In the ecological field: to create effective means for social organizations and movements to fight for the conservation of the environment, as well as historical and cultural monuments.
In the field of international relations: to show support and solidarity to revolutionary, liberation and democratic movements in the capitalist world and in developing countries.
4
The Soviet New Left: Alexander Cockburn Interviews Boris Kagarlitsky1
More socialism, and therefore more democracy!
In Moscow this week, under conditions of official sanction that have remained open to doubt until the very moment the participants are brought to order, a momentous gathering is taking place: the first conference of the Federation of Socialist Clubs, which saw its public birth at the end of last summer.
Back then, between 20 and 23 August in a hall provided by officials of the Moscow branch of the Communist Party, a conference of independent left-wing reformers was held, the first such meeting to be sanctioned in more than fifty years. It brought together about 600 representatives of fifty ecological, cultural and grassroots socialist groups. The proceedings were tumultuous and at the end various associations emerged, among them the Federation of Socialist Clubs, the core bodies being the Club for Social Initiatives (CSI); Obshchina, a student group; and a youth group called the Forest Folk. Also under the Federation’s umbrella came such clusters as the Young Communard Internationalists, the Che Guevara Brigade and Red Sails.
Among the leading activists of the Federation is a twenty-nine-year-old sociologist called Boris Kagarlitsky. He was jailed in 1982 for advancing Euro-communist notions and released thirteen months later under Andropov. His father is an expert on Kipling and Wells, and Boris speaks English fluently.
I first talked to Kagarlitsky in Moscow in th fraught days after Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech to the Central Committee in November. People were prowling through Gorbachev’s speech, trying to gauge the shifts and eddies in the political winds. The affair of Boris Yeltsin, the Moscow party leader, was on every lip. Would he fall, and if so what would that presage?
In those anxious moments Kagarlitsky and his association were active in supporting Yeltsin. They were on the streets collecting signatures in his support; calling for the minutes of the meeting that disgraced him to be made public. Kagarlitsky was frankly pessimistic about the consequences of Yeltsin’s dismissal if it came. On the eve of this week’s conference we talked again. In what follows we can discern the stance — novel, portentous and precarious — of an emergent socialist revival in the Soviet Union.2
AC: It’s now nearly three months since Yeltsin’s enforced resignation. What changes has his fall produced?
BK: There are contradictory signals. In some ways the situation is not good. We can’t get the level of glasnost' that prevailed before November. It’s not that the conservatives are gaining the upper hand, but they are more efficient and active than they were three months ago. But in another way the situation is better, as witness the possibility of this conference.
AC: What are you hoping from your conference?
BK: We want to democratise and formalise the structure of the Federation of Socialist Clubs, and produce a document to be used for its legalisation. This is very important. Right now the state is drafting a law concerning ‘voluntary organisations’ which is actually worse than the existing law, which was promulgated under Stalin in 1932, so you can imagine how bad it is. We want a return to the revolutionary law of 1926, and the conference will be a venue to agitate for that. Also we want to plan practical actions concerning education, prices and so on. Official, or unofficial, either way, it is going forward.
AC: I’d like yo to go back now to Gorbachev’s speech of 2 November.
BK: It was disappointing. People were waiting for more on Bukharin and something positive about Trotsky. Without saying something about Trotsky’s participation in the establishment of Soviet power and the Red Army, you can’t have a real history, which is very important in a country where people are crazy about history and are eager to get the empty parts of the past filled in. Trotsky is treated as a criminal for saying something about the peasantry that was really wrong, but Stalin is not treated as a criminal for putting the same outlook into actual practice. The solution should be to say, Trotsky made a lot of mistakes, but Stalin was a criminal. But we have the reverse situation. Another thing, there’s an anti-Semitic campaign that says Trotsky was responsible for all the evils in Soviet history. It would have been important if Gorbachev had said something to counter the anti-Semitic arguments of such Fascist groups as Pamyat'. There was one favourable mention of Bukharin, but all the major criticisms of him resurfaced in the speech. All the same, you mustn’t say that it was a Gorbachev speech. It was a speech of the Central Committee delivered by Gorbachev. There had been many versions, but the final one was dominated by conservative thinking.
AC: What is the emphasis of official reform?
BK: The big issue involves rewriting the Party history. What does this mean? It means rewriting ideology, because in the Soviet Union history is ideology, and ideology is history. So there’s a lot of struggle inside the group now preparing the Party history. The Stalinists say, You are destabilizing the system by saying the truth about Stalin or about Trotsky or about Bukharin. Saying the truth about Bukharin means saying the truth about the real nature of collectivization.
AC: Could you draw a politico-intellectual map of what is going on?
BK: One current that is gaining ground now is the neo-Stalinist one. It’s a very real danger that under perestroika Stalinism is becoming much more popular than it was under Brezhnev. Stalinists are trying to become populists. Traditional Stalinism was simply manipulation of the people by bureaucratic means, and propaganda was simply a matter of explaining orders to the people. Now hard-line Stalinism, for the first time in its history, is trying to conquer the hearts and minds of the people.
AC: What is hard-line Stalinism today as a political project?
BK: The Stalinist project states, first, We must re-establish the initial values of the system, not liberalize it, not change it, not democratize it, but recognize that the only way to solve our problems now is to turn back to the initial stage of the system, of the thirties, to restore the same structures and the same mode of operating inside the structures. Second, as one Stalinist author wrote, We need a whip. That is, to make functionaries and workers more productive, democratic elements in the system should not be nurtured; per contra, some kind of moral terror should be established. Their economic project is simply to limit consumption, to destroy Western patterns of consumption, thus to free up resources for the second industrialization, which means scientific breakthroughs with computers and so forth. What is interesting is that, psychologically and ideologically, these Stalinists have a lot in common with Reagan’s neo-conservatives. They’re always talking about national pride, traditional values, moral climate, while at the same time urging struggle against subversive external influences, liberal tendencies of an allegedly counterproductive nature. So, psychologically, neo-Stalinism is more like Reaganaut neo-conservatism than like old-fashioned Stalinism. Now, that kind of propaganda is very efficient — not among the youth but among the older age groups.