The political atomization of Soviet society is perhaps the most difficult of Stalin's legacies to overcome. However, after decades of life under a system of terror which froze society in a state of immobilism and inertia, people in the U.S.S.R. are slowly re-acquiring the habits of forming and expressing independent political opinions. Ever since Stalin's death in 1953, a rise in political consciousness has been increasingly apparent. It has been an uneven process, but the long-term trend is undeniable. Moreover, in the last few years the process has been accelerating. This growing re-politicization, and the various opposition groups it has thrown up, are signs that the beginning of the end of bureaucratic ascendancy is now imminent.
The struggle of the new Soviet oppositions for the political regeneration of their society is taking place under extremely difficult conditions. An appreciation of some of these conditions is central to an understanding of the contemporary dissident movement.
Problems of Opposition
First, there are tremendous obstacles standing in the way of the theoretical development of that opposition. Stalinism bequeathed Soviet society a profound ideological disarray by discrediting the ideas of Marxism. The struggle to discover the real meaning of revolutionary Marxism is the major ideological task facing the Soviet oppositions.
In this struggle for Marxist theory, the Soviet oppositions are without access to information about world revolutionary developments. This means that the Marxist dissident gets little support and encouragement from developments outside the Soviet Union and cannot profit from the discussions and experiences of the international revolutionary left. The May 1968 events in France, for example, whose importance in the rise of the revolutionary vanguards in Europe needs no emphasizing, are totally unknown to the Soviet dissident. All he can know about May 1968 is what he read in his press and what he heard from the Voice of America. The Soviet press presented the events as the sabotage, by a section of students led by 'werewolves' like Cohn-Bendit and backed up by Katanga mercenaries, of the peaceful efforts of the French Communist Party to win better wages for workers. Needless to say, the Voice of American imperialism did not present a much truer picture of events.
Secondly, the Soviet dissident is denied knowledge of his own history. The period of the twenties is a closed book. Documents of that period are all kept under lock and key in closed library sections. It is dangerous for a Soviet citizen even to study carefully books of that period which the authorities themselves have published. One Soviet student was recently expelled from Moscow University for an intensive reading of a Bukharin text on sale at Soviet bookshops. Ivan Dzyuba, a Ukrainian dissident, had his entire Lenin library confiscated for taking an 'unhealthy' interest in Lenin's writings on the national question.
Thirdly, in the purges Stalin eliminated an entire generation of Bolsheviks. An official Yugoslav estimate is that between 1936-8, 3 million people were executed, 6 million were sent to camps (few to return), another 3 million were arrested. This of course does not include the hundreds of thousands who were victims of earlier repression, or the thousands of Trotskyists shot in the Vorkuta camps. With the physical annihilation of an entire generation of Bolsheviks, the revolutionary Marxist tradition in the Soviet Union received a monumental defeat. When sections of Soviet youth began once again to become to some degree politicized, they tried to search out former camp inmates and remaining old Bolsheviks — but these were few and far between. Whenever the youth did come in contact with an old Bolshevik who could answer their questions, and offer a key to the understanding of contemporary society, their political development was remarkably rapid. The old Bolshevik Kosterin, when released from concentration camp, politicized a circle of people whose names read like a who's who of the Soviet opposition — Grigorenko, Yakir and Yakhimovich to name only a few.
Finally, the Soviet bureaucracy maintains a massive apparatus of police repression. The existence of this secret police apparatus is of course a sign of the chronic instability of the regime: it is evidence that social control in the Soviet Union can only be maintained by direct and constant invigilation. The police system penetrates society, isolates the individual and fragments his socio-political existence. Under such conditions, discussion and political debate is an extremely dangerous enterprise. The bureaucracy unleashes one wave of repression after another in a desperate effort to suppress even the most partial repoliticization. Over the last year, the Soviet leadership has opened up its latest sweeping campaign against dissidents. Hundreds of oppositionists have been arrested — over 150 in the Ukraine alone.
So if the Soviet oppositions often appear naive, confused and feeble, Marxists in the West, before leaping to criticize them, should make a serious effort to understand the difficult conditions in which they develop.
Opposition Currents
For Trotskyists, there are four key questions concerning opposition in the Soviet Union. 1. To what extent does it exist within the working class? 2. To what extent do the various dissident groupings understand that the central political contradiction of Soviet society is that between the working class and the bureaucracy? 3. To what degree have they broken with all conceptions of the reformability of the bureaucracy? 4. Do the demands they raise have an anti-bureaucratic revolutionary dynamic?
These questions cannot at present be answered adequately. It is almost impossible to ascertain the relative weight and importance of the various oppositional currents in the Soviet Union, because of the very scanty information that reaches the West and the necessarily clandestine nature of much of their activity. There is no need to dwell on the problems of making a proper analysis, but clearly these are formidable.
There are three broad currents of anti-bureaucratic opposition in the Soviet Union. The most visible from outside the country is constituted by the dissident intellectuals. These have focussed primarily on the issue of civil rights, fighting for the intelligentsia's most cherished right of free expression and communication. But the denial of such basic democratic rights in the Soviet Union is an absolutely indispensable aspect of bureaucratic rule. The bureaucracy cannot grant such rights as freedom of speech, press and assembly, without fundamentally undermining the very basis of its power. The struggle of the intellectuals for democratic rights is therefore situated within the dynamic of permanent revolution. In order to secure democratic rights, the intelligentsia has ultimately to pose the question of the abolition of the bureaucracy as such.
The second major current of anti-bureaucratic opposition in the Soviet Union is the struggle of the national minorities. In a society where 46.6% of the total population is non-Russian, the issue of national oppression is critically important. The struggle to end national oppression in the Soviet Union is intensifying sharply, as the recent riots in Lithuania indicate. In the non-Russian republics, a powerful indigenous proletariat has been created by the development of industry. It is they who are destined to be the leaders of the national minorities in all their future struggles.
Finally, there is opposition within the working class, which is at present focussed primarily on questions of poor living conditions, price increases, etc. Unfortunately we know least about this most important of all oppositions. In fact, as one Soviet dissident, Amalrik, has written: 'no one, not even the bureaucratic elite, knows exactly what attitudes prevail among wider sections of the population'. The upper strata of society, he continues, have 'a surrealistic image of the working masses'.¹
There are, of course, other forms of opposition to the existing regime — some of them extremely reactionary. Among the most important of these are the Jewish movement to leave the Soviet Union for Israel; the various religious groups such as the Baptists; and the various Russian nationalist and Slavophile groups. It would be wrong to leave the impression that these currents are insignificant: quite the contrary.
Russian nationalism / Slavophilism, for example, is becoming a major influence in the upper strata of Soviet society. This current is reactionary through and through. It is racist and chauvinist. It attacks the regime for 'betraying traditional Russian values', and attacks Marxism as a 'foreign transplant'. It rejects the October revolution as 'un-Russian', and eulogizes the 'mystical qualities of the Great Russian soul'. The credo of this current is best expressed in a manifesto called 'A Word to the Nation', signed by 'Russian patriots'. Its authors write: 'We are facing the threat of biological degeneration. This danger threatens not only us but the whole white race. If we do not take timely measures we may live to see ourselves playing the part of pawns or at best passive observers in the battle between the black and yellow races for world supremacy. Democratic institutions do not play a healing role, but rather aggravate the disease... more important to us than the victory of democracy over dictatorship is the moral reorientation of dictatorship, an ideological revolution of sorts... Long live the victory of Christian civilization over the chaos which has risen up against it! Long live a great, single and indivisible Russia!'
It is well-known in the Soviet Union that Slavophiles [illegible] the secret police. [illegible] up for over three years in a lunatic asylum, reactionaries like Osipov produce and circulate their rubbish in relative freedom. The officially sponsored 'Rodina (Motherland) Clubs' are known to everyone in the Soviet Union as one of the principal centres of this form of reaction.
These right-wing elements of opposition, however, despite their importance, will not be examined in this article, which will confine itself to those with an anti-bureaucratic revolutionary dynamic.
Working-Class Opposition
The struggle of the Soviet working class against the bureaucracy has centred primarily on questions of social and economic inequality, low wages, poor living conditions, price increases, and the severe factory regime. This struggle is bound up with the state of the Soviet economy, which must therefore be described briefly.
The Soviet economy today suffers from a deep malaise. 1971 figures show that the growth of real income per capita has been the slowest for nearly a decade. The 1972 statistics for the yearly plan fulfilment of the current five-year plan show that there has been no significant increase in consumer goods. The plan for housing in 1972 was once again underfulfilled by 10%. In the same period, national income per head grew at around 3% per annum; but if one takes into account recent price increases, then the growth in national income per head is negligible. At the same time as the economy stagnates, the educational level, industrial experience and expectations of the Soviet working class have increased. The promise of a consumer society which the bureaucracy held out to the working class after Stalin's death has failed to materialize, and there is bitter resentment.
Unable to organize itself into genuine trade unions or other autonomous organizations, with no real possibility for expressing its class interests, the Soviet working class has remained seemingly passive. Of course, any organized form of opposition with generalized demands is difficult in the context of a factory regime which keeps detailed files on every worker, where every worker must carry a 'labour book' which [records] his work [illegible], where an extensive system of informers on the shop floor [keeps] the secret police informed of opinions expressed. Under these conditions, much working-class opposition is an opposition of despair, expressed through individual acts. This takes the form of industrial sabotage, [illegible] production, high rates of absenteeism [illegible] almost daily, rampant alcoholism, and what Soviet bureaucrats have called 'acts of organized hooliganism'. [But working-class opposition is not] limited to this type of activity. There have been literally hundreds of occasions in the last decade when the working class has broken out into more open [opposition, often in the] form of violent spontaneous outbursts. It is interesting to note the speed with which these outbursts develop, and how quickly they spread if the bureaucracy fails to contain them by cordoning off the city in which they occur. In 1962, for example, when Khrushchev announced [a sharp price increase in] meat and dairy products, this action was greeted in many factories in the Soviet Union by sit-down strikes, work stoppages, and street demonstrations. In Novocherkask the working class marched to the Party headquarters [to demonstrate] against the [price increases]. This march sparked off a [riot], and within a day the riots had spread to other cities in the region such as Donetsk (the mining centre) and Zhdanov. Special KGB divisions had to be flown in to suppress the disturbances. A similar situation occurred last summer, when large-scale riots were reported in Dnieprodzerzhinsk and Dniepropetrovsk, sparked off by a strike in protest against low living standards.
An interesting form of working-class protest took place in Krasnodar, in the Kuban, several years ago. Here the working class, exasperated at the shortage of consumer goods, staged a three-day stay-at-home strike. But perhaps the best organized of strikes to have taken place recently was the Kiev Hydro-electric plant strike in the Ukraine. Here the workers actually organized mass meetings which were addressed by their own elected representatives, and where bureaucrats who tried to address the workers were physically evicted from the platform. The strike was about housing shortages. But during demonstrations which the workers organized, banners were raised calling for 'All Power To The Soviets'.
Recently several leaflets circulating chiefly in Leningrad raised the slogan 'For a General Strike'. This example, like the others mentioned, is an indication that it will not be very long before the proletariat re-enters the political arena.
In the context of the economic crisis as felt by the working class, it is important to emphasize the crucial role played by women in the protest actions. There is almost total employment of women in the Soviet Union, but on average they receive 50% of the male wage. Furthermore, they still carry the burden of housekeeping, cooking and queuing, and are therefore more acutely aware of the shortages than men. In Novocherkask in 1962 it was working-class women who, having calculated the cost of the price increases in terms of the family's weekly income, initiated the demonstrations.
A final observation about the pattern of working-class opposition relates to the tendency for unrest to occur most frequently in the peripheral areas of the Soviet Union — that is to say, in areas at quite a distance from the central Moscow-Leningrad region. This does not mean that strikes have not taken place in the central regions — indeed they have, at the Moscow Moskvitch plant for example. But large-scale activity, and mass actions involving all sectors of the working class, nevertheless occur more frequently in the peripheral areas.
There is a good explanation for this. The bureaucracy finds it most difficult to penetrate the peripheral areas, especially the non-Russian republics, and therefore a greater measure of spontaneous action is possible in these regions. Also, the central regions are highly favoured in terms of the flow of consumer goods and employment possibilities. Material shortages and unemployment are much more severe in the 'provinces'. This pattern has serious implications for the process of political revolution, for it means that those areas which are of the least strategic importance have the greatest opportunity for action.
The National Movements
The various movements of the oppressed nationalities are the only significant oppositional current to date to have involved both workers and dissident intellectuals in the same organizations. For example, it was in helping to organize the Crimean Tartars, exiled en masse from their homeland by Stalin, that Grigorenko and his group of civil rights activists achieved something like a mass following. In order to understand the national movements, it is essential to grasp some of the main features of the national question as it is posed in the Soviet Union today.
The early Bolshevik nationalities policy encouraged the development of the national languages and cultures in an effort to raise the educational and cultural level of the non-Russian masses who had been oppressed by the Tsarist regime. It was also part of a policy to ensure that the non-Russian masses could participate in and control the administrative apparatus in their republics — an apparatus which under Tsarism had been totally in the hands of the Russian colonizers. Such a policy was obviously not to the liking of the former Tsarist officials, and this stratum of the colonizing petty bourgeoisie was subsequently to flock to the banner of Stalinist reaction. The essence of the Leninist nationalities policy, expressed by a Communist at the Twelfth Party Congress, was that 'it is better to force ten Great Russian chauvinists and nationalists to learn the language of the country in which they live than to force one peasant to torture his native language in a government office'. For the Stalinists, it was better to force ten peasants to torture their native language than to disturb one Great Russian bureaucrat.
Today, in most of the non-Russian republics, the linguistic division coincides with the social division. Ivan Dzyuba, a Ukrainian oppositionist, writes: '... here the national question again develops into a social one; we see that in city life (in the Ukraine) the Ukrainian language is in a certain sense opposed as the language of the "lower" strata of the population — caretakers, maids, unskilled labourers, newly hired workers, rank and file workers, especially in the suburbs — to the Russian language as the language of the "higher", "more educated" strata of society — "captains of industry", clerks and the intelligentsia. And it is not possible to "brush aside" this social rift. The language barrier aggravates and exacerbates social divisions.' He concludes, 'It is wrong to oppose social problems to national problems on the pretext that the former are more important and immediate. National problems are always social problems as well, problems of political class strategy.'²
The national movements in the Soviet Union vary considerably, involving nations at different stages of development, with radically different historical pasts. I will here examine only the political currents within the Ukraine — the largest non-Russian republic, with a population of over 40 million, a highly developed industry and a territory larger than France. These can be divided broadly into Marxist and nationalist.
The Marxist current in the Ukrainian movement is best exemplified by Dzyuba, by Vyacheslav Chornovil, and by an organization which emerged in the early sixties called the Union of Workers and Peasants. This current attacks Great Russian chauvinism in the name of internationalism, and argues for a return to Leninism. It is also the grouping which has best understood the social consequences of Russification policies for the working class, and that the bureaucracy's nationalities policy is part and parcel of a more general reactionary socio-economic policy. Chornovil, recently arrested, expressed the collective positions of this group when he wrote: 'I categorically state, contrary to all illogical assertions ... that I have always firmly adhered to the principles of socialism and continue to do so ... I cannot imagine true socialism without democratic freedoms; without the widest political and economic self-government of all the cells of the state organism down to and including the smallest; without a real guarantee — and not merely a paper one — of the rights of all nations within a multi-national state.'³
The Marxist current has, however, been divided on how to achieve this aim. Dzyuba, Chornovil and others tended to act as individuals, and not as an organized group. Moreover, they insisted on the employment only of peaceful, constitutional means of expression: petitions, open letters, public protests. But last year the KGB carried out mass arrests among this grouping, and there is every indication that there is now serious rethinking of strategies on their part.
The Union of Workers and Peasants took a different approach. They understood the organizational tasks facing the opposition, and set about building a socialist party with a programme and with the intention of carrying out revolutionary propaganda. Although the platform of this group never reached the West, we have a general idea of its contents from the writings of L. Lukyanenko, a former Communist Party ideological worker and founder of the group. He wrote: 'As a result of studying Soviet reality, in 1960 I came to revise the earlier draft programme and began to think that it was not the independence of the Ukrainian SSR that was essential for improving the life of the people, but the liquidation of bureaucratism.' The Union's programme included a call to end the 'curtailment of the rights of the trade unions, whose leaders had become the best tools of the managers in violating socialist legality', liquidation of 'bureaucratic methods of administering the national economy', 'full democratization of the soviets of workers' deputies', and a radical improvement in the lot of the peasantry. Lukyanenko was sentenced to death. After much protest, the death penalty was commuted to 15 years imprisonment.
Within the Ukraine there is also a straightforwardly nationalist movement. This is strongest in the western regions. It is not 'bourgeois' nationalist, as it does not question the property relations established by the October revolution. But it is nationalist in that it counterposes Ukrainian nationalism to Russian nationalism. Some nationalists, patterning themselves after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a partisan group who fought both the Germans and the Red Army, organized conspiratorial parties using clandestine methods of struggle, including terrorism. One such organization was the Ukrainian National Committee, composed of 40 Lvov industrial workers. Two of its members were executed for allegedly planning terrorist attacks.
Russian Dissident Intellectuals
The oppositional current which has attracted the most attention in the west is that of the Russian dissident intelligentsia. The real preface to their dissent was written in 1956 by Khrushchev, when he gave his 'secret speech' exposing Stalin. Khrushchev's revelations were part of an attempt to restore a sense of confidence in the bureaucracy. As part of this new course, the Khrushchev Party leadership permitted two short periods of relaxed controls over political and cultural life in the Soviet Union. It was during this period that the first of the post-Stalin Russian intellectual oppositions arose: the so-called 'cultural opposition' — writers, artists and poets who pressed for a 'thaw' in the intellectual environment. This opposition did not question the bureaucracy as such, nor did it really raise in a clear way fundamental questions of democratic rights. The cultural opposition set out to liberate the creative process: it demanded the right of the artist to render reality in genuinely realistic terms; it fought the total banality of official Soviet culture. Although the debates of that period may have centred on such seemingly innocuous ground as the 'need for greater sincerity in literature', it became abundantly clear that to grant the writers and poets a freedom of criticism not enjoyed by citizens, and above all by workers, 'was to make artistic creation an inevitable instrument of social criticism'.⁴ By 1965 the bureaucracy was backtracking furiously on its concessions to the intellectuals. It reimposed strict censorship, and began to arrest those writers who still insisted on 'sincerity in literature'. The trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, two writers who perhaps more than anyone else had come to symbolize the values of the new cultural opposition, ended the period of that opposition and gave birth to the 'Democratic Movement' — an array of individuals and groups who initiated a struggle for democratic rights.
The brutal treatment of Sinyavsky and Daniel, and the arrests of other writers, shocked the dissident intellectuals into a realization that artistic freedom without fundamental political freedom was unthinkable. It was not, however, until 1968, beginning with protests around the trial of Ginsburg and Galanskov, that the Democratic Movement really surfaced. And with the Democratic Movement arrived samizdat (literally 'self-published') — the written material increasingly circulated in the Russian underground.
The Democratic Movement's campaign for civil rights is understood by the activists of that movement to mean the democratization of Soviet society. The most frequent demands of this movement are: an end to the arbitrary arrests of individuals by the secret police, strict adherence to the Soviet constitution, an end to press censorship, and the rehabilitation of all former concentration camp inmates. This movement also organized demonstrations against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. And one of its members, Galanskov (who recently died under mysterious circumstances in a concentration camp), marched against the American embassy in Moscow to protest the invasion of the Dominican Republic.
Politically, the Democratic Movement is diverse. It ranges from Leninists like Grigorenko to liberals like Sakharov. These diverse tendencies do, however, take a common stand on the Soviet Constitution, and they stress the importance of law as a mechanism for securing civil rights. But what divides the Democratic Movement is how to achieve a return to socialist legality.
The liberals, usually well-placed figures in the Soviet academic establishment, try to convince the bureaucracy that, in the interests of its own self-preservation, it must introduce a measure of civil rights. As moderate men, the liberals want democratization, but 'without causing undue commotion and mass disturbances'.⁵ If faced with the choice between the two, they would no doubt beat a hasty retreat into the bosom of the bureaucracy.
But within the Democratic Movement there are also 'radical democratizers'.⁶ The Soviet dissidents best known to the West come from this circle: Yakir, Bukovsky, Yakhimovich, Grigorenko, Litvinov and others. Mobilizing public opinion independently of the bureaucracy, publicizing violations of civil rights with courage and self-[sacrifice, they have created a certain climate of freedom] in the public consciousness. But these 'radical democratizers', though vocal on the question of democratic rights, have said little about the economic and political rights of the mass of workers and peasants. Acting as individuals, they have had no strategy for drawing the working class into the struggle for civil rights.
With the arrest of scores of 'radical democratizers' last year, a more political current within the dissident movement has emerged, a current which recognizes the limitations of the legalistic-constitutional orientation of the Democratic Movement. Many dissidents have come to the conclusion that what is required is a more scientific analysis of the system they are trying to change. They are also beginning to understand the need to develop new forms of organization — even the need to build clandestine parties with an orientation towards the working class.
Recently quite a few clandestine parties have come to our attention. We know very little about them, because of the strict secrecy which surrounds their activity. We learn of their existence, for example, in one or two sentences in the Chronicle of Current Events after members have been arrested. They often apparently number no more than a dozen individuals. Frequently, the only indication of their politics is the name they have chosen. Recent examples have included: the 'Russian Socialist Party', which circulated a leaflet in Leningrad calling on workers to launch a general strike; the 'Party of Non-Party Workers Struggling for the Restoration of Socialism'; the 'Democratic Union of Socialists'; 'The Union of Communards'; 'The Party of Young Workers'; and 'The Party of Real Communists'.
It is too early to assess the role these political groupings will play in the coming political revolution. Certainly the economic crisis in the Soviet Union has created a social climate where revolutionary ideas can find a ready response in the working class. Fearing this possibility, the Soviet secret police has intensified its efforts to search out and destroy any incipient organizations. But a clandestine form of organization, as opposed to the 'open protests' of the civil rights activists, has permitted these groups to exist in some cases for a considerable period of time, and to gain invaluable experience for future struggles.
Perhaps as important as the existence of these groups — no matter how much terror they may strike in the minds of the KGB — is the huge body of underground literature, samizdat, which the new political attitude has fostered. Today in the USSR there circulate periodicals, full-length books, historical and philosophical essays, translations, and pamphlets dealing with strategic and tactical problems of political opposition. Samizdat plays a crucial role in the development of political consciousness. It has become the chief medium for the working out of political ideas.
The bureaucracy has become painfully aware of the threat which the samizdat system poses to its hegemony of political expression. It therefore took a decision to put an end to samizdat at all costs, and with this aim it unleashed a wave of mass arrests in January 1972. But the production and circulation of samizdat literature has nonetheless continued unabated. It will continue to give political expression to the forces which are now increasingly prepared to give battle to the bureaucracy.
1. Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, London 1970, p. 30.
* 'A Word to the Nation', Survey, Summer 1971.
2. Ivan Dzyuba, Internationalism or Russification?, pp. 139-40, 1968.
3. International Socialist Review, September 1972, pp. 41-2.
4. ibid.
5. The Development and Disintegration of World Stalinism, SWP Education Bulletin, New York 1970.
6. Intercontinental Press, 4 December 1972, p. 1,354.