Why did the Soviet Union collapse?
Kemal Okuyan, TKP General Secretary
106 years ago, the working class in Russia seized power under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was founded a few years later, achieved enormous successes in many fields. The country emerged from underdevelopment and turned into a superpower that wrestled with the USA in almost every field.
Exactly 74 years after the October Revolution, the Soviet Union dissolved, and the counter-revolutionary wave that also affected the socialist countries in Eastern Europe brought Soviet socialism to an end.
In between there was the Second World War, in which 27 million Soviet people lost their lives; great progress, stagnation, regressions…
I will not talk about these things.
Space travels, gigantic dams, factories, cities full of parks, the mechanisation of agriculture, the complete elimination of illiteracy, the emancipation of women, achievements in the field of culture and arts, the elimination of unemployment and similar developments are not the subject of this article. Those who know already know, those who do not want to know already turn their backs.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics stands there in history as a great foundation that will never be forgotten. No one can remove it from there. It is as real as it gets!
It was collapsed, but…
It was founded with great struggles, fought great struggles and collapsed without a struggle. This, too, is as real as it gets.
So what happened?
There are many answers to this question. It depends on how you look at it, what you care about.
32 years after its collapse, I would like to say that “the Soviet Union was defeated by human being”.
What has been written and drawn about “human nature” must have immediately come to mind. One might even think that I have surrendered to the fallacy that communism is incompatible with the competitive, selfish nature of human and therefore doomed to failure. (TKP member) Nevzat Evrim Önal’s book, “Is Man Selfish?” (published by Yazılama Editorial House in Turkish) gives a very comprehensive answer to these fallacies.
There is no such thing as human nature. No matter how important our biological existence as an advanced organism, human beings are shaped by social relations.
The Soviet Union was defeated by human being, a product of the conditions of the 20th century.
What happened to class struggles?
Let me try to explain.
We always say that capitalism is barbarism. When the October Revolution took place in 1917, capitalism was at the peak of barbarism. In the First World War, the imperialist strife killed millions upon millions of people, and those it did not kill rotted in heaps. Egoism, blood-drinking, vandalism, lying, betrayal, treachery, everything you can think of spread and multiplied like a virus. However, there was no such thing as human nature, or if there was such a thing in that “nature”, there was also standing up, honesty, solidarity, sense of rebellion, brotherhood. The revolution rose with these values.
The revolution rose with these values and raised these values. It energised the “good” in the chaos and struggle within each worker, each intellectual.
Communism creates the material foundations of the “good”, the “advanced”, the “beautiful”, the “right”. It eliminates the conditions that cause the “bad” to flourish and grow stronger.
In a world where there is no unemployment, poverty and hunger, where people do not exploit others, where social classes disappear, where abundance and prosperity prevail, selfishness, cruelty, lies and deceit can only find a very, very narrow space for themselves.
The establishment of such a world will of course take time. In other words, the people of the old world will build the new world!
How?
While endeavouring to eliminate ignorance, to revive agriculture and industry, to mobilise the productive forces, to reach a society of equality and abundance; it will also be necessary to intervene in human beings.
Because the revolution, although a great social upheaval, is not enough to create a “new human”. The masses of the people are susceptible to “malignant” inputs from the exploiting classes, centuries of prejudices reproduce themselves over and over again, and as in the case of the Soviet Union, the imperialist system does everything it can to dominate the human mind with its sophisticated lie machines.
There are four interdependent conditions for resisting this.
Firstly, to draw as many people as possible into the world-wide struggle against capitalism and to keep this struggle alive at all times.
Secondly, to explain the goal well and to make the relationship between what is being done and that goal as clear as possible to the working people.
Thirdly, to encourage the good, to emphasise the advanced, to create rituals that will make it easier for people to commit to a new morality by taking risks if necessary.
Fourthly, to take away the right of a person to surrender to evil, to act with strict and sharp rules, to prevent the deepening of political, ideological and cultural weaknesses that will cripple society, and to be unforgiving in the face of incorrigible examples.
The task of the Communist Party in the process of socialist construction is to assume a leading role in relation to these four conditions.
After Stalin, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union set aside all four of these conditions.
In the Stalin years the Soviet Union always wanted to go forward, the Soviet workers pursued great dreams and made them real one by one. They were in a continuous struggle.
They knew what they were fighting for. Yesterday’s illiterate peasant was becoming an engineer with the opportunities of socialism, helping to build dams to establish communism.
Yes, work was glorified! In the conditions of that period, several generations had to work hard in order to completely free humanity from the scourge of exploitation, from the trouble of working 12-13 hours a day. If you know what you are working for, if you understand well what you are fighting for, you will work hard when necessary.
Every input that would rot the society was ruthlessly intervened against. Laziness, selfishness, theft, corruption were not behaviours that would be tolerated. Just like cowardice, defeatism, indecision and betrayal in the war against fascism…
In the Soviet Union, there was an understanding that protected themself, the country, the people, humanity and socialism.
An uninterrupted intervention.
Then the Communist Party of the Soviet Union stopped intervening. And stopped the struggle…
They were tired and tense from consecutive heavy fights.
Instead of patiently struggling to establish communism, they preferred to live it prematurely and irresponsibly. The process of establishment was frozen. Socialism had achieved social gains unimaginable in any capitalist country, but you couldn’t stop, you had to continue. However, the CPSU leadership was determined to take an endless “break” in the class struggle.
On the international arena, imperialism was no longer seen as an enemy to be defeated, but as another option for peaceful co-existence.
Domestically, the “right to be lazy” was transformed into a fundamental “work ethic”, even though communist society had not yet been achieved.
The party gave up ideological and political intervention in society; when the energy was cut off, the situation was reversed and the party became open to all kinds of input from outside.
The party, which was founded to eliminate privileges and inequalities, began to reproduce privileges as it withdrew from the struggle and from producing ideas for the struggle. One could never speak of an exploiting class in the Soviet Union, but step by step, perhaps without realising it, the party leaders who decayed, the intellectuals who created thanks to the opportunities offered by socialism, who reached the rank of “people’s artist” or received “academic” titles, became alienated from communism in their own little worlds. Moscow was polluted with bribery and corruption, and advanced values were eroded.
At the root of all economic and social problems lay the CPSU’s abandonment of the struggle.
And despite the decaying elements, the Soviet people, who were predominantly in favour of good, truth, solidarity, enlightenment and equality, failed to fight the virus that threatened them. They had forgotten how to fight, there was no party to guide it!
The people of socialism did not and could not fire a single bullet.
This is how the Soviet Union collapsed.
Leaving behind enough lessons for a socialism that will not collapse…