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Unity is the path to our victory against the Zionist enemy and the United States Government and Ruling Classes!
anti_imperialist_solidarity@yahoo.com
The Historical Role of the Soviet Union
--- Kevin Walsh, Editor of EASPF
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1922-1991, was the greatest counterweight to Western imperialism of the 20th Century. This fact alone speaks favorably of it, though it does not discount the possibility that the Soviet Union was a flawed project. Critics on the right have alleged that the Soviet Union was cosmopolitan, egalitarian and even Jewish-controlled. Critics on the left have alleged that the Soviet Union was needlessly totalitarian and made needless ideological compromises that deviated from genuine socialism and that a hidden bourgeoisie emerged from a supposedly classless society. Some leftist critics have gone as far as to accuse the Soviet Union of practicing imperialism while using anti-imperialist rhetoric.
I do not hide my own bias on this issue. I was a member of the Communist Party USA and the Young Communist League USA. I have altered some of the views I held in my youth, particularly those on the national question and the Jewish question, but I do not consider my former membership in these organizations and my support for the Soviet Union to have been youthful indiscretions. My support for the Soviet Union and opposition to the Cold War were the correct lines.
The Cold War was a terrible crime against humanity, and the Soviet Union was not at fault in starting or maintaining the Cold War. The USA developed the atomic and hydrogen bombs and used them to threaten the Soviet Union, China, and many other countries. The Soviets responded by developing their own nuclear arsenal, but the Soviet government tried many times to end the arms race by negotiations with the USA. In the end, Ronald Reagan promoted a huge surge in the arms race to try to spend the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. Reagan and his supporters tried to defend this in the name of "defending freedom," but the only freedom they were defending was the right of the imperialist grand-bourgeoisie to exploit the rest of the world. I could not and can not see any rational excuse to hold the world's people hostage to nuclear anihilation for the protection of the "rights" of a small clique of parasites.
The accusation that the Soviet Union was nothing but a rival imperialism is demonstrably false. Given that supposed "captive nations" sometimes had higher living standards than the "evil empire," it was absurd at face value. Even the CIA admitted that Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic were wealthier per capita than the Soviet Union. The catastrophic effects on the economies of these "captive nations" following the breakup of the Soviet Union emphasizes that these economic relationships were beneficial. The eastern European countries have suffered terrible poverty and unemployment since then. Poland has become a primary source of cheap labor and prostitutes for western Europe. Cuba saw severe economic contraction during the 1990s. One would expect the opposite result if Cuba had been exploited by the Soviet Union. If Soviet socialism was a failure, then post-Soviet capitalism has been a far worse failure.
Rightists who accuse the Soviet Union of having been nothing but a Jewish project, point out that Trotsky received $20 million from a wealthy Jewish capitalist in New York City prior to leaving the USA. When we consider that Trotsky primarily disrupted the Soviet Union and was eventually expelled from the Soviet Union, it is clear that the Bolshevik Revolution could not be bought. Indeed, Max Eastman observed that those expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the 1927 purge were disproportionately Jewish. He quipped, "Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, and Stalin is leading the Jews out of the Party." I like to tell those who don't believe that the Holocaust happened but who accept that the purges happened that they must conclude on this basis that Stalin had more Jews killed than Hitler and that they must therefore concede that Stalin was a better "anti-Semite" than Hitler.
This does not mean that there is no room for criticism of the role Jews played in Soviet society. Indeed, it is particularly disturbing that many of those involved in looting post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s were Jews who had formerly held high positions in the Soviet government. To say that the Soviet Union was nothing but a Jewish project, however, is extremely dishonest.
As the successor state to the old Russian Empire, the Soviet Union had inherited a "prisonhouse of nations." There are many national purists who believe that the country should have broken up completely with each nationality going its own way and that the idea of a Soviet Union was cosmopolitan. When we consider that the Soviet Union was established after a civil war with the presence of foreign interventionist armies, it is understandable that the Bolsheviks felt that unity against enemies of socialism was necessary and that a compromise between independent republics for each nationality and presenting a united front against the Western imperialists was necessary. Although movement of peoples among different Soviet republics was permitted, this did not result in large-scale mixing of nationalities and national nihilism the way the genuine cosmopolitanism of the West is going. This is because socialism provided people with economic security in their own republics, and there was no economic incentive to move to different republics the way there is for massive immigration into western Europe and North America. White racialists who condemn Communism must admit that the countries of eastern Europe and the Slavic and Baltic Soviet Republics have maintained white racial purity far better than the countries of western Europe and North America.
When we consider all that the Soviet Union endured, the accomplishments it contributed are truly amazing. Having endured the terrible bloodletting of the First World War and the Civil War, having lost more than 20 million lives in the Second World War and had much of its industry destroyed, and having had to try to outspend the West in a nuclear arms race with no neocolonies to provide financial support, the Soviet Union went from the most backward country in Europe to a rival superpower to the USA in only a generation. In 1913, Russia had the fifth largest economy in Europe. In 1953, the Soviet Union had the largest economy in Europe and the second largest in the world. In 1913, barely 10% of Russians could read and write. By 1953, nearly everyone in the Soviet Union could read and write. In 1957, the Soviet Union sent the first vehicle into orbit, and in 1961, the Soviet Union sent the first person into orbit and safely returned him. The
peoples
of the Soviet Union were not worked like slaves to achieve this. On the contrary, they achieved all this with a seven-hour work day, universal health care, subsidized food prices, subsidized housing rent and free education. These achievements were also made without the use of cheap immigrant labor or importing cheap foreign goods from neocolonies. They were the results of the willing labor of free people under the direction of a centrally planned and collectively owned economy.
The Soviet Union was a product of former times, and it would not be appropriate or useful to advocate trying to duplicate it today. It also had its flaws, and we should learn from them and correct them in building future societies. We must, however, recognize, that far more good than harm came of the Soviet Union and that there are many positive lessons for us in the Soviet experience.
