On the USSR’s Dissolution

Our view of the USSR’s dissolution is mixed. We see that the USSR by 1991 was not a socialist state, but a capitalist-imperialist superpower with terrible problems in its system. If the country remained socialist, it probably would be around today, but its capitalist restoration weakened its economy by causing shortages, stagnation, and corruption, so its dissolution was basically inevitable. The USSR was also negative in its actions for the people of the world; since it was imperialist, it exploited many countries under its domain, and the masses toiled away for their local comprador capitalists and the Soviet finance capitalists. It also strangled socialist China and Albania in attempts to make them capitulate, and it succeeded in making other people’s democracies capitulate to them. When needed, it cooperated with US imperialism in plundering the world, and the two imperialist powers both backed forces that fought genuine revolutionaries in the third world (even if the forces they backed hated each other).

However, we also understand that it gave workers better concessions than Western-style capitalist states did, and when you compare it to countries with similar incomes, it performed very well in measures of quality of life. The dissolution made the lives of working people in the former Soviet republics much worse. Millions died after the overthrow, and millions more fell to abject poverty when Western capitalist-imperialists robbed the countries of their industry and exported it. Western capitalists still use the dissolution as a supposed “proof” of socialism’s “inferiority”. Thus, this was not a “victory for socialism”, even though it was not necessarily a defeat for it, either. Modern Russia is obviously worse than the USSR, for fascists roam free and can even take power, working-class people have few economic opportunities, and the quality of life is lower. Modern Ukraine is absolutely worse in those measures and more! All of the other former Soviet Republics are either not much better off or are much worse off (even the Baltic republics, commonly cited as “successes of Western capitalism”, have higher unemployment than before ’91, along with other issues). Russia and Ukraine both wave the banners that Nazi-collaborators used against the Soviet motherland back in World War 2, and now they fight each other over accusations of “Nazism”, sending millions of workers to their deaths!

What was to be done with the revisionist USSR? Proletarian revolution was the only solution, not the bourgeoisie of Russia taking off its “socialist” mask and the other republics’ capitalists either becoming US puppets or Russian puppets. “The Working Class in Revisionist Countries Must Take the Field and Re-Establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” clarifies this:

In all the countries where revisionists are in power, the dictatorship of the proletariat is being smashed and replaced by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the socialist regime is being replaced by the capitalist bourgeois regime and the party of the proletariat, degenerated from within, is now but a smokescreen to conceal this treason, to suppress the vigilance and legitimate revolt of the working class and of laboring people. The vigilance and legitimate violence of the working class against the class enemies is what scares the revisionists to death. It is the only force that can subdue them, it is the only way out from this disastrous situation in which socialism and communism find themselves today in the countries where the revisionists are in power. Thus, the revival and fanning of the flames of the proletarian revolution in these countries is the “sine qua non” of the road of salvation. No other road, as events have been unfolded and are rolling on, can be of any stable and lasting benefit to the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism. Any other course can serve only as a posture of compromise, harmful and temporary, with grave consequences for socialism.

It is only the working class at the head of the masses, it is only the working class headed by its real Marxist-Leninist party, it is only the working class through armed revolution, through violence, that can and must bury the traitorous revisionists. …

In the Soviet Union the proletarian revolution is, certainly, being organized and on the rise. The clique are afraid of this and they strike back, try to deceive and to neutralize the party of the class and the working class itself as best they can making them believe that it is allegedly their “Leninist” party which leads, that “everything is proceeding along Leninist lines and with Leninist norms”, and so on. Amongst these illusions we should also include those “historically realistic ideas” on Stalin which certain career-seeking, degenerate army generals and marshals have started to write with a view to throwing dust in the eyes of the masses and of genuine revolutionaries. But the Bolshevik revolutionaries and the Soviet working class are not to be deceived for long. They are becoming more and more aware that, in reality, power is being wielded by a clique of renegades and their bureaucratic anti-worker administration, that the party has been transformed into a bourgeois party and the dictatorship is a bourgeois dictatorship of the new capitalist class which oppresses the masses and the working class, exploits them economically for the benefit of the new revisionist bourgeoisie, does not allow them for a single moment to demonstrate their power and to demand their rights. The efforts of the revisionists to make the working class apolitical, to remove it from the political scene and to orientate it towards economism, will fail. …

Under the present-day conditions, when the revisionist cliques are completely liquidating all the victories of socialism in their respective countries, the working class of these countries must clearly understand that the revisionist party in power is no longer a party of the proletariat, but a weapon in the hands of treacherous leaders in tending to restore capitalism, to deceive the masses. Today there is no longer room for illusions, hesitations and procrastination. The working class of the revisionist countries is now faced with the historic necessity of taking its place again on the battlefield, of launching a ruthless and thoroughly consistent struggle to overthrow and smash the treacherous cliques, to carry out once more the proletarian revolution, to restore the dictatorship of the proletariat. This requires absolute determination, courage, sacrifices and a renewal of the revolutionary spirit and traditions of the times of Lenin and Stalin. This requires, in the first place and above all, the organisation of the genuine revolutionaries into new Marxist-Leninist parties, which should mobilize, organize and lead to victory the general uprising of the proletariat and of the other laboring masses.

At these important moments for the destinies of revolution, none of the Marxist-Leninists and the world proletariat can remain silent and idle in the face of what is happening in the revisionist countries. Proletarian internationalism demands that all the revolutionaries raise their voices and wage a principled struggle through to the end for the destruction of the revisionist cliques in power and give all support to the working class and to the peoples that are today under the revisionist rule, to overthrow these treacherous cliques and to raise again the banner of revolution and socialism.

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In short, we understand that the USSR’s fall was not the fall of a socialist state, but we also recognize that replacing that state-capitalist country with a more private-capitalist system damaged the region and ruined the lives of the workers and peasants. What is needed in the former USSR is revolution and a return of a new USSR, a USSR with flaws corrected and the adoption of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Proletarian revolution is obviously needed worldwide, and that is why we struggle and fight for it!