John Wight argues that, despite its undoubted deficiencies, the Soviet Union marked a huge step forward in the struggle for human progress, and that as such, socialists and progressives everywhere should lament its passing. John has been politically active in the antiwar movement in the UK and in the US, where he lived for a number of years. He has also been active in the struggle for Palestinian human rights. A former member of both the SSP and Solidarity, he now devotes the bulk of his political activity to writing and commentary. In this regard he is a regular contributor to the Morning Star and the Socialist Unity blog. His work has also appeared in Counterpunch, Scottish Left Review, and various other blogs and web magazines.

The Soviet Union, set up following the Russian Revolution of 1917, was inspired by Marx's conception that the necessary first stage on the way to a communist and therefore classless society would be the dictatorship of the proletariat (rule of the working class). This would entail a state apparatus formulated in the immediate aftermath of the revolution with the express aim of dismantling completely the former, bourgeois (capitalist) state and its institutions, and suppressing an anticipated attempt at counterrevolution by the newly displaced bourgeoisie (ruling capitalist class).

Enshrined in the first Soviet constitution in 1918 were equal rights for women, homosexuals, the disabled, national minorities (which it was originally intended were to enjoy the unassailable right to self determination and secession from the Soviet Union if desired), and an economy run by workers councils (soviets), which would liaise with the Central Committee, upon which they would have their own representative. In addition they would vote for their own factory managers and supervisors, over whom they would enjoy the power of recall at any time, as long as this was the will of the majority. The role of trade unions was also intended to play a prominent role in the running of the country, namely that of representing the wishes of the workers as a mass to the government on anything from domestic to foreign policy.

However, between the idea and its implementation came a civil war, an attempt at foreign intervention, and an embargo, necessitating a monumental effort to save the revolution from the very real possibility of its overthrow in its early stages.

War Communism was introduced, whereby workers rights were suspended and every aspect of the economy, from production to distribution, was geared towards fighting the civil war. By the end of the Civil War in 1921 the nation was in tatters. National income amounted to one-third of what it had been in 1913 under autocracy; industry produced less than one-fifth of the goods it produced before the war; the coal mines turned out less than a tenth and the iron foundries a fortieth of normal output. In addition, the railway network was largely destroyed, the exchange of goods between country and town was at a standstill, and the nation's major towns and cities were left depopulated due to mobilization for the various fronts and wastage due to hunger and disease.

The impact this had on the Soviet Union and its governance was immense. In order to develop the country's economy and productive forces the NEP (New Economic Policy) was introduced, which restored private ownership of farms, private trade and a limited return to the profit motive in both. This amounted to a retreat from the Bolshevik’s original intention of the immediate installation of socialist production and exchange.

The system of workers councils proved inadequate to the task of running the economy when it became apparent that the workers at this point did not possess the requisite level of expertise, education and training in order to do so efficiently. Instead, former managers and factory owners, as well as 'experts' from abroad were brought in to help develop industry, supervised by political commissars appointed by the government. At Trotsky’s behest the role of the unions also changed.  Now, rather than a body for transmitting the workers’ wishes to the government, they were charged with transmitting the government's wishes to the workers. Their leaders were now also appointed by the government rather than elected by the workers, as they’d been previously.

Leon Trotsky

After Lenin's death in 1924 came a struggle for power within the Politburo between Trotsky and Stalin. Stalin proved victorious and there followed two and a half decades of dictatorship, during which Stalin arrogated more and more power to himself. He subsequently used this power to purge any and all perceived rivals, and thus destroyed in the process a huge chunk of the country's military, industrial, agricultural and intellectual talent. He and he alone dictated policy, with formal institutions such as the trade unions, Central Committee, Comintern and Politburo reduced to playing merely a symbolic role.

Stalin's rule was not without its gains, however, despite the horrors of forced collectivisation, purges and famine. His five-year plans, implemented at huge sacrifice to the workers, succeeded in developing major industry at a ferocious rate, enabling the Soviet Union the resources to overcome a Nazi onslaught during World War II and provide a check to US imperialism around the world in the postwar years.

After Stalin's death in 1953 the country enjoyed a period of stability, peace and sustained prosperity. In 1956, during the Communist Party’s Twentieth Congress, Khrushchev delivered his now infamous ‘secret speech’, in which he excoriated and denounced Stalin and the years of his reign. The speech marked an end to the era of terror and purges, and in the immediate aftermath a measure of dissent was tolerated in the Soviet Union for the first time since the Left Opposition, comprising Trotsky and his supporters, was finally destroyed by Stalin in 1927. Regardless, a ruling bureaucracy remained the sole governing power, with the unions and Central Committee continuing to play a pro-forma role; their overriding purpose to help implement and enforce policies decided upon by a seven-man politburo. 

No socialist democracy in the way in which the Bolsheviks desired both pre and post-1917 ever existed, largely due to a combination of the backward state of the country in 1917 and the toll of a civil war which decimated a proletariat that was already small relative to the population to begin with. By 1924 Stalin had emerged to preside over a rigid bureaucracy, which, concerned with holding onto power and privilege, was unwilling to countenance any reform. Socialism in one country, certainly in the case of the SU, with the threat to its existence posed by capitalist encirclement, also militated against anything except a garrison-type state, set up with its main priority that of defending the status quo presided over by the bureaucracy.

Joseph Stalin

Nonetheless, in terms of its economic foundations, the SU was a socialist country, albeit one whose transition towards socialist democracy was petrified by a lack of favourable material conditions at birth, and whose continuing development was largely determined by external pressures placed on it by the West. Some socialists labeled it state capitalist (an analysis authored by the likes of CLR James and the founder of the British SWP, Tony Cliff), while others, prime among them Trotsky, disagreed. In his definitive work on the development of the Soviet Union - The Revolution Betrayed - Trotsky promulgates the analysis that whilst a bureaucracy did maintain an iron grip over the country, it remained irretrievably rooted to the proletariat; and that without the fundamentals of any capitalist economy - namely private ownership of the means of production, a stock market and money exchange, inherited wealth, etc. - there can be no capitalism. 

Ultimately, the failure of the Soviet Union to become the socialist utopia to which many ascribe could be said to have been down to two crucial factors: 1) the failure of the European proletariat to make revolutions in their own countries and thus allow the Soviet Union to develop unmolested, and 2) the mistaking of such a utopia for the historical advance of the working class in the initial stages of any socialist revolution.

Economically, the focus on keeping pace with the West through concentrating production on heavy industry to the detriment of light industry and the production of consumer goods led to discontent and disenchantment among broad sections of the population, responsible for ushering in a thriving black market with its concomitant consequences in relation to social cohesion and class consciousness. These, along with the increasing desire for political and individual freedoms throughout the Eastern Bloc, led to a gradual deepening of contradictions within Soviet society which finally became insurmountable.

The bureaucracy had become a brake on the development of socialism throughout the Eastern Bloc, to the extent that attempts at gradual de-Stalinisation, which began under Khruschev, were the catalyst for the emergence of powerful and determined dissident movements in East Germany, Poland, Hungary and later Czechoslovakia.     

Regardless, and despite its deficiencies, there is no doubt that with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the world entered a period of barbarism the effects of which are self evident today. Most of the concessions won by the working class in this country and throughout Western Europe would not have been won without the spectre of the first communist state hanging over the international ruling class. Indeed, most of the aforementioned concessions have since been rolled back or are under attack.

Furthermore, national liberation movements throughout the developing world benefited from the support given them by the former Soviet Union.

Tragically, the ensuing decimation of the developing world on the back of the neoliberal assault unleashed in the 1990s, responsible today for the deaths each year of an estimated six million children under the age of 5 in sub-Saharan Africa from hunger and preventable disease, is probably the most lasting and cruel legacy of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its removal from the page of history.