Gorbachev: the man who ended the Soviet Lie and liberated nations

September 2 dmanewsdesk: Reviled by many for creating a geopolitical disaster and precipitating the fall of the Soviet Union, he deserves credit for drawing the curtains on make-believe Communism, and opening up the possibility of redeeming socialism from its Soviet travesty

Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, at the relatively young age of 54, succeeding, after the short-lived regime of Chernenko, Yuri Andropov, a reformer, whose regime was too short-lived to make an impact. Gorbachev’s attempts to reform Soviet communism via Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (transparency) ultimately led to the culmination of the long-drawn-out failure of an experiment to build socialism in one country, a country that was backward by contemporary capitalist standards, to begin with.

The success of the Soviet regime in modernising backward Russia, creating the kind of military-industrial capability that could defeat Nazi Germany and send man into outer space blinded progressive men and women around the world to the perversion of the ideals of socialism that the Soviet Union had become. Most would agree that they erred, those who responded to Mao’s call for rural areas to surround the cities, exterminate class enemies and vandalise icons of tradition and culture. But few of those who were fascinated by what the Soviet Union stood for are open to admitting its fundamental failure as ‘actually existing socialism’.

Revolution was supposed to happen, in the socialist ferment of early 20th century, in the most advanced capitalist nations. Instead, in Germany, Britain, France, and other European countries, the working class rallied behind their national governments, when World War I broke out. Revolution happened in Russia, thanks to the pugnacious pursuit of opportunities to grab power by the Bolsheviks under Lenin’s leadership. Lenin and the Bolsheviks chose to persist with their revolution and attempted to build socialism in one country when it became clear that none of the more advanced communist parties in the more developed capitalist countries were going to succeed.

It would be honest to accept that this experiment faltered and collapsed by the end of the civil war that followed the Bolshevik power grab. All the advanced nations sent in their armies to fight the Bolsheviks. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union abandoned all internal democracy and freedom of debate, suppressed dissent within the party and by any section of the citizenry, in the single-minded pursuit of victory in the civil war. Trotsky justified and carried out terror against Russians who opposed the revolution, and succeeded. The political philosophy and practice dubbed Stalinism was already entrenched in the party, along with the blurring of the distinction between the party and the administrative unit, the Soviet, before Lenin died, following a period of failing recovery after being wounded.

by T K Arun