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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (Dec. 1, 1997)
PAGE 13 HUCK KONOPACKI brush-fire wars for nearly half a century until glasnost and perestroika were contrived as desperate tactics to preserve the exhausted loser of the titanic struggle. Instead they acted as catalysts to the disintegration of the moribund Russian com munist state. Historical imperative, the Communist Party's ruling dogma, subverted to historical irony: to save itself communism attempted to return to its original purpose but was destroyed by its privileged elite who refused to relinquish their diminishing power. The Old Red Guard made a final catastrophic attempt to regain their lost communist state in the summer of 1991. They failed because perestroika had been more than a series of reforms to the Russian people but a revolutionary dynamic. Stalinism illuminated a major paradox in vtfiich an uneducated populace was, in the words of the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, "given literacy in order to impose on them a ready-made program of development, to stir up hatred of everything that was unlike that program, to isolate the people from the outside world and from the advance of civilization." Gorbachev, architect of glasnost and perstroika, at first clung to the Communist Party, arguing that its original ideas were still variable and necessary. But he dissolved the Party following the Old Guard's botched putsch. He wrote that he based his thinking "on the assumption that the socialist idea without democracy and without a correct and reliable solution of social problems is not possible." (Gorbachev made a remarkable admission in an inter view with writer David Remnick last year. "Had the Russians continued along the path of the February [1917] revolution, had they continued on a path of political pluralism, it would have been a different situation," he said. "Russia at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century was develop ing quite dynamically, and had they gone on that way it would have been much better." He said that the main mistake of the Bolsheviks was that "their violent emergency measures and methods were not temporary at all but lasted for decades.The rather artificial model created by Marx, which was made even more utopian by what the Bolsheviks added to it [and] imposed by force...did violence to the human being, to the human con science, to his beliefs, his initiative, his economic sense. It was diktat, all of it!") Gorbachev (Time Magazine’s "Man of the Year") was invited in May 1992, five months after the fall of Bolshevism, to speak at Westminister College in Fulton, Missouri, where Winston Churchill had proclaimed that an "Iron Curtain" divided the communist from the noncommunist world half a century earlier. Gorbachev said that Churchill's speech was regarded by Russians as the formal declaration of the Cold War. "If the United States and the Soviet Union had been capable of com prehending their responsibility and sensibly correlating their national interests and strivings with the rights and interests of other states and peoples," Gorbachev said, "the planet today would be a much more suitable and favorable place for human life." He also said that the "ending of the global confrontation" and "ideological opposition" of the nuclear superpowers had "rendered more visible the major contradictions between the rich and the poor countries." The very fact the Cold War was over, "released centrifugal forces which have been temporarily frozen" and "encouraged an exaggerated nationalism" that had already led to much bloodshed. The disappearance of communist influence from major regions of the world (China and North Korea, primary except ions) allowed the USA to reassert a global role without Soviet counteraction. The dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union set in motion forces that changed the scope and scale of world power which were not mere strategic adjustments but immense histor ical realignments in the aftershock and vacuum of a vanished empire. Back at the beginning John Reed replied to Western fears and criticisms of the Bolsheviks and the spread of communism in general (wrfiich at the time was limited to small parties in a few European countries and the U.S.): "It is difficult for the foreign bourgeoisie to understand the ideas that move the Russian masses. It's easy to say they aren't patriotic, honorable and duty-bound. Incapable of self-government. A new ideology has replaced the attributes of the bourgeoisie democratic state! There is patriotism — it is allegiance to the international brotherhood of the working class; there is duty — to the revolutionary cause; there is honor — based on the dignity of human life and happiness rather than on what a fantastic aristocracy of blood or wealth has decreed is fitting for 'gentle men'..." Reed believed the Russians were "inventing a whole new form of civilization." In a poll conducted just before collapse of the Soviet regime and reported in Moscow News, almost two thousand people in seven regions of the Soviet Union were asked to agree or disagree with the statement that the "October Revolution" of 1917 expressed the will of the population of the Russian empire — 39% agreed, 36% disagreed and 25% were unsure.They were asked what they would do if the October Revolution happened at that moment: 22% claimed they would actively support the Bol sheviks, 13% would wait and see, 10% would emigrate and 6% would fight the Bolsheviks; 26% were unsure. 46% of respond ents thought a revolution was necessary to achieve Bolshevik aims while 32% believed there could have been a peaceful way to power; 52% thought armed seizure of power was necessary. Lenin came out on top of a list of names that still aroused sym pathy, and 7% continued to admire Stalin; 57%, however, hated him more than any other Soviet leader. 56% disapproved of the Bolsheviks' shutting down newspapers of other parties, 64% were against the armed suppression of peasant uprisings by the Bolsheviks, and fully 77% thought execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family was unnecessary (Ben Lane — formerly of Cannon Beach — wrote of a tour through Russia in 1983, almost a decade before the break down of the Communist Party, that the people he met were "Russian first" and only marginally communist. "Communism has lost its ideological appeal and something else seems to be evolving," he wrote "I got the impression that they vwjuld die to the last man, woman and child for Mother Russia but would give only lukewarm effort toward defending communism ") Another sort of poll was taken in 1917 following the abdication of the Czar in March and before the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in October/November, an election PEQSONA VINTAGE CLOTHING by the interim Republican government vtfiich Lenin had been unable to prevent. Non-communist liberals won by 60% in the first free election in Russian history in which 400,000 voted. The Bolsheviks, already in the process of seizing power of the government, received only 29% of the vote. The Bolsheviks accused the Republican government of being controlled by the very bourgeois class that Marx said must be deposed and eliminated, and it was never allowed to secure power The Bolshevik appropriation of the Revolution was the first example of what has since been called "the old hammer & sickle tech nique: hammer through an agenda and sickle anyone who gets in the way." In a rather overblown article about Boris Yeltsin just after he deflected the Old Guard's coup in 1991, T.D. Allman wrote in Vanity Fair that "all revolutions begin in the mind, and all successful historic change is cybernetic...The most amazing thing about people is that, sometimes, they are capable of changing themselves, and that vos really the question the Moscow putsch posed. Had the Russians already changed sufficiently and in sufficient numbers to say No, history in Russia is no longer made by tanks, power no longer grows out of a gun, the future no longer belongs to faceless conspirators—it belongs to us now? Overwhelmingly Moscow citizens faced down the final spasm of Bolshevik muscle The American revolutionary John Adams might have been speaking about them when confronting the oppressive power of an earlier regime, 'The people, even to the lowest rank, have become more attentive to their liberties, more inquisitive about them, and more determined to defend them.” It could be claimed that the Russian people are once more embroiled in a revolution that might finally complete w4iat they started in 1917 — and earlier in 1905 when the Czar's troops fired on thousands of peasant petitioners. After 1917 this spirit seemed to languish in paradox as the Soviet empire grew in proportion to the domestic poverty and despair within the workers’ paradise: the more communism came closer to its goal of world revolution the less recognizable it was from its original ideal of universal liberation until at last the gross contradictions engendered a fatal rottedness. Marx thought a political system could be managed to avoid despotic excesses, that collective will was enough simply because it was his vision as historically ordained, and thus unnecessary for people's rights to be written into forceful law, a bitter trap his vision set for 20th century proletarians wrfio were compelled to submit to appalling repression in the happy double think of a people's dictatorship. Democracy, for all its corruptions and contradictions, allows reforms to prevent totally unchecked government. Framers of the American Constitution developed a balance of powers and a Bill of Rights for the people that gov ernment could not easily or legally trample, wrfiich as expected it has continually attempted to do. Most of the 20th century has been spent arguing about, waning over and murdering millions for ideologies that were thought up in the 19th century and earlier. "Marx is as little the originator of socialism and communism as the chairman of General Motors Corporation is the inventor of the automobile," Stefan Possony wrote. Communism is as ancient as democracy, and one form or another of each has been considered if seldom practiced since the beginning of history, ever more complex and consequential as the problems and sprawl of civilization magni fied. Democratic theories were preoccupied with legal rights, the relationships between rulers and ruled, wiiile communism evolv ed around people's relationships with production and capital. Though modem political ideology revolves around vary ing forms of materialism, none has yet developed about mech anics; "Machinery is no more an economic category than the ox, which draws the plow," Marx wrote — he might have added political. 'The way in which machinery is utilized is totally distinct from the machinery itself (Marx), is a view obviously inbetween private economic control and state centrism and forgotten in the rush to sacrifice democracy to promote capitalism. Democratic socialism, if practiced without too much corruption or privilege, could combine the egalitarian values of democracy with the class leveling and civic responsibility of socialism and be as necessary for the United States as it is for the split cells of communism and the Third World in the turbulent wake of the Soviet collapse. Dr. Nguyen Khac Vien, an early member of the Vietnam Communist Party and later a leading critic following its victory after two decades of war against the West, wrote "a pitiless dissection of party degeneration" whiich was also, as Alexander Coxbum said in The Nation, "an eloquent statement of what should be the aims of a world democratic front." Written as a letter wily he was not attending a Party Congress on the eve of the fall of the USSR and published in International Viewpoint, Dr. Vien criticized the failure of communism in Vietnam and its desperate alliance with foreign capital to save itself. Democratic liberties must be defended, as must social justice, he wrote: "It was through a constant 200 year struggle that the populations of the developed capitalist countries were able to establish a regime that we have wrongly qualified as bourgeois democratic Democratic liberties and social rights were tom from the bourgeoisie in struggle and should thus be called popular liberties, if the real meaning of the development is to be under stood. If a world front of capital is being founded, its counter weight, the democratic popular front on a world scale, is also in formation. The moment will come wiien the words capitalism and socialism will no longer have any importance. The demo cratic front will have changed its nature." Dr. Vien concluded: "Freedom of the press, of associ ation, of petition, of demonstration, to strike and of election are the forms of struggle of our own epoch; they are proven means that can lead to profound reforms " After all, as Marx and Engels wrote in their Communist Manifesto: 'The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have the world to win." HOPE L. HARRIS GODFATHER’S BOOKS AND ESPRESSO BAR 1108 Commercial • Astoria, OR 97103 Phone: (503) 325-8143 100 Tenth (Street Astoria, Oregon 97103 (503) 325-3837 LICENSED MASSAGE THERAPIST 503/325-2523
