A WORLD TO WIN    #17   (1992)

 

On the Coup and the Counter-coups in the USSR

- Statement by the Committee of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement

29th August 1991

The events in late August in the USSR are a dramatic turning point in the crisis gripping the USSR for the last few years. As Mao Tsetung pointed out, in the 1950s Khrushchev led the Soviet rulers to betray the proletariat and restore capitalism. The New Tsars, as Mao called them, turned the world's first socialist state into a bulwark of reaction, rigged up an empire and set out to challenge the U.S. imperialists for world domination, all under the banner of socialism. Now these New Tsars are reaping what they have sown: the workings of their state capitalist system have plunged the USSR into unprecedented crisis, interpenetrating with the crisis of the whole world imperialist system. The Soviet imperialist rulers are being battered from all sides, and in their desperation to resolve the crisis they are cutting each other's, and their own, throats. Their empire is disintegrating and they have even been forced to abandon their last tattered pretences to be communists.

Western spokesmen describe all this as the "collapse of communism" - but genuine communists, the revolutionary Maoists united in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), rejoice at the growing disintegration of one of the two strongest pillars of world reaction, which certainly is weakening the ability of world imperialism to enforce its rule around the world.

The Western rulers hailed the victory of the "reformists" while decrying the coup plotters. Yazov, Kryuchkov & Co. are certainly criminals. Yet every one of the reformers - Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Shevarnadze and the rest - clawed their way to the top of the ruling reactionary CPSU and for decades have been top managers of the criminal Soviet state capitalist system. All these coups and counter-coups are in-fighting within a Soviet ruling class desperate and divided by the deepening crisis in the USSR.

What will the reformers' programme of Western-style democracy and economic reform and cooperation with the West bring? Already the U.S. and Soviet rulers have shown the world the fruit of their first "joint venture": the corpses of 100-200,000 Iraqis in the U.S.-led colonial Gulf war. As for people in the USSR, the future for many is already visible in the unemployment lines in Poland and the homeless shelters in Budapest, where the "miracle" of "free market reform" enables a handful to drive Mercedes while ever broader numbers are driven to live in the streets.

The reactionary poisons which have dominated life in the USSR since the restoration of capitalism there were given socialist labels, and Marxism-Leninism itself was turned into a state religion, with the CPSU boss its Pope. Now the socialist mask has been dropped. Gone is the flowery fraudulent talk of, for example, "socialist equality between nations": long-standing Russian domination is now displayed in all its ugliness. Yeltsin supporters hurrah "Russia" - the battlecry of the Tsarist troops who carved the Russian empire out of the steppes, wading through rivers of the blood of the so-called savage Eastern peoples. Lenin long struggled against the drive for a "Great Russia". Genuine revolutionaries are happy that the new rulers have had to drop their pretence to uphold the red flag of communism and have reverted to their traditional reactionary flags to stand for their reactionary policies.

In smaller nations demagogues like Lithuanian President Lansbergis exploit the nationalist resentment against this Russian chauvinism. Their "every-nation-for-itself" mentality has led to the disgusting spectacle of small nations trampling on even smaller ones - while the Soviet rulers manoeuvre behind the scenes.

The unravelling of the Soviet state has renewed the reactionaries' cry that "communism is dead". False communism, that hollow shell held up by the likes of Brezhnev and Deng Xiaoping to cover their crimes, is indeed collapsing with inner rot. But the reactionaries' attempt to bury communism intends to smother any hope of the oppressed that there is an alternative to this world of capitalism with all its horrors, and thus to stifle all resistance to their rule. They will never succeed. As Mao Tsetung analyzed, wherever there is oppression there is resistance. And wherever there are exploited and oppressed on this earth, then the vision of ending all oppression and exploitation, of classless society, communism, will burst forth again and again until the flames of revolution obliterate the old world and forge a new one. RIM calls on the rebellious masses of the far-flung Soviet empire to, as was said in the RIM's Call to the Peoples of Eastern Europe, which was translated and distributed widely in many of those countries: "attack the old order more thoroughly, more radically and with more determination, to take up the revolutionary weapon of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought which your rulers have hidden from you, and to establish contact with the RIM so as to strengthen the ties of those from all parts of the world who are resolved to struggle until all oppression and exploitation under any name are done away with forever".

With the fall of the Berlin wall, the imperialists promised an end to great power rivalry and an era of peace and democracy. Instead, war has burst out in the Gulf, Ethiopia and Yugoslavia, and now fratricidal strife stalks the USSR itself. So long as the world is divided into exploiters and exploited and some nations dominate others, so long as this rapacious social order is held together by violence, there will be no peace, and democracy will only be a disguise to cover the rule of the exploiters. In fact, the disorder sweeping the USSR heralds an unparalleled epoch of upheaval in the world: RIM believe now is the time to march forward boldly and fearlessly amidst the turmoil and struggle, to seize on the weakening of the imperialists in order to prepare and launch revolutionary wars of liberation.