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“Truth Behind Bars”: Reflections on the Fate of the Russian Revolution: 3 The Vengeance of History, 1989–91

“Truth Behind Bars”: Reflections on the Fate of the Russian Revolution
3 The Vengeance of History, 1989–91
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“3 The Vengeance of History, 1989–91” in ““Truth Behind Bars”: Reflections on the Fate of the Russian Revolution”

3 The Vengeance of History, 1989–91

If the events of 1953 were precipitated by a paralysis at the top of society that set in after the death of Stalin, the events of 1989 were precipitated by a deeper and more thoroughgoing paralysis—a political crisis, signalled by the state’s embrace of policies of glasnost and perestroika, rooted in a profound and prolonged economic crisis. The latter had first manifested itself in a period of sluggish economic growth during the 1970s, followed by half a decade of stagnation, from 1980 to 1985, and then by outright economic decline. Glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) were the responses to the economic crisis from the Soviet government of Mikhail Gorbachev. But thousands within the very conservative nomenklatura, or bureaucracy, were very resistant to the changes that implementing these policies would have demanded. As in 1953, the resulting paralysis at the top created political openings at the bottom, and the mid to late 1980s were marked by unprecedented political ferment inside the Soviet Union. In this atmosphere, what David Mandel has rightly called the “rebirth of the labour movement” took place between 10 and 24 July 1989—a coal miners’ strike involving almost half a million workers.1 Some seven decades after the creation of what some called a “workers’ state” (a term to which we will turn in Part 3 of this book) that state’s own workers would undermine its foundations, making real Leon Trotsky’s warning, cited in the preface: “The vengeance of history is far more terrible than the vengeance of the most powerful General Secretary.”2

The depth of the economic crisis gripping the USSR in the 1980s is now well known. The magnitude of this crisis, which will become clear below, created the conditions for a vast proliferation of economic grievances from the working class. The regime’s response, under Gorbachev’s leadership, was to reintegrate the Soviet economy with that of the West, even if this meant allowing noncompetitive firms to go under. This restructuring was known as perestroika. But, in the context of declining living standards, restructuring—described at the time by Michael Burawoy as “a potentially explosive combination of openness for intellectuals and discipline for workers”—was likely to produce social unrest.3 It is in this sense that perestroika and glasnost went hand in hand. The intention of the bureaucracy was, through glasnost, to legitimize its economic strategy, to open up the political process just enough to allow a greater feeling of participation on the part of the masses, but without conceding anything in terms of control and power. The problem with such schemes is that they can easily get out of control. Millions of people took Gorbachev at his word, and perestroika from above became redefined as what Theodore Friedgut and Lewis Siegelbaum termed “perestroika from below.”4

Perestroika from Below

Small groups of perestroika enthusiasts began organizing in the mid-1980s. As Friedgut and Siegelbaum note: “In each small group, a start had to be made in introducing democratic change and civic activism. Perestroika had to reach up from below to meet the efforts initiated from above.”5 In particular, the workers’ movement began pressing its economic demands through initiatives outside the control of both the state and a Stalinist union movement that was completely bound to that state. In the words of worker-activist Aleksandr Utkin: “It was obvious to everyone that the old unions were not defending us. When we sat down for negotiations with the government, the official trade-unions sat with the government opposite us.”6

In the first half of 1989, these factors resulted in two million worker days lost to strikes, with “an average of 15,000 workers on strike each day.”7 These strikes raised the possibility, for the first time in seventy years, of working-class organizations independent of the state. But so long had the traditions of independent working-class struggle been buried that, at first, the numbers who looked to independent labour organization were relatively small.

The strike of 400,000 coal miners in July changed that dramatically. As Michael Haynes summarizes:

This strike began in July 1989 in the Kuzbass in Western Siberia, the source of one fifth of Soviet coal, and spread to the Donbass where another third was produced. Some 400,000 of the million or so miners of the USSR were involved in the first genuine mass working class action since the revolution.8

David Remnick says that this unfolding movement involved “mines all across the country, from Ukraine to Vorkuta to Sakhalin Island,”9 a truly gigantic workers’ action that would have profound political consequences. “The initial demands were economic: more soap, detergent, toothpaste, sausage, shoes and underwear, more sugar, tea, and bread.”10 Workers complained of overcrowded dormitories and buses, a shortage of daycare spaces and schools, miserable life expectancy (for miners, less than fifty years), poor work conditions, industrial pollution, runaway inflation, poor scheduling of holidays, and the arbitrary power and corruption of the local officials.11 On 10 July, after negotiations had broken down, these grievances exploded in strike action in Mezhdurechensk (three thousand kilometres east of Moscow and less than four hundred kilometres from the border with Mongolia). By 15 July, the strike involved 158 mines and 177,000 workers. On that date, the workers in the Donbass, in Ukraine, more than three thousand kilometres east of the original strikes, began to go out on strike.12 In all, “100 mines struck in the Donbass with up to 90,000 miners out on a single day…. On 20 July the strike spread to the other mining centres of the Ukraine.”13 As the strikes were reaching their peak there, the Pechora district, twenty-five hundred kilometres north and east of the Donbass, exploded, with thousands going on strike from 19 to 24 July.

Remnick sums up the political consequences of this mass rebellion: “After July 1989, the Kremlin could never again have any confidence at all that it was the master of events. After July 1989, the illusion of a gradual, Gorbachev-directed ‘revolution from above’ was over.”14 A new force in Russian society was discovering its power. “Everywhere the picture was the same,” says David Mandel.

The miners occupied the central squares in permanent meeting. Worker detachments maintained order. In Donetsk [in the Donbass], veterans of the Afghan war played an important role in this…. In Kemerovo [near Mezhdurechensk], crime declined by 52% during the strike. The strike committees stopped the sale of alcohol, sealed liquor stores and set up drug inspection points on the main roads. In Donetsk two miners were dismissed for appearing drunk on the central square.15

The strikes were relatively short-lived and ended, in each case, with partial but real victories. Vorkuta played a key role, its miners having considerable economic power. Its largest coal pit, Vorgashorskaya, could at the time produce 18,000 tons of coal a day.16 In Vorkuta, “the miners won concessions from the Government that included an increase in supplies of soap, fresh meat, refrigerators and leather shoes. In addition, the miners were promised pay increases for certain work shifts and some sort of profit sharing.”17 But more important than these concessions was the increase in confidence and level of organization. These were the first sustained, widespread incidences of working-class collective action since the 1953 prison camp strikes. In contrast to the 1953 strikes, however, the workers’ organizations, once formed, did not have their leaders dispersed into the prisons of the Gulag. As Mandel notes, “with the end of the strike, the strike committees did not disband but transformed themselves into workers’ committees, whose main task was to monitor the execution of the agreements.”18 For the first time in seventy years, organizations based in the working class, independent of the state and powerful enough to avoid instant repression from the regime, were operating in the Soviet Union. A silence more than three generations old was ending.

“There had been strikes before in the Soviet Union,” Remnick writes, including “bus drivers in the city of Chekhov, airline pilots who refused to fly until safety standards were improved.”

But the symbolism of the miners’ strike was extraordinary. The miners embodied the vanguard of the proletariat, a bastion of Bolshevism in the old days. To look out at the great crowd of them in Lenin Square was to see a kind of poster for what had once been called “the masses.” And now the masses were walking off the job and declaring that socialism had not delivered anything—not even a bar of soap.19

Eighteen months later, the coal miners would again lead a nationwide coal strike against the regime. Between these two actions, smaller but nonetheless significant strikes in the coal fields put the working-class struggle front and centre in the unfolding drama of glasnost and perestroika. In response to the explosive events of July 1989, Gorbachev attempted to all but outlaw strike activity. Vorkuta workers responded with illegal wildcat strikes. On 25 October 1989, Fein writes, a strike by “16,000 of the 24,000 miners in the northern Vorkuta region forced the closing of four of the area’s 13 mines.”20 The strike lasted just twenty-four hours. According to Washington Post correspondent Michael Dobbs, the workers decided to return after “the local mine association had threatened legal proceedings against 90 to 100 leaders of the strike, accusing them of breaking the new law on resolving labor disputes.” However, a return to work did not mean an end to the struggle. A spokesman for the miners said that they “would resume the protest if their demands were not met by year’s end.”21

The strike of Vorkuta workers was part of a wider series of actions by miners in other parts of the Soviet Union. On 1 November, a massive two-hour “warning” strike occurred in the Donbass, the largest coal-producing area of the USSR. The striking miners, who numbered almost one hundred thousand, demanded political change: “In addition to routine economic demands, the strikers in Donetsk in the Ukraine called for abolition of the leading role of the Communist Party and direct election of the Soviet President. Similar political demands have been made by miners in the northern city of Vorkuta.”22 In July 1990, roughly one hundred thousand mineworkers went out on strike again, this time in Ukraine, Siberia, and Vorkuta, with expressly political demands. The Chicago Tribune carried the story:

The strike coordinating committee in the Donetsk basin of the Ukraine issued an appeal that expressed total lack of faith in the government.

“We are of the view that [Soviet prime minister Nikolai] Ryzhkov’s government in the year since it was set up has failed to come up with an effective concept of getting the country out of its present economic crisis,” the statement said.

“We cannot sit and wait any longer until our government and the party apparatus dictates its will … and leaves us with nothing but hunger, poverty and devastation.”

In addition to demanding the resignation of Ryzhkov and his ministers, the miners called for the nationalization of all Communist Party property and the elimination of all party political cells in the government, the army and the KGB.23

In the mid-1980s, the activists seeking to rebuild independent working-class organizations after three generations of Stalinism could be numbered in the dozens. Now these activists had an audience of hundreds of thousands. In October 1989, long-time political dissident Boris Kagarlitsky expressed excitement at the possibility that activists could go from the margins to the mainstream. “There are a lot of small groups trying to organise independent trade unions,” Kagarlitsky wrote, “but the only serious possibilities lie with Sotsprof”—the Federation of Independent Socialist Trade Unions, launched that summer—“and the strike committees themselves.” He went on to note that “there are about 5,000 members of the initiative groups for Sotsprof, and the aim now is to develop it in provincial working class areas.”24

Sotsprof was just one of many attempts at forming independent working-class organizations. In the coal fields, for instance, a more important role was probably played by the Independent Miners’ Union, which in 1991, according to Mandel, had “approximately 55,000 members, though its real influence among the miners was much broader.”25 Given the more than seventy-year absence of independent working-class politics, this re-emergence of independent trade unions, however small in scale relative to the tens of millions who comprised the working class in the Soviet Union, was nonetheless significant.

For all of these independent unions, 1991 was to be a turning point in their history. But for all, it was also to represent, for the moment, the peak of their ability to influence Russian politics. In retrospect, this should have caught no one by surprise. Kagarlitsky had, in 1989, warned enthusiasts in the West: “You mustn’t exaggerate the level of class consciousness of the working class. We’re only going through the first steps of the working class movement.”26

The Legacy of the Past

It is impossible to calculate the extent to which working-class consciousness was destroyed by the long years of authoritarianism and Stalinism. Unable to organize independently, punished at the slightest sign of independent activity, unable to put forward independent political parties, and provided with no forums in which to discuss, debate, and hammer out ideological viewpoints, the political consciousness of the working class throughout the Soviet Union was driven to an extremely low level. The 1989 awakening of the class could not help but be marked by this legacy. The negative aspects of this legacy manifested in different ways. With respect to the miners, while extremely militant and politicized, they remained isolated from much of the rest of the working class. In addition, the vacuum of ideas created by decades of political repression left the miners open to illusions about Boris Yeltsin and his market-friendly program of reforms. Isolation and Yeltsinism together meant that this initial attempt at forming independent organizations was to prove incapable, in the short term, of creating stable, mass working-class organizations.

On 4 March 1991, at the ironically named Bolshevik Mine in Novokuznetsk, a city in the Kuzbass not far from Mezhdurechensk, what was to have been a one-day walkout in solidarity with striking Ukrainian miners set off another wave of strikes. The strikes quickly spread to at least one-third of the country’s 580 mines, including those in Vorkuta, and then settled into a massive, generalized challenge to the regime.27 Not only were these strikes larger and more sustained than the 1989 strikes, they were also more expressly political. “In 1989, it was only the coal miners of Vorkuta, in the Russian Polar region, who combined radical political principles with their economic demands,” Remnick reported at the time. “But now, as Gorbachev’s economic policies continue to flounder, almost all of the strikers have proclaimed radical change in political leadership as central to their position.”28

Increasingly, however, this political opposition to the Soviet state transformed itself into political support for Boris Yeltsin, then chair of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR—the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. At the start of May, as the second month of the strike drew to a close, Yeltsin travelled to Novokuznetsk, where, the New York Times reported, he “received a hero’s welcome at every stop from miners,” some of them eager to see Gorbachev resign.29 As one member of the strike committee, Aleksandr Kolesnikov, commented: “So far it’s been all hurrah. At the first rally yesterday the miners formally endorsed Yeltsin.”30 The conditions creating this move toward Yeltsin intensified. By 1991, continued economic decline was making life grim for the miners and rendering hollow the “liberals’ promises of a bright future from market reform.”31 The decline in their living standards dragged many workers into apathy, which opened the door for Yeltsin and his promises of market reform in a way that was much more pronounced than in 1989.

The miners’ enthusiasm for Yeltsin was tempered by the fact that, only the previous week, he had been one of the ten signatories of an agreement reached between Gorbachev and the leaders of nine of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union. Signed on 23 April, the Accord of Ten, as reported by David Mandel, “called on the miners and all other strikers to return to work and to make up the losses, declaring that it was ‘unacceptable to try to achieve political goals by inciting to civil disobedience, strikes and appeals to overthrow the political authorities.’”32 Yeltsin, speaking at a miners’ rally, praised their strike to the heavens. “The miners have turned out to be the initiators of the destruction of the old command-administrative system and creators of a new system of economic management,” he told the miners. However, Pavel Vashonov, a key member of the Yeltsin camp, expressed a quite different view: “‘This wave of strikes cannot give birth to any normal political system,’” he said, going on to argue that the motivation of the workers came from “their instinctive reaction to having been ‘robbed and deceived.’”33

In the confusion, the strike movement, whose activists had increasingly looked to Yeltsin as an alternative to Gorbachev, came to a halt in city after city, pit after pit. Mandel described “the initial reaction among many of the miners’ leaders” as “shock and betrayal,” quoting strike leader Aleksandr Kriger as saying, “I think that Yeltsin betrayed us.”34 Whether the miners had been betrayed or not, Yeltsin seemed like a better choice than Gorbachev to many in the movement. In Vorkuta, the strike ended when an agreement was reached to transfer the control of the mines from the USSR and Gorbachev to the Russian Republic and Yeltsin.35 The workers, in other words, even if disillusioned by the Yeltsin–Gorbachev rapprochement, were looking to Yeltsin and his program of market reforms to solve their deep economic and social grievances. This was expressed in August when hundreds of thousands of working people took to the streets to defend Yeltsin against the reimposition of bureaucratic control in the coup attempted by hard-core Stalinist loyalists that month.

Yeltsin did, of course, prove to be a false saviour. According to Richard Greeman, writing in the early 1990s, Yeltsin’s “‘low intensity’ attack on rights and living standards of working people is demoralizing enough. Planned massive price rises have reduced everyone but the privileged to desperation. Salaries are next to worthless. Pensions are simply not paid on the grounds of a manufactured ‘shortage’ of money, while ‘before our eyes, our systems of free medical care and free universal education are being dismantled without our permission, with no legal basis.’”36

The workers’ movement, starting from a very low point, proved capable of only momentarily breaking out of its isolation in the mining centres. Except for an explosion in Minsk, wrote Mandel, “the movement failed to embrace the largest Soviet cities, and the miners’ attempts to expand the movement in their own regions met with very limited success.”37 In the vacuum of ideas that was the legacy of long decades of Stalinism, and in opposition to Gorbachev, the workers turned to Yeltsin and his pro-market alternative. By 1993, in the wake of the privation and poverty that this “alternative” had led to, the independent union movements of 1991 had retreated from the stage. In the words of Richard Greeman: “For the moment, we have stasis—which the Greeks understood as a violent and degenerative paralysis of a polity in the middle of an unfinished class war.”38

“They Are Their Sons and Daughters”

In the years following 1993, the situation was not, in fact, one of stasis. If economic decline was the background to perestroika and glasnost, what ensued in the transition to neoliberalism was economic catastrophe.

It is extremely difficult to measure the state of the economy in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Government statistics were notoriously unreliable. Working with the statistics we do have and with the most basic measure of the health of an economy—output per capita adjusted for inflation—we find that the economy in the USSR declined 1.27 percent in 1988, 1.47 percent in 1989, 0.76 percent in 1990, and a precipitous 14.6 percent in 1991.39 No wonder there was such a major strike wave in 1991: the economic decline in that year was similar to that experienced by Greece in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008. However, the years following were even worse. Figure 1 takes the same criterion—output per capita adjusted for inflation—and tracks the performance of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Russian Federation from 1991 to 2015. The United States and the United Kingdom experienced economic weakness in 1991 and 1992, in the context of the recession that opened up the decade. A sharp decline in 2008 and 2009, during the Great Recession, is also clearly evident. But otherwise, the economies of those two countries grew. By 2007, just before the Great Recession, inflation-adjusted output per capita in the United Kingdom was 43 percent greater than in 1990; in the United States, the figure was 39 percent. By 2015, after recovery from the Great Recession, the output per capita for both countries was 44 percent greater than in 1990.

A vertical bar graph depicts the output per capita in Russia, the U.S., and the U.K., from 1991 through 2015.

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Figure 1. Output per capita in Russia, the U.S., and the U.K. from 1991–2015 (1990=100). Derived from data available in United Nations, “Population” and United Nations, “GDP, at Constant 2005 Prices – National Currency.”

But the story in the Russian Federation through the 1990s was catastrophic. As figure 1 shows, inflation-adjusted output per capita dropped so precipitously that, by 1998, it stood at just 58 percent of the 1990 figure. An economic decline of 42 percent is reminiscent of the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s. A slow recovery began the next year, but only in 2006 did output per capita return to 1990 levels. By 2014, it was up 22 percent from 1990, but it fell back to 17 percent the next year.

Perhaps even more dramatic as an indicator of economic weakness is the trade balance of the Soviet Union and countries of the former Soviet Union in that most basic of commodities: wheat. “Bread, peace, and land!” was the organizing slogan of the 1917 revolution, but, by the late twentieth century, the first of these could not be produced in sufficient quantity to feed the people of the Soviet Union. As Ernest Mandel explained, “the most dramatic expression” of slowing rates of growth in the 1980s in the Soviet Union was “the quasi-stagnation in cereal production, particularly animal feed, which for years has made the USSR dependent on massive imports of agricultural products from capitalist countries (Argentina, Canada, USA, France and Australia).”40 As figure 2 shows, from the mid-1970s on, the Soviet Union imported more wheat than it exported. By 1984, the trade deficit in wheat stood at a staggering twenty-five million tonnes. The terrible inefficiencies of the system bequeathed by Stalinism are exposed as clearly in this one chart as in any lengthy treatise.

A vertical bar graph depicts the net exports of wheat in countries of the former USSR, for years from 1961 to 2013.

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Figure 2. Net exports of wheat in countries of former USSR, 1961–2013. Derived from data available in FAOSTAT, “Crops and Livestock Products, Wheat, Import Quantity, Export Quantity.”

The difficult realities of the early 1990s are also apparent in figure 2. In the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the trade deficit worsened, with 1993 surpassing the twenty-five million tonne mark of 1984. Just as with the earlier figures on output per capita, by the twenty-first century, recovery is visible. But we can also see the sharp economic decline in the first years of neoliberalism. As is often the case in periods of deep and prolonged economic crisis, in the 1990s, the entire energy of the poor and the oppressed turned to survival. Class struggle receded into the background, and the promising beginnings of 1989 to 1991, in terms of the independent organization of workers, became a distant memory.

Again, as in the two periods looked at previously, throughout 1989 to 1991, it was the miners in Vorkuta who were the quickest to press political demands and the most ready to take direct action and who were in the forefront of establishing independent union organizations. According to David Mandel, during the July 1989 awakening of the Russian workers’ movement, Vorkuta, of all the coal-mining regions, had the highest “level of politicization.” Not only did the miners there demand “the removal of the coal minister and of the chairman of the Union of Workers of the Coal Industry,” but “the chairman of the Vorgashorskaya mine strike committee, himself a party member for over ten years,” called for the rescinding of the article in the constitution that allotted the Communist Party a monopoly of power in the state.41

In a November 1989 interview, Kagarlitsky was asked why it was the Vorkuta miners who were the most militant and the most politicized.

“It’s important to know that these miners are the sons and grandsons of Stalin’s victims. No one other than those in the labour camps ever worked in the mines.” Kagarlitsky said today’s miners were aware of the Trotskyists who were forced to work in the Vorkuta labour camps during Stalin’s purges. “They are their sons and daughters. No one ever moves there, so these are the second and third generation.”42

This was indeed the revenge of history.

From the Standpoint of the Working Class

A core part of the methodology, for those of us who are historical materialists, is to listen to the voices of workers in struggle. One of the aspirations of this book is to discern the trajectory of the Russian Revolution of 1917. If we listen to the voices of workers in struggle, that trajectory is revealed with absolute clarity.

Upon invoking a desire to see things from the standpoint of the working class, however, we are immediately confronted with conceptual difficulties. The term class, more often than not, is used to capture an objectively measurable category. We think of it as a statement about differential relations to wealth and power, to status, or to the means of production. These objective measures all have their place. Income levels tell us a considerable amount. Status in a hierarchical economy is very real, and often very offensive. And the question of relation to the means of production is frequently decisive. It is not uncommon for scholars to suggest that for Karl Marx, these objective measures correspond to one half of his class analysis, the half that can fit under the heading of “class in itself”—the objective or structural counterpart to the subjective or struggle-based notion of “class for itself.”

Edward Andrew, in 1983, provided a list of those who accept this “class in itself” reading of Marx, a list that includes T. Dos Santos, Nicos Poulantzas, Irving M. Zetlin, and Robert Tucker. However, Andrew went on to make the interesting point that, in fact, nowhere did Marx use the term “class in itself.”43 Here is what Marx, as a young man in 1847, actually did argue, in The Poverty of Philosophy:

Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle … this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.44

There are objective, structural pressures pushing in the direction of class formation. Capital in the cycle of capital accumulation continually calls up and creates a “class as against capital.” That is, however, nothing like the structuralist formation implied by the term “class in itself.” Structuralist Marxists who emphasize a “class in itself” versus “class for itself” binary risk falling into the same trap identified by Marx, a trap that vitiates all materialisms precedent to historical materialism. The young Karl Marx said, in his famous “Theses on Feuerbach”: “The chief defect of all previous materialism … is that things [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.”45 Classes are not structures. Classes are collections of human beings with hopes, dreams, ideas, and passions. Marx’s interest was not with an inert mass of workers created and recreated by capitalism, but with the dynamic and living mass of workers who, in political struggle, begin to unite and to become a “class for itself.” His is a subjective approach with an objective dimension rather than an objective approach with a subjectivist add-on.

More than half a century has passed since the publication of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Thompson is in the company of C. L. R. James, Rosa Luxemburg, and others who remind us in their writings of the human, “class for itself” dimension of serious historical materialist analysis. The emergence of a class “for itself” is not automatically determined. It is a product of struggle.

Thompson chose to use “making” in his title because his book is “a study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning. The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.” As he goes on to explain, “I do not see class as a ‘structure,’ nor even as a ‘category,’ but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.”46 Writing about class in the context of ancient Greece, G. E. M. de Ste. Croix put it this way: “I am not going to pretend that class is an entity existing objectively in its own right like a Platonic ‘Form.’” Similarly, Thompson understood class as “essentially a relationship”—as an expression of the social relations through which human beings enter into the process of production.47

The three chapters that constitute part 1 of this book suggest that a Thompsonian approach to class can help us understand class formation in the territories of the Soviet Union in the Stalin and post-Stalin eras. What is sometimes lost in debates about, for example, the “class nature” of the Soviet Union in these eras is the lived experience of the poor, the oppressed, and the exploited. An examination of their struggles—their hopes, dreams, forms of organization, ideas—can shed some light on the working class that did emerge “for itself” on several occasions in the twentieth century and can perhaps give us some insight into the class to emerge for itself at some point in the twenty-first century. The first stage in that process was the heroic hunger strike of the Trotskyist forced labourers—their doomed last stand telling those willing to listen that a new Russian working class “in the making” existed in the Gulag. The second stage was the wave of camp strikes centred on 1953, which led to the dismantling of the forced labour system. The third stage involved the strikes that took place between 1989 to 1991, which sounded the death knell of the Stalinist system. The re-emergence of the working class as a “class for itself” in 1989 to 1991 was a tremendous achievement. The August 1991 coup attempt, when hardline Stalinists attempted to re-establish “communist” rule, was stopped in large part by striking workers throughout the USSR, including, as journalist John Gray notes, “striking miners in most of the Soviet coal fields.”48

The depression of the neoliberal 1990s drowned the 1989–91 wave in a tsunami of misery. But the story doesn’t end there. The economic crisis has eased. Slowly, tentatively, as the figures in this chapter show, the economies throughout much of the former Soviet Union have returned to growth, including returning to being net exporters of wheat. Given that the Black Earth Region that lies in Russia and Ukraine contains some of the most fertile land in the world, it is astonishing that there was ever a moment when these countries had to import wheat on a massive scale. Although the working class in the countries of the former Soviet Union has many obstacles to overcome, it is a class that has covered a tremendous amount of ground in very few years. While it took the Western labouring masses almost two thousand years to progress from the slave rebellions in 71 BC to the struggle for democracy in 1848 AD, in modern Russia, a mere forty to fifty years separated the Spartacus-style revolts of the 1940s and the working-class struggle for democracy in the late 1980s. This struggle for glasnost and democracy quickly generated ideas about and the initial attempts at independent working-class organization, which points to a future in which lessons from past struggles can be generalized with much greater rapidity than was the case for the European working-class movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We cannot know in advance the outcome of these struggles, but we do know that they will come.

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Part 2 Self-Emancipation Versus Substitutionism
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