Socialism, as I understand it now, is an outlook, and I am certain that in today’s world it is impossible to formulate policy without socialist values. These values are now particularly necessary. Inequality is seen by the public as an acute global problem, and politicians on all continents cannot but respond to that. Social democratic ideas are back on the agenda.
Russia needs social democracy
In the early twentieth century, social democracy was a major political force in the world, but the fate of Russian social democracy has been particularly dramatic. Stalinism perverted and compromised its ideals and practice.
As a result of the victory over Nazi Germany, and after the historic resolutions of the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, which condemned the theory and practice of Stalinism, there was a gradual rapprochement between communists and social democrats. During the years of Perestroika a remarkable social democratization of the ideology and policies of the CPSU occurred.
With the abandonment of Perestroika, the policy of shock therapy brought about an abrupt polarization of society. Under the circumstances, what was needed was a party able to offer the public an alternative strategy for developing society, and this was the aim of the Russian United Social Democratic Party (RUSDP), which brought together scattered social democratic associations.
I tried to point the party in the direction of systematic inculcation of such values of international social democracy as freedom, justice and solidarity, and of developing a programme for modernizing Russia. It was to represent the interests not of particular groups or mafias, but of the overwhelming majority of Russia’s citizens.
In one of my conversations with President Vladimir Putin, I said that establishing a social democratic party had aroused interest and been welcomed by the public. To this, he responded (and I quote him verbatim): ‘What do you mean? Our country is already social democratic!’ I do not know what Putin thinks about the issue today: he has said nothing along these lines for a long time, at least not in public.
In Russia, we had to start building a mass social democratic party virtually from scratch. It was important for us that people made their own decision and personally applied to join the party. At the first meetings of our steering committee, it was noted that the two extremes, the Communist Party and the radical ‘liberals’, were failing to meet the expectations of the public by not providing answers to the challenges facing the country. We were certain that a fundamentally new, genuinely social democratic programme was called for. This would clearly lay out the party’s ideology, describe accurately the state the country was in, detail the problems vexing Russia’s citizens and what most needed to be done to resolve them.
In our manifesto we wrote:
Russia is in a state of systemic crisis. The economy is crippled by monopolies and protectionism, the state by corruption, and society by organized crime. The small and medium-sized businesses that appeared in the Perestroika years are burdened with unfair levies and taxes, gangster protection rackets and extortion by officials.
The country’s fundamental social welfare provision has been undermined. The funds allocated by the state for science, culture, education and health are inadequate not only for these areas to function effectively, but even for them to survive. The income of those in work is insufficient to ensure a decent standard of living, and jobs are constantly being cut. The pauperization of millions of people affects their moral and physical health and life expectancy.
The RUSDP considers that the cause of this systemic, socio-economic crisis is erroneous strategic choices, disengagement of the government from the people, together with a profound moral and intellectual crisis inside it. The government is suppressing people’s initiative and thereby generating economic and social passivity and a loss of faith in democracy. If this pernicious tendency is not overcome through the joint efforts of a majority of citizens, Russia will be doomed to a dull existence on the margins of civilization.
Given this situation, the RUSDP proposes not only to its political supporters, but to society as a whole, a social democratic alternative to enable the country to progress.
…Our history has shown the unacceptability of a strategy of lagging behind the West. The RUSDP believes that the only alternative is competitive advancement of Russia by implementing a breakthrough strategy.
The RUSDP sees investment in human development and social programmes not as charity but as an important means of achieving modernization, economic growth and social progress.
Despite the obstacles placed in our way and our minimal financial resources, we succeeded in creating party organizations and becoming active in most territories of the Russian Federation. That in itself was no small achievement.
I felt that in Russia the Social Democratic Party had to be a mass party, which was largely behind our decision to team up with the Party of Social Democracy, which was initially under the leadership of Alexander Yakovlev and later of Konstantin Titov. Not all members of the RUSDP favoured this merger, many of them alarmed by the radical-liberal bias of its leaders. We did, however, eventually emerge as a united Social Democratic Party of Russia, the SDPR.
Dozens of new regional and local social-democratic organizations sprang up in Russia under the umbrella of the SDPR, but we saw the party’s main achievement as the writing and dissemination of its manifesto, which set out the party’s strategy and tactics in detail. Our starting point was that reforms in Russia could not be based on neo-liberal ideas about the economy that ignored Russia’s history and culture. We were far more in sympathy with the thinking of John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig Erhard, which had made it possible to overcome the pre-war economic crisis in the United States and the post-war crisis in Germany. Their ideas posited active state intervention in the economy, which European social democrats had also supported and which was particularly germane in Russia, where the state has always played a prominent role.
At the same time it was clear there could be no serious alternative to market forces in the Russian economy. Like all other social democrats, we were in favour of a market economy but not of a market society. We proceeded from the view that, in addition to the market, there are always areas in a society outside its reach: science, education, culture. We declared: ‘There should be as much of the market as possible, and as much of the state as necessary.’
We saw the main lever for economic development as encouragement of small and medium-sized businesses. We saw these as agents that could rapidly saturate the market with goods and services, reduce unemployment by creating new jobs, and speedily assimilate technological innovation.
We raised the question of where best to apply the revenues from Russia’s natural resources. Economists estimated that just the revenues from the sale of oil and gas abroad amounted to five times the total state budget. In our view, these revenues should be spent on state and public needs. The capital presently circulating mainly in the sector of financial speculation, where the highest profits were to be made, should be redirected through tax mechanisms into production.
We offered the public a programme which, if carried through, would give Russia the opportunity to enter the new post-industrial era on an equal footing with developed countries, to master modern technologies and to be a player in global progress. We noted in our manifesto that the highest levels of investment should be in people, their education and training, in advancing science, and that there should be an industrial policy that took advantage of the strengths of the state and big business.