BROAD TOPIC – Union Soviet Secularist Republic

NAME : HARDIK SOLANKI

SUB TOPICS
 What was the Soviet System ?
 The origins and Evolution of the
soviet state

 Communist Leaders- Mikhail

Gorbachev’s Glasnost and
Perestroika

 The Cold War

 Khrushchev And De-

Stalinization

 Sputnik
 Mikhail Gorbachev
What was the Soviet
system?

O ne of the popular interpretations of the Soviet system by

socialists is that it was a form of state capitalism in which the
bourgeoisie class was replaced with a statist class. Some of the
proponents of this view include Charles Bettelheim, Stephen
Resnick and Richard Wolff, but each with their own slightly
different take. The common version of this view is that the top
officials of the communist party became a new capitalist class
which appropriated surplus value from employees of the state.
Beginning with Bettelheim’s version of this analysis, from his
book Class Struggles in the USSR, he suggests that the
Communist party came to dominate the working class, thereby
becoming a “new” bourgeoisie class. Bettelheim’s analysis,
however, suffers from some problems. In the Soviet system,
there was no private ownership of the means of production,
no real enterprise competition, and no production for profit.
Soviet elites (or nomenklatura) had no drive or even means by
which to accumulate capital. Rising within the ranks of the
Communist Party or government administration was the only
means by which to obtain greater status in the society, and the
only way to do that was to perform well in your position — that
is not to say government officials (apparatchiks) did not enjoy
certain privileges; although elites were at the front of the queue
for consumer goods in times of shortage, only a select few had a
higher standard of living than, say, the average American
middle manager. Furthermore, workers had guaranteed jobs;
they could not be fired as it was against the law, so party
members could not use unemployment as a disciplining device
for labor as is the case under capitalism. And since most basic
needs were met through the provision of public goods, workers
were not dependent on any one elite for subsistence. This
analysis also runs counter to Marxist theory which argues the
bourgeoisie class exerts influence over the political class, and
thereby state policy. In the Soviet system, there was no
bourgeoisie class to offer patronage, and state policy was
determined within the party. Therefore, the description of state
capitalism appears to be inconsistent with what we know about
how the Soviet system functioned.

Given these inconsistencies, Resnick and Wolff’s, in their

book Class Theory and History, make a similar case by
examining the relational structure of appropriation of surplus
value. Workers contribute value above what they needed for
their own subsistence, thereby creating surplus value. If the
Soviet system were a communist class system, workers would
have control over the distribution of the surplus. Since the
Communist elite had control over the surplus, they argue that
this was exploitation. Resnick and Wolff also argue that the
Soviet system had some similar features to capitalism. Labor
was free to move between enterprises. Industrial ministries
were organized similarly to corporations. There was some
competition among enterprises, and profit rates were one
criterion to evaluate performance. However, this appears to be a
dubious attempt to apply the label of capitalism to the Soviet
system. For one, there was no real competition between
enterprises. When an enterprise failed to consistently meet
quota, it did not go bankrupt or out of business. Management
would be punished or replaced, scrutiny would increase, but
nothing like the consequences of competition we see in a
market-based system. When a firm was able to consistently
meet or surpass quota, workers were rewarded with bonuses;
“profits” were otherwise retained earnings. That was the extent
of competition in the Soviet system. Furthermore, Resnick and
Wolff are arbitrarily narrowing the descriptive options of class
relations — slavery, feudalism, communism or socialism, and
capitalism — and exclude the possibility of a hybrid or mixed
system wherein a new exploitative class could arise unaccounted
for in traditional Marxian analysis.

Paul M. Sweezy attempted a more refined argument of a new

class system in his article, a “Post-Revolutionary Society”,
published in Monthly Review back in 1980. Sweezy claimed
that the Soviet system did transform into a statist mode of
production in which the Communist party elite were the new
ruling class, but admitted that the system lacked the key
features of capitalism such as commodity production and
competition. However, it is not clear the party-state elite where
a class, at least not in the way we would define it in Marxist
theory where this argument originates. It is also not clear the
party-state elite appropriated a surplus from workers. Profits
were the first source of investment by enterprises, which were
also taxed for government expenditure. Only a small portion
went towards workers as a bonus for surpassing objectives.
Party-elites had no mechanism by which to appropriate portions
of those profits, or surplus generally in the aggregate.
Furthermore, capital accumulation was not a measure of social
status, nor could it be. Money did not equal power, only
position. And, as noted above, the only way to increase social
status in the Soviet system was to rise up through the ranks of
the party and government positions. It is also telling what the
later generations of Soviet party-elites truly thought of the
system given they did little if nothing to defend it before its
dissolution in 1991. Many party-elites thought they had more to
gain from capitalism. And many of them went on to become the
oligarchs in former Soviet Union countries.

But if the system was not capitalist, was it socialist? The claim
that the system was socialist was made both by Soviet officials
and Western specialists. The reasons they agreed upon were
based on state ownership of the means of production and
central planning. Some socialists argued that the system was
socialist at first, then mutated into a deformed workers’ state by
Stalin and later leaders — this was the position taken by
Trotskyists for example.

Nominally, one might regard the Soviet system as socialistic in

some respects; there was after all social ownership of the means
of production through the state — not the only means of social
ownership possible mind you — which engaged in economic
planning and production for use, not profit. The system had
many of the trappings desirable of a socialist system — the right
to a job, full employment, wide provision of public goods to
meet basic needs, absence of property income, and relatively
low levels of inequality. The non-socialist features, on the other
hand, were substantive departures from the ideal socialist
system. The two central tenets running through all ideals of
socialist transformation is the social ownership of the means of
production, and the democratic control of those means. But
while democratic on paper, workers had little democratic rights
in the Soviet Union. The state was governed by a single party
which was ruled by a select privileged elite that revolved around
the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party. The state was highly hierarchical and
authoritarian, and planning authorities and enterprises were as
well. Civil rights and liberties were extremely limited
throughout the Soviet Union; particularly during the Stalin era.
Given these shortcomings, the description of socialism seems to
be a stretch as its invocation suggests of a system which
embodies both the central tenants of social ownership and
democratic control (which cannot be emphasized enough
particularly in today’s discourse). However, it is also a stretch to
consider it capitalist for the reasons noted above. It is more
persuasive then to characterize the Soviet system as a uniquely
mixed system with both socialist and non-socialist features.

By convention the mixed system of the Soviet Union has been

regarded as ‘state socialism’. But many socialists rightly cringe
at the notion of conceding any invocation of the term socialism
to the Soviet system because it failed to extend democracy so
miserably in both its political and economic spheres —which is
also, at least in part, the motivation of many theorists, especially
those discussed above, to categorize the Soviet system as an
aberrant form of capitalism . Capitalism for its part has
managed to maintain democracy, or a form of it, in the political
sphere, and to a degree in the economic sphere as consumers do
have more choices in products.

The goal of socialism, however, is to extend democracy to

additional spheres of human relations particularly that of
production. In imagining a truly state socialist system, it is
possible to conceive of a democratic state that owns the means
of production, but is internally organized in a participatory,
cooperative fashion that would achieve both central pillars of
social transformation desired by socialists — social ownership
and workplace democracy. Thus any conceit of the label of state
socialism to the Soviet Union suggests socialist systems need
not be democratic first and foremost in the political sphere, but
also for economic and productive relations, and makes it that
much more difficult to rid socialism of its Soviet baggage.
The Origins and Evolution of the
Soviet State
In the Russian Revolution  of 1917, revolutionary Bolsheviks
overthrew the Russian czar and four socialist republics were
established. In 1922, Russia proper joined its far-flung republics to
form Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The first leader of this
Soviet state was the Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin .

The Soviet Union  was supposed to be “a society of true democracy,”

but in many ways it was no less repressive than the czarist
autocracy that preceded it. It was ruled by a single party–
the Communist Party –that demanded the allegiance of every
Russian citizen. After 1924, when the dictator Joseph Stalin  came to
power, the state exercised totalitarian control over the economy,
administering all industrial activity and establishing collective farms.
It also controlled every aspect of political and social life. People who
argued against Stalin’s policies were arrested and sent to labor
camps known as gulags  or executed.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet leaders denounced his brutal

policies but maintained the Communist Party’s power. They focused
in particular on the Cold War  with Western powers, engaging in a
costly and destructive “arms race ” with the United States while
exercising military force to suppress anticommunism and extend its
hegemony in Eastern Europe.

Communist Leaders
Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost and
Perestroika
In March 1985, a longtime Communist Party politician named Mikhail
Gorbachev assumed the leadership of the USSR He inherited a
stagnant economy and a political structure that made reform all but
impossible.

Gorbachev introduced two sets of policies that he hoped would help

the USSR become a more prosperous, productive nation. The first of
these was known as glasnost, or political openness. Glasnost
eliminated traces of Stalinist repression, like the banning of books
and the omnipresent secret police, and gave new freedoms to Soviet
citizens. Political prisoners were released. Newspapers could print
criticisms of the government. For the first time, parties other than the
Communist Party could participate in elections.

The second set of reforms was known as perestroika, or economic

restructuring. The best way to revive the Soviet economy,
Gorbachev thought, was to loosen the government’s grip on it. He
believed that private initiative would lead to innovation, so
individuals and cooperatives were allowed to own businesses for the
first time since the 1920s. Workers were given the right to strike for
better wages and conditions. Gorbachev also encouraged foreign
investment in Soviet enterprises.
However, these reforms were slow to bear fruit. Perestroika had
torpedoed the “command economy” that had kept the Soviet state
afloat, but the market economy took time to mature. (In his farewell
address, Gorbachev summed up the problem: “The old system
collapsed before the new one had time to begin working.”)
Rationing, shortages and endless queuing for scarce goods seemed
to be the only results of Gorbachev’s policies. As a result, people
grew more and more frustrated with his government.

The Cold War

Following the surrender of Nazi Germany  at the end of World War II ,
the uncomfortable wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and
the United States and Great Britain began to crumble.

The Soviet Union by 1948 had installed communist-leaning

governments in Eastern European countries that the USSR had
liberated from Nazi control during the war. The Americans and
British feared the spread of communism into Western Europe and
worldwide.

In 1949, the U.S., Canada and its European allies formed the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO ). The alliance between countries
of the Western bloc was a political show of force against the USSR
and its allies.

In response to NATO, the Soviet Union in 1955 consolidated power

among Eastern bloc countries under a rival alliance called the
Warsaw Pact, setting off the Cold War .

The Cold War power struggle—waged on political, economic and

propaganda fronts between the Eastern and Western blocs—would
persist in various forms until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Khrushchev And De-Stalinization

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev  rose to power. He
became Communist Party secretary in 1953 and premier in 1958.

Khrushchev’s tenure spanned the tensest years of the Cold War. He

instigated the Cuban Missile Crisis  in 1962 by installing nuclear
weapons just 90 miles from Florida’s coast in Cuba.
At home, however, Khrushchev initiated a series of political reforms
that made Soviet society less repressive. During this period, later
known as de-Stalinization, Khrushchev criticized Stalin for arresting
and deporting opponents, took steps to raise living conditions, freed
many political prisoners, loosened artistic censorship, and closed
the Gulag labor camps.

Deteriorating relations between the Soviet Union and neighboring

China and food shortages across the USSR eroded Khrushchev’s
legitimacy in the eyes of the Communist party leadership. Members
of his own political party removed Khrushchev from office in 1964.

Sputnik
The Soviets initiated rocketry and space exploration programs in the
1930s as part of Stalin’s agenda for building an advanced, industrial
economy. Many early projects were tied to the Soviet military and
kept secret, but by the 1950s, space would become another
dramatic arena for competition between dueling world superpowers.

On October 4, 1957, the USSR publicly launched Sputnik 1—the

first-ever artificial satellite—into low Earth orbit. The success of
Sputnik made Americans fear that the U.S. was falling behind its
Cold War rival in technology.

The ensuing “Space Race ” heated up further in 1961 when Soviet

cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.

U.S. President John F. Kennedy  responded to Gagarin’s feat by

making the bold claim that the U.S. would put a man on the moon by
the end of the decade. The U.S. succeeded—on July 20, 1969,
astronaut Neil Armstrong  became the first person to walk on the
moon.

Mikhail Gorbachev
A longtime Communist Party politician, Mikhail Gorbachev came to
power in 1985. He inherited a stagnant economy and a crumbling
political system. He introduced two sets of policies he hoped would
reform the political system and help the USSR become a more
prosperous, productive nation. These policies were called glasnost
and perestroika.
Gorbachev’s glasnost plan called for political openness. It addressed
personal restrictions of the Soviet people. Glasnost eliminated
remaining traces of Stalinist repression, such as the banning of
books (like Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize-winning “Dr. Zhivago ”) and
the much-loathed secret police (though the KGB  wouldn’t fully
dissolve until the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991). Newspapers
could criticize the government, and parties other than the
Communist Party could participate in elections.

Perestroika was Gorbachev’s plan for economic restructuring. Under

perestroika, the Soviet Union began to move toward a hybrid
communist-capitalist system, much like modern China. The policy-
making committee of the Communist Party, called the Politburo,
would still control the direction of the economy. Yet the government
would allow market forces to dictate some production and
development decisions.