t know enough about it to say if and how it could have been prevented but it is certainly high on my “Things in history I wish would have turned out differently” list.
- Cultural conservatism did more harm than good to the USSR. I understand the fear that western cultural products could act like a Trojan horse for capitalist ideology but ultimately attempts to prevent western culture from affecting the USSR was experienced as silly in the population and made Soviet culture look weak and outdated in comparison. Maybe a more permissive and confident cultural policy that invited foreign inputs and expanded upon them in a socialist context could have made a difference and put the socialist world on the cultural offensive. It shouldn’t be that hard to pick up on a youth culture that rebelled against conservative bourgeois norms and see it through a socialist lens.
- The balance that was found between protecting the revolution and the individual liberties of the people left the people dissatisfied and eroded trust in the system. It is a hard question; naive liberal permissiveness would have exposed the USSR to bourgeois subversion and brought the system down even faster but the people really didn’t like the censorship and the secret police stuff. Maybe there are valuable lessons to learn from China about being permissive and even inviting of public criticism of material problems and concrete policies but cracking down on challenges to the socialist system, ie. people should be welcome to tell about how the bus system is run badly and how the guy in charge is corrupt but they shouldn’t be allowed to say that done capitalist should own and profit from it.
- The apparent wealth gap between the west and the AES countries was a highly efficient propaganda tool for the bourgeoisie. On one hand more could have been done to credibly tell people about the whole picture of how wealth and poverty coexisted in the capitalist west, for instance by facilitating cultural and personal exchanges with western proletarians. You might not believe it when the state media tells you about poverty in the west, but it is harder to dismiss when a poor American exchange student or guest worker tells you about his life story. On the other hand there was a significant gap and a greater supply of consumer goods, of treats, might have stabilised the system. The USSR was not as developed as the west and had to spend significant resources on defense, on the other hand Soviet industry was not as efficient as it could have been. The before-mentioned corruption and conservatism of an aging leadership proved disastrous to the USSR.
- A series of failed liberal reforms under Gorbachev tried to solve the problems of the socialist USSR by making it look more like the capitalist west, but instead they accelerated the downfall that killed millions and impoverished the nation. Centrism is a dead end that ultimately leads in a reactionary direction. Problems in a socialist society must be dealt with in a socialist manner and policy must always be true to the revolutionary and proletarian roots.
Most of the stuff pointed out (cultural conservatism, bourgeois “rights”) are liberal posthoc stories told by the west as cover. The soviet union failed plain and simple because the party itself did not believe it was legitimate. Economic dysfunction is not an automatic death sentence for a regime, otherwise the high inflation and chronic shortage nations like Argentina and Mexico would have their nation states fragmented and replaced every few years.
The USSR, starting with Khrushchev as ssjmarx puts it, was run by a vanguard party that shit all over its past leaders and embraced nothing but personal gain and bureaucratic ladder climbing. By the time you get to 1980s USSR, the CPSU was not a party of the people but a party over the people.
In fact, Gorbachev’s glastnost policies were the impetus for the west to seize upon nationalist movements in undermining the USSR. The state security apparatus that had kept the union together for decades suddenly couldn’t act on nationalist sentiment. And once people got used to complaining about the CPSU it was pretty much all over. Opportunists inside the party and all over worked overtime to heighten every crisis . Ultimately, you can trace the start of the collapse to Gorby flying to Crimea to renegotiate the Union treaty into something more like federalism, but by then Union hardliners had enough. They couped him and in the resulting chaos opportunists like Yeltsin were able to seize the initiative and dismantle the USSR republic by republic.