V. EVERYDAY LIFE UNDER SOVIETSOCIAL-IMPERIALISM

Marxist-Leninists have only begun the kind ofthorough investigation of the actual workings ofSoviet social-iniperialism that is needed. We otterthe preceding analysis of the social-imperialisteconomy and the role of the Soviet Union as an im-perialist power as a contribution to this irivestiga-tion, but we recognize much remains that is dif-ficult to explain. We also recognize that this kind ofbasic analysis, while essential, and while clearly in-dicating that the Soviet Union is a capitalist-imperialist and no longer a socialist country, isitself limited. We must also know more vividly whatthe restoration of capitalisnl has meant to the Sov-iet people in their everyday lives.

1) A Rising Standard of Living?

ln confronting this question, we must hold noillusions about what socialism was like in theSoviet Union. While it brought tremendous pro-gress and benefits to Soviet working people, andqualitatlvely changed the nature of work and lifein society generally, socialism is not a utopia.Class struggle continues, and in the conditionsof the Soviet Union great sacrifices were calledfor, especially at crucial points, in order for theworking class to hold state power, maintain itsalliance with the peasantry as the basis of thatpower and build the foundations of a rational,planned economy in the service of the people.

Under Stalin's leadership most of the resourcesof the society were invested in two areas-defenseand the f uture. The production of the means of pro-duction, that is, of factories, machines, tractors,etc., took priority over the productiOn of immediatenecessities, and the diversion of vital resources tothe production of defensive weaponry-but not of agrand imperial navy like today-was necessitatedby the harsh realities of imperialist encirclement,Nazi invasion and "Cold War." Thus, the Sovietpeople often had to do without many of the thingsAmericans, including many American workers, takefor granted.*

,Today, while it is clear that this policy was in the mainnecessary and correct, perhaps too much emphasis wasplaced on the development of "heavy" industry to the un-ecessary detriment of consumer production and agricutture.ln present day China drversified light industry is being de-veloped alongside the more dynamic sector of heavy industry.Yet here. too, Sacrifices must be made in the interests of de-fense and balanced future development.

,lt would be a bit dishonest, then, for us topoint an accusing finger at the'social-imperialistsand call attention to thd present lack of adequatehousing and shortages of foodstuf{s or consumerdurables which do exist in the Soviet Union withoutrecognizing that these problems also existedbefore 1956. But it must be recognized that todaythese problems arise in a completely different con-text.

We certainly do not resent the somewhathigher material standards enjoyed by many Sov-iet citizens today, nor do we look down uponneeded improvements from the high horse ofpetty bourgeois moralism as "depadent" andi'corrupting" in themselves. We do, however, re-cognize and stress that insofar as economic ad-vances have benefitted the working people, theyare the result not of the social-imperialists'generosity, but of the legacy of hard struggle andselfless labor for the f uture bequeathed totoday's citizenry by a generation of Soviet workersand peasants led by the Communist Party andLenin and Stalin.

Moreover, we are fully convinced that any im-provement in the general standard of living ofthe laboring masses can only be temporary un-der social-imperialist rule. Back in 1927, whenbourgeois econgmists were. jumping up anddown with excitement about the "wonders" ofpost-war capitalist stabilization and the risingstandard of living of the people, it was noneother than Stalin who pointed to the illusorynature of these gains. Accurately predicting theonset of the "Great Depression" and of a newimperialist war, Stalin' pointed out: "Partialstabilization is giving rise to an intensificationof the crisis of capitalism, and the growing crisiSis upsetting stabilization-such are the dialecticsof the development of capitalism in the presentperiod of history."rThe same could be said todayof social-imperialism and the "successes" it trum-pets to the world.

Furthermore, the kind of "improvement" whichhas taken place in the standard bf living of theSoviet people is'extremely uneven and in mostimportant respects represents, in fact, a stepbackward. Under Stalin inequalities did exist andMarxist-Leninists have concluded that these weretoo extensive. Such inequalities include$ widewage differentials between skilled and unskilledlabor and higher compensation for managerial

page82 r

and technical personnel. Yet overall economicdevelopment u/as. carried out in the interest of thebroad masses, and basic necessities were priced aslow as possible. Where shortages did exist, ration-ing ensured that thepoorest would not suffer most.

The development of collective, social institu-tions was stressed over the production of privateconsumption goods. Standard of living cannot bemeasured in gross quantitative terms like GNP orother capitalist-type production indices. Thequality of life must also be assessed, as must thepattern of distribution of socially produce.d goodsand serviees.

ln the Soviet Union today, the distribution ofwealth has grown increasingly uneven and the rul.ing class is in every respect a privileged elite. Ex-panding differentials in income are coupled withcutbacks in social services. While material stan'dards may have,improved somewhat for some, it isthe bourgeoisre whose living standards have reallyrisen. At best, the workers have managed to retain afew crumbs.

2) The Growth of lnequality

ln the past Soviet production strongly leanedtoward the creation of improvements whichcould be collectively enjoyed by large numbers ofpeople (like theatres, public transportation, etc.),but today the production of individual luxuries,available mainly to a few, is stressed. While thismay contribute to the maintenance of a risingproduction chart, it does little for the Sovietmasses and reflects their lack of mastery overproduction. To produce more luxury goods,prices of consumer necessities have been raiseddrastically. As we noted before, between 1959and 1965 prices of 15 major consumer items roseby 4T/9 and even the government journal Sov-ietskaia Torgovia (Soviet Commerce), had to admitthat the stores stock only expensive clothing andthat many customers have complained about theshortage of cheap autumn and winter we'ar. :

This gives some indication of the growing ten-dency of the Soviet bourgeoisie to flaunt its new-found wealth in "style." The fourteen luxury carswhich Brezhnev oWns' do not merely representthat leader's personal idiosyncracy. We can pointalso to the newly developing Soviet fashion in-dustry which is trying so hard to mimic the Diorsand St. Laurents.

The Soviet press itself has noted the risingtrend of officials purchasing "country homes",often former estates of the tsarist nobility. Forexample, the clairman of a collective farm in theAzerbaijan Redublic built a '16-room villa "un-rivalled in splendor'l in the whole area.3 More re-cently, political squabbling among the social-imperialists forced., exposure of the fact thatMme. Yekaterina Furtseva, a former crony ofKhrushchev's and a top Soviet leader, had em-bezzled state funds to build what can only belabelled an extravagant mansion as her personalcountry dacha.

But perhaps most revealing of all, because it in-volves the direct exploitation of human labor, is

.,n.

that in recent years many professional and official families have begun to hire what Russianscall an "incomer" (prikhodiashchaiaf-a personalmaid. These women, like their U.S. counterparts,are paid extremely low wages and are subject todegrading treatment. Also, as in the U.S., theyare f requently members of oppressed na-tionalities and are new arrivals from the coun-tryside who lack training for skilled work.

ln the past such women were put to work onprojects of general social utility, f rom streetsweeping to day-care, until they could be trEinedto enter the industrial work force. Today, they mustcater to the personal need of their new rulers. Andno doubt the Soviet bourgeoisie joins in choruswith their western counterparts in complaining ofthe shortage of |good help." I

One particularly glarlng example of how ,the

Soviet bourgeoisie lives "the good life" off thesweat of Soviet workers is the story of BellaAkhmadulina, the Soviet Union's leading youngpoetess and ex-wife of the famous revisionistpoet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko. She is now married'to the writer Yurii Nazibar. According to apersonal interview in the New York Iimes, Ms.Akhmadulina is "a millionaire." She has a full-time maid and butler, a fancy car with a chauf-feur, and, of course, a country house. Enoughsaid about the Soviet leadership's claims to be"building communism", a system where distribu-tion of wealth is according to need!"

Yet such blatant flaunting of 'wealth can onlygo so far. The Soviet rulers have to keep up thepretext of working class rule. Thus, a system ofofficial corruption has developed which makes amockery of' rules and restrictio.ns. For example,Soviet executives l'iave taken a cue from theirclass brothers in lhe West in milking that well-known hidden income source, the expense ac-count.

Legally,.expense accounts in the Soviet Unionare quite small. But the managers and bureacratshave gotten around this. They bill each other'sfirms instead of their own! And, apparently, somefrrms in resort areas seem to exist for ltttle morethan to provide the sourcg of what is essentiallyexpense account funding of pleasure junkets forexecutives of other companies. For example, theSochi Construction Organization t2 (Sochi is aresort on the Black Sea) once paid out 1300rubles for the visit to town of A.V. Manvellian,director of the Southern Trade Construction En-terprise of Krasnodar, and a friend (not his wife),all of which was charged to cost overruns. ;

This is not unusual. Note, for instance, theuses made of the 'business conference."Komsomolskaia Pravda reports that a company

f rom Krasnodar held a three-day seminar atSochi, racked up a bill for 4,000 rubles (nearly$5,000), and left no sign of actual business meet-ings. There were restaurant bills, a charge for asight-seeing excursion, items for a typist and a

stenographer (and what did this disguise?), butno'seminar programs or re'cords. "

And what are we to think of the conference on

:.

milk and dairy production organized by the Sochimilk enterprise for 180 out of town delegates?Again according to Komsomolskaia Pravda, "Nodocuments were f.ound after the conference ex-cept for the resolution adopted by the' con-ference which was printed two months before ittook place!" q

These examples, of course, reveal only the ex-tent to which managers and technical people arefree to live high on the hog. The real power-holders, however, are, as we pointed out before,the high state officials who form a new state-monopoly capitalist class.

While it is occasionally in the rnterest of thisruling group to expose the "excesses" of theirsubordinates, partly to keep them in line andpartly to pacify lhe justly outraged workers, suchcorruption is an integral part of the Sovietbourgeois way of life., As a Baku taxi driversummed it all up for a U.S. reporter: in the SovietUnion, to get almost anything "either you have tohave a friend or it takes money."'ro

But what about the workers? How have theyfared? Though,some workers have been granteda few concessions in the form of higher wages,most have paid a stiff price in terms of security,working conditions and quality of life. ln the pre-vious chapter we described some of the ways inwhich capitalist restoration has affected workerson the shop floor, bringing on speed-up, layoffsand other ills stemming from bourgeois controlof production. But outside the plant the status ofworkers has been sharply degraded, too.

First of alll we should note that in a societywhere the working class is really in power, to beaworker is considered a noble and respected ac-tivity, as it is in China, Albania and other socialistcountries.. Not sq in the Soviet Union.

- Thpre was a survey taken of occupational pre-ferences among Soviet high school graduates inJune 1971. This was.the first graduating class,by the way, to be raised completely under re-visionist rule. ln general, students looked uponihe traditional petty bourgeois careers of scien-tist, surgeon, engineer, writer as having the moststatus. The most preferred working class jobswere the skilled positions of turner and polisher.ln Novosibirsk these ranked 39 and 40. lnKostroma, a' factory town, they ranked 75 and76!tlThis only conf irms the complaint of GeorgiKulagin, Director of the Sveidlov Machine Work6Combine, who wrote in the journal literaturnaiaGazeta, that since 1967 young people were refus-ing to become workers, finding it "beneath theirdignitY." tz

The regular reader of the Soviet press will notgenerally conclude that there is any unemploymentin the Soviet Union. The papers.are f illed with com-plaints of a labor- shortage, mainly of skilledworkers. Such complaints can also be found in thenewspapers (want ads especially) in the U.S. andother openly capitalist societies. The establishmentof "Bureaus for the Utilization of ManpowerResources" in 1967 was largely a response to thisproblem. The bureaus were designed to assure anequitable distribution of skilled labor among

Page 83

various factories and plants, preventing a suc-cessful enterprise from hogging more than,its fairshare of skilled hands. They serve o-nly marginallyas true unemployment offices.

It is, however, at least partly the decline in pre-stige of-working class careers apd the growingincome gap separating skilled labor from thebourgeois professions which has tended to dis-courage young people f rom improving theirtechnical skills. After all, why become a lather ora carpenter when one might aim higher andbecome an engineer? The catch, of course, isthat there are already too many engineers andthe recruitment of new ones is basically limited tothe privileged groups: the new bourgeoisie hasalready closed its ranks.

Meanwhile, the number of unskilled workerscontinues to grow. As the Soviet rulers seek tomaximize surplus value in the form of profit bysacking unskilled workers through Shchekino-type ventures, a contradiction is developingbetween a growing pool of unskilled workers anda decreasing demand for their labor. Moreover,the problem is further sharpened by a continualand increasing f low of completely untrdinedyoung people streaming into the cities from thecountryside as a direct result of revisionism'smiserable failure in agriculture-the result ofcapitalist restoration. For example, in the regionaround Moscow the rural population decreased by257o between 1959 and 1970. t:

The proletarian response to this would bepolitical mobilization for technical training aimedat breaking down distinctions between expertiseand execution. This is impossible, .of course, ifthe working class does not hold state power. Analternative for the Soviet bourgeoisie would be. toincrease the material incentive to become a skilledworker. But this conf licts with the need ofcapitalism to maximize profits at the expense ofthe workers. Under imperialism superprofits fromventures abroad can be used to bribe a smallstratum of the skilled workers. This carries theadded benef it for the capitalists of forging a socialbasefor imperialism within the working class' Butthis policy atso is limited by the need to maintainexclusionary barriers between the skilled laboraristocrats and the masses of workers.

Thus, a situation has developed in the SovietUnion which is similar to what we have in theU.S., although it is still not so advanced as here..ln the U.S. almost everyone is aware that officialunemployment figures hide a whole mass ofmillions of people who have long since given up thesearch for work. By and large these people con-stitute a reserve army,of labor wliich permits the.capitalists to more effectively hold down allworkers, both employe( and unemployed. ln theU.S. and in the Soviet Union there are always a fewskilled positions open while many ordinary un-skilled workers go hunqrv.

Although th6 socia"l-imperialists have not yetadmitted-to the existence of this problem (which'we grant, is as yet not nearly so severe as in thecountries where capitalism has existed longer'"un-interrupted" by any period of socialism), there

pagel

have been some indications in the Soviet pressOf its development. The most strikinE evidenbe is,of course, the marked increase in social ills likethiev€ry, 'begging and drunkenness associatedwith the emergence of. an unemployed reserveqrrny.,We shall discuss these shortly. But one in-diCation that we find most outrageous is the ap-pearance of reports like the one in the June 16,1971 Komsomolikaia Pravda.

ln ,that issue ,a young worker named A.Poriadkov told how in seirch of work he hadtravelled several'hunQred mites to ki*r, wherethe Soviets (with extensive aid from the FordMotor Co.) are building the world's largest truckfactory. When he got there the Young Com-munist League told him there was no work. Heapparently had lots of company because he soonlearned that "about 200 people come and go tikethisevery day"!

The editor of the paper did not question this,but.inStead added a horror story of his own. Hetold how eight young Ukranian women spenttheir life savings travelling to Yakutsk in northernSiberia looking for work. They didn't find anyand barely scrounged enough through odd jobsto return horne. But the biggest horror was theeditor's comment on both t66se incidents. "Whois,responsible for this confusion?" he asked. "lthinkthe principalculprit is the thoughtlessness ofthose who come unbidden. "

The restoration of capitalism has also meant aloss in vital social services for the workers, asthese are increasingly monopolized by thebourgeoisie. ln Lithuania it is reported thatsaunas serving as exclusive clubs for the highParty and state officials have been constructed atpublic expense.rr Health care facilities are beingbuift. mainly for the privileged, while local clinicsreceive inadequate funding. ln the Ukranian townof.;Teiebovlia, 4,000 yoting people between theages o1 16 and 28 are served by the fottowingrecreational. facilities'i one movie theatre,' a"House of Culture" and a library that closes at7:30 p.m. But, as 50 youths deciared in a letterlo Pravda, the House of Cu,ltgre used to be openevery evening with parties, amateur theatricalproductions, lectures, music and garnes. Today it[s used only rarely for ma.ior "cultural" events, likethe visit of a leading ballet troupe or sym-PhonY. tr

3) Once Again a "Prison House of Nations"

I enin called tqarist Russia "the prison hodse ofnations." A crucial phrt of the revolutionarystruggle there was ine liberation of nationsformerly oppressed by Great Russia and the fightfor full equality between all nationalities. With t-heoverthrow of the tsar, the capitalists andlandlords, the Soviet Union was founded as amultinational state based on the voluntary unionof peoples, guaranteeing the right 6t setf-determination to all formerly oppressed ,nations.Under Socialism, great strides were made towardetirninating all national inequality-though some

Ia

mistakes in national pglicy were made. Thisstood as a powerful exampie that only with therule of the working class could 'nat.ional op-pression be uprooted, and the Sovi€t Union wasa gregt assistance and inspiration to the hun-dreds'of millions of nationally oppressed peoplein the colonies, and the working class and op-pressed people everywhere, in the fight for na-tlonal liberation and socialism.' But under the rule of the new tsars and therestoration of capitalism, this great progress hasbeen reversed. lncreaSing attacks on the rights ofminority nationalities in the Soviet Union havecalled forth powerful protests and resistance fromamong these peoples and f rom the Soviet people ingeneral.

lnitially, the policy of the revisionists headed byKhrushchev on the national question included theencouragement ,of bourgeois natronalism of theoppressed nations as part of the process of un-leashing all possible bourgeois forces in Sovietsociety. Throughoutthe 1 953-57 period, Khrushchevplayed upon and encouraged national divisionsin order to more readily divide the Soviet peopleand communists. (Even during this period,however, Khrushchev did not hesitate to resort topolicies of Russification wheh such suited hisneeds, as in Kazakhstan.)

But by 1958 Khrushchev abandoned his lormerpolicy-probably because it could no longer yieldmuch in the way of tactical' advantage in hispersonal power struggle with other revisionists.Thus, references to the "coming together"(sblizhenie) and even 'merging" (slianie) of na-tions became the order of the day. From '1958 tothe present, the Soviet lcadership has followed aconsistent policy of "national rapprochement", a'policy of forcible assimilation and Great Russianchauvinism in the form of Russification of theoppressed nations.

This policy was first expressed in 'its full andcomplete form in the official Program of CPSUadopted at the 22nd Party Congress in 1961. Ad-vocating an "increasingly ploser, rapprochment ofnationalities", the program stated that:

"The boundaries between the union repubtics withintbe USSF are increasingly tosing their formers;ignificance . .. Futl-scale-Communist constructionslgnifies a new stage in the devetopment of nationalrelations ln lhe USSF in which the nations will drawstill closer together and their complete unity will beachieved." r"

This position remains the off icial social-imperialist view. According to Brezhnev:

s as'imperml.ssib/e any attempt" . ..the Party ,regardwhatsoever to hold back fhe process of the drawingtoQether of nations, to obstruct it on any pretext, orartilicially to reinforce nationat isolation." t;

ln 1973 the Party journal Kommunist dectaredthat the Soviet Union is entering 'the stage ofachieving complete unification" -of nationalities.The same article pointed out that there are now

]..]

''possibilities to conceive more specifically theprocess of rapprochement, even integrationamong all nationalities." According to the social-imperialists, "a single sgcialist nation is taking

-shape" in the Soviet Union. 'sThat such views are merely a cover for the forci-

ble Russification of Soviet minority groups can beclearly seen when the revisionist position is con-trasted to the position held by genuine Marxist-Leninists. As summarized in'a recent issue of Pek-ing Review:

"Viewed from the long-term historicat development,the integration of nations and extinction of nationsconform to the taw ol historicat developmenf. ButMarxist-Leninists maintain that the elimination ofc/asses "wilt come fist, followed by the eliminationof the state and finally that of natlons. Lenin pointedout that mankind can 'arrive at the inevitable inte-gration of nations only through a transition period ofthe complete emancipation of all oppressed na-tions.' Refening to Lenin's'attitude towards the pro-blerh of nationatities the great Marxist-Lemnlst Sta/rnpointed out that 'Lenin never said that the nationaldifterences must disappear and that nationallanguages must merge into one common languagewithin the borders of a single state before the vic-tory of socialism on a world scale. On the con-trary, Lenin said something that was the very,op-posite of this, namely, that ,'national artd state dif-fprences ' among peoples and countries ...willcontinue to exist for a very, very [ong time' evenafter the dictatorship of the proletariat has beenestab/,shed on a world scale.' 'l (emphasis in theoriginal)t'

ln fact, Stalin stressed that the victory ofsocialism "creates lavorable conditions for therenaissance and flourishing of the nations thatwere formerly oppressed by tsarist imperialism.":o

ln the Soviet Union today, only the worst sortof national chauvinist could think that the condi-tions for a "coming togetherl' or "integration" ofnations exist. These did not even exist yet undersocialism, where the historic advantages whichthe Great Russian nation enjoyed were not fullyeliminated. (Though great progress was madetoward real and concrete national equality.) Nowthat the Soviet Union is no longer a socialistcountrF-and by no means is it in the stage of"full-scale communist construction"!-the ad-vocacy of "national rapprochement" can onlymean advocacy of national inequality and na-tional privilege, of Russitication and nationaloppressron.

ln fact, all the lying propaganda about the"construction of Communism" in the SovietUnion is aimed not only at covering up the actualcapitalist riature of society but is a-lso an attemptto promote narrow self-interest, in particular na-ttonal chauvinism, among the people of the Sov-idt Union, especially the Great Russians. lt says:we are going forward to the final goal of Com-munism{which is presented as basically a hiQherstandard oI living achieved through'greater pro-duction), and anything. we do to get there, even if

page06:

it means oppressing and plundering nations inr-'

side and outside our borders, is a necesdaiy'and'justified part of this process. 'Of ' coursd,' therestoration of capitalism-imperialism in the SdvietUniorr-under the cover of I'constructing Com-munism"- has brought increased suffering,'hota better life, (and certainly not the advent of cqm:munism!) for the'Sovi'et people as a whole, andespecially the oppressed nationalities.

Before turning to, some concretd examples bfnational oppreslion" in the Soviet Union t6day, itwill be useful to spend some time surveying the.work of several lea!ing Soviet ideologueS on thls,question. Social-imperialist spokesmen havegone to great lengths to distort and deny :Mar*-ism-Leninism in oider to cover up the'chauvinistessence oi their national policy. ' :' '

One important forum where national policy ra4as

fully discussed was in a symposium sponsored bythe authoritatiye journal'Voprosy lsliorti (Question ofHistory), in 1966-1967 under the title "Discussion ofthe Concept: The Nation." According to a U.S.bourgeois scholar who studied the various paperscoming out of this symposium, it:

'represents the most senous attempt undertakensince the adoption of the Party Program to layrespectable theoretical foundations for rapid ',h-ternationalization': although the sdies has'been pre-sented as a disrnteresfed search for truth tfirougfi,'acomradely and scholarly exc;hange of ideas, seieralconsiderations'suggest that it may well have been apolitically-inspired move supported by those e/e-ryents in the elite who fear non-rQussran nationalismand favor a fastbr assimilation of

' the nationalnlinorities.'tzr

Two trends appeared in this symposium. Thedominant trend came qut for the rapid rnergingof nations and revision of the definition of a na-tion in order to facilitate such a merging. Theminority tendency, while defending the Marxist-Leninist position to some degree, did so fromthe opportunist stance of tighting a real'-guardaction in defense of bourgeois:nationalism of theoppressed nations. This is clear {rom the"attacksmade by this trend on the mainly coreqt: na?tionafities policy followed by the Soviet Union un-der Stalin. The tendency of this group was to'postpone multinational unity so tar into thefuture as to make this a compl6tely abstract andidealistic concept..

Howe..rer, tne oominant,'iaSsinlilatiortisf I rtrend

was really most important here, for the ideas put,forward 6y representatives of thisline are'by'andlarge those held to by the Cocial-imperialis-tleadership. The main spokesmen folthis pos-itionin Voprosy /stor7 were the acailemibians PavelRogachev ahd'Matvei Sverdlin (h Flussian and a.leri1, Pavel Semionov (a Russiqn), StrrehKaltakhchian (an Armenian) and Nikolal

' Ananchenko (a Ukranian).Ideologically, this group seeks to redefine thb

nation in alrnost purely economic termS. Accord-ing to these revisionidis, this'makes the natiorr ilfoim specific to'the capitalist epoch irl the'rnost

''i r l

narrow sense. Thus, with the coming of socialism, no material basis should exist to prevent the

"coming together" and "merging" of nations.(True Marxist-Leninists, of course, also see thenation as an essentiatly bourgeois category-thatis, as a function of capitalism and the transition'from capitalism to full communism-but recognize' its roots in pre-capitalist forms and its continuedlife long after the overthrow of capitalism.)

The line of these Soviet rqvisionists is essen-tially the same as the position Lenin attacked(especially around the time of WW t) as "im-

, perialist economism." Lenin pointed out thatsuch opportunism took the stand that "Sincesocialism creates the economic basis for theabolition of national oppression in the politicalsphere, therefore our author refuses to formulateour political tasks in th is spherel That'sridiculous!" (emphasis in original)22 Like their op-portunist forerunners, these piesent-day Soviet

' revisionists refuse to recognize that socialismmeans Ihe development of formerly oppressed na-tionalities, which unites these nationalities moref irmly in the course of building socialism.

As noted earlier, Lenin rei:eatedly emphasizedthat the eventual achievement of communism willmean the abolition of nations but this does not.mean that tfie objective of the socialist transitionperiod is to eliminate nations, any more than thefact that communism will also mean the abolitionof classes and the state argues for the elimina-tion of the rule of the proletariat, its state dic-

, tatorship, during socialism. On the contrary, in; the socialist period the proletarian state must bestrerrgthened, just as the rights and developmentof all nationalities must be upheld, so that dis-tinctions between classes and nations can finally.be'overcome and these categories finally disap-peai. But unlike the opportunists of Lenin's time,their descendants in the Soviet Union today

, . dredgb up old opportunism to serve the interestsof revisionism, in power, of the ,new social-i mperial ist bou rgeoisie

Such apologists for social-imperialism, Sverdlinand Rogachev, for example, take the revisionistposition that "it is necessary ...to- focus uponthe fact that processes of rnerging must occursooner within the USSR than in the world as awhole." :: And as early as 1961 Semionovdeclared that " ...the mutual assimilation of na-tions in essence denationalizes national-territorialautonomous units and even union republics,bringing Soviet society even from this standpoint'closer to the point at which the full state-iegatmerging'of nations will become a matter of thef oreseeable f utu re. " :l

To justify ihis chauvinist policy the authors re-pudiate the Marxist-Leninist definition of a na-tion, formulated by Stalin in 1913: "A nation is anhistorically evqlved, stable community of people,formed on the basis of a common language, ter-ritory, economic life, and psychological make-upmanifested in a common culture." rsAhd since, aswe shall see, there are some similarities-thoughnot complete identity-between 'the national

question in the USSR and in the U.S. today; itwill be helpful to briefly explore this question ofthe definition and development of ,nations aS ap-plied to the two sLlperpowers.

To some forces in the U.S. revolutionary,move-ment, it may seem strange for the RU to attack,the Soviet revisionists for negating Stalin'scriteria for a nation, since we haVe made con-siderable analysis, and engaged in lengthypolemics'(for example, in Red Papers 5 and 6)'toShow that the Black nation in the U.S. today doesnot strictly conform to Stalin's definition. But,ouranalysis, and the class stand on which .it. isbased, is the direct opposite of that of the Sovietrevisionist "theoreticians'' on the national ques-tion.

fneir purpose is to liquidate the national ques:'tion, in the service of the imperialist.poticy offorcible assimilation of nations. Ours is to upholdrevolutionary national struggle by making a con-crete analysis of the actual character andmaterial basis of the Black liberation struggle to-day and to refute the revisionists, Trotskyites andother reactionaries in the U.S. who argug thatthere is no" longer-or has never been-a basisfor a revol{.rtionary Black liberation struggle.

The essence of our position is that Black peo'pie were formed into a nation, as Stalin definesit, ln the period after the Civil War andFleconstructibn. And, although that nation hasbeen dispetsed from its historic homeland, andtransformed from mainly peasants to mainlyworkers, the struggle of Eilack peopfe against im: .

perialism has not therefore been liquidated, butmade even more powerful, and more closelylinked with the overall class struggle tor.,socialism. Further, although the Black nation ex:,'ists today'under new dnd different conditionsthan in the past-and than nations in most otherparts ol the world, especially the Third World-.and althoug[ the question of liberating and con-trolling the "Blach Belt" south is not at the heartand the hiEhest expression of the Black peopleisstr.uggle, the right of self-determination, the rightto political secession, must still be upheld. Thepolicy of forcible assimilation must be defeatedto unite th6 multinational prbldtariat in the U.S.for the historic task of socialist revolution.

ln making this analysis, we have been guidedby the stand, viewpoint and method of Marxism-Leninism, including the writings of Stalin, whopointed out that "nations and. national languagespossess an extraordinary stability and tremen-.dous resistance to the policy of assimilatioh!1even under the cbnditions where they have been"rent and mangled" by reactionary ru'|e.26 Stalin,on the other hand, emphasized that in an overallsense the national question iS subordihate to thequestion of proletarian revolution, and that "thenational question does. not always, have one aridthe same character, that the character and tasks otthe national movement vary with the differentPgflods in the development of the revolution." 2T

The opportrinisfs-those- who cloak theirbourgeois [ines in the' guise of Marxiern-

\

.:1 ) ::..:.lr'jr.: :r.. :rr..;.,rtn?:'.1;i : -r,.. j. a. .i.' :' lr:r: 1::n1.'1.),r'- llilt',' : t: ::ii:

Leninisrn*{epart f rom this protetarian stand,viewpoint and method. lq some cases this takesthe form of dogmatism, viewing the nationalquestion as "something self-contained and con-stant, whose direction and character remainbasically unchanged throughout the course, of,history." 28(Stalin) ln other cases, it takes the formof reyisionism-openly denying the basic prin-ciples of Marxism-Leninism and cutting the re-volutionary heart out of it. ln either case. in the'national question it leads to a line of ticiiriOationand to unity with imperialist oppression bf na-tions. "

. The revisionists th-emselves have useddogmatism as well as open revisionism to attackthe Marxist-Leninist solution to the national ques-tion. Henry Winston, chairman of the "CommunistParty", -U.S.A,, has, for example, accused theChinese Communist Party-of great nation (Han)chauyinism, of violating the Leninist principle ofs€lf-detbrmination, because the solution to the na-tiondlquestion in China itself was not the same asln'the USSR. ln China it did not take the form ofestablishing separate,republics,,but onlyautonomous regions and areas for the minority nartionalities. At the same time, the "CP", U.S.A.argues that Black people are no longer a nalion,and.tfat.there,is no.basis for a revolu{ionary Blackliberation struggle, whilb their soc'ial-imperialistBatrons in the Soviet Union argue that Staiin's de-finition of a natldn, and the whbte Marxist-Leninistapproach.to the national question,'is and alwayshas been incorrect.

The purpose of these Soviet revisrohists is toundermine the unity of the norl-Russian nationsin the Soviet Union, as well as other nations out-side its borders, which are oppressed by and re-sist the new tsars. To do this they especiallyrniriimize the psychological and cultural (orethnic) ' factors of a nation. Sverdlin andRogachev, for example, reject the concepts of"national characterl' and common psychologicalrnakeup, one of the criteria oullined by Stalin.These revisionists recognize ohly'ls6naciousnessof national belonging", by which they mean littlemore than simple recognition of one's "ethnicity",as in filling out a census forn1. They deny one of .

the key forms in-which the' common bonds of anation are forged., Along similar linqs, Kaltakhchian offers thefollowing def inition: "A nation is a social-historical phenomenon, it evolved into a stablecommunity of people in the capitalist stage ofsocial development. The main characteristicfeatures of a nation are comniunity of territory,language and economic ties of peopte." 2e ln thisjoker's view, Stalin failed to see that " ...to as-gert the stability of community or.psychologicalrr.rakeup of the people of a given nation, and con-sequently of exploiter and ^exploited in an an-tagonistic society, means to view the nation as anaturalistic and eternal, not social-historical com-munitY.":o

This, of course, is rubbish. Marxists havealways recognized that within any nation there isclass struggle and Lenin even spoke of l'two na-.

,' ' ::. : -'

t"' .-. I ,'prgeaz

tions" co-e,xisting within all modern nations.Stalin,'too, recognized this fact even as he as-sevted the existence of distinctly nationalpsychology and culture. ln Marxism 'and the Na:tional Question, he declares that 'lone cannotseriously speak of the 'cultural community: of anation when the masters and the workers of anation have . ceased to understand eachother." ?r But this has absolutely nothing in com-mon with otir revisionists' epsentially econo&ristand mechanical materialist (and thus idealist) ap-proach.. The position of Marxist-Leninisis is that in the

final analysis, psychology and culture are de-termined by class struggles. Real differencesmust always exist between the psychology andculture of the'bourgeoisie and of the proletariatin any'given nation. But Jvlarxist-Leninists assertthat 'development never takes the same form.everywhere. ln the .real world-rfrhich after: all isivhat it is all about:-capitalist pnoduction rela-tions and the class struggle between thebourgeoisie and the proletariat develop w.ithinparticular national contexts and these 'differentnational ,contexts have an effect on both. classes,on their psychology and culture.

For example, in China a great siruggle is todaybeing waged by the Chinese proletariat againstthe reactionary ideas of Confucius. The id'Oalistworld outlook/ of the bourgeoisie and thematerialist world outlook of the proletariat standin sharp contrast to each other on this questiori.The counter-revolutionary line of the bourgeoisie isto defend Confucius, while the,revolutionary pro.letariat seeks to destroy all vestiges of Conf.ucianthought.

ln form, this is a struggle particular to China;yet its content is universal. All over the globe thebourgeoisre and the proletariat square off eachday on opposite sides of innurnerable questionsof this type. ln each couhtry there is a proletarianrevOlutionary stand and a bourgeois reactionarystand on every question of national culture. Butit is because the Chinese people of all classes doshare a "common psychology manifested in acommon culture" that the particular question ofConfucius-and not Plato, Jesus, Allah, etc.-takesceriter stage. This commonality provides, so tospeak, a common frame of reference, an arenawithin which the bourgeoisie and the proletariatmust inevitably stand opposed.

This is what Marx and Engels meant when theystated in the Communist Manifesto that "Thoughnot,in substance, yet in form the struggle of theproletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first q na-tional struggle. The proletariat of each countrymust, of course, firgt of all settle matters with itsown bourgeoisie." 32 The class struggle under.capitalism thus exhibits a nationat as well as ahinternational character and, yes, "a commonpsychological 'makeup manifested in a commonculture" does develop within each nation. Ofcourse, as capitalism expands it dbes have astrong tendency to break down national barriersand eliminate these psychological and culturaldifferences. But even this process is uneven and

with this, cpntradictions betwgen nationalities-which exist all during socidlism-have once more.become antagonistic, under the conditions of im-perialist rule.

We have spent so muc,h time on these petiyhack ideologues not only to illustrate the depthito which the social-imperialists have sunk in their"theoretical" endeavors. lt is important to re-cognize that the revival of national oppressionhas 4ot comb about simply because the currentrqlers are mainly Russian or because they areevil men (though they are both). Rather, thisstems directly from ,the political line adop.ted bythe revisionists in 1956. A crucial part of this wasKhrushchev's attack on Stalin-which providesthe basis for the attack on Stalin's great con-tributions on the national question and for theabandonment of the proletarian dictatorship bythe CPSU.

The concrete results of this chauvinist linehave been very evident. Seeking to hasten the"merging" of nations, the social-imperiqlists havedispersed members of the- national minorities andoppressed nations throughout the Soviet state.According to. the .1970 $oviet census, over390,000 Moldavians, 14.6k of the Moldavian peo-ple, were moved out of the Moldavian Flepublicin the preceding decade. Over five million Ukrai-nians, 13.4"/" of the Ukrainian populatibn, weremoved out of the Ukrainian Republic. r.

lndeed, this kind ol policy has led to stagna-tion in population growth and even the outrightelimination of some of the smaller nationalities.Theoretical Problems of the Formation and Develbp-ment of the Multi-National Soviet State, a bookpublished in the Soviet Union in 1973, states that"With each new census, the number of nationalitiescovered by statistics constantly declines." Thus,between the 1959 and 1970 censuses, the numberof nationalities dropped from 126,to 1'19. Moreoverrii these years the Karelian population decreased by21,0@ (about 13old, the Veps by 8,800 (about 51%),and the Mordvinians by 22,000. Those nationswhose population remained cornple'tely stagnantincluded the Latvians, Evenkis, Khentys, Aleuts andUdegreitsys.lT

Along with forcdd emigr:atiorl of minority na-tionalities, the social-imperialists have carried outRussification through the large-scale rmmigrationpf Russians and other Slav peoples into minorityareas. This has led to increasing discriminationin employment. To cite just two examples: ln1972 a letter signed by 17 Latvian communists,most Party veterans of 25-35 years, was sent tothe Centrat Committee of the CPSU pr,otestingthe removal of nearly all native Latvian officialifrom their posts in that small nation. The letteralso condemned the continued immigration ofdroves of ethnic Russians who we.re placed injobs ahead of Latvians. These latter often

're-

mained unemployed or under-employed.Also in 1972 the Ukrainian Party member lvan

Dziuba published a 'scathing indictment of"Russification" in that nation, .entitled lnterna-tionalism or Russification? ln this work, Dziuba

*:iqe!9$, , -: ,. '

' qonditioned in turn by national .peculiarities anddigtincti,gns, inclu'ding those cit nationalpsyphology and culture,.,Td hold otherwise is, .in fact, to hold to aTrolskylie position, a position that the classstruggle is only international and everywhere at

. thq samg.stage of development. Such a position.is,based uport ,the idealist separation of politicsfrom economics. Yet, in essence, this is really thepq6ition of our Soviet authors which, pareh-inbticatty, reveals ohce more that the essence offrotskyism, despite its generally "leftl' oover, isaccornmqdation to revisionism, on the national

The g,gpial-impgrialist. "theoreticians" attempt .

to deBy .qny basis for the continued ex'istence ofthe.,nation once capitalism is,ggne. By denyingthe psyChdlogical and, cullural particularities ofdifferent nations the revisionists seek to liquidate'ine iiational quelstion, encourage premature' as-simifptioql, and return to the oppression whichminority,,nationalities suffered under the tsars.

ln fact, i.n,this rbgard two.authors, Sverdlin andRogachev, eveq go so.far as.to claim that under'tnJtsars ties ef

-friqndship bbtween the different

nalions were '-'very strong"! They assert.that'withthe .overthrow :of capitalism, so.cialist pconomicdevefopment has spontaneously joined all Sovietcitieens ilto o1g '.'Sovi.et.people", a. new ethnicgroup,cbmpriping. all Soviet nationalities-atransitional form between national disunity and"national-less " fbeznats ion al noe ) soc iety.

This concept is a common one among Sovietpropagandists and apologists and it has beenembraced ,officially , by .the social-imperialistleadership. ln his address to the 24th Congressof,the CPSU in l971,.Brezhnev declared that "'lnthe yeafs .of sociallst construction a new his-tgrical community of people-the Soviet people-arose in our country.":r To cover his tracks

. Brezhn'ev stressed that this "does not meanelimination tit tne differences among various na-tionalities and disregard of national charac-ieiistibs, :language and-culture." But despite suchhemming and hawing it is clear that the newconcept is precisely designed as a means of li-'quidatifig the competing concept of the nation.For examplb, the journal Sovlet Ethnology says:"The concept of nation and. tribes . .. will in-creasingly give way to the concept of the Soviet

Kaltakhchian's definition (quoted above) leadshim to even more 'abSgrd :and chauvinist con-clusions. He eyen accuses S,verdlin and'Rogachev of underestirnating the "real communi-ty of national culture and national character in' the Soviet Union." r5 (Never mind, of course, thatKaltakhchian has aiready criticized Stalin foremploying just such' supposedly incorrect terms:ds

"naticinal cultuie.") He argues that "with thedisappearance' of -social antagonisms, .nationalantagonisms also disappeared in the U.S.S.R."Social antagonisms-class antagonisms-have, ofcout'se, not disappeared in the Soviet Union, buto.OCB.; IDOfe exist within the framework of,boufgeois rule,and capitalist society. And, along

presents the following' example of the social-imperialists' national policy.3t work:

"Let us take as an example one of the gieat Ukrai-nian construction projecfs, the building of the KievHydro-electric power station ... At the end of 1963,when the number of workers on the project almostreached its maximum,. the labor force was made upof 70-75"/o Ukrainiaris, 2"h Byelorussians, 20"/"Fussians and smaller numbers of several other na-tionalities . . . The power station seerns to have beenbuilt mainly by Ukrainians. And yet atmost alt the topposts on the job (construction chief, chief engineer,most sectional and divisional manaEers) were oc-cupied by Aussrans. They also constiiute the majorityamong.the rank and file engineers and techniciani.Among the Russian workers a much higher percen-tage are highly skilled than among the tlkrainians.Many of the latter were dismissed when the construc-tion was nearing completion. Of the 127 Russianmembers of the management'division of the main in-stallations, onty 11 were born in the tJkraine, the restcamefrom Bussia. "3d

The immigration of ethnic Russians intominority areas has increased as the Sovietleadership relies more and more on the use of'"experts"-to stimulate the economy. As these aremainly Russian, this strategy for development ispredicated on the perpetuation of nationalprivileges. Were the policy of the Soviet Unionthe c'orrect socialist policy of striving to eliminatethe distinction between "expert" and "worker"the problem would not loom so large-althoughit would still be essential to tiain techniciansfrom the ranks of the minority peoples.

But this is hardly the case. Thus, in someminority areas the local feaders-prevented fromrelying on their own resources by the Party'sthorough-going capitalist line-have opted tolorego any economic development rather thanface an influx of alien technicians and skille-d

, workers. Jn the Adzhanskaia AutonomousRepublic of Georgia, it was reported in the pressthat "there were executives who urged theAdzhan Party organization to reject proposals . . .

to build new factories and plants and to developresgrts and tourism, basing their advice on thepremise that this would lead to migration of peo-ple from other republics." 3'

Of course, this is only a problem in those re-gions singled out by the social-imperialists forf urther economic development. The Sovietleadership's'preoccupatibn with capitalisteconomic "eff iciency" and "intBnsive" ratherthan j'extensive" development has lead to con-centration of investment in the already developed"European core area" of the economy. This,despite the fact that population growth is cur-rently most rapid in the relatively underdevelopedareas of Central Asia and Azerbaidzhan, and thatthese regions now suffer from a growing laborsdrplus exacerbated by further immigration fromethnic Russia and the Ukraine. (One estimate en-viqions the population of these regions doubling

,,i, paSqEO

within 30 ybars. Moreovei, according io the 1970census, between 52 and 56% of the poprtlation otthe four Central Asian r:epublics andAzerbaidzhan were under 20 years of age com-pared to only 29 to 38% in the major weJtern re-gions.lro-

Und'er socialism the factors of investment effi-ciency, strategic and foreig:n policy considera-tions and regional equalization were all takeninto account by the plan, aid within the bveriilleconomic advance of the Soviet Union dispropor-tionately high growth indexes were registered forthose national republics initially most backward"This was achieved mainly through mobilizing andtraining of the native population. However, asone scholar has pointed out, "the tendencytoward equalization of regional levels of develop-ment observable 'before World War ll and onthrough the mid 1950s appears to have reveisedsince 1958." aI

Another area in which the social-imperialists'chauvinist policy contrasts shar.ply with thepolicy of the communists under Stalin is in thef ield of education. Under socialism Sovietchildr:en were taught the traditions and true his-tory of the oppresied peoples, bufltoday they arespoon-fed a Russified serieg of lies and distor-.tions passed off as proletaridn history and de-signed to deny to the minorilyi peoples their'cultural heritag6. This was suggeited by the'Sov:iet publication Statr'stical Review, 'which in 1972declared that "the people of different na-tionalities and tribes in their millions regardRusdian culture as their own." {2

One particular example has been the treatmentof the history of the Kazakh people. We have on-ly to compaie the 1943 editidn of tne official His-tory of the Kazakh SSR with the same work's 1957version to see how much things have changed.The '1943 edition treats the annexation. ofKazakhstan by the Russian tsar as follows:

"The conversion of Kazakhstan into a colonysignified the end of the independent existence otthe Kazakh people and their iitatusion in the sySternof military-feudal exptoitation, which was crea{ed bythe domination of Tsarism for alt the exploitedpeoptes of the tsarist 'prison of peoples,.'":t

But the 1957 edition reads: i

"The annexation of Kazakhsian to Russaa . . . had aprogressive significance tor. the historic destiny otthe Kazakh peoplg appearing at a crisis hour intheir history ... (lt) delivered the Kazakh peoplef rom enslavement by Dzhungarian feudalleaders . .. The most important rdsult of the annexa-tion was the drcwing tagether of the Russian aNKazakh peoples in a common qtruggle -againstIsar'sm with Russian landlords and capitalists andthe Kazakh feudal leaders."ll

Even more shocking is the eontrast in treat-ment of the Kenesary movement, a revolutionarynationalist uprising of the Kazakhs against tsarist

page 90

rule which tasted from tAbZ b 1g42. Accbrdingto the 1943 version:

"During that decade the majority of the populatiionof the three Kazakh hordes rose under tieii leader,\enegay Kasymov, for a liberation struggle againstRuqslan colonizers and their agents, in*e SrfltanSrulers. /n its scope and significaice, this was themost substantial uprising of the Kazakh people intle whole period of the colonizing'policy of AussaanIsarism. ln this uprising, whici appe:ared as fhesum and synfhesis of all the previous movements,the Kazakh pegple demonstrated with particutarforce and clarity, through' their freedom-loving andmilitant spirit, that they would not easity giie up.their national independence. " 45

eui rlow look at how this very same gloriousrevolt is slandered by the revisionists in their1957 history. According to this new, up-dated' and revised Great Russian chauvinist history, the

.Kenesary movement "was a reactionary, feudal-monarchal manifestation, aimed at holding theKazakh people back and strengthening thepatriarchal-feudal system, working toward thealienation of Kazakhstan from Russia and theRussian p€opls.".+t' Need we say more?!

Of course, with respect to education the rewrit-ing of history is really a minor part of the social-imperialists' policy of national oppression. Amore important point has been the decliningstatus of minority language education, which ispart and parcel of the social-imperialists' plan toinstitute Russian as the sole language for theSoviet Union. This goes directly against the stat-ed policy of Lenin, who time after time declargdthat "There must be no compulsory officiallanguage." Today Brezhnev and his cronies havestipulated that "every citizen (of the non-Russiannationalities) should master this language

. (Russian1." '', By robbing the oppressed na-tionalities of their own languages, the social-imperialsts hope to hasten the disappearance ofthese peoples.. As one Soviet text declares,"Groups of people who have changed theirlanguage, in thq course of time usually alsochange their ethnic (national) identity." *a

Before the revolution virtually all educationwas in the Russian language. This held back thecultural, social and economic development of thenon-Russian speaking nationalities. ln the 1920sand 30s, Soviet power moved to correct thesituation and "a vast network of native languageschools", was set up. Further, Soviet scholarsspent many years of painstaking effort construct-ing completely new written languages for thosenationalitieg still limited to oral dialect. At theend of the 1930s and the beginning of the 40s,the system was broadened even further.

l-'lowever, according to Florida State Universityprofessor Brian D. Silver, "Despite the continuedldrck of systematic enrol'lment figures, highly relia-ble and convincing data have now accumulatedindicating that enrollment in non-Russian schoolshas after all significantly declined during the

1960s, not only during Khrushchev's term,as FirstSecretary but also during the leadership ofBrezhnev-Kosygin." +e This decline is a direct re-sult of Khrushchev's education "reform'l of 1959.This law gave parents the formal right to choosethe language they preferred for their children'sschooling, a move which most Obsqrvers sawdirecteij at exposing parents to coercion by localRussifying officials, a view borne out thoroughlyby the results.

ln 1958, even before the reform was officiallypromulgated, the Karelians were deprived of allnative-language schooling. The Kabardians andBalkars met the same fate in 1965 766. ThpKalmyks had native-language sihoolingdecreased from foUr to three years in 1962 163and_ by 1968 the whole program had beeneliminated. ln the Volga region nearly all rion-Russian groups experienced a reduction to atleast primary level native-language education bythe end of the 60s. These are but 6 few ex-amples.

The aim of these changes has clearly been tospeed up the Russification of the oppressed na-tionalities. According to one Soviet educator,"The conversion of elementary school children toRussian as the language of instruction is an im-portant phenomenon in the sphere of educa-tion . . .(which has) enormous progressivesignificansg." so

Now, the aim of communists has always beento develop cooperation and unity among theworking people of all nationalities through in-creased communications and exchange on . thebasis of equality and mutual respect. ThatRussian would be the logical .language for suchinter-nationality exchange in the Soviet Union isnot particularly shocking, though we should notethat the Russians themselves now number just alittle more than half the Soviet population. But towork for the rTpid replacement of native .

languages as part of a general policy of hasten-.ing the "coming together" and future "merging"of nations certainly amounts to great nationchauvinism \Yet in 1956, the very year of Khrushchev's

triumph, "ln autonornous republics, provinces,and national okrugs, the transaction of cor-respondence and business in local languages instate institutions and organizations was aban-doned and transferred to the Russianianguage." 5r We think this represents somethingmore than mere coincidence.

We could, of course, continue to relate hun-dfeds, even thousands of examples of nationaloppression stemming from the restoration ofcapitalism in the Soviet Union. But this would,after a time, become redundant. lndeed, the mostcompelling evidence pointing to a revival of na-tionat oppr6ssion has been the growing move-.ments of the oppressed peoples themselves,which have erupted at times into violent revolt.We shall deal with this aspect in our next chapJer.

But one more story must be told in this sec-

tion. We present the fotlowing example, the storyof howthe Kazakh people were depriVed of nearlyhalf their homeland during Khrushchev's'harebrained "virgin lands" campaign, becausewe believe it epitomizes the callous disregard fornational rights shown by the current Soviet -

rulers. And, equally important, we relate this talebecause one of its leading characters-itsvillain-is none othbr than Leonid Brezhnevhimself.

The story begins-at the September 1953 Cen-tral Committee plenum, six months after Stalin'sdeath. fhis was when Khrushchev first proposedhis sendational virgin lands scheme. This'was abold, overly ambitious and poorly planned pro-posal to plow and sow with grain 13,000,000 hec-tares--+nore than 50,000 square miles, an arealarger than Louis.iana and equal to England-ofpreviously barren land in Kazakhstan andsouthwest Siberia..Although the extension of ara-ble land was hardly a novel idea and completelysensible, the scope of Khrushchev's plans wasbound to put.too great a burden on Soviet re-sources. As one historian has noted, "Thescheme was full of imponderables and fraughtwith incalculable risks." s2

No one recognized this more than ZhumabaiShayakhmetov, first secretary of the KazakhstanCommunist Party, who had held office for eightyears and was the first native Kazakh to occupysuch a high position. Shayakhmetov and otherKazakh leaders argued that the scheme was toodrastic. Although they were eager to develop theresources of Kazakhstan for the benelit of allSoviet citizens, they recognized that the am-bitious proposal laid out by Khrushchev wouldbring only misery to the native Kazakh population.

To undertake the plan hundreds of thousandsof Russians would be needed to occupy- andfarm the land. The Kazakhs, herders by tradition,would be driven off the grasslands at such ardpid rate that few would be able to retrain asfarmers. The Kazakh language and culture wouldbe threatened, as would all vestiges of constitu-tionally assured Kazakh autonomy.

Khrushchev, however, refused to take no for ananswer. While pulling political strings designedto undermine Shayakhmetov's authority inKazakhstan, he shopped around for a compliantreplacement. He found one in Brezhnev, thenchief political commissar of the Soviet navy. Therew.as, however, a hitch. At this time Khrushchev hadnot consolidated full power and other Partyleaders, notably Malenkov, then Khrushchev's chiefrival, demanded their own watchdog. So Brezhnevwas not at first put formally in charge. His nominalsuperior-though everyone agreed that Brezhnevwould really run the show-was PanteleimonPonomarenko, a former associate of Zhdanov. Thissituation lasted until Malenkov's forced "resigna-tion" as Premier, when Ponomarenko was abruptlyshipped off to Warsaw as S_oviet ambassador toPoland, leaving Brezhnev in complete command ofKazakh affairs.

\ Page91

On January 30, 1954, Shayakhmetov and mem-bers of the Kazakh'polit-bureau were summoned

. to Moscow to meet with Khrushchev, Brezhnev,Ponomarenko anO the Central CommitteeSecretariat. Shayakhmetov and an assistant, lvanAfonov, were dismissed from office. A week laterBrezhnev and Ponomarenko arrived at Alm4 Ata,capital of Kazakhstan, where a plenum of theKazakh Party Central Committee "elected" themto replace the two deposed leaders.

Shortly thereafter, the seventh Congress of theKazakh Communist Party wab convened.Shayakhmetov was accused of embodying"burea0cratic, paper methods of leadership" andexiled to the position of oblasf (district) secretaryin South Kazakhstan (an area not part o,f thevirgin lands scheme). ln June 1955, Brezhnevpersonally arranged for his removal from thatpost, foo.

With this resistance out of the way, Brezhnevproceeded to carry out Khrushchev's orders. By1956 half a million Russian, Ukrainian and othersettlers had arrived in Kazakhstan. Over 500 newstate farms were established. By 1959 theKazakhs numbered less than 3O/" of thepopulation of their native homeliind. The Euro-pean population of Kazakhstan exceeded the en-tire,European population of Africa."

The scale of the virgin lands adventure wasawesome indeed. lnitial plans called for bringingin 5,000 combings and harvesters, 10,000 trucks,6,000 cultivators, 3,000 harrowers and over50,000 tractors. Over 1,200 miles of railroadwere !o be laid. Yet with such grandiose plans itwas, perhaps, inevitable that difficulties wouldarise.

Equipment arrived but the train stations had nomachines to unload heavy tractors. Youngkontomoly would come eager to work but therewere no training programs. Trucks arrived butthere was no fuel. During the first harvest count-less tons of grain were lost because there wereno sacks to put it in. As for housing, promised tothe new settlers (but not to the native Kazakhs, ofcourse), Lt simply never appeared. After the firstharvest 75h of the immigrants faced a winter intemporary tents.

ln short, "for hundreds of thousands of volun-' teers the reality of Kazkhstan was the rottinggrain because someone had. failed to providetrucks or storage facilities; the broken driveshafts on their harvesters for which there wereno replacement parts; the cold nights in the tenlor dugout; the lack of soap and water; theshortage of mittens and warm boots or the let-ters from home that never reached them becauseno one bothered to deliver the mail." s3

. Yet despite this situation, the plan was deemeda success on the basis of a good harvest in 1954.This proved to be quite a feather in Brezhnev'scap and he quickly returned to Moscow with apromotion. Never mind the virtual pillage of theKazakh homeland. Never mind that the massiveshipment of equipment and manpower to theeast completely disrupted and almost ruined

page 92

agriculture in the traditional Ukrainian and southRussian granaries. .And never mind that after'1954, Kazakhstan has suffered far more than itsshare of bad harvests due to frequent drought,poor planning and a demoralized work force.

The robbery of the Kazakh people continues tothis day. Currently, Russians, Ukrainians, etc., con-tinue to move into the agricultural region openedup by the virgin lands campaign. However, few re-main here. Soviet studies have shown that thetypical immigrant stays in the countryside for justtwo or three years and then moves into alreadyoverpopulated urban and industriail areas of theKazakh republic. 5r As ,a result, agriculture hasstagnated in recent yeaIs while Kazakhstan'syoung cities are f looded with job seekers.

And, of course, it should come as no surprisethat most good jobs go to those immigrants who,in theory, were "sent" to populate the coun-tryside. Meanwhile, the native Kazakhs, alreadydriven off their grazing land, stagnate in thecities where they increasingly comprise an ex-p,loited; underemployed-even unemployed-minority.

4.'Working Women Bear a "Double Burden"

Social-imperialist rule has also brought backthe oppression and degradation of women incapitalistic society. Under socialism the idea ofequality between men and women was propagat-ed widely and women were brought into produc-tion at all levels. Women'made great gains, andeven today the majority of Soviet doctors and alarge proportion of other professionals arewomen. ln industry women still number abouthalf the work force.

But now, since the social-imperialists are in-capable of developing the economy so that allmight work productively, they are making a bignoise about how "unfeminine" Soviet womenhave become. This is designed to put Sovietwomen back in the home shackled by all thosebackward customs and ideas that capitalismneeds to survive. The revisionist "poet", llyaSelvinsky, wrote recently of how women shouldlearn to walk more gracefully: i'Unfortunately, notall our girls pay attention to the way they walk,"he complained, adding that " . . . we need a cultof feminine charms. lt should develop not only inart but also in the family. lt is necessary, I repeat,to 'idealize' Wornen.'l ss

Soviet women, of course, have no need for the"pedestal" on whiph hacks like this would placethem. And the average Soviet woman not onlyhas no inter:est, but also no time to think aboutwalking "more gracefulll" for a dirty old manlike Selvinsky..She is too busy slaving away, athome andon the job!

According Io the Soviet woman socidlogist,Zoya A. Yankova, women. in the Soviet Union to-day spend more time on household chores thanever before.56This has been one factor leading toa rise in complaints about inadequate child carefacil,ities. ln fact, according to the July '17, 1971

Pravda, in the.last ten years not one Soviet pro-vince built as many day care centers as plannedlln light industry alone therd is currently a waitinglist for day care of over 150,000 mothers.5T

The chores of housework are particularlyburdensome to women workers. According to a1969 survey of Leningrad'working womeri, Z0Zoften felt fatigue on the job. Their illness ratewas double that of male workers. When asked,"ls it difficult for you to combine family obliga-tions with work on the production line?" 44o/"answered "bearable", 31% "hard" and 25"/"answered "very hard." Two Soviet researchbrshave concluded:

"that the posslb/ltles for tiberating women from the'double burden' are being realized only in a smalidegree. As a'result 'of women's"entry into produc-tion, negative consequences have accompanied thepositive ones: worsened physical and, psychologicalcondition, lowered general tone of conjugal and.family life, restriction of social and cultural con-tacts. "'*

One way to alleviate the burden on workingwomen would be to increase production of inex-pensive household appliances-combined withthe sharing of household duties between menand women. But in spite of their perpetual pro-mises of turning the Soviet Union into a con-sumer's paradise, the social-imperialists havedone little in this direction. Under socialism, ofcourse, no one had much access to such conve-niences. The proletarian policy was that untilsuch goods could be produced in enough quan-tity and at a low enough price to be accessible tothe masses, none would be sold. lnstead,socialism relied on the development o{ coopera-tion and socialized work. Where possible, for ex-ample, laundromats were opened. The f ightagainst chauvinist ideas and the sharing ofhousework by men and women was encouraged.

However, with the present level of the Sovieteconomy, the capability of producing such laborsaving devices for the mass market now exists.Yet the social-imperialists price these items at oreven above their cost _of production, effectivelylimiting tlieir market.

Moreover, the emphasis in production is, as rnthe U.S., on technical wizardry and not low-costpracticality. Thus, even in the highly industrialcities of Leningrad, Moscow and Penz'a only 13%of working women own washing machines, 20%own vacuum cleaners and only 38% ownrefrigerators. ie One exasperated Soviet economistsummed up the situation when he complainedthat "We've long sincb needed not 'technologicalwonders' but cheap; reliable appliances, not forexhibitions, but for the home, not for engineersand futurologists but forthe housewivesl" ",'

All this adds up to an attempt by the social-imperialists to drive women from the work force,trahsforming them into patronized and oppressedhousekeepers and "baby makers." Yet despite all

i

I

i

. .' | .

the hardships and pressure placed on them, Sov-iet women rnusf work. As a railroad worker re-marked:

"There are five children, in our family. There areplenty of cares. But my wife goes ta work. Sheworks because my earnings do not provide for qllthe neqds of our family. No, today work is not yet aspiritueil need of women. lt ls a materialn€c€ssif. "r'r

\But even on the job.women still encounter dis-

crimination. Even in'fields where women formthe majority of the work force, few women oc-cupy leading positions of authority. For example,although only 15% of all medical personnel dreirnen, they are,507" of all c.hief physicians andnospitat executives. Likewise in industry,"W6men are employed as supervisors; shopchiefs, and in comparable leadership'positionsone-sixth to one-seventh as frequently as men." nz

Women are,also concentrated in the most low-paid indudtries and positions. According to theSoviet authority, A.G. Kharchev, the averagewage of women in industry is well below that ofmen. And as the following table shows, womenare by and large concentrated in lower-payingf ields:

FEMALE PARTICIPATION AND WAGE SCALES IN SOVIETLABOR FORCE BRANGHES: 1967

WomenasTool RublesPer monthBranch total employment (avg. all workers)

. page93

conscious long-term class struggle against malechauvinist ideology among the masses on theother. And a good deal of progress was made!

However, in recent years-despite the fact thatfor the first time the technical level'facilitatingthe full absorption of women into heavy industry(where the jobs pay best) has been reached-thesituation is actually deteriorating. For example,the average monthty wage in education (72"/"women) was seven rubles below the nationalaverage in 1967. Yet by 1971 this differential hadmore than doubled lo 14.2 rubles. o3 Today malebureaucrats who merely sit on their asses all dayearn several times the salary of a woman textileworker or collective farmer.

Also of concern to Soviet women has been thesevere decline in family stability over the past 2Cyears. Communists, of course, have always ad-vocated and fought lor the full right to divorce.And after eve.ry socialist revolution millions ofwomen have taken advantage of this right, freedthemselves f rom old, oppressive relationshipsand entered society as productive andrfulfilled in-dividuals. Millions of marriages have also beenstrengthened by both partners knowing that un-ion is fully voluntary. I

But communists do not advocate the right ofdivorce out of any commitment to "free love'' ordpposition to the family. We support the right todivorce in order to strengthen family bonds. Foronly on the basis of the full right to divorce forboth partners can a marriage of equality andmutual respect be built.

Communists stand for a strengthening of thefamily not as ,an isolating refuge from society,but as a fully participatory societal unit. lnChina today, for. example, divorce is relativelyrare even though the right Of divorce is guaran-teed both women and men. And where conflictsdo arise, all efforts are made to resolve the dif-ficulties. Divorce is considered the last step and,in most cases, represents a kind of failure.

This was also true in the Soviet Union undersocialism. But since 1950 the situation ,haschanged drastically.t+Today the Soviet Union hasone of the highest divorce rates in the world, andthis is still rising rapidly. ln 1960 there were27A,200 divorces in the Soviet Union. By 1967 theannual figure had risen to 646,300' Put-anotherway, in 1950 for every 100 marriages there wergbut 3 divorces. ln 1960, however, there were '10

divorces for every 100 marriages. By 1967, forevery '100 marriages there were 30 divorces, atenfold increase in just '17 yearsl Soviet statisti-cians themselves are quite f irm in stressing that im-proved reporting iprocedures and somewhatliberalized laws aocount for only a small portion ofthis increase.

5) Alcoholism and Crime: The Social-lmperialistPlague

Probably the most prevalent reason given forthe increasing instability of the Soviet family has

Science & scientific svcs.ConstructionT.ansportationApparatusof lovt't. &

economic admin. & olcoop. & public orgs,

lndustry

Nationwide average 50

Education 72Ciedit & lns. 75Health 85Trade 74Housing & Municipal Economy 5'lCommunicqtions 66

45 122.128 119.424 115.5

58 1',t2.747 112.0

r03.4

96.493.382.282.278.778.1

Reprinted'lrom Lotta Lennon, "Women in the USSR." SourceN arodnoe Khozi astvo SSR v 1 969 g o d u, Moscow, l 970, p. 654.

Similar statistics also indicate that within thesefields, women are once again concentrated at thebottom of the wage hierarchy.

This situation is, however, to some extent in-herited from the socialist period. At that time, in-equalities continued to exist and it was generallyrecognized that these could only be finally over-cone on the basis of increased production andtechnological progress on the one hand, and the

)-

been what is now by far one qf the most seriousand widely discussed 'social problems in theUSSR: alcoholism. ln our investigation of Sovietsociety, we have been struck'by the incredibledepth of this problem under revisionist rule. Thdspread'of alcoholism has become symbolic of allthe decay and rot growing everywhere in theSoviet Union today. ln fact, we think that asomewhat more detailed look at the developmentoJ hlcohglism and associated'probtems wiit givepeople a very clear picture of what the rise ofsocial-imperialism has meant in stark hurnanterms for the wOrking people of the Soviet Union.

Heavy drinking is, of course, hardly a newphenomenon in Russia. ln pre-revolutionary timesthe state drew a substantial portion of its re-yenums much as one-third-from its alcoholmonopoly and as. a result was eager to en-courage drinking as both money iraker andsocial pacifier. (The tsarist budget used to becalled the "Drunk Budge!" due to its .depen-'dence on alcohol tax rev-enue.) ln the words of aSgviet journalist:

"For centuries iheavy drinking seemed an in-dispensable and necessary.part of Fusslan life. Theendless grey monotony of peasant life with-ifs cons-tant threat of famine and spine-breaking toil, the dirtand degradation of squalid city slums, the stiftingahnsphere of merchants' homes-all this was anappropriate frame for 'vodka', one of the few wordsfrom tsarist Fussra that became familiar throughoutthe world.""5

This was one of the first problems to betackled by the Bolsheviks after 1917. And theevidence reveals quite clearly that per capita con-sumption of alcohol declined. steadily betweenthe revplution and 1950. ln the pre-revolutionary

..years.1906-10, per capita cbnsumption of purealcohol slood at 3.41 liters a year. By 1935-37,this had declined to 2.8 liters. And 1948:50marked the low point in official production, wttha figure of 1.85 liters, a decisive reduction ot 50"/ofrom pre-revolutionary times, n8

Many bourgeois observers are quick to pointout that these figures cover only legal productionand that there is a long tradition of home-brewing. This is true, but it only makes the argu-ment stronger, not weaker. For throughout theseyears the Soviet Union was becoming increasing-ly urbanized. Peasants were moving to the citiesto fill jobs in the new factories. And city workerswere losing touch with relatives in the coun-tryside. (The practice of city workers returninghome for harvest, common under tsardom, beganto fade out after 1917.1 Since moonshining ismainly a'rural activity, it stands to r,easdn thatconsumption of legal alcohol would thus tend torise-both absolutely and on a per capita basis.'But instead the opposite occurred.

The main weapon used to defeat alcoholismwas revolutionary politics. Enthusiasm f orsocialism and disciplined dedication to the dif-

ficult but inspiring tasks of socialist constructioncame to replace the,desire of people to escapeto an alcoholic fantasy land. Patient educationabout the dangers of alcoholism was carr:ied out.For example, in the 1920s the All-Union Councilof Anti-Alcohol Societies'was set up. This bodypublished a journal, Trezvost' i Kultura (Tem-perance and Culture), distributed other scientificand popular literature, and organized anti-alcoholpropaganda. State production of vodka wasdecreased sharply and ,,price policy worked todiscourage excess drinking. Moreover, alcoholicsthemselves were treated as suffering individualsin need of'help and not as criminals. Sobering.up stations "provided a bath, a clean bed andhearty breakfast, all grati5." n'z

Today, however, the situation.is entirel.y dif-ferent. According to ieliable estimates, consump-tion of vodka, wine and beer in the USSRdoubled between 1950 and 1960.and increasedby anolher 50% by 1966. n8 By all accounts it isstill increasing at present. Beginning in '1958, theSoviet authorities took note of the growing trendand began to take "corrective rneasures" but tono avail. The problem has become e\er moresevere and, according to tzvestia, "the harmcaused by alcoholism is exceptionally great." 6e

Today, the, typical worker's family spends ,

almost as much on 'alcoholic beverages (93rublesT year) as it does on movie5, theatre,newspapers and all cjther cultural goods andservices. 70lt is said lhat over half of all tr:aff ic ac-cidents are directly attributable to drink.

lndustrial enterprises each year report hun-dreds of thousands of cases of ,absenteeism andtardiness due to drinkihg. ln Zhodino, Minsk pro-vince, paychecks were issued directly intoworkers' savings accounts to cut spending onvodka.;t And on one South Russian railway linecomplaints of drunken young people on trainsbecarhe so great that volunteer militia detach-ments of train.crew members had lo be formedto protect the passengers.,Tz This reminds us ofrides on the purbway systems of U.S. citids.

Even from the Soviet press it is clear that thesprbad of alcoholism is approaching epidemicproportions. Yet the most,stringent laws, such asthe one passed in 1967 providing two years"compulsory treatment and corrective labor" forexcessive drinkers, have had little Effect. Why arethe Soviet people, especially the workers, turningto drink?

As early as the 1.840s, Friedrich Engels in hisfamous study, The,.Condition of the Working C/assin England, noted that the worker drinks primarilyto escape from the -suffering of his daily ex-istence under capitalism: ".:.he muSt havesomething to make work worth his trouble, tomake the prospect of the next day en-durable...(He seeks) the certainty of forgetting foran hour or two the wretchedness and burden of1ife..." 73 Other writers have also pointed to op:pressivd social coiditions as a principal cause ofalcoholism, including the great Soviet revolu-tionary writer, Maxim Gorky. (See excerpt in box.)

:,i1-'.r I .

,MAXIM GORKY ON THE CAUSES OFRUSSIAN ALCOHOLISM

"The day was swallowed up by the factory;the machine sucked out'of men s muscles asmuch vigor as it needed. The day was blottedout from life, not a trace of it left. Man madeanother imperceptible step toward his grave;but he saw c/ose before him the delights ofrcst, the joys of the odorous tavern and hewas satisfled .. . The accumulated exhaustiotnof years had robbed them of their appetites,and to be able to eat they drank, long and de-ep, goading on their teeble sfomachs with thebiting, burning lash of vodka . . . Returninghome they quarreled with their wives; andoften beat them, unsparing of their fists. Theyoung people sat rn the taverns or enjoyedevening parties at one another's houses,played the accordion, s?ng vulgar songs de-void of beauty, danced, talked ribaldry, anddrank. Exhausted with toil, men drank swiftly,and in every heart there awoke and grew anincomprehensible sickly irritation. lt demandedan outlet. Clutching tenaciously at every pre-tert for unloading themselves of this disquiet-ing sensation, they fell on one another formere trifle1, with the ferocity ol beasts, break-ing into bloody quarrels which somefi:mesended in serious injury and on occasions evenin murder.

-from Maxim Gorky, The Mother

No doubt, this is a large part of the explanationfor the rise of drinking in the Soviet Union. The{vorkers know in their hearts that they are nolonger in control and can feel the Qffects ofcapitalist restoration in all aspectb of their lives.But the development of an alcoholism problemis, in fact, more intimately connected with therestoration of capitalisrt'r than even this.

The first references to the drinking problern toappear in the Soviet press were in the early1950s. But at this time the main target ofcriticism was.not the workers, though we wouldnever go so far as to portray the Soviet pro-letariat as at any time a teetotaling class. TheproQlem in the early 50s, however, was concen-tratdd among the educated youth, the sons anddaughters of the rising new bourgeoisie. Theseyoung people had come to see themselves as.Somelning special just because their parentswere high Party officials, technicians or universi-ty scholars. One way a number of them (thoughdecidedly a minority) would flaunt their privilegedposition was to drink to excess in public.

ln late 1953, Komsomolskaia Pravda carried ashocking account of a group ol such young peo-ple who formed a dr.inking and social club thatturned to petty crime to finance its activities.Tragically, in the course of trjring to hide theiroperation from thb police, several of the youths'turned to murder. When the case was exposed it

',

' turhed out that most of the participants camefrlrm a background which we in the U.S. mightlabel "spoiled rotten." 71

Stories like this indicated that the struggle. against alcoholism under socialism was not un-

connected"to the continuing class struggle. Thisclass strug'Qle between the socialist road and'thecapitalist road, th e pro letar iat an d .thebourgeoisie, was not just a question of internalParty politics. lt touched all aspects of life andwas waged at all levels of society.

Yet despite this kind of continued struggle, itwas the political restoration of capitalist classrule, signalled by Khrushchev's take-over in '1956,

which marked the'real take-off point fof the re-surgence of alcoholism. To confuse and pacifythe workers,.the Khrushchev revisionists openedthe taps and really let the vodka flow. Criticismand exposure of dissolute, privileged youth caineto a halt and vodka was pu'shed on the workers.This was especiatty true once profit was restoredto the command post of.the economy.

One U.S. observer, after surveying a wide arrdyof references to alcoholibm in the Soviet press,reached the followihg conclusions:

"Commerciat organizations and outlets are vitatly in-terested in the sale of alcoholic beverages, whichare sold in special shops, grocery sfores and in'restaurants and cafes. The fulfilment of economicp/ans rb contingent upon achieving the maximumsa/es of such beverages, for they account for atarge part---apitroximately one-third--<f sa/es p/ansin the public catering industry. Enterprise managers,sa/es elerks; waiters and Waitresses are thuspersonally interested in the liquor trade. Moreover,to increase prgfits, commercial organizations try toplace wine and lor- vodka outlets near rnassmarkets. Ihrs does not only mean that'liquor.is soldnear plants and factories,' in some parts of thecountry, over-zealous otficials sell hard liquor inparks and on beaches, and they have installedwine-vehding machines in public places, . . Storesarrange elaborate and attractive displays to ad-verfise alcoholic beverages, corrupting adults andyoung children alike. At the same time, films,television and popular literature are said "to praisethe pleasures of alcohol to excess.' Apparently'abundant and pointless drunkenness ls frequentlyshown in theatres; on the screen and,on television.'An eminent legal scholar has remarked, '.:. we seethe heroes of our films drinking with gusto. I canhardly think of a single picture in which thery is nodrinking.' Other Soviet commentators haveseconded this view."75

That the problem can be laid directly at thedoorstep of newly triumphant capitalism was alsomade clear in a 1971 letter to lzvestia, which not-

'ed that in the past stores had to fulfill specificsales for. particular items. ln,other words, theywere told, try to spll so much meat, butter, eggs,etc. Now, however, each store must strive tomeet an overall prof it quota wnich leads

page 96

managers to push the easiest products to sell,one of which is vodka. The writer of this letterasked poignahtly, "How often for the sake of avisible figure on the proiits chart do financialagencies chase after 'graphic' crisp to the touch

' money . .: (Butf how do you calculate the lossesfrom broken homes, degradation of thelpersonality.'.."76 Does this appeal not truly expose the uglyface of capitalism in the Soviet Union today?

ln the Soviet Union alcoholism is a matter ofgreat concern also because it is seen as tied inwi'th a more general decline in moral vigor..Forexample, for the first tinie in Soviet histdry (out-side of g small number of border regions such aspoppy-growing Georgia) drug addiction is emerg-ing as a problem. Evidence of this developmentis still scanty and it is clear that the problem isnot yet nearly so severe as in the U.S., but it issurely growing.

ln both 1969 and 1972, new laws were pio-mulgated increasing the severity of punishmentforrdrug trafficking. This year an additional, eventougher, law had to be enacted. And in 1970 thesatirical weekly, Krokodil, carried the first publicexpose of the life of a big-time Tashkent dopedealer, a near-legendary figure named "CrookedAPolle." zz

More striking and widespread has been therapid growth of juvenile delinquency. This isoften directly associated with alcoholism-muchmore so than in the 50s-as drunken gangs .ofrowdy youths have begun to cause real pro-blems; for example, in one Kazakhstan silk-weaving town. (For details of this grizzly story,see boX.) With the decline in available recreation:facilities and the increasing cost of those ac-tivities which do exist, many young people havetaken to hanging out aimlessly on street corners,passing around a bottle or two of wine or,perhaps, vodka. As in the U.S., this is often theonly kind of social life available to working class'youth. But just as in the U.S., it can degenerateinto,vagrancy, hooliganism or-petty larceny. TheSoviet press in recent years has been filled withcomplaints about such activity. ln Moscow therise in burglaries has led the police departmentto begin selling an automatic burglar detectionsystem which is advertised in the press.78

Also serious has been the problem of the so-called "Bichi" "(literally "nuisances"), gangs oftramps who roam otltlying regions. These peopleare attracted to places like Western Siberia dueto labor shortages in these areas. They comefrorh all walks of tite and include "former bankdirectors, builders, disappointed artists, metalworkers, graduates of circus schbols, pianotuners" and others. Dropouts from society, theywork at casual jobs on a part-time basis and are.usually paid in kind with furs, meat and milk bytocal peasants. These goods the "Bichi" then sellon the black market for a profit.

When nbt at work, the "Bichi" engage in pettycrime, drinking bouts and just general anti-social

ln the mitl lown of Ferg'ama, in Kazakhstan,abofi 600 young women come into the city'ftom the surrounding countryside each year'towoik in the silk weaving mills. A similarnumber leqve, disappointed and depressed,whv?

According to Komsomolskaia Pravda, the'problem is alcahol. /t 'seems that periodicallythe women's dormitory at the factory fa:lls ':un'

' der a state of sr'ege. " The besiegers are, afcourse, drunken young men. But these are noidle panty raids. On occasion women would,narrowly escape rape aitd all endured thernost vile of insults and'abuse. One particularly '

"vicious" gang wh,ich from time to time would .

make such visits fo the dorm was under the'known teadership of the Secretary ef the'fac/- ,

,tory's Communist Youth League chapter!tlVtty did this occur? Well, one explanation ,

might be that the mill and the women's dormare separated by about a three block walk.And along this stretch the state has seen fit toset up no /ess than nine vodka bars. The

, ygung women report that sometimes they mustaim themsetves with bricks and travel'in largegroups just in order to make it home safely!;e

behavior. Themselves victims of the social- .

imperialist system, their revolt has led them to re-ject all socig-ty and to snub their noses at thehard-working and oppressed majority of the Sov-iet pedple. s')

The Soviet Union does not publicly'disclosefigures on crime, but authorities have certainlyrecognized its growth. Under public pressure,various special- commissions have been foimedto "deal" with the problem. As in the U.S., a'whole criminology bureaucracy is developing andperiodically profound "studies" appear whichserve only to confirm what ordinary workers had'already known. These studies and commissions,despite the fact that many well-meaning peopleserve on them, are designed to divert attentionfrom the real causes of crime and from the realcriminals.

This can be seen pretty clearly from a 1971 in-terview with the Soviet Minister of Justice,Vladimir l. Terebilov, published in the trade unionnewspai:er i'rud. Terebilov was not optimistic'about prospects for improvement in the crimesituation. Nor was he particularly enlightening asto why. His explanation of the iising- crime ,ratereads as follows: "As long as teen-agers commitcrimeb, we cannot expect crime to be reduced." sl

Such brilIancel This fetlow surely deserVes aplace beside our own "leaders" in the two-faced,'

These are but a few of the social problpms.which have developed in the Soviet Union in re-cent years. We do not mean to suggest thatmanagerial corruption, unemployment, nationaf

l:;i-11 "

oppressioh, drunkenness Ind crime are totallynew. Thbse were present under Stalin'sleadership as well. But at that time these pro-rblems represented what was old and declininEand .not what was new and develdping. Andmost important, the policy of the Party and statewere aimed at systematrcally eradicating ,,such

bacl6ward things from Soviet society. lf this wassometimes done in an inefficient, bureaucratic orinsensitive manner, we must learn from thatnegative experience as well as its overwhelminglypositive character and truly remarkable achieve-ments. And, in oppbsition to the present social-imperialist rulers, the true Soviet communistshad the interests of the working people, the vastmajority of the people of the Soviet Union and ofthe 'Jvorld, at heart. ' "The restoration of bourgeois rule and ,

capitalism is what lies at the heart of each of the"horror stories" we have related in this chapter.We do not relate this information with glee,standing aside from the struggle like theTrotskyites and other so-called "rEvolutmnaries"who slanderously pontificate about the evils of"Stalinisml'-that is, the dictatorship of the pro-letariat--+ven as they abandon the Soviet work-ing class in its time of trial and renewed strugglefor socialism.

Certainly it would be possible'to yvrite lengthya;ticles, even books, on each of the problems wehave. touched upon here. We make no claim to a"total.assessment", and we encourage others todeepn our still somewhat superficial investiga-tion of such questions as national oppressionand the role of wdmen in the Soviet Union. But,at the same time, we would like to strq/ss that forsuch investigation to be of use to the revolu-tionary movehent, it must be based firmly on theMarxist-Leninist method and upon.a firm graspof the Soviet Union's development into an im-perialist (monopoly capitalist) country.

Reeently the so-oalled "convergence" theoryhas become popular among certain circles ofU.S. bourgeois scholarship; and to some extentsuch ideas have found echoes in the anti:imperialist rnovement as well. This "theory" triesto argue that the Soviet Union and the UnitedSiates are spontaheously becoming more alike aseach enters the stage of advanced industrialsociety, also known as "neo-capitalism", "post-in$ustrial society'' or "consumer society." Thisidea is profoundly misleading

While it is tru6 that the two superpowers aiebecoming more similar' in some key respects (andwe have noted several of these), the problemsthey share are not problems of "advanced in-dustrialism", a new stage in history which sup-posedly supercedes such "antiquated" 19th cen-tury phenomena as capitalism and socialism, astage which will soinehow be reached on6 dayby bgth China and lndia, Albania and Yugoslavia,but by "different paths." No, these problemswhich the two iniperialist giants share are pro-blems of class rule-to be specific, of bourgeoisclass rule.

It is not inevitable that wealth and power bedistlibuted indquitably. .lt is not ineviiable thateconomic development leads to social disruption',disillusioirment and mbral decay. The problern ofthe "quality of life" is a problem as directly tiedto the nature of the social system as.the problemof wage labor. ln China'before Liberation therewas a drug dddiction pro'blem worse than in any"advanced" country today. Yet within ten yearsafter the victory of the revolution, this had, for allintents and purposes, disappdared, and is not re-appearing now that economic development hasmade great strides under. the continuing rule ofthe proletariat. ' ,

The problems the Soyiet people face in theireveryday lives today are not exactly the sameones faced by their farents and grandparents in1917, though many phenomena common totsarist Russia have re-emerged. But, once again,they are problems produced and exacerbated bythe capitalist system. And like the problems ofpre-Ociober, 19i7, these will not be solved untilcapitalism is overthrown and once more torn

6. Literature and Ari in the Servipe of theBourgeoisie .

Our swvey of life under social-imperidlist rulewould not be complete if we did not at least touchupon the development of culture under re-visignism.

MaoTsetung has stated:

"Any given culture (as an ideologicat form) is a reflec-tion of the politics and economics of .a given societyand the former in turn has a tremendous influence andeffectupon'the latter . . . "

He also says; "ln the world today all culture, allliterature and art belong to definite classes and aregeared to definite political lines." 8z

Under Stalin, Soviet policy on the arts was basedupon the application of these principles.'Duringthose years serious attempts were made to developand popularize proletarian forms in literature andart.

When we speak of proletarian art we mean twothings. First of all, true prole[arian art is art thatteaches the working people about their own his-.tory, traditions of struggle and aohievements. lt isart which seeks to raise the workers to a fuller andmore complete understanding of their place in theworld and of the hist6rical destiny of the workingclass to build a new socialist and comrnunist world,and thus liberate all humankind. Proletarian art ispartisan art. lt boldly champions the cause andleadership oI the working class. lt stands for collec-tivity over individualism, for struggle and'militancyover pacifism,.for the toiling masses over all 'ex-ploiters past and present.

. But proletarian art must be art for the workers.The proletarian artist cannot preach to the massesbut must go among (he masses, learn from themasses and bring back to the masses in the higher

;,1

page 98

form of art their own authentic, heartfelt aspira-tions. To.do this proletarian art must speak theIanguage of the masses.

tn tnJ tirst decade of Sovietrpower, a number ofartists and writers were inspired by the revolutionand its liberating force. These men and womensought to express their support for and loyalty tothe revolution in their art, but many.had little ex-perience with the real world of the .workers andpeasants. They were more familiar with the narrow,rnored world of the petty bourgeois artist. Thus,many gravitated toward formalist and expressionistforms of abstract art. This was particrtlarly true inpainting and music.

But such art meant little to the workers.Therefore, by 1930 the Party had moved to correctthe qituation. Norms were established to guidecultural workers and to help them better serve themasses of people. Many remolded themselves byjoining in the heroic elforts to industrialize thecountry, defeat the Nazis and build socialism.

These prolbtarian artists worked side by side withthe working people and their works reflected thekind of class feeling this engendered. Others,however, retained their old bourgeois world out-look. They continued to believe that they, theartistic and. literary "geniuses", were the realheroes and that it was their job to interpret life tothe masses who were dull and stupid.

Throughout the socialist period the strugglebetween two lines on literature and art continued,as did the class struggle as a who'le. During thisperiod the proletarian line was generally in com-mand, and was expressed through the theory of"socialist realism."

'"socialist realism" is a concept much malignedby the bourgeoisie. ln essence, however, thistheory meant only that art should reflect reality asseen by the class c.onscious proletariat. ln otherwords, revolutionary art and literature shouldportray in a down-to-earth style the reality ofsocialist life from the point of view of revealing thenew world coming into being. This concept is in-timately connected with Andrei Zhdanov, who wasits major proponent in the late 1940s.

Tlie bourgeoisie lloves to portray Zhdanov asan enemy of art; indeed, an enemy of life itself.This is patently absurd. We need only point outthdt when Leningrad was under siege'by theNazis and the whole city was starving and freez-inQ, struggling daily with death, it was Zhdanov(then the city's Party secretary) who arranged tohold a writers' congress light in the city's center!

But Zhdanov/ was an enemy of bourgeois art.Through constant criticism he sought to developamong Soviet cuitural workers an attitude that inart and literature, as elsewhere in life, politicsmust be in command. The campaign associatedwith Zhdanov was an importanl blow struck bythe Soviet communists in their struggle with re-visionisffr. (see Chapter ll).

The Soviet working class produced many finewriters and drtists. The most famous is certainlyMaxim Gorky, whose career began before the re-

volution and whose woiks, such ai ine Mother andThe LoWer Depths, served as models to a whol€generation of proletarian writers. Other notablewriiers include A. Fadeyev, whose The Young Gua,rdtells the story of a group of Soviet youth who fightheroically behind Nazi lines in World War ll. Also agreat contribution was Nicholas Ostrovski's Howthe Stee/ is Te.mpered. And in f ilm can ahyone denythe great proletarian artist, Sergei Eisenstein?

With the coming to power of the Khrushchevgang in 1956, however, these ftgures were[usieO to the ,background. Their writings werebranded "outmoded." Instead, figures like BorisPasternak, Ilya Ehrenburg and Yevgeny Yev-tushenko came to the foreground.

Pasternak and Ehrenburg represented an oldergeneration of Soviet writers. They were the menwho had refused to remold themselves. For yearsthey had harbored resentments against theworkers' state for "shackling their creativity."Now they were set free to publish,openly all thegarbage they had been carrying around in theirheads for so long. ln his six volume memoirs,People, Years, Life, Ehrenburg wrote warmly ofthe United States and praised all the gieat "pro-gress" the U.S. ruling class was making. He openlyattacked Stalin (in this he was given special en-couragement by Khrushchev) and renewed his nowweary call Jor the introduction of the abstract intothe Soviet Union. d'

More important was the publication ofPasternak's counter-revolUtionary novel DoctorZhivago. This book treats the .Russian revolutionthrought the eyes of a complete historical non.entity, a man who stands aside as history takes aleap forward. ls this done to point to the folly ofsuch a posjtion? Of course not. The main themeof this novel is the assertion that the OctoberRevolution was an "historical error" and an "ir-reinediable catastrophe." lt alleges that "every-thing that happened'1 after the October Revolu-tion "was a crime." The October Flevolution u/asa catastrophe-but for the bourgeoisie!

ln addition, this period saw such tigures asMandelshtam, Zoshchenko, Akhmatova andBunin- all previously criticized-crawl out of thewoodwork and into the limelight. This period sawsucfi books as Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Lileof lvan Denisovich, and Dudintsev's Not by BreaoA/one become "bestsel lers. "

At the same time, Yevtushenko came torepresent a new generation of writers. Marchingunder the Khrushchevite banner of the so-called"culture of the whole people, of all mankind",young writers like Yevtushenko claimed only thatthey were "chrldren of the 20th and 22ndCongresses of the Communist Party of the SovielUnion." 81

ln their works these writOrs would slander the ac-complishments of the Soviet Working class. Theyheld up the capitalist world as a model to beemulated, openly identifying with the Westernbourgeois style of life. For example, in one novelthe author Gladilin described his "hero" as a man

::- l

)

"seeking ways to make money to buy a car as soonas possible so that he could drive for pleasure everySunday." ls this the proletarian ideal? ss

This new school of art was extremely influen-tial in film. Under Khrushchev, Soviet filmakersabandoned the militant tr:adition of Eisenstein. ln-creasingly, Soviet films began to examine life notfrom the class conscious stand of the revolu-tionary proletariat but from the "humanistic",pacitistic stance of the bourgeisie. Commentingon the Soviet love film, Nine Days of -a SingleYear, Time magazine noted that in the past theheroes of Soviet films were "Stakhanovites andstrong-jawed sons of the soil", while in this filmthe heroes are more like the "bourgeoisie" of theWest. This shows, in lime's view, "how far creep-ing liberalism hds managed to advance." Anotherfilm of this period, I Stride Through Moscow, is aflagrant copy of the typical Hollywood diversion. s6

Durinq the Khrushchev period, Soviet films wentout of their way to encourage bourgeois pacifismai part of the general campaign to presdnt"peaceful co-existence" as the essence of Com-munist strategy. For example, the tilm Ballad of aSpldier, which was widely acclaimed in the U.S.,takes as its theme "how war goes against natureand peace brings happiness." While it is true thatthe finat aim,and destiny of the working class isto abolish all war, by eliminating imperialism anJall reactionary classes, it is not true that under allconditiohs peace necessarily brings happiness.Peace with imperiatists can only bring greatersuffering and more war. Yet this f ilm putsforward precisely this notion of classless pqaceat any price.

ln response to criticisms of this kind; Sovietapologists often point out how the Soviet Unionsuffered during World War ll. They argue thalatter 20 million deaths the Soviet peoples learnedbetter than anyone the real significance of peace.This is certainly true. But the real significance ofpeace is not what the revisionists say it is. Peaceis not something for which people go begging. ltis not something for which the masses will notsacrifice. Peace must be won,on the basis offreedom, independence and ultimately socialistrevolution. lt is not some classless, foggy utopia.

Contrast the revisionist treatment of Sovietwartime sacrifices ivitn tne attitude of the Viet-namese communists, for example. Certainly theVietnamese have suffered from war as much asany nation. Yet do the Vietnamese speak of howwar goes'against nature? Have they yearned onlyfor the guns to silence? No! Because, as Ho ChiMinh declared, "Nothing ,is more precious thanfreedom and independence."

With the ousting of Khrushchev and the advent topower ol Brezhnev, Kosygin and Co., the re-visionists beg,an to chanqe their tune a bit. lt ap-pears that during the Khrushchev years,"liberalism" in art, literature and film went a littletoo far. The petty bourgeois individualism of

paseP

such writers as,solzhenitsyn was as uncomforta-ble with. imperialism as it had been witngocialism. And with all the writers jumping on thebandwagon to "expose" Stalin an$ his "crimesl',people began to wonder wheher they'could everbelieve their leaderb. Rfter all, if a jerk like Ehren-burg had known the "truth" all along, where.hadBrezhnev been?

Thus the new leaders began to tighten the re-ins on their new bourgeois artists. Most wentalong with this move. Yevtushenko, for example,found it quite easy to make a smooth transitionfrom angry young man to "official" poet. He onlydemanded in exchange that he be permitted totravel abroad where he might hobnob with theWestern'society set. This he was quickly granted.Other writers refused to buckle under to so-called "re-Staliniaatioh." of the arts. Many ofthese became the kernal of today's "dissident"movement. (see Chapter Vt)

Of particular importance to Brezhnev was thatSoviet writers abandon the kind of pacif ismcharacterigtic of art under Khruschev. This hadserved its purpose. Now the Soviet leadershipwas actively seeking to change the hegemony ofU.S. imperialism and for this a more martial spiritwas needed.

Thus, at the 24th Party Congress Brezhnevcalled for literary works to ref lect "patriotictheme."srAt the Sth Congress of Soviet writers,G.M. Markov, first secretary of the Union of Sov-iet Writers, emphasized thqt "literature has a'special responsibility' to army and navy person-nel.'. He added that all efforts must be made todevelop and strengthen the war tradition in Sov-iet literature." ss

In particular, recent works have lauded Sovietmilitary adventures around thb world. Thedocumentary film,' Czechoslovakia, a Year of Test,tries to justify the .social-imperialists' brutal in-vasion of tna{ country. lt was awarded "the stateprize for literature and art."

Another documentary, The Ocean, "plays upSoviet revisionist social-imperialists' globalmaritime expansion through its portrayal of aSoviet admiral i,n command of fleets in the Atlan-tic and Pacific Oceans, the Berents Sea, theArctic Ocean, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea andthe Mediterranean." ln the novel, Nuclear Sub-marines on the Alert, lhe notion of "loafing aboutin one's own territorial waters" is criticized."Before the war we did not often.go to sea," theauthors of this work note, "but at present a fun-damental change haS taken place."

Another theme bf these increasingly militaristworks is the glorification of the military traditionsof tsardom. Accordingly, the literary magazind,Molodaia Gvardia, openly lauded notorious col-onialists as "patriotic" heroes. The old Tsar Alex-is is praised for his "patriotic" feats, though he isknown for aggression and expansign. Gold Fever,a long novel published recently, openly defendsthe tsars' crimes of aggression against China. lt

'' r, \r

pagel@

alleges that areas seized from Ch\na'under une-qual treaties (later renounced by Lenin) were"first opened up" by Russian immigrants.

Of coufse, under socialism works of art did 6'n-courage a militant, martial qpirit among themasses, and a socialist patriotism linked with-communist principles of proletarian interna-,,tionalism. But in these lvorks a careful distinctionwas made betwden real "defense of themotherland" and outright aggresslon. Moreover,these films were designed to mobilize andeducate the masses themselves to their own de-fense., Today, however, Soviet artistp downgrade therole of the masses. Like their U.S. counterpartsthey portray technology as all-powerful and peo-.ple as weak. This provides' a link between thepacifism of the Khrushchev years and the militar-ism of today. The key diflerence is that underKhrushchev, socialism was being wrecked and theprocess of capitalist restoration was in its first

stage, while today the Soviet Unicin has engagedas a full{ledged imperialist superpower, wreckedby internal contradictions and forced to expandthrough aggression everywhere---so it is on theoffensive throughout the world.

Look, for example, at the full-length fdaturetilm Tame the Flames. which is devoted to therace for nuclear duperiority. This film takes theabsurd but common imperialist position that astrong nuclear shield is the.best defense againstwar, Thus, the film boasts of the "power" of Sov-let rockets. lt urges scientists to serve themilitary. According lo Pravda, "Tame the F/ames isour political film." lt is 'iof historicsignificance in the deepest sense of -thesewords." The long novel Thunder of Bockefs, de-votes d great deal of space to the dream of arocket force commander: A nuclear wai breaksout and he is sent to attack the enemy withnuclear weapons. He wins victory and the enemyis destroyed.

;,

1. J.V. Stalin, 'Report to the 1sth Congress'2. How the Sov,et ffevlsrbnists Carry Out All-Round Restolation

of Capitalism rn lhe USSB. p. 30.Same source, p. 20Newsweek, July 1 7, 1 974.New York limes, October 9, 1967.

. New York limes, Oct. 9, 1967.Komsomolskaya Prav da, date unknown.Komsomolskaya Pravda, date unknownKomsmolskaya Pravda, date unknown.New York Iimes, December 8, 1971.fuavda, June 18, 1971.Literatwnaya Gazeta, date unknown,New York limes, October 4. 1971 .

Komsomolskaya Pravda, June 16, 1971.New York limes, March 2. 1969.

. New Program ot the CPSU, 1962.L. Brezhnev, "Report to the 24th Congress of the CPSU",Quoted in peking Review, July 19, 1974.Peking Review, July l9, 1974.Stalin, "The National Question, and Leninism".Grgy Hodnett, ,"What is a Nation?", Prdblems ot Com'munism, Sept.-Oct. 1 967.V.l. Lenin, "The Nascent Trend ol lmperialisteconomism,' Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 16.

23. Quoted in Hodnett, p. 7.

24. Quoted in Hodnett, p. 7-8.25. Stalin, Marxism.and the National Question.26. Stalin, "The National Question and Leninism".27. Stalin. "The National Question and Leninism".

.28, Stalin, "The National Question and Leninism".29: Filosofskie Naukr, 1964, #5.30. Same source.

; 31. Stalin, Marxism and the National Question.32. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Com-

,n)nist PartyBrezhnev, "Report to the 24th congress of the CPSU".Quoted in Peking Review, July 19, 1974.Quoted in Hodnett, p. 12.Peking Review, July 19, 1974.Peking Review, July 19, 1974.lvan Dziuba, lnternationalism or Russitication? London,1970, p. 11G1.

39. Quoted in Teresa Rakowska-Harmstorle, "The Dialecticsof Nationalism in the USSR'', Problems ot Communism,lVlay-June 1974.

40. Same source.41. Same source.42. Quoted,in Peking Review, July 19, 1974.

43. History ot,the Kazakh SSF (1943). pp. 307-0844. History ol the Kazakh SS,C (1957). pp.'244-45.45. History of the Kazakh SSF (1943). p. 22046. History of th.e Kazakh SSF (1957). p. 32147. Quoted in Peking Review, July 19. 1974.48. Same Source49. Brian D. Silver. The Status of National Minorrty, Lahguages in Soviet Education: An Assessment of Fie-

cent Changes . Soyiet Studles. January 1974.50. M. Baragunov. Ob obuchenii na russkom yazyke .v

nachal nykh klassakh . Russkii yazyk v nalsional 'noishko/e, 1963.

=2. p.29. Ouoted in Silver. p..34.

5'1. Ouoted in Silver. p. 39.52. John Dornberg, Brezhnev. fhe Masks.of Power. New York,

1974, p 132; All statistics on the Virgrn Lands campaignfrom this source.Dornberg. p. 139.G. Vech-kanov. Raisino the Effectiveness of the Ter-ritorral Redrstribut)on 6t LaOor. Resources . Nauchnyedoktady vrlsshei shkoly-ekonomtcheska nauki. 1969. =5.'New York limes, October 9, 1967.New York llmes, January 25. 1971Pravda. July 17.1971.Quoted in Lotta Lennon. "Women in the USSR .

Problems ol Communism, July-August. 1971.

,Lotta Lennon,'Wor,nen in the USSRLiteraturnaya Gazeta, June 4, 1969,Literaturnaya Gazeta, July 12. 1967Lotta Lennon, 'Women in the USSFIsame sourceStatistics on divorce from New York Ttnes. September 7.1969.Elena Korenevskaya, Combating Alcoholism in the US-SR", Quarlerly Journal of Studies in Alcohol, Vol. 27, ;1. p.97.Vera Etron, The Soviet Appioach to Alcoholism . Socia/

53.54.

' '3.4.5.

.6.7.8.9.

.10.'l 1"

12.13.14.15.16.17.18.19.20.' 21 .

22.

55.3b.57.58.

59.60.61.62.o\r.64.

65.

t 66.

33.34.35.36.37.38.

67. Korenevskaya.68. David E. Powell, :Alcholism in the USSH . Survey,.

Winter, 1971.69. lzvestia. June 27. 1965.70. lzvestia, December 3, 1967.71. Pravda, June 18,1971.72. Pravda, May 16, 1971.73. t--riedrich Engels, The 'Condition of the Worki7g C/ass ln-

England 'in 1844.

74. Komsololskaya Pravda, November 19, 1953.75. David E. Powell. 'Alcoholism in the USSR''

i,.':tj ril.$$,,

lzvestia, June 18. 1971. .New Yoik'TimEs, July127, 1969, December'20,'i970, Sep-

.a- . :/.

How the Soviet Revision.sts . . .. p. 34'llow the Sovlet.Bevlslonlsts ,. . . . p. 40.How the Soviet Re:visionrsfs . . .. p. 40.How the Sovibt Revisionists . . ., p. 45.Quoted in.Peking Review, May 31., 1974Quoted in' P'eking Review. May 31 , 1974

pagerl01

/ o. . 83.84.:; 95.

' 86,87.88.

tember 13. 1972.

79. New York Times, April 28, 1970.80. Ner,rz York Times, August 17, 1970. i

8.1 . New York Times, January 10, 197l82. Mao Tse-tung,''Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature

and Art'r

Soviet poster, put out in 1966,stresses central role of profitsin new Soviet capitalist system.Worker in poster is holdingpile of rnoney, with word"Profit" blazed across it.