No More Learning

? COMMUNISM IN WONDERLAND 71
like a catechism. Its critique of capitalism had no vibrancy or mean- ing for those who lived in a noncapitalist society. Instead, most intel- lectuals found excitement in the forbidden fruit of Western bourgeois ideology. In looking to the West, they were not interested in broadening the ideological spectrum, a desirable goal, but in replacing the dominant view with a rightist anticommunist ortho- doxy. They were not for an end to ideology but for replacing one ideology with another. Without hesitation, they added their voices to the chorus singing the glories of the free-market paradise.
Heavily subsidized by Western sources, the right-wing intelli- gentsia produced publications like Moscow News and Argumentyi Fakti which put out a virulently pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist mes- sage. One such publication, Literaturnaya Gazeta (March 1990), hailed Reagan and Bush as "statesmen" and "the architects of peace. " It questioned the need for a Ministry of Culture in the USSR, even one that was now headed by an anticommunist: "There is no such ministry in the United States and yet it seems that there is nothing wrong with American culture. " Who said Russians don't have a sense of humor?
With the decline of communist power in Eastern Europe, the worst political scum began to float to the surface, Nazi sympathizers and hate groups of all sorts, though they were not the only purvey- ors of bigotry. In 1990, none other than Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa declared that "a gang of Jews had gotten hold of the trough and is bent on destroying us. " Later on he maintained that the com- ment did not apply to all Jews but only those "who are looking out for themselves while giving not a damn about anyone else" (Nation, 9/10/90). The following year, in Poland's post-communist presiden- tial election, various candidates (including Walesa) outdid each other in their anti-Semitic allusions. In 1996, at a national ceremony, Solidarity chief Zygmunt Wrzodak resorted to anti-Semitic vituper- ation while railing against the previous communist regime (New
YorkTimes, 7/9/96).
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Romanticizing Capitalism
In 1990, in Washington, D. C. , the Hungarian ambassador held a press conference to announce that his country was discarding its socialist system because it did not work When I asked why it did not work, he said, "I dont know. " Here was someone who confessed that he had no understanding of the deficiencies of his country's socio- economic process, even though he was one of those in charge of that process. Leaders who talk only to each other are soon out of touch with reality.
The policymakers of these communist states showed a surpris- ingly un-Marxist understanding of the problems they faced. There were denunciations and admonitions aplenty, but little systemic analysis of why and how things had come to such an impasse. Instead, there was much admiration for what was taken to be Western capitalist know-how and remarkably little understanding of the uglier side of capitalism and how it impacted upon the world.
In the USSR, glasnost (the use of critical debate to invite innova- tion and reform) opened Soviet media to Western penetration, and accelerated the very disaffection it was intended to rectify. Leaders in Poland and Hungary, and eventually the Soviet Union and the other European communist nations, decided to open their economies to Western investment during the late 1980s. It was anticipated that state ownership would exist on equal terms with cooperatives, for- eign investors, and domestic private entrepreneurs ( Washington Post, 4/17/89). In fact, the whole state economy was put at risk and even- tually undermined. Communist leaders had even less understanding of the capitalist system than of their own.
Most people living under socialism had little understanding of cap- italism in practice. Workers interviewed in Poland believed that if their factory were to be closed down in the transition to the free market, "the state will find us some other work" {New Yorker, 11/13/89). They thought they would have it both ways. In the Soviet Union, many who
? COMMUNISM IN WONDERLAND 73
argued for privatization also expected the government to continue providing them with collective benefits and subsidies. One skeptical farmer got it right: "Some people want to be capitalists for themselves, but expect socialism to keep serving them" ( Guardian, 10/23/91).
Reality sometimes hit home. In 1990, during the glasnost period, when the Soviet government announced that the price of newsprint would be raised 300 percent to make it commensurate with its actual cost, the new procapitalist publications complained bitterly. They were angry that state socialism would no longer subsidize their denunciations of state socialism. They were being subjected to the same free-market realities they so enthusiastically advocated for everyone else, and they did not like it.
Not everyone romanticized capitalism. Many of the Soviet and Eastern European e? migre? s who had migrated to the United States during the 1970s and 1980s complained about this country's poor social services, crime, harsh work conditions, lack of communitarian spirit, vulgar electoral campaigns, inferior educational standards, and the astonishing ignorance that Americans had about history.
They discovered they could no longer leave their jobs during the day to go shopping, that their employers provided no company doc- tor when they fell ill on the job, that they were subject to severe rep- rimands when tardy, that they could not walk the streets and parks late at night without fear, that they might not be able to afford med- ical services for their family or college tuition for their children, and that they had no guarantee of a job and might experience unem- ployment at any time.
Among those who never emigrated were some who did not har- bor illusions about capitalism. In fact, numerous workers, peasants, and elderly were fearful of the changes ahead and not entirely sold on the free-market mythology. A 1989 survey in Czechoslovakia found that 47 percent wanted their economy to remain state controlled, while 43 percent wanted a mixed economy, and only 3 percent said they favored capitalism (New York Times, 12/1/89). In May 1991, a
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survey of Russians by a U. S. polling organization found that 54 per- cent chose some form of socialism and only 20 percent wanted a free-market economy such as in the United States or Germany. Another 27 percent elected for "a modified form of capitalism as found in Sweden" (Monthly Review, 12/94).
Still, substantial numbers, especially among intellectuals and youths--the two groups who know everything--opted for the free- market paradise, without the faintest notion of its social costs. Against the inflated imagination, reality is a poor thing. Against the glittering image of the West s cornucopia, the routinized, scarcity- ridden, and often exasperating experiences of communist society did not have a chance.
It seems communism created a dialectical dynamic that under- mined itself. It took semi-feudal, devastated, underdeveloped coun- tries and successfully industrialized them, bringing a better life for most. But this very process of modernization and uplift also created expectations that could not be fulfilled. Many expected to keep all the securities of socialism, overlaid with capitalist consumerism. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, they were in for some painful surprises.
One reason siege socialism could not make the transition to con- sumer socialism is that the state of siege was never lifted. As noted in the previous chapter, the very real internal deficiencies within com- munist systems were exacerbated by unrelenting external attacks and threats from the Western powers. Born into a powerfully hostile cap- italist world, communist nations suffered through wars, invasions, and an arms race that exhausted their productive capacities and retarded their development. The decision by Soviet leaders to achieve military parity with the United States--while working from a much smaller industrial base--placed a serious strain on the entire Soviet economy.
The very siege socialism that allowed the USSR to survive made it difficult for it to thrive. Perestroika (the restructuring of socio-
? COMMUNISM IN WONDERLAND 75
economic practices in order to improve performance) was intended to open and revitalize production. Instead it led to the unraveling of the entire state socialist fabric. Thus the pluralistic media that were to replace the communist monopoly media eventually devolved into a procapitalist ideological monopoly. The same thing happened to other socialist institutions. The intent was to use a shot of capitalism to bolster socialism; the reality was that socialism was used to subsi- dize and build an unforgiving capitalism.
Pressed hard throughout its history by global capitalism s power- ful financial, economic, and military forces, state socialism endured a perpetually tenuous existence, only to be swept away when the floodgates were opened to the West.
? CHAPTER 5
STALIN'S FINGERS
In 1989-1991, remarkable transformations swept across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Communist governments were over- thrown, large portions of their publicly owned economies were dis- mantled and handed over to private owners at garage sale prices. And one-party rule was replaced with multi-party parliamentary systems. For Western leaders, who had tirelessly pursued the rollback of communism, it was a dream come true.
If the overthrow of communism was a victory for democracy, as some claimed, it was even more a victory for free-market capitalism and conservative anticommunism. Some of the credit should go to the CIA and other cold war agencies, along with the National Endowment for Democracy, the AFL-CIO, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and various right-wing groups, all of whom funded free-market, anticommunist political organizations and publications throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in what swiftly became the best financed chain of "revolutions" in history.
76
? STALIN'S FINGERS 77
The upheavals occurred with remarkably little violence. As Lech Walesa boasted in November 1989, Polish Solidarity overthrew the communist government without breaking a single window. This says at least as much about the government that was overthrown as about the rebels. Rather than acting as might U. S. -supported rulers in El Salvador, Colombia, Zaire, or Indonesia--with death-squad terror- ism and mass repression--the communists relinquished power almost without firing a shot. The relatively peaceful transition does not fit our image of unscrupulous totalitarians who stop at nothing to maintain power over captive populations. Why didn't the ruthless Reds act more ruthlessly? 1
How Many Victims?
We have heard much about the ruthless Reds, beginning with the reign of terror and repression perpetrated during the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin (1929-1953). Estimates of those who perished under Stalins rule--based principally on speculations by writers who never reveal how they arrive at such figures--vary wildly. Thus, Roy Medvedev puts Stalin's victims at 5 to 7 million; Robert Conquest decided on 7 to 8 million; Olga Shatunovskaia claims 19. 8 million just for the 1935-40 period; Stephen Cohen says 9 million by 1939, with 3 million executed or dying from mistreatment during the 1936-39 period; and Arthur Koestler tells us it was 20 to 25 million. More recently, William Rusher, of the Claremont Institute, refers to the " 100 million people wantonly murdered by Communist dictators since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917" (Oakland Tribune, 1/22/96) and Richard Lourie blames the Stalin era for "the slaughter of mil- lions" (New York Times, 8/4/96).
1 During the mid-1980s, the police in communist Poland shot forty-four demon- strators in Gdansk and other cities. Ten former police and army officers were put on trial in 1996 for these killings. In Rumania, there reportedly were scores of fatalities in the disturbances immediately preceeding the overthrow of Ceaucescu, after which Ceaucescu and his wife were summarily executed without trial. The killings in Poland and Rumania are the sum total of fatalities, as far as I know.
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Unburdened by any documentation, these "estimates" invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR's single largest enterprise.
In the absence of reliable evidence, we are fed anecdotes, such as the story Winston Churchill tells of the time he asked Stalin how many people died in the famine. According to Churchill, the Soviet leader responded by raising both his hands, a gesture that may have signified an unwillingness to broach the subject. But since Stalin happened to have five fingers on each hand, Churchill concluded-- without benefit of a clarifying follow-up question--that Stalin was confessing to ten million victims. Would the head of one state (espe- cially the secretive Stalin) casually proffer such an admission to the head of another? To this day, Western writers treat this woolly tale as an ironclad confession of mass atrocities. 2
What we do know of Stalin's purges is that many victims were Communist party officials, managers, military officers, and other strategically situated individuals whom the dictator saw fit to incar- cerate or liquidate. In addition, whole catagories of people whom Stalin considered of unreliable loyalty--Cossacks, Crimean Tarters, and ethnic Germans--were selected for internal deportation. Though they never saw the inside of a prison or labor camp, they were sub- jected to noncustodial resettlement in Central Asia and Siberia.
To be sure, crimes of state were committed in communist coun- tries and many political prisoners were unjustly interned and even murdered. But the inflated numbers offered by cold-war scholars
2 Stalin "confided the figure of 10 million to Winston Churchill": Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1973), 463n. No doubt, the famines that occurred during the years of Western invasion, counterrevolutionary intervention, White Guard civil war, and landowner resistance to collectivization took many victims.
? STALIN'S FINGERS 79
serve neither historical truth nor the cause of justice but merely help to reinforce a knee-jerk fear and loathing of those terrible Reds.
In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to pre- viously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well- documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. 3 At about that time, there began a purge of the purgers, including many intelligence and secret police (NKVD) officials and members of the judiciary and other investigative committees, who were suddenly held responsible for the excesses of the terror despite their protestations of fidelity to the regime. 4
Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. 5 Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York
Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as "the largest system of death camps in modern history. "
Almost a million gulag prisoners were released during World War II to serve in the military. The archives reveal that more than half of all gulag deaths for the 1934-53 period occurred during the war years (1941-45), mostly from malnutrition, when severe privation was the
3 By way of comparison, in 1995, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the United States there were 1. 6 million in prison, three million on probation, and 700,000 on parole, for a total of 5. 3 million under correctional supervision (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/1/96), Some millions of others have served time but are no longer connected to the custodial system in any way.
4 J. Arch Getty, Gabor Rittersporn, and Victor Zemskov, "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence," American Historical Review, 98 (October 1993) 1017-1049.
5 Getty, et al. , "Victims of the Soviet Penal System . . "
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common lot of the entire Soviet population. (Some 22 million Soviet citizens perished in the war. ) In 1944, for instance, the labor-camp death rate was 92 per 1000. By 1953, with the postwar recovery, camp deaths had declined to 3 per 1000. 6
Should all gulag inmates be considered innocent victims of Red repression? Contrary to what we have been led to believe, those arrested for political crimes ("counterrevolutionary offenses") num- bered from 12 to 33 percent of the prison population, varying from year to year. The vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpo- litical offenses: murder, assault, theft, banditry, smuggling, swin- dling, and other violations punishable in any society. 7
Total executions from 1921 to 1953, a thirty-three year span inclu- sive, were 799,455. No breakdown of this figure was provided by the researchers. It includes those who were guilty of nonpolitical capital crimes, as well as those who collaborated in the Western capitalist invasion and subsequent White Guard Army atrocities. It also includes some of the considerable numbers who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and probably German SS prisoners. In any case, the killings of political opponents were not in the mil- lions or tens of millions--which is not to say that the actual number was either inconsequential or justifiable.
The three historians who studied the heretofore secret gulag records concluded that the number of victims were far less than usu- ally claimed in the West. This finding is ridiculed by anticommunist liberal Adam Hochschild, who prefers to repeat Churchills story about Stalin's fingers (New York Times, 5/8/96). Like many others, Hochschild has no trouble accepting undocumented speculations about the gulag but much difficulty accepting the documented fig- ures drawn from NKVD archives.
6 Ibid. 7 ibid.
? STALIN'S FINGERS 81
Where Did the Gulag Go?
Some Russian anticommunist writers such as Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, and many U. S. anticommunist liberals, maintain that the gulag existed right down to the last days of communism. 8 If so, where did it disappear to? After Stalins death in 1953, more than half of the gulag inmates were freed, according to the study of the NKVD files previously cited. But if so many others remained incarcerated, why have they not materialized? When the communist states were over- thrown, where were the half-starved hordes pouring out of the internment camps with their tales of travail?
One of the last remaining Soviet labor camps, Perm 35, was vis- ited in 1989 by Republican congressmen and again in 1990 by French journalists (see Washington Post, 11/28/89 and National Geographic, 3/90, respectively). Both parties found only a few dozen prisoners, some of whom were identified as outright spies. Others were "refuseniks" who had been denied the right to emigrate. Prisoners worked eight hours a day, six days a week, for 250 rubles ($40) a month.
What of the supposedly vast numbers of political prisoners said to exist in the other "communist totalitarian police states" of Eastern Europe? Why no evidence of their mass release in the postcommu- nist era? And where are the mass of political prisoners in Cuba? Asked about this, Professor Alberto Prieto of the University of Havana pointed out that even a recent State Department report on human rights showed hundreds of people being tortured, killed, or
8 The term "gulag" was incorporated into the English language in part because constant references were made to its presumed continued existence. A senior fellow at the liberal-oriented Institute for Policy Studies, Robert Borsage, sent me a note in December 1982, emphatically stating in part that "the gulag exists" When I gave talks at college campuses during the 1980s about President Reagan's domestic spending policies, I repeatedly encountered faculty members who regardless of the topic under discussion insisted that I also talk about the gulag which, they said, still contained many millions of victims. My refusal to genuflect to that orthodoxy upset a number of them.
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"disappeared" in almost all the Latin American countries, but men- tions only six alleged political prisoners in reference to Cuba (People's
Weekly World, 2/26/94).
If there were mass atrocities right down to the last days of com-
munism, why did not the newly installed anticommunist regimes seize the opportunity to bring erstwhile communist rulers to justice? Why no Nuremberg-style public trials documenting widespread atrocities? Why were not hundreds of party leaders and security offi- cials and thousands of camp guards rounded up and tried for the millions they supposedly exterminated? The best the West Germans could do was charge East German leader Erich Honecker, several other officials, and seven border guards with shooting people who tried to escape over the Berlin Wall, a serious charge but hardly indicative of a gulag.
Authorities in the Western capitalist Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) did contrive a charge of "treason" against persons who served as officials, military officers, soldiers, judges, attorneys, and others of the now-defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR), a sovereign nation that once had full standing in the United Nations, and most of whose citizens had never been subjects of the FRG. As of 1996, more than three hundred "treason" cases had been brought to trial, including a former GDR intelligence chief, a defense minister, and six generals, all indicted for carrying out what were their legal duties under the constitution and laws of the GDR, in some instances fight- ing fascism and CIA sabotage. Many of the defendants were eventu- ally acquitted but a number were sentenced to prison. What we witness here is the Nuremberg trials in reverse: Reds put on trial for their anti-fascist efforts by West German friendly-to-fascism prose- cutors, using a retroactive application of FRG penal law for GDR cit- izens. As of the beginning of 1997, several thousand more trials were expected. 9
9 The vice-president of the highest court in the GDR, was a man named Reinwarth, who had been put in a concentration camp by the Nazis during the war and who
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In 1995, Miroslav Stephan, the former secretary of the Prague Communist party, was sentenced to two and a half years for order- ing Czech police to use tear gas and water cannons against demon- strators in 1988. Is this the best example of bloodthirsty Red oppression that the capitalist restorationists in Czechoslovakia could find? An action that does not even qualify as a crime in most Western nations?
In 1996 in Poland, twelve elderly Stalin-era political policemen were sentenced to prison for having beaten and mistreated prison- ers--over fiftyyears earlier--during the communist takeover after World War II (San Francisco Chronicle, 3/9/96). Again one might wonder why post-communist leaders seeking to bring the commu- nist tyrants to justice could find nothing more serious to prosecute than a police assault case from a half-century before.
Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prison- ers, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other commu- nist states. In 1989, when the millionaire playwright Vaclav Havel became president of Czechoslovakia, he granted amnesty to about two-thirds of the country's prison population, which numbered not in the millions but in the thousands.
Havel assumed that most of those incarcerated under communism were victims of political repression and therefore deserved release. He and his associates were dismayed to discover that a good number were experienced crimi-
was the presiding judge in trials that convicted several CIA agents for sabotage. He was sentenced in 1996 to three-and-a-half years. Helene Heymann, who had been imprisoned during the Hitler regime for her anti-Nazi activities, later was a judge in the GDR, where she presided over anti-sabotage trials. She was put on trial in
1996. When her conviction was read out, it was pointed out by the judge that an additional factor against her was that she was trained by a Jewish lawyer who had been a defense attorney for the Communists and Social Democrats. Also put on trial were GDR soldiers who served as border guards. More than twenty GDR soldiers were shot to death from the Western side in various incidents that went unreported in the Western press: Klaus Fiske, "Witchhunt Trials of East German Leaders Continue," Peoples Weekly World, 10/19/96. These trials are in direct violation of the FRG/GDR Unification Treaty, which states that any criminal prosecution of acts undertaken in the GDR is to be done in accordance with GDR laws operative at the time.
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nais who lost no time in resuming their unsavory pursuits (New York Times, 12/18/91).
Memories of Maldevelopment
In chapter two I discussed the role of popular revolution in advancing the condition of humankind. That analysis would apply as well to communist revolutions and is worth reiterating in the present context. We hear a great deal about the crimes of communism but almost nothing about its achievements. The communist govern- ments inherited societies burdened with an age-old legacy of eco- nomic exploitation and maldevelopment. Much of precommunist Eastern Europe, as with prerevolutionary Russia and China, was in effect a Third World region with widespread poverty and almost nonexistent capital formation. Most rural transportation was still by horse and wagon.
The devastation of World War II added another heavy layer of misery upon the region, reducing hundreds of villages and many cities to rubble. It was the communists and their allies who rebuilt these societies. While denounced in the U. S. press for leaving their economies in bad shape, in fact, the Reds left the economy of Eastern Europe in far better condition than they found it.
The same was true of China. Henry Rosemont, Jr. notes that when the communists liberated Shanghai from the U. S. -supported reac- tionary Kuomintang regime in 1949, about 20 percent of that city's population, an estimated 1. 2 million, were drug addicts. Every morning there were special street crews "whose sole task was to gather up the corpses of the children, adults, and the elderly who had been murdered during the night, or had been abandoned, and died of disease, cold, and/or starvation" (Z Magazine, October 1995).
During the years of Stalins reign, the Soviet nation made dra- matic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the
? STALIN'S FINGERS 85
Stalinist era is discussed. To say that "socialism doesn't work" is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism cre- ated a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, for- eign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dra- matic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.
State socialism transformed desperately poor countries into mod- ernized societies in which everyone had enough food, clothing, and shelter; where elderly people had secure pensions; and where all chil- dren (and many adults) went to school and no one was denied med- ical attention. Some of us from poor families who carry around the hidden injuries of class are much impressed by these achievements and are unwilling to dismiss them as merely "economistic. "
But what of the democratic rights that these peoples were denied? In fact, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, these countries had known little political democracy in the days before communism. Russia was a czarist autocracy, Poland a rightist dictatorship with concentration camps of its own, Albania an Italian fascist protec- torate as early as 1927, Cuba a U. S. -sponsored dictatorship. Lithuania, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria were outright fascist regimes allied with Nazi Germany in World War II.
Then there were the distorting effects that unremitting capitalist encirclement had upon the building of socialism. Throughout its entire seventy-three-year history of counterrevolutionary invasion, civil war, forced industrialization, Stalinist purges and deportations, Nazi conquest, cold war, and nuclear arms race, the Soviet Union did not know one day of peaceful development. In the attempt to main- tain military parity with the United States, the Soviets took on crush- ing defense costs that seriously depleted their civilian economy. In addition, they faced monetary boycott, trade discrimination, and technological embargo from the West. The people who lived under
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communism endured chronic shortages, long lines, poor quality goods and services, and many other problems. They wanted a better life, and who could blame them? Without capitalist encirclement, they would have had a better chance of solving more of their inter- nal problems.
All this is not to deny the very real deficiencies of the communist systems. Here I want to point out that much of the credit for the deformation and overthrow of communism should go to the Western forces that tirelessly dedicated themselves to that task, using every possible means of political, economic, military, and diplomatic aggression to achieve a success that will continue to cost the people of the world dearly.
? CHAPTER 6
THE FREE-MARKET PARADISE GOES EAST (I)
Capitalist restoration in the former communist countries has taken different forms. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, it involved the overthrow of communist governments. In China, it pro- ceeded within the framework of a communist system--as seems to be happening in Vietnam, and perhaps will happen eventually in North Korea and Cuba. While the Chinese government continues under a nominally communist leadership, the process of private cap- ital penetration goes on more or less unhindered.
Suppression of the Left
The anticommunists who took power in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989-91 set about to impose bourgeois dominance over political and cultural life, purging communists from govern- ment, the media, universities, professions, and courts. While pre- senting themselves as democratic reformers, they soon grew impatient with the way democratic forms of popular resistance lim-
87
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ited their efforts to install an unrestrained free-market capitalism. In Russia, associates of President Boris Yeltsin talked of the "dan- gers of democracy" and complained that "most representative bod- ies have become a hindrance to our [market] reforms. " (Nation, 12/2/91 and 5/4/92). Apparently, the free market, said by "reformers" to be the very foundation of political democracy, could not be intro- duced through democratic means. In 1992, the presidents of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Russia demanded that their parliaments be sus- pended and they be allowed to rule by presidential decree, with repressive measures against "hardliners" and "holdovers" who resisted the free-market "reforms. " Their goal was not power to the
people but profits to the privileged.
This process of democratization-via-suppression began even before the actual overthrow of communism. In 1991, Soviet presi- dent Mikhail Gorbachev, prodded by Russian president Yeltsin, announced that the Communist party of the USSR no longer had legal status. The partys membership funds and buildings were con- fiscated. Workers were prohibited from engaging in any kind of political activities in the workplace. Six leftist newspapers were sup- pressed, while all other publications, many of them openly reac- tionary, enjoyed uninterrupted distribution. The U. S. media, and even many on the U. S. Left, hailed these acts of suppression as "mov- ing ahead with democratic reforms. "
Gorbachev then demanded that the Soviet Congress abolish itself. It had remained too resistant to change. Actually the Congress was not opposed to democratic debate and multi-party elections; these were already in practice. It resisted an unbridled free-market capital- ism, and for that reason would have to go. Gorbachev repeatedly cut off the microphones during debate and threatened singlehandedly to abolish the Congress by emergency decree. He forced a vote three times until he got the desired abolition. These strong-arm methods
were reported in the U. S. press without critical comment.
What gave Yeltsin and Gorbachev the excuse to pursue this repres-
? THE FREE-MARKET PARADISE GOES EAST (II) 89
sive course was the curious incident of August 1991, when a nervous group of leaders, mouthing vague phrases about the deterioration of life in the Soviet Union, attempted an oddly orchestrated "coup" against the Gorbachev government, one that flopped before it ever got off the ground. Weeks later, the Washington Post (9/26/91) noted happily that the defeat of the coup was a triumph for the Soviet mon- eyed class. Among the coup s militant opponents were private entre- preneurs and thousands of members of the Russian stock exchange, who routinely made twenty times the average wage of ordinary Soviets. They headed onto "the streets of Moscow to defend their right to wheel and deal. The coup collapsed, democracy tri- umphed. . . . Private businessmen contributed more than 15 million rubles to buy food and equipment for the defenders. " One broker was struck by how few workers responded to Yeltsin s call to defend democracy.
The boldness of this investor class in the face of an armed coup might have another explanation. A socialist critic of communism, Boris Kagarlitsky argued, "In fact, there was no coup at all. " The sol- diers were unarmed and confused, the tanks called out were undi- rected, "and the leaders of the so-called coup never even seriously tried to take power. " The real coup, says Kagarlitsky, came in the aftermath when Boris Yeltsin used the incident to exceed his consti- tutional powers and dismantle the Soviet Union itself, absorbing all its powers into his own Russian Republic. While claiming to be undoing the "old regime," Yeltsin overthrew the new democratic Soviet government of 1989-1991.
In late 1993, facing strong popular resistance to his harsh free- market policies, Yeltsin went further. He forcibly disbanded the Russian parliament and every other elected representative body in the country, including municipal and regional councils. He abol- ished Russia's Constitutional Court and launched an armed attack upon the parliamentary building, killing an estimated two thousand resisters and demonstrators. Thousands more were jailed without
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charges or a trial, and hundreds of elected officials were placed under investigation.
Yeltsin banned labor unions from all political activities, sup- pressed dozens of publications, exercised monopoly control over all broadcast media, and permanently outlawed fifteen political parties. He unilaterally scrapped the constitution and presented the public with a new one that gave the president nearly absolute power over policy while reducing the democratically elected parliament to vir- tual impotence. 1 For these crimes he was hailed as a defender of democracy by U. S. leaders and media. What they most liked about Yeltsin was that he "never wavered in his support for privatization" (San Franicsco Chronicle, 7/6/94). 2
Yeltsin, the "democrat," twice suspended publication of the Communist party newspaper Pravda. He charged it exorbitant rent for the use of its own facilities. Then in March 1992, he confiscated the paper s twelve-story building and its press and turned full own- ership over to Russiskaye Gazetay a government (pro-Yeltsin) news- paper.
Yeltsins "elite" Omon troops repeatedly attacked leftist demon- strators and pickets in Moscow and other Russian cities. Parliamentary deputy Andrei Aidzerdzis, an Independent, and deputy Valentin Martemyanov, a Communist, who both vigorously opposed the Yeltsin government, were victims of political assassina- tion. In 1994, journalist Dmitri Kholodov, who was probing corrup- tion in high places, also was assassinated.
In 1996, Yeltsin won reelection as president, beating out a serious challenge from a communist rival. His campaign was assisted by
1 The new constitution was seemingly approved in a December 1993 referendum. However, a commission appointed by Yeltsin himself found that only 46 percent of eligible voters had participated, rather than the 50 percent required to ratify a constitution (Los Angeles Times, 6/3/94). Little note has been taken of the fact that Yeltsin was ruling under an illegal constitution.
2 For a more detailed account of the Yeltsin repression and the whitewash it received in the U. S. media, see "Yeltsin's Coup and the Media's Alchemy," in Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996).
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teams of U. S. electoral advisors, who used sophisticated polling tech- niques and focus groups. 3 Yeltsin also benefited from multi-million dollar donations from U. S. sources and a $10 billion aid package from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Equally important for victory was the crooked counting of ballots (as curso- rily reported in one ABC late evening news story in July 1996).
Yeltsin exercised monopoly control over Russia's television net- works, enjoying campaign coverage that amounted to nonstop pro- motionals. In contrast, opposition candidates were reduced to nonpersons, given only fleeting exposure, if that. Yeltsins reelection was hailed in the West as a victory for democracy; in fact, it was a vic- tory for private capital and monopoly media, which is not synony- mous with democracy, though often treated as such by U. S. leaders and opinion makers.
Yeltsins commitment is to captialism not democracy. In March 1996, several months before the election, when polls showed him trailing the Communist candidate, Gennadi Zyuganov, Yeltsin
ordered decrees drawn up "that would have canceled the election, closed down parliament and banned the Communist Party" (New York Times, 7/2/96). But he was disuaded by advisors who feared the measures might incite too much resistance. Though he decided not to call off the election, "Yeltsin was never committed to turning over the government to a Communist if he lost" (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/26/96).
3 These U. S. political consultants operated in strict secrecy lest they be seen as interfering in Russian affairs--which indeed they were. They advised Yeltsin against making extended speeches and urged more sound bites and photo opportunities. They pointed to issues and images he could exploit and ones he should avoid. Political scientist Larry Sabato, who long opposed the involvement of U. S. consultants in foreign elections, observed that Americans can be stripped of their citizenship for voting in a foreign election. "Why then should it be acceptable to influence millions of votes in a foreign election? " I would add that no foreigner is allowed to contribute money to U. S. candidates or work on their campaign staffs. But U. S. leaders can send large sums and secret teams of consul- tants to manipulate and sway foreign elections. Just another example of the double standard under which U. S. policy operates.
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During the 1996 campaign, Yeltsin and his associates repeatedly announced that a communist victory would bring "civil war. " In effect, they were voicing their willingness to discard democracy and resort to force and violence if the election did not go their way. Nor was it taken as an idle threat. At one point surveys showed that "about half the population believed that civil war would result if the Communists won" (Sacramento Bee, 7/9/96).
Through all of this Yeltsin received vigorous support from the White House and the U. S. media. An editorial in the Nation (6/17/96) asked: What if a popularly elected communist president in Russia had pursued Yeltsins harsh policies of privatization, plunging his country into poverty, turning over most of its richest assets to a small segment of previous communist officials, suppressing dissi- dent elements, using tanks to disband a popularly elected parliament that opposed his policies, re-writing the constitution to give himself almost dictatorial power, and doing all the other things Yeltsin has done? Would U. S. leaders enthusiastically devote themselves to the re-election of this "communist" president and remain all but silent about his transgressions?
The question is posed rhetorically; the Nation editorial presumes that the answer is no. In fact, I would respond: Yes, of course. U. S. leaders would have no trouble supporting this "communist" presi- dent, for he would be communist in name only. In actual deed he would be a devoted agent of capitalist restoration. One need only look at how successive administrations in Washington have cultivated friendly relations with the present communist leaders in China, over- looking and even explaining away their transgressions. As Chinas leaders open their country to private investment and growing eco- nomic inequality, they offer up a dispossessed labor force ready to work double-digit hours for subsistence pay--at enormous profit for the multinationals. U. S. politico-economic leaders know what they are doing, even if some editorial writers in this country do not. Their eye is on the money, not the color of the vessel it comes in.
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Since the overthrow of communism, free-market right-wing forces in the various Eastern European countries enjoyed significant financial and organizational assistance from U. S. -financed agencies, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the AFL-CIO s Free Trade Union Institute (a group intimately linked to the CIA), and the Free Congress Foundation, an organization with an anticommunist and conservative religious ideology. 4
Communists and other Marxists endured political repression throughout Eastern Europe. In East Germany, the Party of Demo- cratic Socialism had its property and offices, paid for by party mem- bers, seized in an attempt to bankrupt it. In Latvia, the communist activist Alfreds Rubies, who protested the inequities of free-market "reform," has been kept in prison for years without benefit of trial In Lithuania, communist leaders were tortured and then imprisoned for long durations.