| |
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.
|