Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow, and a stance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is."
member of the coordinating committee of the Democratic
In this situation, Lenin put forward pro-
Platform Inside the CPSU. He joined the CPSU in 1987. He is a posals that now seem prophetic: "the strictest rules must be introduced on the prominent figure in the preparatory committees for a new use of the national language in the non-
Socialist Party. The following interview was given in Paris on
Russian republics of our unionA
April 5 to Salah Jaber and Gerry Foley.
detailed code will be required, and only the nationals living in the republic in question can draw it up at all successfully.
And then we cannot be sure in advance that as a result of this work we shall not take a step backward at our next Congress of Soviets, i.e. retain the union of Soviet socialist republics only for military and diplomatic affairs, and all in other respects restore full independence to the individual People's Commissariats."
Need to reestablish national units in the army
The only possible way today to maintain the USSR on an internationalist basis is to reshape it in the sense indicated by
Lenin, including reestablishing the national units that made up the Soviet army until their dissolution by Stalin in
1938 into an ethnically mixed and thus
Russian speaking and Russian dominated army. What has happened after March 11 in Lithuania shows the importance of this issue for real national sovereignty.
Unfortunately the option that is gaining ground in the Soviet Union today is not the internationalist one but a more narrow spirited nationalism such as that of the
Sajudis leaders who have not even taken the trouble to coordinate their actions with that of the other Baltic states, not to speak of the other oppressed nationalities in the union, or with those of the Russian anti-bureaucratic opposition.
But the fundamental reason for all of this is the weakness of real internationalism in Russia itself, and the absence from the scene of a powerful independent workers movement capable of embodying such internationalism. The fundamental reason is that it is not the Leninists who are in command in Moscow but the
"Great-Russian chauvinist, this rascal and tyrant such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is."*
International Viewpoint #183 • April 23, 1990
AN you describe the origins of your organization? Our groups began to work on a legal basis in 1987. The first name for the Soviet left groups was the Federation of Socialist Clubs. These were small groups, one of the main ones being syndicalists. It had 30 to 40 members in Moscow and some 300-400 throughout the Soviet Union. As a result of its last congress on March 25, another group called the Socialist Initiative, led by Boris Kagarlitsky, Vitaly Ponomarev, who is a specialist on the Asian Republics, Yefim Ostrovsky, one of the leaders of our work in the Komsomol and myself turned itself into the Moscow Committee of New Socialists. It is also not a big organization - 40 members in Moscow.
There are some other organizations who support our struggle for a new Socialist Party. There is the left-wing of the Komsomol in Moscow Where, who are called the Federation of Socialist Youth. Some provincial committees of the Komsomol stand on this position. Another group is the left wing of the Independent Trade Union, Sotsprof. One of its leaders, Lev Volovik, is a member of the preparatory committee of the new Socialist Party. There are Sotsprof workers groups with a socialist position in Prokopevsk (Kuzbass), Vorkuta, Donbass, Narva and Moscow. Also involved are some members of the Democratic Platform in the CPSU as well as left populists, in Moscow, Irkutsk, Kazan, Kiubyshev and so on.There was a meeting of the preparatory committee March 25 in Irkutsk, but I was in France and I do not know what the position is in Siberia, the Urals and the Far East.
There are many different organizations that describe themselves as social democrats. The most serious of them is led by Oleg Rumantsyev and Leonid Volkov who are now members of the Russian parliament. It is a party of young intellectuals who want an electoral rather than a mass party. They call themselves a party of the middle class. Our idea is to have a mass party with working class roots. This is the difference between socialists and social democrats in the Soviet Union.
There are some other left groups but they are not real political forces. We have had some publicity in the Soviet mass media, but they do not like the Soviet left. There has been material in Moscow News on the social democrats but not on the socialists. Now there is a new magazine Dialog which comes out three times a month, whose first number contained a letter from me about an article by one of our left economists. In its sixth number there was to be an interview with me about the conception of the Socialist Party, but there is a problem about the publication of this interview. There is a real blockade of information about our organization. • What was the relation between the movement for a Socialist Party and the Komsomol?
The Komsomol has been destroyed. It was a long process. The left wing of Komsomol, the Federation of Socialist Youth, was not a mass organization. It was a part of the apparatus which turned against the apparatus as a whole. Soviet youth do not have a strong interest in politics, which is a
----- photo credits and running heads -----
4
real problem. The leaders of the FSY are now members of the Socialist Party. We tried to publish our materials using this basis.
The Clubs do not exist now. They existed in 1987-88. Now the members of the
Clubs are in the Popular Fronts, or are members of local government at different levels. Now we have three deputies in the
Moscow Soviet, Boris Kagarlitsky, Vladimir Kondratiev and Sergei Baranov. We have one deputy in the Russian Parliament, Vladimir Makhanov, one of the leaders of the miners from
Prokopevsk.
But there are about 30 other members of the Moscow Soviet who support our self- government programme.
• How did the Socialist Party idea
The idea was an old one. When Boris
Kagarlitsky, Pavel Kudukhin, and Andrei
Fadin began organizing, ten years ago, they were arrested. That was in 1982. But when perestroika began released. Thus we have only been able to conduct legal political activity for four years. At the start it was small groups of left-wing intellectuals in Moscow, Leningrad and other towns. After 1988 things became more serious. The Popular Fronts were founded throughout the Soviet Union
— also by young intellectuals. Only after the miners' strike of 1989 did we establish a real party.
• Do you have an unofficial publication of your own?
This was one of the most serious problems. We do not have xerox equipment and so we have to get our publication commercially duplicated in the
Baltic Republics, particularly in Lithuania. Our magazine is called Levy
Povorot (Left
Turn) and is published in about
300-500 copies and each has between 100 and 200 pages.
Over twenty numbers of this journal have appeared. We also get our articles published in
Prokopevsk and Donbass by the strike committees, but in this case there are a variety of forces involved.
• Could you say more about your connections with these strike committees?
We did not have contact with the miners before the strike. At first the miners did not know why they were going on strike.
But we were the only organization that supported them and tried to link up the different regions. Our Westorientated liberal radicals in the Democratic Union and our nationalist radicals in
Pamyat did not want to have anything to do with the strikes. We began to make links in July and August 1989. Now we are strongest in Prokopevsk - Makhanov was one of the leaders of the regional
We are also supported by some regional committees of Sotsprof, from Donbass, Moscow, Vorkuta, Karaganda and Narva. Workers are in a minority in Sotsprof. The majority are intellectuals and supporters of cooperatives. They are not social democrats, but for popular capitalism. There are preparations for a new one e representatives from the mining regions are saying that the government has not done any of the things that they promised. They are making links with railworkers and engineering plants. But it is difficult to decide when to begin.
I don't know the results of the conference of the official miners union which is under the influence of the strike committees. It was starting when I left for Paris. • You said that there were different forces in these strike committees. Are these organized forces or currents of opinion?
There were different forces from the beginning of the strike. Some wanted to solve their problems with the government, not against it. They did not like the reactions of the local nomenklatura, but they did not know the position of the central nomenklatura. Now there are all kinds of political groups in the strike committees — members of the CPSU's Democratic Platform, social democrats, socialists, militants of popular capitalism, supporters of independent unions on the Solidarnosc
USSR model and so on. But is difficult to say what the mass of miners are thinking.
• What about the
Democratic
Union? Are there different currents?
This is a problem which is interesting for the mass media, but is not a really important question in Soviet politics. There are
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the Democratic Union! The former want to boycott the elections, the latter want to participate.
But it is all shadow boxing between the
DU and the militia on Moscow's Pushkin
Square.
They are like the early Church. They bear witness to their ideals but do not have a real policy.
• How homogeneous is the Socialist
Party from an ideological and political point of view?
I can't explain this in English — you will have to read our programme. The ideas that unite us are self-government and
Self-management for workers, self-government in municipalities and so on. The anarchists are for pure self-management, but we believe that the new government would have a serious role during the transitional period, within the framework property. The workers don't want to turn over state property to workers' collectives at this time.
I know of only one exception, the
Vorgashorskaya mine in Vorkuta.
They are in a very difficult situation
- they don't have a rail connection.
So they produce the coal but it isn't taken away. They were attempting to establish an island free from totalitarianism in the Soviet
Union, but it isn't possible. Solidarnosc had a similar idea, believing you could get margins for manoeuvre, but it doesn't work.
Our ideas draw on several sources. One is revolu-
Marxism, tionary the Fourth International, another is the New Left curis another rent, ecological socialism, and a fourth left Social Democracy. We are also very much influenced by the experiences of
Solidarnosc. We think that in some respects the movement in Russia will take a similar form.
Sin the other so-called socialist countries 5
USSR there is no independent mass workers movement with decisive force, but we think that this is a possibility in Russia. • Do you see the Socialist Party as a party for the whole Soviet Union?
This is very difficult to explain. Some regions — the Baltic, Central Asia and the Caucasus — are going to separate from the Union soon. We are not trying to build anything there. We work amongst the Russian speaking peoples of the Soviet Union — but not only Russians. These are people of Soviet, not only Russian culture. Officially, for example, Donbass is part of the Ukraine, and Karaganda a part of Kazakhstan, but they are a part of this single movement of Soviet workers.
There is not much of a left in the smaller such as the Baltic. Even the exception of Lithuania — are small groups of intellectuals. There is an internationalist workers movement only in Riga. Everywhere else the workers movement is completely divided on national lines, and blocs with its own national nomenklatura (bureaucrats). The process will be the same in the other Republics, for example, • Have you chosen not to work in the smaller republics or are you trying to work there?
We have too few forces, and we cannot do anything where no potential support exists. Without a mass movement in Russia, there is nothing real that we can do in the smaller republics. We support Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Baltic Republics and so on and oppose military intervention by the Soviet government, but we can only do this in meetings in Moscow. When there is a mass movement, it will be able to take real decisions about the smaller republics.
The majority of Russian workers in Russia itself are for the separation of these republics but with guarantees for the Russian speaking minorities. The problem is that the present leaderships in the Baltic speak about such guarantees but don't do anything real. They say "Russians go
Our position is that the sooner these republics leave the better. The problem is to minimize the sufferings of the non-native populations. These minorities also want self-determination and the right to separate. The nationalist movements accept self-determination for themselves, but not for others. Our position is quite sharply defined on this. If, for example, the Russian minority in the North-East of Estonia want to separate from Estonia — which at the present time they do not want to do - they have the full right to do it. This would leave Estonia without electricity. At the moment they are demanding autonomy, not separation.
We want a compromise solution but the reality is that there is a very sharp confron6 In Russia, the most likely variant in the tation. In the absence of a mass movement International Viewpoint #183 • April 23, 1990
Western Soviet Union is Latin Americanization - the emergence of banana republics — in the Caucasus, Lebanonization, and Afghanistanization in Central Asia. We must try to ensure that these problems are solved with the least possible bloodshed. That is why we think that separation should take place as quickly as possible. Otherwise there will be an extension of the Afghanistan experience. We will end
11PANLHO up with the Military Union of Soviet Republics. • Do the nationalist currents have representatives in Moscow?
There are groups but they are very small, and are rather like High Commissions of their republics. They are linked to the mass movements. They often have solidarity meetings with other republics and our comrades are often on the platforms, especially with regard to the Caucasus and Central Asia. • What is your attitude to the Moscow People's Front?
It continues to exist and intends to go on existing. In the elections there was something called the Bloc for Democratic Russia. It included liberals, socialists, social democrats and populists. The party committee was removed from power in Moscow, so now we will see what we have got. The Front has base organizations in ten districts in Moscow and these local groups cannot operate without some kind
The Front has split into three separate parties; socialists, social democrats and constitutional democrats. So it's still unclear whether we should try to keep the Front as a united organization. • What about Boris Yeltsin?
He depends on the mood of the masses. On the television you can see that there is one Yeltsin in front of the cameras and another at the mass meetings. I didn't believe this at first, but it has been shown quite clearly. It is very difficult to define him politically. When there is a mass movement he swells up like a balloon, but when the movement declines he deflates. He has no presence of his own.
In 1989 he made two big political mistakes. The first was when he didn't stand for president, as public opinion wanted. The second was when he didn't go to the mines during the strike. In fact he signed a statement saying that they should go back to work as soon as possible.
Now he wants to be But the situation in the Russian supreme soviet is difficult for him. There are maybe 300 left liberals, and pendents, and to win Yeltsin has to keep the independents. He has to depend on his Furthermore he has to become President. He may well win the first ballot - he is in the same situation as Gorbachev. It is not because he is so popular, but the others are much worse. If he can't become Russian president it will be his last chance. • Yeltsin played a positive role for a whole period. You are saying that this is no longer the case.
Yeltsin is a member of the nomenklatura who rebelled against the nomenklatura. It pleases the people to see a bureaucrat rebel against the bureaucracy, but they don't see him as an independent leader. He's good at destructive work, but he has no constructive programme. • Can we say the same about the Democratic Platform as the Popular
The DP is not a mass movement. There are three tendencies. The most aggressive tendency are the social democrats, associated with Yuri Afanassiev. They are ready to split as soon as possible and establish their own party. But the majority are not ready for this. They are not social democrats because they don't know what that is. They see no need to break with the CPSU. It is impossible to define this group - they are not social democrats nor are
There is a left group in DP, not just socialists, who want a new Marxist vanguard party. They want to merge socialism with the workers movement. The coexistence of these three groups is a temporary thing. In the true Russian style they agreed on who to unite against. At the moment the DP is fighting both against Gorbachev and the Stalinist and nationalist right-
High hopes and deep wing.
The Russian CP is dominated by this right-wing. There are going to be three Russian CPs. On April 22, the anniversary of Lenin's birth, the Russian Communist Party — the party of the Stalinists - is going to be formed in Leningrad. There is no coverage of this in the press. In May there will be a conference of the Platform and they will unite with other social democratic groups. They won't leave before the CPSU conference. Some elements may leave and join the Socialist Party. Then in June Gorbachev will form his own Russian Communist Party.
Thus there will be three Russian CPs, the hard-line Stalinist CP, Gorbachev's CP and an independent CP including the social democrats. The SP cannot align with any of them. We can't form a Marxist workers party, which is what we aim to do, with these kinds of people. But there are possibilities. In the 1920s the largest part of the German Independent went over to the Communist International. They took tens of thousands of people and organizations with material
USSR / CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Show me another - somehow I don't feel free in this one (from
That is our optimum perspective. As a minimum we want to get some thousands of people. You cannot hope to win the CP
Lidové noviny)
DEMOCRACY in Prague. Walls and windows in the city centre are from within and we don't want to form our own Russian Communist Party.
plastered with leaflets. Some advertise services, but most are political appeals from a myriad of newly formed political groups
• What is the balance of forces ranging from the libertarian Marxist Left Alternative to the between the Stalinist forces and
Gorbachev?
Republican Union, promoting thoroughoing free enterprise and
In my view Gorbachev wants to liqui-
"closely connected with Jacques René Chirac". There are also date the CP, but in a controlled way, by leaflets about specific questions such as the expulsion of the stages. What would be very dangerous for
German minority from Czechoslovak territory after the Second him would be if the CP split up into a few big organizations one of which could
World War. Posters of the founding father of the Czechoslovak emerge as a serious rival. In fact not all of
Republic Tomas G. Masaryk are everywhere and many parties lay the neo-Stalinists will go into the new Stalinist RCP. The latter will be the party of
Nina Andreeva; Ligachev will stay with
Gorbachev.
Gorbachev's party will have a Eurocommunist programme but a Stalinist personnel. Gorbachev and the CC want to expel the people who don't agree with them, but not all at once. They will be ruthless. Probably, but not necessarily, Gorbachev wants to keep a party of his own.
• So the majority of the forces for the Soviet Left will come from the
CPSU.
Yes. In the coming year the left will leave the CP, as in Poland in 1981, but there is nowhere for them to go. There is no Solidarnosc. We do not want to repeat some of the mistakes of Polish comrades.