The Results of Gorbachev's Capitulation: on the right,
Glasnost, on the left Perestroika.
This Spring-Summer on the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the end of the Eastern European socialist states we will often read in the Big Business press that it was dire economic need that forced the hand of the Soviet leadership in its abandonment of internationalist foreign and domestic policy. But this is a Myth created by the corporate media. Nations much harder pressed and economically strapped than the Soviet Union of the 1980s (Cuba, Vietnam & etc) have endured while maintaining socialist principles and policies. Soviet society was not in favor of an abandonment of their socialist system in 1985. The Gorbachev elite at the top created the retreat from socialism - rather than an internal foment from below sparking the counter-revolution .
The betrayal of socialism of twenty years ago was the consequence of a "Revolution from Above"*) constructed by a small elite circle of politicians headed by Mikhail Gorbachev. There was no public participation in this decision in the USSR. Gorbachev declared that the nations of the Warsaw Pact would no longer receive any assistance from the USSR. In his UN Speech of Dec. 1988 Gorbachev spoke of the "binding nature of the freedom of choice" of system for the people of every country, socialist and and capitalist. This phraseology put the most disingenuous construction on what he was actually doing to Eastern Europe in political, ideological and economic terms. Gorbachev in the same year gave "freedom of choice" to the national liberation movements around the world, permitting national and socialist Resistance fighters to
sink or swim...
The transformation of the Soviet political system and of Soviet foreign policy resulted from an elite accord between capitulationist party intellectuals and a pro-capitalist leader. While the top political strata of the Communist Party was sharply divided, the revisionist section of it held the ace card: general secretary Gorbachev in the leadership. In consequence, decisions from the highest layer of the political elite dissolved solidarity with socialist friends afar and near at hand.
Has Russia fared better under capitalism? Anti-Soviet academics such as Stephen Cohen insist that with the collapse of soviet socialism the people of the nation fell into a "perilous economic abyss" that has shortened life expectancy and created a new financial oligarchy. On the international front an unchecked USA has made wars in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and most recently by proxy in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. Without the assistance of Soviet ideological and financial solidarity, the newly emerging and small states have been forced to adopt the prescriptions of the neo-liberals and globalisation. M S Gorbachev is not a hero in his own Russia - he is regularly polled the nation's most unpopular politician by the people he betrayed.
* See: David Kotz (with Fred Weir), Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System
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