Yes, Gorbachev was a failure but other hands helped bring down the Soviet Union

The reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union are myriad and can’t be laid solely at the feet of one person. Mikhail Gorbachev is widely despised by Russians as well as by activists and partisans of the Left. There are good reasons for that. It is impossible to imagine the collapse of a superpower and the catastrophic effects of imposing capitalism via “shock therapy” that immiserated a vast country without him. 

But if we are serious about analyzing history, and the ongoing effects that history has on the present day, we must take a dialectic approach, and examine this history in all its complexities. Amid the triumphalist accolades heaped upon Gorbachev upon his death from Western capitalists and the opprobrium heaped on upon him by his many critics — continuing a pattern of three decades since the Soviet Union’s dissolution at the end of 1991 — we might take a more nuanced view.

The preceding is not to deny that Gorbachev was, ultimately, a failure who disorganized an economy and set in motion one of the greatest economic collapses ever recorded. But to pin all blame on him ignores not only other personalities but the stultifying effects of an economy badly in need of modernization and democratization, a sclerotic political system and the social forces and corruption set in motion during the reign of Leonid Brezhnev. Nor would it be fair to exclude the unrelenting pressure put on the Soviet Union and other countries calling themselves “socialist” that did much to distort and undermine those societies. 

Nonetheless, a serious examination must concentrate on internal factors, those the responsibility of Gorbachev, and those where responsibility lies elsewhere. That was the approach taken in my book It’s Not Over: Learning From the Socialist Experiment, and it is that book’s fifth chapter, The Dissolution of the Soviet Union — that forms the basis of this article. Indeed, the mounting problems of the Soviet Union were not unnoticed within its borders — from the 1960s, academic institutions published reports detailing the bottlenecks built into the system and reform plans were drawn up within the government, but mostly were ignored.

^{Mikhail Gorbachev was praised by Western leaders who were happy to see shock therapy imposed on Russia (Credit: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum)}

The edifice of the Soviet Union was something akin to a statue undermined by water freezing inside it; it appears strong on the outside until the tipping point when the ice suddenly breaks it apart from within. The “ice” here were black marketeers; networks of people who used connections to obtain supplies for official and illegal operations; and the managers of enterprises who grabbed their operations for themselves. Soviet bureaucrats eventually began to privatize the economy for their own benefit; party officials, for all their desire to find a way out of a deep crisis, lacked firm ideas and direction; and Soviet working people, discouraged by experiencing the reforms as coming at their expense and exhausted by perpetual struggle, were unable to intervene.

Five years of reform with meager positive results in essence caused Gorbachev to throw in the towel and begin to introduce elements of capitalism. Gorbachev intended neither to institute capitalism nor bring down the Soviet system, but by introducing those elements of capitalism, the dense network of ties that had bound it together unraveled, hastening the end. To say this, however, is not at all to agree with some simplistic and unrealistic ideas out there that Gorbachev was a trojan horse intent on destruction. Every so often, over a period of many years, an article circulates online purporting to quote Gorbachev that he was intent on destroying the Soviet Union from the beginning of his career and worked patiently until he was in a position to do so. But this “confession” has allegedly appeared in many different publications in several different countries. The last time I saw this peddled it was an alleged article published in a Turkish newspaper. One might ask: Why would he make a spectacular confession such as this to an obscure publication in Turkey?

People who circulate such nonsense are simply seeking a scapegoat, and either can’t be bothered to study the actual conditions of the Soviet Union or are so blinded by a rigid ideology that they have ceased thinking. Again, this in no way suggests Gorbachev doesn’t have a huge responsibility to history. One can be a firm critic of the Soviet Union and still lament what happened. 

Changes needed, but what changes?

Serious reforms were necessary; that is why the members of the Politburo, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s highest body, finally named Gorbachev general secretary. There was also strong support for his elevation among the party’s regional and provincial first secretaries, who formed the backbone of the Central Committee. When Andrei Gromyko, the foreign minister for a quarter-century and stalwart of the party’s old guard, endorsed Gorbachev’s ascension, that essentially clinched the promotion. Reforms had been attempted since 1965, when Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin first proposed reforms that went nowhere. But by 1985, even the most doctrinaire party leader knew changes were necessary. The political and economic systems were out of date. A Soviet book published 20 years earlier declared that “a system which is so harnessed from top to bottom will fetter technological and social development; and it will break down sooner or later under the pressure of the real processes of economic life.”

Gorbachev started by stressing the “strengthening of discipline,” cracked down on alcohol, readily discussed the need for improvements in consumer products and consolidated several ministries to retool industry. He also pushed out several high-ranking officials opposed to any reforms, demanded “collectivity of work” in all organizations and declared that collective work is a “reliable guarantee against the adoption of volitional, subjective decisions, manifestations of the cult of personality, and infringements of Leninist norms of party life.”

Even before he became general secretary, Gorbachev had begun meeting with intellectuals working in Soviet institutions, later recalling that his safe was “clogged” with proposals. “People were clamoring that everything needed to be changed, but from different angles; some were for scientific and technical progress, others for reforming the structure of politics, and others still for new organizational forms in industry and agriculture. In short, from all angles there were cries from the heart that affairs could no longer be allowed to go on in the old way.”

First major reform more stick than carrot

Yet when it came to making concrete changes, there was a lack of imagination. To put it bluntly, Gorbachev had no plan and little idea of what to do. So when concrete structural changes began being implemented in 1987, they mostly were on the backs of working people. Eventually, the early enthusiasm for a new course gave way to anger and disillusionment. The first major reform, the Law on State Enterprises, approved in June 1987 by the party Central Committee, was more stick than carrot. The basic concept of the enterprise law was to liberate enterprises from some of the more rigid controls of the ministries, put them on profit-and-loss accounting, reduce the amount of product required to be produced for the state plan, reduce subsidies in order to make enterprises more efficient, and to bring a measure of democracy into the workplace with the creation of “labor-collective councils” and workforce elections of enterprise directors. 

State planning remained in force, but would become less of a hard numerical total and more of a guide, although the requirement of fulfilling the (reduced) plan requirements would continue. Production sold to the state under the plan would still constitute most sales and would continue to be paid at rates specified by the state, but production beyond plan fulfillment could be sold at any price, subject to volume limitations to prevent unnecessary production beyond any reasonable social need. 

In conjunction with these reforms, measures were implemented aimed at putting pressure on wages. Basic wage rates were increased, but individual output quotas (or “norms”) were also raised, to make it much more difficult to earn bonuses. Bonuses would no longer be essentially automatic; they could only be earned through more effort — and the new wage levels made up only part of the differences between the new basic wage and the old basic wage plus bonus. Put plainly, workers would have to work harder to earn the same amount of money. The basic idea behind these sets of reforms was to introduce a mechanism that would provide a better understanding of demand while retaining central planning. In turn, more efficiency would be wrung out of the system through the use of shop-floor and enterprise-wide incentives and the introduction of some workplace democracy, thereby alleviating both some of the alienation on the part of the workforce and the incentive of management to avoid introducing technological or other improvements. 

The de facto wage cuts, and accompanying ability of factory managers to force workers into lower skill grades (thereby forcing reductions in wages), was implemented immediately, but the rest was to be phased in. “Labor-collective councils” were supposed to be formed to give workers a say in managing their workplace since they were asked to shoulder some of the profit-and-loss responsibility. These were stillborn. In most factories, either there was no council, it did nothing or the enterprise director headed it, neutralizing its potential. The trade unions, as before, did nothing to intervene, remaining silent or backing management.

The enterprise law text was ambiguous — it made references to “one-man management,” the foundation of the existing top-down command structure; did not specify the powers of labor-collective councils and the workforce; and stated that, although directors are elected, those elections must be confirmed by a ministry, a veto power supposedly needed to avoid cases of unspecified excesses. Not only did managements remain unanswerable to workforces, government ministries refused to relinquish their grips. Government bureaucrats owed their privileges and power to the ability to command, and naturally most of them did not relish losing such positions. Ministry officials continued to issue detailed orders to enterprise managements that left no room for enterprises to make their own decisions and continued to require enterprises to buy from a specific supplier, acting as a crucial brake on democratization; they also continued to impose management personnel. The traditional top-down economic structure remained largely untouched. 

Workers announce their response by striking

During these years, serious reforms to the structure of the Communist Party were made, with Gorbachev maintaining his hold on power and steadily placing his followers into high-level positions. There may have been a quickening pace of events in the political sphere during 1988 and 1989, but everyday matters such as the economy and living standards stagnated. Failing to see sufficient improvement from the promises of perestroika, working people began to take a more direct approach — by striking. 

The first mass strike was conducted by the country’s miners in 1989. More than 400,000 miners ultimately walked out across the country. The fastest advancing strikers were in Ukraine’s Donetsk province. Strikers there occupied the square in front of the regional party headquarters, and all 21 area mines sent representatives to occupation meetings. Abandoned by their union and all other institutions, the miners set up their own strike committee, and began making contact with the striking miners in other regions, who then also set up committees. The strike committees became the effective local governments, setting up patrols, acting as arbitrators for problems citizens brought to them and closing all sources of alcohol. Strikers this time refused to negotiate with the coal industry minister, and would only end the strike when Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov signed a detailed agreement and Gorbachev announced his personal approval.

Further strikes in other industries broke out. These were often strictly local affairs, however, and there was little attempt at national coordination, rendering them politically ineffective. Nor was there coordination with the miners. The Soviet trade union central umbrella was widely seen as irrelevant, but new unions that began to form by 1990 were very small and unorganized, and even the very few unions that did work well had no links with other unions. A lack of a coherent plan and a lack of grassroots pressure meant that perestroika, as the restructuring was called in Russian, was failing.

^{A Russian coal mine (credit: Institute of Economics and Management in Industry)}

All social groups seemed to lose faith in perestroika. By 1990, polling found that 85 percent believed that economic reform had achieved nothing or made the situation worse. As the miners’ strike, the failure of the labor-collective councils and mounting disillusionment demonstrated, efforts by the reformers to gain the support of working people had failed. Two important reasons for this failure were the ongoing shortages of consumer goods, which, if anything, were becoming worse, and the realization that the economic reforms were, in large part, going to come on their backs. The timid effort at workplace democratization through the labor-collective councils was intended to compensate people on the shop floors for the harsher work conditions and lower basic pay, and when the councils proved a farce the reformers were empty-handed.

The 1987 enterprise law, in addition to the profit-and-loss accounting and its other reforms, also legalized “cooperative” retail and service enterprises. These cooperatives, although not altogether new, helped exacerbate shortages and trigger inflation. Farmers’ markets, which sold produce at higher prices than charged in state markets while offering greater variety, were long a part of Soviet retail, as was street trading and peddling. But the new cooperatives quickly took advantage of the differential between what the new market would bear and the level of prices set in state shops. For example, when a shipment of meat would arrive at a state store, where it was intended to be sold at the low, state-controlled price, more than half of the shipment would be illicitly resold to a cooperative, which would then sell it at a far higher price, and leaving a shortage in the state store. 

Another report found that, although the Soviet Union enjoyed an excellent harvest in 1990, only 58 percent of produce that was supposed to be delivered to state stores actually made it; the remainder was siphoned off by black marketeers or rotted due to a distribution system that was breaking down. Consumers feared future shortages, which became self-fulfilling prophecies when wide-spread hoarding helped empty store shelves.

Why manage factories when you can own?

By now, black marketeering and corruption, which blossomed during the Brezhnev “era of stagnation,” were worse than ever. Now adding to the picture was that the government and industrial bureaucracy (known as the “nomenklatura”) had begun thinking bigger. Their privileges were based on their management of the Soviet Union’s industry and commerce, and this control rested completely on the state ownership of that property because they did not own the means of production themselves.

Some among the nomenklatura began to dream of capitalism — then they would be able to dramatically upgrade their lifestyle. Economic malaise was becoming more pervasive as the dense web of threads that held the Soviet system together were starting to be snipped through corruption, local protectionism and supply disruptions, the last of which was exacerbated because many component parts were produced in only one factory. The move to profit-and-loss accounting helped to bring about an “all against all” mentality: Instead of simply continuing to manage state property, why not grab it for yourself?

It was against these backdrops that in 1990 Gorbachev began to abandon his efforts to renew the system he inherited. On the political level, the general secretary began eliminating the party’s monopoly on power and, through creating a new freely elected legislature, built himself a power base outside the party. His power was soon used to begin to introduce elements of capitalism. To bring about these “market reforms,” the limited ability of working people to defend themselves had to be eliminated. A series of laws designed to do this began with a new enterprise law stealthily passed by the Supreme Soviet in June 1990. Gorbachev continued to insist that market reforms were to remain within the boundaries of a socialist system (and there was a widespread belief in the country that the conditions for an outright restoration of capitalism didn’t exist), but in reality from this time the debate within Gorbachev’s government and among his closest advisers was about how far and how fast the transition to a capitalist-type system should go. 

^{Red Square, Moscow}

The new law eliminated what little opportunity workers had to influence their management in addition to legalizing private ownership of enterprises. More would quickly come in the following months. Subsequent laws completely freed wages of any central control, reducing wage labor to a commodity as it is in capitalist countries; granted guarantees to investors, including compensation in the event that future legislation affects an investment; created unemployment insurance but failed to authorize any money to pay for it, in expectation of mass unemployment; and legalized the privatization of state enterprises.

Simultaneous with the passages of the above legislation, two competing economic plans were floated. One called for a phase-in of some market mechanisms over five years while retaining state control over pricing, the other called for a sweeping transition to a capitalist economy in 500 days with no working plan on how to accomplish that. Gorbachev, increasingly unable to make a decision, asked the backers of the competing plans to reach a compromise between them. But Boris Yeltsin, having maneuvered himself into the newly created presidency of the Russian Republic, undercut Gorbachev by unilaterally declaring the 500-day plan adopted.

The Russian Republic constituted about 80 percent of the area of the Soviet Union and was by far the dominant republic among the Soviet Union’s 15 republics. The other, much smaller 14 republics had their own party apparatus, albeit completely subordinate to Moscow, and a Russian republic party would have been almost redundant. But as nationalism rapidly gripped peoples across the country, a Russian party body was created. Yeltsin gained control of it, using it to accelerate and deepen a path toward capitalism, undermine Gorbachev, dismantle the Soviet Union and ultimately impose brutal shock therapy on Russians after the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

In essence, Yeltsin set up a dual government in competition with the Soviet government headed by Gorbachev. But unlike 1917, when a brief period of dual government would end with the taking of power by the Bolsheviks, this time the capitalist restorationists led by Yeltsin would win.

The period of a dual government must always be brief

As 1990 drew to a close, many reformers became convinced that Gorbachev had gotten cold feet, and would call a halt to reform or even turn back. His appointment of hard-liners as prime minister (Valentin Pavlov), interior minister (Boris Pugo) and vice president (Gennadii Yanayev) fueled this fear; enough so that Gorbachev’s long-time ally and foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, resigned in December with a warning that “dictatorship is coming.” Ironically, hard-liners — those who had been opposed to any reforms and wanted a return to the Brezhnev era — were needed so that capitalism could be imposed on a country that didn’t want it.

Gorbachev, until the end, maintained that he was committed to a long-term strengthening of socialism through the introduction of market mechanisms, although the concrete results of the decisions that he and the Supreme Soviet took from June 1990 formed a reality of a phased transition to capitalism. Yeltsin, in contrast to his populist image and public proclamations in favor of democracy, stood firmly for a much more rapid transition to capitalism — when the time came, the change would be so sudden and so cruel it would become known as “shock therapy.” Yeltsin was already assembling a team of young technocrats itching to upend the entire economy, and there would be absolutely no popular consultation nor any consideration of the social cost. Yeltsin was also a skilled political tactician; he turned back an attempt by the Russian parliament to remove him as parliament chair by calling for demonstrations in his support and gathering enough support so that a referendum to create a new post of Russian president be put to voters. Voters approved, and in June 1991 Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian republic. The dual government was more firmly in place. 

^{The military attack on the Russian parliament in 1993, which killed 500, was praised as “democracy” by the U.S. government and World Bank officials.}

Separate from all the political maneuvering, no true popular mass movement developed. If the creation of a better society, with popular control over all aspects of life, including the workplace, was in a position to happen, it was now, before widespread privatization. The workers of Czechoslovakia, during the Prague Spring, had begun working out a national system of workers’ control and self-management; they could attempt to create an economic democracy because the economy was in the hands of the state, and therefore could be placed in collective hands under popular control. But once the means of production become private property, the task of wresting control becomes vastly more difficult. The owners of that privatized production dominate a capitalist economy, enabling the accumulation of wealth and wielding that wealth to decisively influence government policy; the state becomes an agent of the dominant bourgeois class and the force available to the state is used to reinforce that dominance.

Although it probably is impossible to overstate the exhaustion of Soviet society as a factor in the failure to develop national grassroots organizations, perhaps the people of the Soviet Union didn’t believe that they had nothing left to lose as their ancestors had in 1917. Back then, Russians lived in miserable material conditions and under the constant threat of government violence. By no means were material conditions satisfactory during perestroika, but they were not comparable to the wretchedness endured under tsarist absolutism nor did the urgency of having to remove a violent dictatorship exist. A social safety net, tattered and weakened, still existed, and most Russians believed that, despite whatever dramatic economic and political changes still lay ahead, they would be able to retain the social safety net they were used to under Communist Party rule. 

Pushing back against economic and political changes, hard-liners thought they would be able to turn the clock back and reinstitute some variation of the orthodox Soviet system. They, too, did not understand the social forces that were gathering. The Soviet Union could not stand still — if it could not find a path forward to a pluralistic, democratic socialist society that would be defended from across the country, then capitalism was poised to burst in as if a dam holding back a sea burst. 

The Soviet Union could not find such a path — working people were unable to create a society-wide movement, perestroika was unable to solve the massive economic problems that had only become worse, and introducing capitalistic reforms had severed the supply and distribution links among enterprises without putting anything in their place. The Soviet command system did not function well and had been long overdue for radical changes to convert it into a more modern system — but it did function. What had begun to replace it, elements of capitalism, disorganized the country’s economy into disaster.

Yeltsin grabs power and imposes shock therapy

The August 1991 putsch brought an end to communist rule. Although the coup was badly executed and failed within three days, with Gorbachev reinstalled as Soviet president, the failure of the party to condemn the coup and Yeltsin’s opportunistic speeches loudly condemning the coup, despite his antipathy toward Gorbachev, meant that Yeltsin emerged as the winner. The party was swiftly banned, its publications suspended, and the brief period of the dual government effectively ended. Yeltsin quickly assembled a team of young technocrats itching to dismantle all institutions of planning and began doing so despite having no legal authority to alter Soviet agencies. That no longer mattered; Gorbachev was now irrelevant. He resigned at the end of the year, having no country to lead.

The three leaders of the Slavic republics — Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus  — met in a forest to sign an accord declaring that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. One week after Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation, the shock therapy would begin on January 2, 1992, with complete liberation of prices (except for energy), the concomitant ending of all subsidies of consumer products and for industry, and allowing the ruble to float against international currencies instead of having a fixed exchange rate. The strategy was to radically reduce demand, a devastating hardship considering that most products were in short supply already. The freeing of prices meant that the cost of consumer items, including food, would skyrocket, and the ruble’s value would collapse because the fixed value given it by the Soviet government was judged as artificially high by international currency traders. This combination would mean instant hyper-inflation.

^{Belavezhskaya forest, Belarus (photo by Szeder László)}

Yeltsin was already ruling by decree at the end of 1991, and his team of reformers used the president’s authority to force through their plans. Inflation for 1992 was 2,600 percent and for 1993 was nearly 1,000 percent — that alone wiped out all savings held in banks. The excess cash that had accumulated in banks, instead of being put back into circulation by stimulating demand or used toward productive investment, was simply made worthless. A large surplus of personal savings parked in banks had built up during the previous three years because there had not been enough production for consumers to buy. Yeltsin’s economic aide, Yegor Gaidar, considered liquidation of the money in savings accounts part of the effort to reduce Russia’s “monetary hangover.” In other words, Russians possessed too much money — another “technical” issue because too large a supply of money causes inflation, Chicago School economists believe, a problem cured here through hyper-inflation.

In the first days of January, what little food was available in state stores completely disappeared, as state-store managers diverted their supplies to private operators for a cut of their profits. State enterprises were also crippled by new high taxes levied only against them. Reduced to penury, Russians took to the streets to begin peddling their personal possessions to survive. At the same time, a handful of speculators, mostly arising out of black-market networks, made fortunes through smuggling consumer items and exporting oil, the latter particularly lucrative because the oil was bought at extremely low subsidized Soviet prices and sold abroad at international market prices. Organized crime networks blossomed, demanding “protection” money from all merchants and street peddlers.

Yeltsin would, in 1993, maintain power by launching a military assault on parliament that killed about 500 people and wounded another 1,000. Yeltsin ordered the parliament disbanded and, for good measure, also disbanded the Moscow city council. He was loudly applauded by the U.S. government and financial institutions for preserving democracy for that. Yeltsin would go on to give away Russia’s natural resources to oligarchs who had him re-elected in 1996 despite an approval rating of 3 percent.

Further economic disasters would come. By the end of 1998, on the heels of another crash that again wiped out savings, Russia’s economy had contracted 45 percent from 1990, when capitalism began to be introduced. Investment in industry declined by almost 80 percent in the same period and the murder rate skyrocketed to become one of the world’s highest. Two million children were orphaned with more than half of them homeless. The World Bank estimated that 74 million Russians lived in poverty; two million had been in poverty in 1989. In the Ural Mountains, competing organized-crime groups fought armed battles for control of factory complexes, backed by different police forces, with the winners then proceeding to strip the assets.

The stagnation of Gorbachev gave way to collapse under Yeltsin. Capitalism de-developed Russia. The weakness of Russian institutions, both cause and effect of the oligarchs, had the perverse effect of enabling a vigorous proponent of nationalism, Vladimir Putin, to arise. How much of Russian history can we assign to Mikhail Gorbachev? A lot. But not all. History is always far more complicated than the career of one human being. What if the Soviet peoples had rallied to their cause and built a system of economic democracy? History would be far different. Gorbachev must be assigned much responsibility for the inability of Soviet peoples to organize, but the long history of Soviet-style communism that atomized and alienated people while shutting them out of political participation can’t be overlooked, nor can the Soviet bureaucracy’s willingness to adopt capitalism for personal enrichment be over-estimated.

There was a poverty of imagination: In a mirror of the West, Soviet officials could not see beyond an impoverished and unimaginative choice of either Soviet-style centralism or Chicago School runaway capitalism. No one leader could, or can, be responsible for all that. 

We have no cheering interests when two oligarchic right-wing governments fight

It is bewildering to see the Russia/Ukraine war be reduced to a cheering contest, as if a football game were being watched. For those along much of the political spectrum, this cheering for “our side” is not a surprise given the well-oiled propaganda apparatus that constitutes most of the corporate media. But many on the Left have substituted cheerleading for analysis, on both sides.

On one side, we have a capitalist country run on behalf of selected oligarchs in which a reactionary church aligns itself with a powerful authoritarian ruler who oversees an intensely patriarchal social policy featuring deep sexism and violent homophobia (Russia). On the other side, we have a capitalist country controlled by shifting alignments of oligarchs in which a virulent nationalism long intertwined with fascist ideologies are backed by far right militias given free rein (Ukraine).

Why should we be rooting for either of these? To say this is not to deny the brutality of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or to condone it, nor to deny the reality of U.S. imperialism and the aggressive, destabilizing NATO expansion that contributed to the tensions that detonated into war. But it is ordinary Ukrainian people who are paying the biggest price of this war — if we are anti-war, then perhaps our efforts might be directed toward bringing the war to a negotiated end. Both sides still believe they can win militarily, but as the war increasingly develops stagnant front lines, it seems that negotiation may be the only way to bring the fighting to an end. From a humanitarian standpoint, ending hostilities not only will save Ukrainian and Russian lives, it will also save lives elsewhere, given the blockades on Ukraine’s Black Sea ports that have prevented the export of grain.

^{Dawn in the Prypiat-Stohid landscape park, Northwestern Ukraine. (photo by EnergyButterfly)}

The July 22 agreement among Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and the United Nations to allow grain shipments to resume was a hopeful sign, although the bombing of Odessa’s port a day later demonstrates there are many difficulties to come and that humanitarian concerns are not at the forefront of military minds.

A serious look at the two combatant countries might provide us ample reason to not engage in cheerleading. Is Russia really classifiable as a progressive bulwark because of its opposition to U.S. domination of the world as some would have us believe? Is Ukraine really a democratic beacon in which fascist groups are so minuscule as to be completely irrelevant as some others would have us believe? Let’s take a look.

Putin represents a continuation of Yeltsin

To understand President Putin’s rise and continuing grip on power, it is necessary to summarize Russia’s post-communist history. Boris Yeltsin was able to out-maneuver Mikhail Gorbachev in the last years of the Soviet Union, and upon the breakup, Yeltsin was already Russia’s leader. Yeltsin immediately imposed a program of “shock therapy” — the sudden simultaneous lifting of all price and currency controls and withdrawal of state subsidies in conjunction with rapid mass privatization of public assets and properties. The immediate purpose of such a program is to place everything into private hands so that as much profit as possible can be extracted, in conjunction with the concomitant broader goals of blocking the creation of more socially harmonious economic models. This would be a very specific ideological experiment — a “pure” capitalism. “Pure” because this would be capitalism without constraints.

There was nothing democratic about this. The plans for shock therapy were not placed before the public nor the Russian parliament; they were presented only to the International Monetary Fund. A large majority of Russians opposed full privatization, instead backing the transformations of enterprises into cooperatives and state guarantees of full employment. The shock therapy program of complete liberation of prices (except for energy), the concomitant ending of all subsidies of consumer products and for industry, and allowing the ruble to float against international currencies instead of having a fixed exchange rate was a disaster. The freeing of prices meant that the cost of consumer items, including food, would skyrocket, and the ruble’s value would collapse because the fixed value given it by the Soviet government was judged as artificially high by international currency traders. This combination would mean instant hyper-inflation. At the same time, oligarchs quickly arose, mostly from the black-market networks that flourished during the corruption of the Brezhnev era, taking control of Russia’s productive enterprises. Western governments, while doing everything they could to have shock therapy imposed, slated Russia to be reduced to a natural resources exporter as Russian industrial output drastically decreased.

The Russian economy collapsed so steeply that Yeltsin could only “win” re-election in 1996 through massive cheating, and handing the biggest prizes, giant natural resources enterprises that had not yet been privatized, to the seven biggest oligarchs for almost nothing in exchange for their financial and media support. The result of the first years of capitalism was that the Russian economy contracted by an astonishing 45 percent by 1998 as poverty and crime rates skyrocketed. Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin as his last prime minister, then appointed him his successor as president in exchange for a blanket pardon for him and his family. Rising prices of oil and gas helped the Russian economy strengthen during Putin’s first set of terms as president. Nonetheless, he cut taxes for the rich while reducing benefits for pensioners. Corruption became so rampant that, in Putin’s first years as president, the amount of money spent on bribes exceeded the amount of revenue paid to the Russian government.

^{Red Square, Moscow}

It is a commonplace cliché to say that he is a product of the KGB who oversees a personal dictatorship that represents a sharp break from Yeltsin’s reign. That is not so. An excellent analysis of the Putin régime is found in Tony Wood’s book Russia Without Putin. The author demonstrates well that the Putin era is in large part a continuation of the Yeltsin era, that corruption is endemic among Russian elites and that Putin is at the apex of a system that predates him. The kleptocratic, autocratic variety of Russian capitalism was well established before Putin’s ascent to power. Putin was shaped in the massive corruption of the post-communist 1990s and the Yeltsin régime. He was brought into the St. Petersburg city government in 1990 and became a functionary in the Yeltsin national government in the mid-1990s. Loyalty to superiors and to Yeltsin enabled his swift rise. There was a gradual drift of Putin’s government from seeking cooperation with the West to dogged opposition, a change cemented by the 2014 overthrow of the Ukrainian government and the U.S. hand-picking the new prime minister for Kyiv. Unrelenting hostility from the U.S. despite Russian overtures, and NATO expansion as the U.S. pressed its strength over Russian weaknesses, played a significant role in this evolution.

Mr. Wood offers this summation of Putin’s rule:

“Putin’s first administration, from 2000 to 2004, was perhaps the most energetically neoliberal, introducing a series of measures designed to extend the reach of private capital: in 2001, a flat income tax set at 13 per cent; in 2002, a labour code scaling back workers’ rights; tax cuts for businesses in 2002 and 2003. These moves were widely applauded in the West at the time: the right-wing Heritage Foundation praised ‘Russia’s flat tax miracle’, while Thomas Friedman gushed about Russia’s embrace of ‘this capitalist thing’, urging readers of the New York Times to ‘keep rootin’ for Putin’. His second presidency, too, was marked by moves to increase the private sector’s role in education, health and housing, and by the conversion of several in-kind social benefits to cash payments — a ‘monetization’ that prompted popular protests in the winter of 2004-05, but which was carried through in modified form all the same.”

Reactionary social policies grounded in misogyny and homophobia

Not very progressive, is it? Nor is the Putin régime in social matters. Here’s an excerpt from a Human Rights Campaign press release issued after an anti-LGBT law was passed:

“Last year, the law banning ‘propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations’ was passed by Russia’s Federal Assembly and signed into law by President Vladimir Putin. Under the guise of protecting children from ‘homosexual propaganda,’ the law imposes fines or jail time on citizens who disseminate information that may cause a ‘distorted understanding’ that LGBT and heterosexual relationships are ‘socially equivalent.’ The fines are significantly higher if such information is distributed through the media or Internet.”

An article in the peer-reviewed academic journal Slavic Review, authored by sociologist Richard C. M. Mole, provides further information on Putin’s anti-LGBT law:

“The politicization of homophobia in post-Soviet Russia came to a head in the 2013 ‘gay propaganda law,’ under the terms of which individuals and organizations can be fined for disseminating information about ‘non-traditional sexual orientations’ among minors, promoting the ‘social equivalence of traditional and non-traditional relationships’ or ‘the depiction of homosexual people as role models, including mention of any famous homosexuals.’ ”

Sounds just like what right-wing Christian fundamentalists promote in the United States, doesn’t it? If we, correctly, energetically oppose such hate in the West, shouldn’t we also energetically oppose it elsewhere? Directly related to these developments, Russian Orthodox is again the official state religion — in an echo of tsarist rule, the ruler and the church are reinforcing one another. The Russian Orthodox Church is so extreme in its hatred that its top-ranking official equated same-sex marriage to “Nazism” and also “a form of ‘Soviet totalitarianism’ that threaten[s] humanity.” He has called Vladimir Putin’s rule “a miracle” while Putin grants the church “generous economic support from state-allied energy giants.” The church is deeply misogynistic, with the church opposing laws against domestic violence because such concepts are “Western imports” and church officials claiming women are less intelligent than men.

Putin is also in lockstep with the church when it comes to women. He signed into law a measure that decriminalizes domestic violence — in a country in which an estimated 14,000 women per year die from injuries inflicted by husbands or partners. Russia also has one of the world’s widest pay gaps between men and women, and numerous jobs are closed to women.

The far right ideologist who gives Putin his worldview

Although Russia is increasingly aligning with China, that alliance is perhaps more grounded in pragmatism than in any shared economy-building project. China has given rhetorical support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but appears to have given no material aid. In any event, Moscow will be the junior partner in any formal alignment with Beijing. Who are Putin’s ideological allies around the world? Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, France’s Marine Le Pen and her National Rally, Italy’s Matteo Salvini and his far right League, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and his reactionary Fidesz party, and Nigel Farage, former leader of Britain’s absurdly named United Kingdom Independence Party. Might there be a pattern here?

Taking all this into account, plus Putin’s wildly inaccurate claims that Ukraine is an artificial construct, might leave a reasonable observer in less than shock that the person believed to be Putin’s biggest ideological influence is Aleksandr Dugin. Who is this person who is frequently described as “Putin’s brain”? “Alexander Dugin is quite possibly, after Steve Bannon, the most influential fascist in the world today,” writes Dan Glazebrook, a journalist and activist who writes frequently on fascism. “His TV station reaches over 20 million people, and the dozens of think tanks, journals and websites run by him and his employees ultimately have an even further reach.”

^{A pro-Russian demonstration, May 9, 2022, in Vienna. (photo by Robot8A)}

Mr. Glazebrook wrote a most interesting article on Dugin in the now lamentably discontinued CounterPunch print magazine (Volume 25, No. 6). Dugin’s strategy is using Left-sounding phrases as a way of coopting the Left, a classic strategy of the far right. (This has echoes of so-called “9/11 truthers” on the far right who are trying to use the issue as a way of worming their way into the Left; a strategy that, sadly, all too many fail to observe.) It is worthwhile to quote extensively from Mr. Glazebrook’s article so we get a full sense of the Dugin strategy. He writes of Dugin:

“His strategy is that of the ‘red-brown alliance’ — an attempt to unite the far left and far-right under the hegemonic leadership of the latter. On the face of it, much of his programme can at first appear superficially attractive to leftists — opposition to US supremacy; support for a ‘multipolar’ world; and even an apparent respect for non-western and pre-colonial societies and traditions. In fact, such positions — necessary as they may be for a genuine leftist programme — are neither bad nor good in and of themselves; rather, they are means, tools for the creation of a new world. And the world Dugin wishes to create is one of the racially-purified ethno-states, dominated by a Euro-Russian white power aristocracy (the ‘Moscow-Berlin axis’) in which Asia is subordinated to Russia by means of a dismembered China. This is not an anti-imperialist programme. It is a programme for an inter-imperialist challenge for the control of Europe and Asia: for a reconstituted Third Reich.”

And what does Dugin propagate? “His first journal, Elementy, founded in 1993, praised the Nazis and the Conservative Revolutionaries which preceded them, and published the first Russian translations of esoteric interwar fascist Julius Evola.” Dugin’s work, Mr. Glazebrook writes, is frequently re-published on a U.S. white supremacist website. That is no aberration, as Dugin “has close links to the American far right — he has links to former KKK leader David Duke; one of his disciples, Nina Kouprianova, is married to leading US fascist Richard Spencer; whilst him and Alex Jones feature on each other’s TV shows.” But, sadly, Dugin was once invited by a Syriza government minister in Greece to give a lecture.

“Dugin’s outlook essentially boils down to a combination of “ethnopluralism” and what he disingenuously terms Neo-Eurasianism,” Mr. Glazebrook writes. “Both ideas lend themselves well to the building of a ‘red-brown’ fascist-led alliance, as both have elements which are superficially appealing to the left whilst in fact providing theoretical cover for genocide and imperial war.” While superficially saying that different land masses belong to the people who originate there, the corollary is that non-Europeans should be removed from Europe. This is white supremacist and anti-Semitic, demonstrated when Dugin condemns what he calls “subversive, destructive Jews without a nationality.” The Dugin project “is essentially the reconstitution of the territories of the Third Reich (including the parts of Russia it never conquered) under joint German-Russian tutelage. … The real inspiration Dugin appears to have gained from classic Eurasianism was its strategy of the infiltration and colonization of the left rather than direct confirmation with it.”

Mr. Glazebrook’s article concludes that “Duginism is a classic fascist blend of ‘anti-elite’ rhetoric, demands for ethnic purification, and an imperial foreign policy agenda, all dressed up in politically-correct appeals to cultural distinctiveness and anti-western tubthumping. Its particular danger comes from the deep inroads it has made into anti-imperialist and leftist circles.”

The reactionary source for claiming Ukraine doesn’t exist

The article just summarized does not mention Putin. But plenty of writers have made the connection between the Russian leader and Dugin. Writing in the March/April 2015 issue of World Affairs, Andrey Tolstoy and Edmund McCaffray write, “Dugin is the intellectual who has Vladimir Putin’s back in the emerging ideological conflict between Russia and the West. At home, Putin uses him to create a nationalist, anti-liberal voting bloc.” And not only the Russian leader: “Dugin has also been actively involved in the politics of Russia’s elite, serving as an adviser to State Duma chairman and key Putin ally Sergei Naryshkin. His disciple Ivan Demidove serves on the Ideology Directorate of Putin’s United Russia party, while Mikhail Leontiev, allegedly Putin’s favorite journalist, is a founding member of Dugin’s own Eurasia Party.” Dugin is a former sociology professor at Moscow State University, founded the Center for Conservative Studies and lectures at police academies, military schools and other law enforcement institutions.

Dugin, in 2016, praised the election of Trump as U.S. president. Olivia Goldhill, writing in Quartz, said “Dugin’s ideas are reminiscent of the alt-right movement in the US, and indeed there are ties between the two. … The Russian philosopher has published articles on Spencer’s website, Alternative Right, reports Business Insider, and recorded a speech titled ‘To my American Friend in Our Common Struggle,’ for a nationalist conference in 2015. … Dugin has also identified an ally in Donald Trump, viewing him as a triumphant opponent to the liberal global elite. After Trump was elected, Dugin told the Wall Street Journal he was elated at the result. ‘For us it is joy, it is happiness,’ he said. ‘You must understand that we consider Trump the American Putin.’ ”

Other friends of Dugin’s include the Greek fascist party Golden Dawn. The party has a picture of Dugin standing with a Golden Dawn member who was also a member of an anti-Semitic group that “praised the gas chambers of Auschwitz.”

^{Percentage of population that identified Ukrainian as their native language in the 2001 census. (Author: Alex Tora)}

Dugin’s ideology is also sometimes characterized as “Traditionalist.” But regardless of what term might be used for his far right ideology, there seems little doubt that he is a strong influence on Putin. Interviewed in Jacobin, Benjamin Teitelbaum, an International Affairs professor who has written works on the far right, said:

“[I]t seemed quite obvious that Putin was listening to Dugin speak, because when Putin went out afterward he was recycling and learning from Dugin, almost letting him teach him how to characterize the war and Russia’s role in the world. But throughout all of this, he has basically had no significant official role in the Russian government. That’s what makes him so hard to characterize. … If Russia is being characterized or ever characterized itself as a beacon of the immaterial and the spiritual in the world (which you do hear from Putin occasionally — we heard a version of it at the beginning of his speech on Ukraine right before the invasion — that’s Dugin territory. It’s in the most deeply messianic and eschatological framings of this war that you can see Dugin’s influence.”

Dugin’s use of the term “Novorossiya” (New Russia) for territories of Eastern Ukraine, has been taken up by Putin. Three days before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin asserted that Ukraine is a fiction. He said, “Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, more precisely, Bolshevik, communist Russia. This process began immediately after the revolution of 1917. … As a result of Bolshevik policy, Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine.’ He is its author and architect.” Earlier, in December 2019, Putin said, “When the Soviet Union was created, primordially Russian territories that never had anything to do with Ukraine were turned over to Ukraine,” referencing Ukraine’s southeast, including the entire Black Sea region. But, according to a London School of Economics blog post linking to the 1926 Soviet census, ethnic Ukrainians “far outnumbered ethnic Russians” in eastern Ukraine, including today’s contested areas, at that time. Internal Soviet republic borders tended to be drawn very carefully as to the local populations; the highly complicated borders of the former Soviet Central Asian republics remain a good demonstration.

Putin’s assertions, resting on anti-communism no less, have no basis in reality. Present-day Ukraine is where Slavic peoples settled in the fifth century CE; from there Slavic tribes expanded their territories, including tribes that would eventually become the Russian nationality. A state centered on Kyiv was founded in the late ninth century, and the name “Ukraine” has been used for centuries. It is true that for six centuries there was no independent Ukraine — it was overrun by several empires and often divided — but Poland was similarly wiped from the map for more than two centuries and Slovakia spent a thousand years under the Hungarian yoke. Does anybody deny the existence of the Polish and Slovak peoples? Putin’s statement is ahistorical nonsense.

Ukrainian attacks on its Russian minority

Now let us turn to Ukraine. The country experienced a collapse and oligarch domination similar to Russia. Ultimately, the Ukrainian economy shrank by about 60 percent in the first five years of independence, and didn’t resume growth until 2000, one of the worst performances of any former Soviet republic under capitalism. As late as 2013, Ukraine’s economy was 20 percent smaller than it was in 1990. In 2014, with the economy still floundering, the International Monetary Fund proposed more shock therapy for Ukraine. The IMF program required Ukraine to impose drastic austerity, in the usual fashion. In accepting the IMF deal, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said the austerity package would result in inflation as high as 14 percent that year and a further economic contraction of 3 percent.

Earlier that year, U.S. diplomat Victoria Nuland imposed Yatsenyuk as prime minister, famously caught on tape saying “Yats is the guy” and offering a vulgar dismissal of any potential European Union concerns. Yatsenyuk had a reputation as “rabidly anti-Russian,” which surely featured prominently in the U.S. decision. That of course was hardly the only occasion of U.S. interference.

^{A Ukrainian demonstration in Kyiv on Oct 6, 2019, under the slogan “No to capitulation.” (photo by ReAl)}

Ukraine, despite the previous close relationship between Russians and Ukrainians, became a bitterly divided country in the years after independence. Fighting in the Donbas provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk has gone on since 2014. The Minsk Accords were to have been the solution. Under these accords, the Donbas provinces were to have been given measures of autonomy with full Russian language rights. The Ukrainian government, spurred by nationalist agitation, had put strong prohibitions on the public use of the Russian language, making Ukrainian the only official language. The Minsk Accords would have also kept Ukraine neutral. Given the deep divides of the country, having trading links to both the EU and to Russia, and allowing Russian as an official language given the millions who speak it, would be in the country’s interest.

Unfortunately, nationalists, and in particular the far right, had different ideas. Contrary to those proffering one-sided pro-Ukrainian viewpoints, the far right is a significant factor in Ukrainian politics, regardless of the tiny size of their official parliamentary presence.

The Ukrainian refusal to implement the Minsk Accords

As we did above with Dan Glazebrook’s work, an article on Ukraine, “Towards the Abyss” in the January-April 2022 issue of New Left Review, is worth an extended study. The article is an interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko, a Ukrainian sociologist now based in Berlin. Extreme nationalists and the far right took advantage of the 2014 “Euromaidan” coup that overthrew the administration of Viktor Yanukovych, but not only them. According to Dr. Ishchenko, the 2014 Euromaidan, like previous “color” revolutions in former Soviet republics, were captured by “agents” who participated in the uprising but “were very far from representing” ordinary Ukrainians. The four major agents that grew stronger after the Euromaidan were the oligarchic opposition parties, structured around a “big man” and patron-client relations; NGOs funded by the West; the far right, organizing into militias and espousing extreme nationalism while taking advantage of a weakening state; and “Washington–Brussels.”

“The competing oligarchs exploited nationalism in order to cover the absence of ‘revolutionary’ transformations after the Euromaidan, while those in nationalist-neoliberal civil society were pushing for their unpopular agendas thanks to increased leverage against the weakened state,” Dr. Ishchenko said. Those who gained the upper hand were opposed to the Minsk Accords. “The Minsk agreements specified a ceasefire, Ukrainian recognition of local elections in the separatist-controlled areas, the transfer of control over the border to the Ukrainian government, and a special autonomy status for Donbas within Ukraine, including the possibility of institutionalizing the separatist armed forces. … The general logic of the Minsk Accords demanded recognition of significantly more political diversity in Ukraine, far beyond the bounds of what was acceptable after the Euromaidan.”

Multiple political currents that had been mainstream before Euromaidan became stigmatized as “pro-Russia,” leading to online and physical harassment. Left organizing had to be done clandestinely due to persistent unchecked threats from the far right. Although the far right comprised only a tiny portion of the post-Euromaidan governments, their ultra-nationalist agenda became government policy. Petro Poroshenko, elected after Yanukovych fled Kyiv, became widely unpopular. As a result, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected in a landslide (in part on his promise to implement Minsk), but had no pool of people behind him to fill out his government.

^{NATO headquarters (photo by Swadim)}

Poroshenko began opposing the Minsk Accords despite his campaign promises to implement them. According to Dr. Ishchenko:

“Although in the end it appeared to be Putin who put an end to the Minsk Accords by recognizing the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in February 2022, there had been multiple statements from Ukrainian top officials, prominent politicians and those in professional ‘civil society’ saying that implementing Minsk would be a disaster for Ukraine, that Ukrainian society would never accept the ‘capitulation’, it would mean civil war. Another important factor was the far right, which explicitly threatened the government with violence should it try to implement the Accords. In 2015, when parliament voted on the special status for Donetsk and Luhansk, as required by Minsk, a Svoboda Party activist threw a grenade into a police line, killing four officers and injuring, I think, about a hundred. They were showing they were ready to use violence.”

After his election, Zelensky proved to be too weak to control the far right militias, which had continued fighting in the Donbas provinces.

“At the same time, Azov and other far-right groups were disobeying Zelensky’s orders, sabotaging the disengagement of Ukrainian and separatist forces in Donbas. Zelensky had to go to a village in Donbas and parlay with them directly, even though he is the Commander in Chief. The ‘moderate’ anti-capitulation people could use the protests of the hard right to say that implementation of the Minsk Accords would mean a civil war because Ukrainians wouldn’t accept this ‘capitulation’, and so there would be some ‘natural’ violence.”

From 2014 until the Russian invasion in February 2022, an estimated 14,000 people were killed in Donbas fighting and dislocations are believed to be numbered in the millions.

The weakness of the Ukrainian state and the strength of fascist fighting groups, doesn’t absolve Russia of responsibility, Dr. Ishchenko concludes:

There has been an “incapacity of the post-Soviet and specifically Russian ruling class to lead, not simply to rule over, subaltern classes and nations. Putin, like other post-Soviet Caesarist leaders, has ruled through a combination of repression, balance and passive consent legitimated by a narrative of restoring stability after the post-Soviet collapse in the 1990s. But he has not offered any attractive developmental project. Russia’s invasion should be analyzed precisely in this context: lacking sufficient soft power of attraction, the Russian ruling clique has ultimately decided to rely on the hard power of violence, starting from coercive diplomacy in the beginning of 2021, then abandoning diplomacy for military coercion in 2022.”

The adoption by Ukrainian governments of fascist demands

It would be grossly unfair to characterize Ukraine as a country of fascists. Nonetheless, the extent to which fascists have gained control within the country is likely understated by Dr. Ishchenko despite his well-informed commentary. They are definitely understated by those who blindly defend all things Ukrainian. A February 2019 article in The Nation provides a dire picture of fascists running nearly unchecked. Written by Lev Golinkin, the article, “Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine,” pulls no punches. Mr. Golinkin, widely published on Russian and Ukrainian topics, flatly states, “There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.”

The fascist Azov Battalion, which has been folded into the Ukrainian army, is the best known of these formations but is not the only one, Mr. Golinkin wrote.

“The Azov Battalion was initially formed out of the neo-Nazi gang Patriot of Ukraine. Andriy Biletsky, the gang’s leader who became Azov’s commander, once wrote that Ukraine’s mission is to ‘lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade … against the Semite-led Untermenschen.’ Biletsky is now a deputy in Ukraine’s parliament. In the fall of 2014, Azov—which is accused of human-rights abuses, including torture, by Human Rights Watch and the United Nations—was incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard. … In January 2018, Azov rolled out its National Druzhina street patrol unit whose members swore personal fealty to Biletsky and pledged to ‘restore Ukrainian order’ to the streets. The Druzhina quickly distinguished itself by carrying out pogroms against the Roma and LGBT organizations and storming a municipal council.”

Militia leaders have also been given high-ranking positions in the security apparatus. “The deputy minister of the Interior—which controls the National Police—is Vadim Troyan, a veteran of Azov and Patriot of Ukraine,” Mr. Golinkin wrote. Far right influence has extended beyond personnel, and to the rewriting of history. “In 2015, the Ukrainian parliament passed legislation making two WWII paramilitaries—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—heroes of Ukraine, and made it a criminal offense to deny their heroism. The OUN had collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust, while the UPA slaughtered thousands of Jews and 70,000-100,000 Poles on their own volition.”

^{Cherry blossoms in Washington (photo by Sarah H. from USA)}

Is the above report alarmist? Somehow exaggerated? Here are two U.S.-centric sources that also paint a disturbing picture. A group of four human rights organizations — Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Front Line Defenders and Freedom House — issued a joint statement, “Ukraine: Investigate, Punish Hate Crimes,” that condemns unchecked hate crimes in Ukraine. The statement says:

“Since the beginning of 2018, members of radical groups such as C14, Right Sector, Traditsii i Poryadok (Traditions and Order), Karpatska Sich and others have carried out at least two dozen violent attacks, threats, or instances of intimidation in Kyiv, Vinnitsa, Uzhgorod, Lviv, Chernivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk, and other Ukrainian cities. Law enforcement authorities have rarely opened investigations. In the cases in which they did, there is no indication that authorities took effective investigative measures to identify the attackers, even in cases in which the assailants publicly claimed responsibility on social media.”

Among the statement’s organizations, Human Rights Watch is known to tilt its reportage toward U.S. interests, and Freedom House is funded by the U.S. government and is notorious for its conservative biases. Not the sort of groups going out of their way to condemn U.S. allies. Want more? How about a report from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, one of the U.S. government’s leading propaganda arms. A 2019 article by the combined organization reported on the arrest and quick release of far right militants that resulted in several police commanders declaring themselves “Banderites.” That is a reference to Stepan Bandera, a 1940s Ukrainian Nazi collaborator whose Ukrainian Insurgent Army massacred tens of thousands of Jews and Poles, and issued anti-Semitic statements as virulent as those of Hitler.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported that after a riot police officer taking part in the arrest of “ultranationalists” called them “Banderites,” Interior Department and police senior officials issued apologies for the use of “Banderite” in a derogatory way, and the arrestees were released. “National Police chief Serhiy Knyazev says he is one. So does Interior Ministry and National Police spokesman Artem Shevchenko. Interior Ministry adviser Zoryan Shkyryak is, too. From the top on down, cops and their bosses are lining up to air their admiration for Stepan Bandera,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty wrote.

Not a government or society free of fascism, is it?

Should we cheer or should we think?

Lurking in the background, there is the specter of NATO expansion. Many advocates for Ukraine (although, here, not from people on the Left) try to claim that the U.S. never promised Russian officials there would be no eastward expansion of the military alliance. Soon after the invasion, a New York Daily News article “assured” its readers that no such promises were ever made, even claiming that Mikhail Gorbachev had “no recollection” of such a promise. Either Mr. Gorbachev has a short memory or, more likely, the Daily News writer made up that claim out of thin air. It was quite well known at the time that assurances were in fact made. For those requiring proof, George Washington University’s National Security Archive has published an extensive collection of documents demonstrating that such assurances were repeatedly made. “Not one inch” was the well-known formulation of James Baker, then the secretary of state for the Bush I administration. Such promises were made in the context of securing Soviet approval of German unification.

Finally, there are U.S. commercial interests involved. The U.S. has long sought to wean Europe off Russian natural gas and instead buy liquified natural gas from U.S. energy companies. Thus an excuse for Europeans to drop Russia as an energy supplier is not unwelcome among U.S. political and corporate leaders. At this time we have no proof, but it is likely that such considerations contributed to U.S. encouragement for Ukraine to refuse the Minsk Accords.

This has been a long discussion of Ukraine and Russia, but unavoidable if we are to seriously grapple with the complex issues of the war and the combatant countries. Who among us really has a rooting interest in this? Or in either of these two dismal régimes? The United States may be willing to fight a proxy war to the last Ukrainian and Russia is conducting its war in a savage, inhumane manner — and Ukraine has the right, as does any country, to defend itself — but this does not require us to act as cheerleaders for either side. Neither side is remotely a beacon of democracy. Russia’s severe crackdown on dissent is heavily reported, since Russia is now the No. 1 enemy of the West, but parallel actions by Ukraine are ignored in the corporate media. Ukraine has outlawed several parties for being on the Left, or simply because they were in opposition to President Zelensky, including parties holding parliamentary seats. Ukraine, as has Russia, shuts down television stations it doesn’t control.

Cheerleading for Russia simply because it opposes U.S. imperialism without regard for the nature of the country’s government represents a lack of thinking; nothing more than a simplistic chasing of anything that appears to contradict corporate media discourse and U.S. foreign policy. Cheerleading for Ukraine represents a similar lack of critical thinking; an unreflective regurgitation of U.S. government and corporate media propaganda. We really can, and should, do much better than either. War is not a football game.

The revolt that shook the world

History does not travel in a straight line. I won’t argue against that sentence being a cliché. Yet it is still true. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be still debating the meaning of the October Revolution on its centenary, and more than a quarter-century after its demise.

Neither the Bolsheviks or any other party had played a direct role in the February revolution that toppled the tsar, for leaders of those organizations were in exile abroad or in Siberia, or in jail. Nonetheless the tireless work of activists laid the groundwork. The Bolsheviks were a minority even among the active workers of Russia’s cities then, but later in the year, their candidates steadily gained majorities in all the working class organizations — factory committees, unions and soviets. The slogan of “peace, bread, land” resonated powerfully.

The time had come for the working class to take power. Should they really do it? How could backward Russia with a vast rural population still largely illiterate possibly leap all the way to a socialist revolution? The answer was in the West — the Bolsheviks were convinced that socialist revolutions would soon sweep Europe, after which advanced industrial countries would lend ample helping hands. The October Revolution was staked on European revolution, particularly in Germany.

The beginning of the October Revolution in Nizhny Novgorod on the Annunciation Square

We can’t replay the past and counterfactuals are generally sterile exercises. History is what it is. It would be easy, and overly simplistic, to see European revolution as romantic dreaming, as many historians would like us to believe. Germany came close to a successful revolution, and likely would have done so with better leadership and without the treachery of the Social Democrats who suppressed their own rank and file in alliance with the profoundly undemocratic Germany army. That alone would have profoundly changed the 20th century. And provided impetus to the uprisings sparking off across the continent.

Consider the words of British prime minister David Lloyd George in 1919 as he discussed his fears with Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister: “The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent, but of anger and revolt among the workmen against prewar conditions. The whole existing order, in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other.”

What country goes first?

Russia was the weak link in European capitalism and the stresses of World War I added to the conditions for a revolution. Not an inevitability. Leon Trotsky’s analogy of a steam engine comes to life here: “Without a guiding organisation, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam.”

The October Revolution wouldn’t have happened without a lot of steam; without masses of people in motion working toward a goal. The revolution faced enormous problems, assuming it could withstand the counter-assault of a capitalist world determined to destroy it. The revolution was a beacon for millions around the world as strikes and uprisings, inspired by the example of Russians, touched off across Europe and North America. Dock and rail workers in Britain, France, Italy and the United States showed solidarity through refusing to load ships intended to be sent to support the counterrevolutionary White Armies that massacred without pity. Armies, assisted by 14 invading countries, that sought to drown the revolution in blood.

The revolution survived. But the revolutionaries inherited a country in ruins, subjected to embargoes that allowed famines and epidemics to rage. The cities emptied of the new government’s working class base, the country surrounded by hostile capitalist governments. There was one thing the Bolshevik leaders had agreed on: Revolutionary Russia could not survive without revolutions in at least some countries of Europe, both to lend helping hands and to create a socialist bloc sufficiently large enough to survive. The October Revolution would go under if European revolution failed.

Meeting at the Putilov Factory (1917)

Yet here they were. What to do? With no road map, shattered industry, depopulated cities and infrastructure systematically destroyed by all armies hostile to the revolution — having endured seven years of world war and civil war — the Bolsheviks had no alternative to falling back on Russia’s own resources. Those resources included workers and peasants. For it was from them that the capital needed to rebuild the country and then begin to build an infrastructure that could put Russia on a path toward actual socialism, as opposed to an aspirational goal well into the future, would come.

The debates on this, centering on tempo and how much living standards could be short-changed to develop industry, raged through the 1920s. Russia’s isolation, the dispersal of the working class, the inability of a new working class assembled from the peasantry to assert its interests and the centralization necessary to survive a hostile world — all compounded by ever tightening grasps on political power by ever narrowing groups that flowed from the country’s isolation — would culminate in the dictatorship of Stalin.

Privatization ends chance of democratic control

Stalin would one day be gone and the terror he used to maintain power gone with him. But the political superstructure remained — the single party controlling economic, political and cultural life, and the overcentralized economic system that steadily became a more significant fetter on development. The Soviet system was overdue for large-scale reforms, including giving the workers in whose name the party ruled much more say in how the factories (and the country itself) were run. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, and the country’s enterprises were put in private hands at minuscule fractions of the value of those enterprises, the chance to build a real democracy vanished.

A real democracy? Yes. For without economic democracy, there can be no political democracy. The capitalist world we currently inhabit testifies to that. What if the people of the Soviet Union had rallied to their own cause? What if the enterprises of that vast country had become democratized — some combination of cooperatives and state property with democratic control? That could have happened because the economy was already in state hands. That could have happened because a large majority of the Soviet people wanted just that. Not capitalism.

They were unable to intervene during perestroika. Nor did they realize what was in store for them once the Soviet Union was disbanded, and Boris Yeltsin could impose shock therapy that threw tens of millions into poverty and would eventually cause a 45 percent reduction in gross domestic product — much deeper than the U.S. contraction during the Great Depression.

A revolution that began with three words — peace, bread, land — and a struggle to fulfill that program ended with imposed “shock therapy” — a term denoting the forced privatization and destruction of social safety nets coined by neoliberal godfather Milton Friedman as he provided guidance to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Millions brought that revolution to life; three people (the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus) put an end to it in a private meeting. With the financial weapons of the capitalist powers looming in the background, ready to pounce.

The Soviet model won’t be recreated. That does not mean we have nothing to learn from it. One important lesson from revolutions that promised socialism (such as the October Revolution) and revolutions that promised a better life through a mixed economy (such as the Sandinista Revolution) is that a democratic economy and thus a stable political democracy has to rest on popular control of the economy — or, to use the old-fashioned term, the means of production.

Leaving most of the economy in the hands of capitalists gives them the power to destroy the economy, as Nicaragua found out in the 1980s and Venezuela is finding out today. Putting all of the enterprises in the hands of a centralized state and its bureaucracy reproduces alienation on the part of those whose work makes it run. It also puts into motion distortions and inefficiencies because no small group of people, no matter how dedicated, can master all the knowledge necessary to make the vast array of decisions that make it work smoothly.

The world of 2017 is different from the world of 1917; for one, the looming environmental and global-warming crisis of today gives us additional impetus to transcend the capitalist system. We need to produce and consume less, not more, unlike those of a century ago. We need the participation of everyone, not bureaucracy. Planning from below with flexibility, not rigid planning imposed from above. But we need also learn from the many advancements of the 20th century’s revolutions — the ideals of full employment, culture available for everyone, affordable housing and health care as human rights, dignified retirements, and that human beings exploiting and stunting the development of other human beings for personal gain is an affront.

The march forward of human history is not a gift from gods above nor presents handed us from benevolent rulers, governments, institutions or markets — it is the product of collective human struggle on the ground. If revolutions fall short, or fail, that simply means the time has come again to try again and do it better next time.

This article originally ran in the Indypendent newspaper of New York.

“Justice” for a billionaire, none for the state he ripped off

There has been much cheering across the corporate media about the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ordering the Russian government to pay more than US$51 billion as compensation for confiscating the assets of Yukos, yet silence concerning the original theft of the company by Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

The basis of the decision by the arbitration court was that the assets of Yukos, seized for alleged non-payment of taxes, were sold for US$9 billion, well below the estimated value of the company. Conveniently left out of this picture is that Mr. Khodorkovsky purchased the assets for $159 million seven years earlier in a rigged process that he controlled. He did so as one of seven oligarchs who bought deeply unpopular former President Boris Yeltsin a second term and were handed control of the country’s vast natural resources as a reward.

This is a story that can not be separated from the fall of the Soviet Union and the looting of its assets, with a handful of newly minted oligarchs, mostly former black marketeers who became bankers, coming to control post-Soviet Russia’s economy. Estimates of the size of the assets that came to be owned by the seven biggest oligarchs (Mr. Khodorkovsky was one of them) in the late 1990s range up to one-half of the Russian economy. This at the same time that the Russian economy shrank by 45 percent and an estimated 74 million Russians lived in poverty according to the World Bank; two million had been in poverty in 1989.

Siberian mountain formation (photo by Irina Kazanskaya)

An important factor in the failure of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika was that working people saw the reforms as coming at their expense. A 1987 reform loosened job protections in exchange for enterprise councils that were to have given workers a voice in management, but the councils were largely ineffective or co-opted by managements. The law had also been intended to eliminate labor shortages. It didn’t, and a 1990 reform was stealthily passed to reduce employment and eliminate the ability of working people to defend themselves. Enterprises would now have private owners with the right to impose management and ownership shares could be sold.

Exhaustion from years of struggle also were a factor in the lack of organized resistance to the elements of capitalism that were introduced in the last years of perestroika and to the shock therapy that was imposed on Russia at the start of 1992, days after the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union and the assumption of uncontested power by President Yeltsin. Shock therapy wiped out Russians’ savings through hyperinflation and state enterprises were sold at fire-sale prices, or sometimes simply taken.

Connections allowed him to set up businesses

Mr. Khodorkovsky used his connections as an official within the Communist Youth League to found a company that imported and resold computers and other goods at huge profits and engaged in currency speculation. The proceeds were used to buy companies on the cheap and found a bank. His bank, Menatep, earned large fees by providing credit when it was in scarce supply during the post-Soviet collapse.

When President Yeltsin was up for re-election in 1996, he faced a daunting challenge as his popularity rating was well below 10 percent — tens of millions of Russians had been plunged into poverty and the economy had contracted for several years in succession. The president admitted in his memoirs that he was about to cancel the election. But he was presented with a plan by the seven oligarchs, the scheme that became known as “loans for shares.”

These seven oligarchs offered President Yeltsin a bargain: In lieu of paying taxes, they would make loans to the government so it could meet its expenses, such as actually paying its employees. In return, the government would give the oligarchs collateral in the form of shares of the big natural-resources enterprises that were soon to be privatized. (Other state enterprises had been quickly privatized upon the implementation of shock therapy.)

If the loans were repaid, the bankers would give the shares back. If not, the oligarchs would hold auctions to sell the collateral. The government had no ability to pay back these loans, but President Yeltsin issued a decree sealing the deal in August 1995.

The oligarchs used their own banks to conduct the subsequent auctions, and, through a mix of rigged terms and conveniently closed airports, won them all at prices that were small fractions of the enterprises’ reasonable market value. These enterprises represented Russia’s enormous reserves of oil, nickel, aluminum and gold, and a minority share in the dominant gas company, Gazprom.

These seven oligarchs all became billionaires through the “loans for shares” scam. The oligarchs, who owned almost the entire Russia mass media, spent 33 times the legal limit on the election and provided 800 times more television coverage of President Yeltsin than was provided to his opponents.

Mr. Khodorkovsky’s bank, Menatep, was put in charge of the auction of Yukos. It avoided competitive bidding, enabling his holding company to buy it for $159 million, only $9 million above the starting price. As long as Boris Yeltsin was president, the oligarchs could steal all they wanted. Nor did Western authorities complain about this; President Yeltsin’s bombardment and illegal disbanding of the Russian Parliament in 1993, resulting in more than 500 deaths, was celebrated as a democratic triumph. Indeed, the World Bank’s chief economist for Russia declared, “I’ve never had so much fun in my life.”

Corporate lawyers as arbitrators

The Permanent Court of Arbitration that handed down the $51 billion judgment is one of the international tribunals that hear investor-state disputes behind closed doors. As is customary with these bodies, the arbitrators are corporate lawyers appointed by governments.

In the Yukos case, each side could choose one of the three panelists who hear the case. The deciding panelist was Yves Fortier, a former chair of one of Canada’s biggest corporate law firms and of Alcan Inc., a mining company since bought by Rio Tinto, and a director of several other companies.

I see no sense in denying that politics were behind Mr. Khodorkovsky’s prison sentence and his loss of Yukos. But there can be no dispute that politics and shady dealing earned him his fortune in the first place. The gangster capitalism in which he excelled in the 1990s, cheered on by the West, was without mercy. Are there going to be outpourings of sympathy for the tens of millions of Russians immiserated so that the country’s Khodorkovskys could become billionaires? I think we already know the answer.

Power concedes nothing without a demand

We struggle because there is no alternative. We need to struggle because none of us can know when the spark will come. To not struggle is to give up.

Photo by Patrick Prémartin

I couldn’t help thinking about this subject again while helping out at an Occupy Wall Street information table last Sunday. As usual, there were many perspectives contending, but there was a distinct undercurrent of despair. Some articulated that as frustration that more people can’t be reached faster, but another subset was rooted in the idea that all is already lost, that we are already running out of time. From the latter it is a short journey toward giving up.

The process of organized resistance to injustice is called “struggle” for a reason — it is never easy. Frederick Douglass said it as well as it can said be a century and a half ago in words that will always bear repeating:

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

During this process, success always lies over the horizon. Sometimes we struggle for something we won’t see in our lifetimes; history is replete with such examples. Sometimes we know we won’t see it in our lifetimes, but the call of a greater good animates us. Sometimes we do taste victory. But when? We can never know ahead of time.

One strike among many

Take Russia’s February Revolution of 1917, when the tsar was overthrown. People persevered for decades in conditions far worse than anybody in an advanced capitalist country faces. The movement waxed and waned; strikes and even peaceful marches were drowned in blood. St. Petersburg, then the capital, was racked by waves of strikes in the first weeks of 1917 amidst shortages of all kinds.

Put aside for the moment your opinion about the eventual course of Russian history; the people struggling to survive at this time shouldn’t be held responsible for the wrong turns the October Revolution later took. On one particular day, tens of thousands of women textile workers walked out, then went to the metal factories and asked the men working there to join them. They did, the strike spread and within two days a general strike took hold. In another five days, the tsarist régime was finished — one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships brought to an end.

Why that one day? Why that one strike among hundreds of actions? We can never know. The most we can say is that on that particular day, Russians had finally had enough. This amazing feat, overthrowing an autocratic régime that had endured for centuries, occurred as most of the leaderships of the various political parties and organizations were in Siberian exile, in foreign exile or in jail.

Yet there was no spontaneity at work. Russia’s socialists had tirelessly laid the groundwork, and although the tsar’s secret police had decimated their ranks and so many had paid with exile, banishment, hard labor, jail and execution, the ideas could not be stamped out. The talks of the socialist agitators, the words of the socialist newspapers, pamphlets and fliers, resonated with the experiences of Russians — not only in the cities, but in the countryside and in the army and navy. It was this practical work, carried out over many years, that provided the people of Russia with the tools necessary to understand, and then change, their conditions.

They changed their conditions even though most were so under-educated that they were illiterate; even though a omnipresent propaganda insisted that the tsar ruled as a direct representative of God and there could be no change; even though police, militaries, death squads and secret police promised swift retribution against anyone questioning the natural order, the only order that could be.

Dignity in the face of inhumanity

Take a more recent example, South Africa. The apartheid régime seemed impervious. Disdainful of world opinion, determined to hold power at any cost, murdering or shipping to island prisons its opponents with impunity, consigning the Black majority to grinding poverty and daily humiliation — how could optimism that a better day would come be sustained? Yet is was.

I remember vividly the day Nelson Mandela made his first speech after his release. The only picture we had of him had been that of a young man with a fierce expression. Now here he was, an older man with gray hair. I was startled by his appearance before remembering we were seeing him three decades older, all at once. I couldn’t quote to you a single word of what he said that day, but it was perhaps the most memorable speech I have ever witnessed. What I do remember is the dignity of Nelson Mandela. Dignity. He was not broken after 27 years in prison, not at all. But beyond that, the African National Congress leader was fully human.

He would not allow his humanity to be taken away, no matter how cruel his oppressors. Nelson Mandela made that speech because he was part of a movement. Only an organized movement could have brought that day. A movement willing to engage in struggle. Another African National Congress leader, Steven Biko, summarized a most important lesson in these words:

“The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

Throwing up your hands in despair, declaring that nothing can be done so nothing should be started: You are oppressing yourself more effectively than any dictatorship, any sham democracy, any rule of financiers. To say “they” are too strong or too vicious, whomever “they” are, is to give up on living. Such an attitude is the surest route to your material conditions getting worse, to the next generation living under harsher conditions.

Everything of human creation is temporary. Everything of human creation will come to an end. Whether the next system will be better or worse, whether we or our descendants will be more or less free, is up to us.

The toll of privatization and the ideology of “there is no alternative”

No ideology lasts forever, and nothing of human creation lasts forever. Margaret Thatcher embodied the idea of stasis in thought and structure with her infamous statement that “there is no alternative,” which was given further form in her second most notorious utterance, “there is no such thing as society.”

There is no stasis, and five years and counting of economic crisis has chipped away at the idea that there is no alternative to present-day capitalism. It has perhaps also begun to undermine the former prime minister’s second quote, a stark encapsulation of the underlying ideology of everyone for themselves — that pitiless competition is the primary way that human beings relate to one another. Humans surely can be competitive. But they are at least as capable of cooperating, as the reactions to any natural disaster demonstrate.

Time plays its part as well. The bogeys of one generation fail to have the same effect on the next; now that two decades have passed since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a powerful bogey is becoming less of a talisman for capitalists and the politicians who love them. Thus it is not surprising that polls show that young people are more open to socialism than their parents — the concrete realities of the debt-saturated, limited vistas that today’s economy offers them can not fail to grab their attention.

An often-cited April 2011 survey by the Pew Research Center found that the opinions of respondents in the United States ages 18 to 29 had virtually identical opinions of capitalism and socialism — both were viewed as favorable by 43 percent, while the unfavorable responses differed by one percentage point. An interesting aspect of this poll, much less noticed, is that among respondents who described themselves as Democrats, regardless of age, 44 percent had a positive response to the word “socialism” while 43 percent had a negative response. (Republicans and those who not identify with either major party responded strongly negatively.)

Opinions seem to be evolving, as a later poll, conducted in November 2012 by the conservative Gallup organization, found that 53 percent of “Democrats/Democratic leaners” were favorable to socialism (and 55 percent were favorable to capitalism). Perhaps most interestingly, 23 percent of “Republicans/Republican leaners” were favorable to socialism. Although three times as many of the Republican/Republican-leaning respondents answered positively to the word “capitalism,” nonetheless such a response would have been unimaginable a few years ago. Minds do seem on the move.

The toll from “shock therapy” is, well, shocking

If we are to believe “there is no alternative,” the result should be, if not paradise, then at least rapid improvement in countries in which capitalism was re-instated two decades ago, such as in Russia. But, alas, that has not been so.

Take, for example, a 2009 study published by The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals and hardly a bastion of socialist boosterism. The study, conducted by a team of professors from institutions like Oxford and Cambridge universities, concluded that the mass privatization in the former Soviet bloc — a critical aspect of economic programs often referred to as “shock therapy” — resulted in one million deaths. If you haven’t heard of this study, that is not surprising as it received almost no attention in the corporate media after its issuance.

An Oxford University press release announcing the publication of the study (“The public health effect of economic crises and alternative policy responses in Europe: an empirical analysis”) said:

“The Oxford-led study measured the relationship between death rates and the pace and scale of privatisation in 25 countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, dating back to the early 1990s. They found that mass privatisation came at a human cost: with an average surge in the number of deaths of 13 per cent or the equivalent of about one million lives.”

The study used World Health Organization mortality statistics corrected for a series of factors, including population aging, past mortality and employment trends, and country-specific differences in health-care infrastructure. The study found a definitive link between increased mortality and shock therapy:

“David Stuckler, from Oxford’s Department of Sociology, said: ‘Our study helps explain the striking differences in mortality in the post-communist world. Countries which pursued rapid privatisation, or ‘shock therapy’, had much greater rises in deaths than countries which followed a more gradual path. Not only did rapid privatisation lead to mass unemployment but also wiped out the social safety nets, which were critical for helping people survive during this turbulent period.’ ”

The whip was applied earlier than critics assert

Naturally, this sort of ideologically inconvenient research did not lack counter-studies. The Lancet, in January 2010, published “Did mass privatisation really increase post-communist mortality?,” which, this set of authors admit, was motived by an unwillingness to accept the study led by Professor Stuckler. The authors of the counter-study, led by Christopher J. Gerry, made, inter alia, the following complaints:

“[T]he data show that the health trends driving the association noted by Stuckler and colleagues pre-date the introduction of mass privatisation programmes in the post-communist world. … [T]he Russian privatisation programme, announced in December, 1992, and completed in June, 1994, cannot plausibly be claimed to have affected mortality rates at all in 1992 and at most weakly in 1993.”

Unfortunately for this argument, privatization began well before December 1992. Elements of capitalism were introduced into the economy of the Soviet Union as early as 1987, following the uneven adoption of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Law on State Enterprises, the net result of which was to impose wage cuts and other measures of market discipline on workers but not on managements or bureaucracies. A series of liberalization measures in the following years, including a 1990 law that institutionalized privatization, caused more job insecurity and increased shortages, unraveled the dense network of threads that bound together the Soviet system and cut the social safety net.

Moreover, shock therapy was implemented on the second day following the end of the Soviet Union — January 2, 1992 — with complete liberation of prices (except for energy), the concomitant ending of all subsidies of consumer products and for industry, and allowing the ruble to float against international currencies instead of having a fixed exchange rate. This was a strategy to reduce demand significantly, a devastating hardship considering that most products were in short supply already, and it would also lead to hyper-inflation, wiping out savings.

Privatizations and takeovers had already begun; that the government’s formal program, in which enterprises would be sold off at minuscule fractions of their value, did not start until months later is no argument that shock therapy was not already well under way.

The counter-study authors led by Professor Gerry goes so far as to conclude:

“If anything, there may be some evidence of a positive link between market reforms and health outcomes.”

Poverty, alcoholism and sexism as health indicators

The preceding statement seems to be based more on ideology than facts. By the end of 1998, Russia’s economy had contracted by an astonishing 45 percent. The World Bank — a powerful institution of the advanced capitalist countries — estimated that 74 million Russians were living poverty by then, as opposed to two million in 1989. Russia’s murder rate become one of the world’s highest. During Soviet times, we were assured by Western commentators that high levels of alcoholism were a sign of despair, yet alcohol per-capita consumption rates in 2007 were three times that of 1990. The toll on health from these factors can’t be separated from “market reforms.”

The breakdown of a society under the sudden onslaught of unbridled capitalism, neoliberal style, is exemplified in a study by University of Rhode Island Professor Donna M. Hughes, “Supplying Women for the Sex Industry: Trafficking from the Russian Federation,” in which she demonstrated how unemployment, skyrocketing levels of violence at the hands of male partners, the elimination of the Soviet-era social safety net, the pervasiveness of organized crime, and ubiquitous television and other mass media images glamorizing prostitution and the consumption of the rich of the West resulted in hundreds of thousands of Russian women trafficked into prostitution. Professor Hughes also noted the dramatic social shifts unleashed:

“A much reported 1997 survey of 15-year-old schoolgirls found that 70 percent of schoolgirls said they wanted to be prostitutes. Ten years before, 70 percent said they wanted to be cosmonauts, doctors, or teachers. Some people have claimed this finding is an indication of the decline in moral standards or the social acceptability of prostitution. This finding is more likely an indication of how the media has glamorized and romanticized prostitution.” [page 14]

The point here isn’t to suggest that the Soviet Union was some sort of paradise. It was far from that. But it is necessary to challenge assumptions, particularly when when those assumptions rest on ideological foundations. How could the larger social disintegration documented in Professor Hughes’ study, and other indications, not be indicative of a decline in health and well-being?

If market forces improve health outcomes as Professor Gerry believes, then we need only compare the country in which market forces drive health care more than anywhere else, the United States, with other countries. In an average year, 22,000 people die and 700,000 go bankrupt as a result of inadequate, or no, health insurance, while the U.S. is well below average in life expectancy and infant mortality in comparison to other developed countries. And the U.S. spends, by far, the most money on health care of any country.

When “market forces” are allowed to govern health care, then the result is that the system will be geared toward maximizing corporate profit, not providing health care. When society — social bonds — break down, we are reduced to a scramble for survival.

Surely there is an alternative. Crises are overcome with cooperation, not competition. Future alternatives won’t be anything like the Soviet Union, but the number of people newly open to socialism is a sign of the open-mindedness, and strong societies, the world needs.