This is one of the most complicated pieces of History. Not because of intrinsic difficulties, but mainly by the incredible amount of garbage created in the west and now more or less imprinted in fire into the mainstream narrative of History. George Orwell would love this great work of the Ministry of Truth. Not to speak of Dr Goebels.
The creation of the USSR can only be understood in the context of the world at the beginning of the 20th century and, in particular, the closer context of the Russian Empire itself. Any analysis made out of those contexts is pure garbage. It goes without saying that those contexts themselves are easy prey for those who write History as fiction.
Forgetting fiction, what we have is the industrial revolution that created an incredible mass of human beasts of burden called at the time proletarians, a term taken from old Roman Empire for those who did little else beyond multiplying themselves. It is important to clarify how the proletarians of industry were created. The commons, lands in England collectively used by small farming and herding, were privatized by law passed in Parliament. The commons were fenced and used as large agricultural enterprises by those who could afford it. Capitalism as we know it was born, created by those who commanded society and the law, and not by free market forces, as harebrained people believe. The enormous exodus from the commons toward industrial cities of England created the proletarians and a veritable holocaust. It would be otiose to describe the enormous death toll and suffering in this process.
The forced regimentation of masses of proletarians in factories created ideal conditions for resistance against the capitalists, and it happened. Police and Armed Forces were used against them to keep salaries very low and rights barely adequate for replenishment of the work force by reproduction.
That was the time when the first theorists of Economy published seminal books still studied today in economic schools. But among them was the German Karl Marx, exiled in London by persecution in his land or origin. Marx was not just another economist. Philosopher and political agitator, he studied capitalism through a different lens. His thought was not centred in the mechanics of production and commerce. He was interested in the irreconcilable shock of interests between two classes: capitalists and proletarians.
The conclusions of Marx were published in a formidable work known as Das Kapital in German. He also published with his lifelong friend Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto, that combined short reading with a powerful tool proletarians could use to spread the gospel of revolution across the world.
Marx and Engels had produced a theory of revolution. The Socialist Revolution that, once installed, would implant a proletarian dictatorship to be used against the enemies of the revolution, but very democratic inside the body proletarian. The Philosophical background of Marx and Engels gave their theory a solid base, and proletarians were taken wholeheartedly by it.
Social Democratic Parties were created to organize the revolution, and the First Worker's International was founded worldwide.
An elite of socialist thinkers led the way. Marx predicted that the Revolution would first have success in the most advanced capitalist countries, and by 1900 it was clear that Germany had taken the first place, displacing England. The Socialist International had German as its official language, and the revolutionary movement was more advanced in Germany than in any other place.
It was in the middle of this state of affairs that the WW1 erupted. According to Marxist thought, proletarians should not fight for their countries. Their war was against the apatrid, international capitalism. The Revolution was to be Global.
At this moment the First International was left naked by its inner frailties. German proletarians chose to fight for their Kaiser, and the same happened in other countries. We must remember that, at that time, Europe was the centre of the world, and its situation spread like fire. The First International was dead.
During the war, Imperial Russia fought alongside England and France against Germany and its allies.
By a curious association of circumstances, the Revolutionary movement was more developed in Russia than elsewhere. And the serious defeat of Russia in the face of Germany was associated with a deep and chaotic economic crisis. The leadership of the marxist movement secceded from the Social Democrats and entered the Revolutionary Social Democratic Party, aggressive in the pursuit of marxist goals. The crisis made possible to the revolutionaries to conquest the Armed Forces, and the Czar was ousted in what was named the First Russian Revolution, the February Revolution of 1917.
This revolution soon revealed unpalatable facts. The first was that a large part of the Party considered Russia not ready for Socialism, and wanted to transfer the power to the weak capitalist class of Russia. The second was the organization of the Counter Revolution, well armed and well led in the field. The Party still had a minority of faithfull followers of Marx. They refused the arguments of the dominant sector of the Party. This minority concentrated in its middle the best leaders of the Revolution, and they understood Marx better than the dominant part.
Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and many others did what Marx predicted: they continued to develop theoretical marxism, and the conclusions they arrived at demonstrated that the Revolution was possible in Russia, even if the Russian backwardness was a problem. Events in 1917 demonstrated two things. First, the majority of the Revolutionaries worked with the representatives of the weak capitalist class of Russia because they misinterpreted Marx. They thought that the capitalists should conduct the revolution toward the capitalist development of Russia, so that then, and only then, the Socialist Revolution could take place. Second, the crisis deepened and produced famine, what produced a radicalisation of the proletariat.
In the meantime, Lenin produced a blueprint for a new Revolutionary Party, the Communist Party, based on the then called democratic centralism. Decisions should be taken by the 'soviet' base and sent to the central commitee who would then act as the executive branch of the Party. In this way, Lenin sought to preserve the all-important unity of command and the internal democracy.
The internal crisis of Russia continued to deepen, till a point when the leadership around Lenin, still a minority in the revolutionary forces. came to the conclusion that a window of opportunity was open for the taking of Power by the Proletariat, leaving the capitalists orphaned.
Confident in the massive support of the majority of the base, the minority or the Revolutionaries launched the war cry All Power to the Soviets. The soviet translates into English as 'council', and it was the structural unit of the Revolution.
The Soviets took the power everywhere in the Russian Empire. A massive wave of counter-revolution evolved based on conservative officialdom in the military. External intervention appeared in he form of 21 countries envoying expeditionary forces to kill the Revolution. Winston Churchill famously said let's kill the baby in its cradle. American marines were there as well.
The Central Commitee designated Leon Trotsky to organize the Red Army and defeat the counter revolution. And that was done with incredible speed and effectiveness, cementing forever the revolutionary reputation of Trotsky.
The Revolution was victorious. Foreign Capital was expropriated and production was put in the hands of the factory soviets. But the war against Germany and against the counter Revolution had left the newly founded USSR in rags.
This is the crucial point when two different options were on the table:
Russia had to comply with the marxist mandate of world revolution and give all help possible to revolutions everywhere. Lenin and Trotsky were the champions of this option.
Russia was too weak, and should concentrate on internal affairs, constructing Socialism in One Country, so that posterior development would enable the USSR to support the World Revolution. This option was championed by Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev.
Revolutions erupted in Germany in 1918 and in Hungary in 1919, without any Soviet help, and were defeated. Inside the USSR the death of Lenin in 1924 left the Party in the hands of Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev. The struggle between two opposite visions of the World Revolution was initiated.
Lenin saw the Russian Revolution as a trigger for the world revolution. If he knew that if it would not work that way he would have settled for a capitalist revolution in Russia. This is the opinion of Eric Hobsbawm, British Historian of great repute.
But now it was not time for hindsight, that old trap of History, and the struggle between Trotsky nd Stalln went to he last conclusions. The core of the arguments on the two sides could be summed up like:
Stalin wanted the erection of the Soviet structure in Russia in order to help the world revolution later.
Trotsky said that socialism in the USSR would not survive without the propagation of the world revolution, as the isolation of the USSR would be fatal.
History tells us that Stalin and his friends won the fight, a very dirty fight, eventually ended with the assassination of Trotsky. The accusations against Trotsky were never based in this view of the Revolution, but were largely fabricated by the troika Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev. Trotsky was dubbed enemy of Lenin, a fantastic lie.
Both the Communist Party and the State of the URSS proclaimed the doctrine of Socialism in One Country, thus transformed in a mandatory directive.
And this is the point where the dissolution of the USSR decades later was made certain.
The proclamation of Socialism in one State had ramifications that Stalin and his friends could not grasp. The State assumed an enormous size, and workers were transformed into civil servants of the State. Bureaucracy took over both the Party and the State.
In fact, stalinist politics transformed the USSR into just another capitalist power welbowing for space in the world of Great Powers. When Hitler invaded the USSR, Stalin had to claim Mother Russia as the treasure to be defended, and not Socialism.
The industrialisation of the USSR went ahead, but the quality of life of the population remained low. At this point, the USSR was just another periferic capitalist country, like Brazil and Argentina. When the great capitalist crisis of the 1970s happened, the URSS had the same destiny of Brazil and Argentina. These two last countries were already in the fold of the Empire, and the USSR had to pass through a tremendous transformation to keep pace with the capitalist periphery.
Again, making use of hindsight, we can see a victorious German Revolution in 1918 with massive Soviet help. This would transform completely the story of the 20th century.
All is now done, and there is not a way back. But a diagnostic is necessary. Stalin killed the USSR in the 1920s. It is a miracle that the USSR had lasted as much as it lasted.
The posture of the USSR in the Yalta Conference during ww2 had nothing to distinguish her from other great capitalist powers, using the division of the world into spheres of influence. In his attempts to tempt the west to an antifascist alliance before the war, Stalin was rebuffed because the USSR was so backward. To gsain time for industrialisation, Stalin signed a treaty with Hitler, thus sending the Nazi hordes westward temporarily. The simple fact that Stalin had the power to do that demonstrates his limitless power in the Communist World Movement.
After Stalin's death, there was the option of going back to Lenin, but the bureaucracy in the Party and the State prevented that. Some years later, Khrushchev denounced stalinism without touching its structure, and the path toward collapse was preserved.
In the 1980s inflation was high in the US, and the Fed boss Volker increased substantially the basic rate of interest in the US. That meant that countries paying higher interests in dollars from their loans floundered. Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and the USSR were the main victims of the capitalist trap.
The USSR lost its sovereignty in face of the US and went bankrupt. Once dissolved the USSR, the world entered a never seen market domination, propelled by the erection of the monopolar world, a world-wide American Empire.
Disappointingly, that did not work for the linear-thinking American strategists. Russia and China rose to defy the monopolar world, pulling a great number of States awsay from the Empire without a war.
And yet a war is in the horizon because the Empire will not accept a defeat. History show us that great transformations do not happen peacefully. That is the burden of Humanity. A price has to be paid to establish new paradigms.
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