Can anything guarantee that opportunism never succeeds again? One safeguard might involve strictly limiting legal private enterprise and enforcing the law against illegal private enterprise and thus preventing associated corruption of the Party and the government. As for Party standards, it is hard to imagine higher ones than the ones that Lenin set. The lesson is probably not in the search for higher party standards or the invention of altogether new norms, but in the maintenance of those standards. Also, as Bahman Azad rightly observed, a policy of frank international Communist criticism might have helped expose the negative trends in Soviet socialism, and mobilized action against them.653 By muting public criticism of the Soviet Union, the left committed a grave, if understandable, mistake.
In part, Gorbachev framed his program as completion of the “anti-Stalinist” agenda interrupted by Khrushchev’s removal. By the end of his rule, Gorbachev was freely using traditional anti-Communist terms of abuse such as “Stalinism,” “totalitarianism,” and “command economy.” Stigmatizing the past with borrowed invective paralyzed rational, honest debate about the past and present realities of the Soviet Union. In the future, supporters of socialism must come to terms with the Stalin era. In Stalin: Man of Contradiction, Kenneth Neill Cameron wrote,
A few months ago I had lunch with a leading academic Marxist and faculty colleague. When I told him I had just finished a book on Stalin he said “Stalin! My God, every time I talk about socialism, some student brings up Stalin – and then, what can one say?” One can say quite a lot.654
Cameron’s book was a start. At first even Gorbachev called for an all-sided view of the Stalin years. He said:
To remain faithful to historical truth we must see both Stalin’s incontestable contribution to the struggle for socialism and to the defense of its gains, and the gross political errors and abuses committed by him and those around him for which our people paid a heavy price and which had grave consequences for the life of our society.655
A balanced historical view of Stalin must include an assessment of not just the repression but the circumstances of it. As Hans Holz said, this means the recognition that “the despotic aspects of Soviet socialism”656 occurred in the period of its encirclement. Historian Herbert Aptheker enumerated some of the aspects of this encirclement:
…the hostility, boycott, economic warfare, systematic sabotage, military assaults, creating and bolstering Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, the tardiness and weakness of two-front assistance to the USSR and then after victory the rejection of any decent relationships between the triumphant but shattered Soviet Union and the victorious Western powers. When one writes “shattered” Soviet Union one has in mind the devastation of everything in its European territory, the loss of about 25 million dead and the serious wounding of some 40 million of its citizens.657
The gaps in knowledge of the Stalin era remain enormous. The fact that bourgeois historians cannot agree on whether Stalin’s victims numbered 5, 20 or 100 million shows the abysmal state of historical understanding.658 Using new information obtained since 1991, Michael Parenti has pointed out that post-Soviet scholars have made a promising start on an honest accounting.659 Some historians are retreating from the wildly exaggerated claims of Cold War polemics.660 Now that the Soviet archives are opened, the calumnies of rabidly anti-Soviet authors661 will not be the last word on Soviet history.
The Soviet tragedy renders farcical the claim of one historian that “the 20th century will go down in history as the century of the greatest in world transformations—the socialist revolution.”662 Twentieth century history proved not so rectilinear. Yet historical materialism has an explanatory power great enough to survive the Soviet reversal. Anthony Coughlan wrote:
People in the socialist tradition should above all be able to think historically. When did capitalism begin? Was it 15th century Venice? 16th century Geneva? 17th century Holland or 18th century England? If it took capitalism centuries to develop—and it is still in full spate in many parts of the world—is it not naïve to expect socialism to spring full-grown from the womb of history in our particular century? Moreover, as capitalism developed in a zigzag way, with periods of setback as well as advance, should not a historical perspective lead one to expect a long period of complex interaction between capitalism and socialism around the world before one gives way to the other?663
The Soviet experience demands a reconsideration of the idea of “socialism in one country.” Socialism in one country involved a basic decision to try to hold on and build a new society, although many external and internal conditions militated against it. It was a calculated and reasonable risk, for a revolution in Soviet Russia had its advantages, namely, a huge territory, a large population, and geographical remoteness. Marx probably would have approved the gamble. He once wrote: “World history would be very easy to make if the struggle were taken up only on the condition of infallibly favorable chances.”664 In any case it is doubtful that the eventual demise of the USSR invalidated the attempt to build it in one country. Socialism develops country by country because capitalism develops unevenly. Simultaneous revolution in all remaining capitalist countries is impossible. As Lenin observed, “History has not been kind enough to give us socialist revolution everywhere.” Uneven development meant that capitalism broke at its weakest link in 1917. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, uneven development of the world economy is more extreme than ever. For example, the ratio of average incomes in the world’s twenty richest countries compared to the world’s twenty poorest has risen from twenty to one in 1960s to forty to one in the new century.665 Since these are national aggregates, if anything this indicator understates the extreme inequality in the world. Thus the likelihood of revolutions in isolated countries remains, and revolutionaries in the 21st century will face a challenge similar to those in the last, having to build socialism alone or almost alone in the cauldron of imperialist pressures.
The breakup of the USSR as a socialist multinational federation underlines the importance of the national question. Marx himself underestimated the national question in one or more respects. Moreover, contrary to the expectations of some internationalists of old, and contrary to the claim of today’s globalists, nationalism remains a growing phenomenon. Compared to 1945 when only about 40 flags flew outside the UN building, today more than 190 fly. Ethnic and national strife is likewise rising, often fomented by the transnational corporations (TNCs). As the TNCs, with their free trade and globalization ideology, assault national sovereignty and development, partisans of workers must be the best champions of the democratic right of nations to self-determination.
New forms of the national question are arising. Multinational federal states are under stress in many parts of the world, to mention a few: India, Britain, Canada, the Russian Federation, and Spain. The colonial legacy remains. Africa and the Mideast have ridiculous borders drawn by departing colonialists and bearing little or no relation to national or economic units. Many former socialist states, independent before 1989-91, are now prostrate semi-colonies. National feeling in those lands is on the rise. World domination by the USA as the sole global military power is accentuating the national question of all other states. Supra-national integration in the form of the European Union, NAFTA, and other schemes has become a main aim of transnational finance capital. The national question is producing unusual alignments where divergent political forces find themselves in common battle against the TNCs, although, of course, from different class positions and with different motives. For example, not long ago in the USA, the trade unions and Texas billionaire Ross Perot were at the same time opponents of NAFTA. In Britain, Communists and many conservatives, at loggerheads on almost everything else, oppose the EU.