By Gary Lefley

When Mikhail Gorbachev died the British media wrote glowing obituaries of the leader who presided over the demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The acclaim, and his terminal role, are not unconnected. That 80% of the newspapers publishing these obituaries are privately owned by 5 billionaires might raise our suspicions. That two far-right former leaders of Britain and the U.S., Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, embraced Gorbachev as “a man we can do business with”, while branding Nelson Mandela a terrorist, is indicative. Mandela and Gorbachev stood on opposite sides of history, and of the imperial divide. 

BIRTH OF THE SOVIET UNION

When Gorbachev was born in 1931 the Soviet state was barely 13 years old. As we might expect of an embryonic socialist society, the first of its kind in 200,000 years of human history, conceived during the carnage of the first global war, trying to make its way in a hostile capitalist world: the struggle for survival was traumatic.

In 1917 Soviet Russia was technologically and economically 50 plus years behind the industrialised capitalist countries. World war and civil war had created widespread famine and poverty. Virtually all heavy industry had been destroyed. Agricultural output had fallen by 50%. Three quarters of the population could not read. 7 million people had died of famine, 3 million more of typhus and cholera epidemics. 1.5 million died in World War 1, another 1 million in the civil war. 2 million emigrated en masse - the industrialists, financiers, merchants and 9/10ths of the engineers, doctors and teachers.

WAR AGAINST FASCISM 

By the time Gorbachev was 9 years old the Soviet Union, abandoned by its ‘allies’, was facing the Nazi blitzkrieg alone. The US and Britain declined to open the second front for 4 years. Senator Harry Truman, later to become US President, explained in 1941, “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible…” The strategy was clear: encourage Soviet socialism and Germany - an imperial rival to the US - to destroy each other. The US could then march in and pick up the spoils, in terms of markets, capital exports, resources and cheap labour.

In defeating Nazi Germany and the might of the Wehrmacht, the USSR lost 25 million dead. Another 25 million were rendered homeless. 1710 towns and urban centres were destroyed, along with 70,000 villages and 32,000 industrial enterprises. And yet, the USSR survived. Such were the conditions in which the first socialist state was to be built. In 1945 the revolution was just 28 years old, a third of which had been spent defending itself against war, invasion and civil war. What was achieved domestically during this period, and subsequently, was a testimony to the astonishing possibilities of the new socialist society, and of human endeavour.

COLD WAR 

No sooner had World War 2 finished than the US and Britain began preparing for war, and nuclear war, with the Soviet Union. In 1946 Winston Churchill made his Fulton Cold War “Iron Curtain” speech, declaring Britain’s World War 2 ally to now be its enemy. US General Groves, who was in charge of the atom bomb Manhattan Project from Autumn 1942 onwards, subsequently wrote, “I think it is important to state, I think it is well known, that there was never from about two weeks from the time I took charge of the project, any illusion on my part but that Russia was the enemy and that the project was conducted on that basis.”

When the Soviet people were dying in their millions to liberate the world from fascism, Nazi Germany was gassing millions in its concentration camps, and Britain’s armed forces were in North Africa fighting to keep a hold of its colonies.

The Cold War hostility continued through to Gorbachev’s appointment, with an arms race that was designed to bankrupt the USSR, divert its resources away from building socialism domestically and from providing material backing for national liberation movements in their fight against colonialism and imperialism. Nevertheless, the Soviets continued to provide huge support, including military hardware, for the people of Vietnam in their war against US imperialism. They provided similar support for African peoples in their liberation struggles against European neo-colonialism.

SOVIET ACHIEVEMENTS 

Despite all these drains on its economic development, the socialist developments of post-war USSR were remarkable.

• Unemployment: The right to work was established in Soviet law as a basic human right. Unemployment was abolished by 1930 with all citizens guaranteed employment to match their qualifications.
• Wages: Between 1950-1970 average real wages rose by a fraction under 100%. From 1970-1976 wages rose by 20%, student grants by 50% and other allowances by 40%. From 1965 to 1977 real per capita incomes rose by 65%.
• Taxation: Taxes represented a tiny percentage of income.
• Prices: In the 1970s the USSR Retail Price Index (RPI) fell by 0.2%. For several decades the prices of basic consumer goods and services were frozen. In Britain during the same period the RPI rose by 114.9%; U.S. 46.6%; West Germany 40.8%; France 66.9%.
• Rent: By the time Gorbachev came to power the USSR had the lowest and most stable rent levels in the world. Rent included electricity, central heating, and gas. It had not risen since 1928 and constituted on average 4-5% of the family budget.
• Housing: during the 1970s over 11 million new flats were built, enabling 20% of the population to move into new accommodation.
• Social Wage: By the time Gorbachev became the Soviet leader the USSR social wage was as high or higher per capita than any other country in the world, with the exception of the German Democratic Republic. This included the number of schools, teachers, institutes of higher education, hospital beds and doctors.
• Women in politics: Women were guaranteed in law equal rights, equal opportunities and equal pay. By 1980 there were more women with higher education qualifications than men. Women constituted 51% of the workforce, 31% of the Deputies to the Supreme Soviet, 35% of the 15 union republic supreme Soviets and 48% of the local Soviets.

RETURN OF CAPITALISM 

Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 and Head of State in 1988, committed to the introduction of market principles within the planned economy. By 1991 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was no more. His much vaunted policies of ‘Perestroika’ and ‘Glasnost’ turned out to be smokescreens which facilitated the return of the private ownership of capital. He had championed Perestroika (‘Restructuring’) and Glasnost (‘Opening Up’) as if they were new revolutionary concepts in the development of socialist society. In reality, Perestroika was doublespeak for privatisation; the rise of the billionaire Oligarchs was its realisation. Glasnost, projected as press freedom, was actually its antithesis. While it ‘opened up’ the Soviet press and air-waves to the penetration and ownership of western corporate media, including agencies such as the CIA, by 1991 under Yeltsin the Communist Party and its publications were banned.

Ethnic tensions began to develop that subsequently were to erupt into full-scale wars in Chechnya, Georgia and Moldova after the Soviet Union collapsed. Three decades later, some of these conflicts remain unresolved. Contrary to the West’s narrative, the transition back to capitalism across the USSR was anything but peaceful.

The United States, which had been covertly active in undermining the governments of the 15 republics and the Warsaw Pact states, as well as stirring up social unrest, asserted its unipolar world order, with consequent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yugoslavia, and Libya.

In March 1991, a referendum resulted in an overwhelming majority for preserving the Soviet Union as a federation of equal sovereign republics. The outcome was shelved. The following August Gorbachev signed a decree banning the Communist Party of Russia.

On 25th December that year he resigned as President of the USSR which was formally dissolved the following day. Yeltsin continued in his role as the leader of Russia. Seven decades of the first great socialist experiment was over.

Sky History.com provides a succinct summary of Yeltsin’s role in office, “With the Soviet Union out of the way, Yeltsin eliminated most price controls, privatized a slew of major state assets, allowed for the ownership of private property and otherwise embraced free market principles. Under his watch, a stock exchange, commodities exchanges and private banks all came into being. But although a select few oligarchs became shockingly wealthy, many Russians lapsed into poverty due to rampant inflation and the rising cost of living. Yeltsin’s Russia also struggled with the taint of being an ex-superpower and with corruption, lawlessness, decreased industrial output and falling life expectancies.”

These developments were greeted with wholesale approval by NATO and the EU, happy in the thought that the markets, natural resources and labour force of the USSR and Warsaw Pact states would now be ripe for exploitation by western capital. Mikhail Arutyunov, who was standing with Yeltsin on top of a tank in Moscow on 19th August 1991 as the Soviet leadership disintegrated, later summed up what was happening to Russia under Yeltsin, "The population is separating into the extremely poor and the extremely rich.”

GORBACHEV DESPISED 

With his Nobel Prize in hand and his heroic reputation abroad, Gorbachev put his popularity to the test by running for Russian president in 1996. He secured 0.5% of the vote.

Most charitably, Gorbachev was inept and naive. In reality, he was a catalyst in the destruction of Soviet socialism; the rise of the billionaire oligarchs; the impoverishment of the people; the privatisation of half of Europe and one third of Asia; the exponential growth in power and reach of NATO, from 16 to 30 members; and the rise of a unipolar world order under the sway of US imperialism.

For that he is despised in his own country. As one observer of the Russian media commented at the time, “The response by Russians to the death of Gorbachev has been overwhelmingly negative with social media attacking his [domestic] role in the 1980s and for destroying the world socialist system. The media have been partly respectful but many point to the current war (Ukraine) as being a result of his betrayal and incompetence. Social media have been uniform in calling him a traitor.”

An honest assessment of Gorbachev has to deal with the reality that the gradual political decline of both the Soviet Union and its Communist Party during the latter phase of Brezhnev’s leadership was a reflection of the emergent revisionism and careerism within the Party and the state. These developments disempowered the Soviet working class and incapacitated the forces necessary to resist the overt and covert interference of the West, along with the rise of Gorbachev, Yeltsin and a billionaire oligarchy. The counter-revolution culminated in the breaking up of a highly successful planned economy, in large-scale privatisation, social and democratic regression and the reestablishment of capitalism. A vigilant, thriving, revolutionary vanguard of a politically educated and mobilised working class would not have permitted the likes of Gorbachev and Yeltsin to destroy 70 plus years of socialist progress.

Churchill had once bemoaned: “we should have strangled the Bolshevik infant in its cradle”. Like his adoring Tory descendent Thatcher, he too would have been able to do business with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Mikhail Gorbachev in 2010. Photo by Dimitry Aleshkovskiy