They needed on a very practical basis, especially after Andropov died (I still think it was salvageable) to:
- Crackdown hard on the secondary economy. This was the main source of inneficiency and corruption.
- Rethink the economic planning, modernize it into cybernetics like Chile had tried, or at the bare minimum computize the calculations and make inputs/outputs easier to measure.
- Either win the Afgan war or when they lost it, not be cucks like the Gorbachev government were they didn’t ask for shit (in all occasions not just this one).
- A Cultural Revolution to purge and refresh party membership, and introduce a proper Mass Line.
- Extend those policies to the rest of their block.
But the biggest issue I still think comes from Krushev’s Thaw, that shit destroyed the national identity and spirit basically forever, no one really believed in socialism after that. China keeps going because no one threw Mao under the bus like that. Not saying reforms weren’t needed by the mid 50s, but they should have been made following a mentality in which Socialism wasn’t fundamentally broken (this with avoiding the Sino-Soviet split would have changed everything).
But the biggest issue I still think comes from Krushev’s Thaw, that shit destroyed the national identity and spirit basically forever, no one really believed in socialism after that.
yeah. my parents’ generation basically thought of marxism as we think of paul krugman. they thought only the lamest saddest fucks join the communist party (and this was by then kinda true, eg, fucking orban was on track to join the party and rise in the ranks, before the counterrevolution happened). something went very wrong there, because as it turns out, everything the commies said about capitalism was true, but that generation thought they knew better. when they were told that western welfare “social democracy” was only possible due to exploitation of the global south, they went “yeah lol what do you idiots know” and tried to do a heckin western social democracy. and look where we are now.
I agree the population in general did support the leadership in their “reformist” insanity with the 500 day plans and shit. By this point things have gone very, very wrong, especially with the party allowing the Gorby clike to reduce party powers and all, after this collapse was absolutely inevitable.
A billion different things which are endlessly debatable. But Xi said it best: the leadership stopped believing communism would work.
Another previous thread on this: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9245432
That’s a question with quite a large scope. There’s entire books, from all political persuasions, that have been written on the Soviet collapse.
However, the nature of the Soviet counter-revolution means the question is not necessarily the same as the famously facetious “why did the Roman Empire collapse?”
Most of the responses in this thread so far surprise me in the sense that they don’t appear to engage with any literature on the world historical event of the 1989-1992 counter-revolutions.
Capitalist restoration was primarily self-inflicted. External factors like Western and American pressure played no small role. The economic position was also not ideal. However, there is a wide gap between all of that and anything that necessitated the collapse of the Soviet state.
For a principled Marxist Leninist analysis, I’d recommend reading through Carlos Martinez’s “Why Doesn’t the Soviet Union Exist Any More”: https://invent-the-future.org/2018/06/why-doesnt-the-soviet-union-exist-any-more/
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I do think there are many things that USSR could have done differently. It was a huge country and could have been largely self sufficient given that DPRK managed to survive being much smaller and having far less advantages.
In my view, the problems come down to the way selection process in the party worked, which allowed people like Khrushchev and Gorbachev get to the top. Khrushchev destroyed relations with China which facilitated American detente in the 70s and further isolated USSR. If The Soviet Union and China combined powers instead, we’d be living in a completely different world today.
Another example would be shutting down of Artels (Артель) which provided a structure of many small-scale producers in USSR that would fill the niches like belt buckles, specific forms of toys and other minute necessities that can be fulfilled more efficiently without central planning. Such a worker formations worked for themselves, were prohibited from growing beyond a certain size and had to prove they had no exploited workers, but they allowed to have more flexibility in the market.
Then there was OGAS which could have been implemented in the 70s, and would’ve been completely transformative. Incidentally, it does look like China is moving in that direction. Their use of digital currency is a step towards facilitating that. This was a surprisingly good read on the subject. Once you have digital tracking integrated into the supply chain, you have real-time information about the state of all the pieces in the supply chain. And nowadays, we have stuff like AI systems that can do dynamic allocation better than markets can. While in the west, most of the focus with this tech has been on making chat bots, in China it’s being actively integrated into industry and supply chains where it will provide immense value.
Overall, the big insight Stalin had with Artels and CPC has embraced was that markets can be used as allocators within central planning. One of the core weakness of the Soviet model is that the planners need to have accurate and up to date information to make sound decisions. But the problem is that you inevitably have a lot of noise in the system. There are honest mistakes, corruption, lack of transparency or inadequate data collections, and so on. The data also takes time to be collected, aggregated, and analyzed. So, by the time the plans are made, they are based on incomplete data that’s also out of date. Then it takes more time for the plan to be implemented, and thing get more and more out of sync as the process goes on. The tendency ends up being to overcorrect, which further compounds the problems.
Chinese approach is to avoid doing micromanagement. The central planners set general direction, and provide incentives, then let the markets do dynamic allocation at each level. In this scenario, planners simply have to figure out how to create the right selection pressures to direct labor and resources in the desired direction. Support companies that do things that fit with the plan, pass legislation to suppress enterprises that go counter to it, and let things work themselves out.
DeepSeek is a really good example of this approach in action. The party decided that quant trading was harmful and banned it. High-Flyer was one of the hedge funds involved in it, and they saw the writing on the wall. They realized they had a bunch of GPUs and math talent on hand, so they pivoted to AI, and ended up producing one of the best models around. The government never had to tell them to do any of this explicitly, they simply created the conditions for it.
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All due respect to the poetic rhythm of that kind of outlook, I don’t believe this sort of teleological narrative is supported by a historical materialist analysis.
Attributing the Soviet collapse to the will of teleology and the omnipotence of the United States is also a unhelpful framework that only serves to bind leftists to psychological paralysis. This would be counter-intuitive as, to quote Carlos Martinez:
“The more our movement can learn about the Soviet collapse, the better prepared we will be to prevent historic reverses and defeats in future, and the better equipped we will be to develop a compelling, convincing vision of socialism that is relevant to the here and now.”
The reality is that while the United States and the West played a major role in abetting the counter-revolution, they were not some almighty force such that a power like the Soviet Union can be characterized as some “antediluvian victim” to the age of American unipolarity.
The majority of the blame can be attributed to the last generation of Soviet leadership. This is supported by analyses from across the political spectrum: liberal (Zubok’s “Collapse”), social democrat (Kotz and Weir’s “Revolution from Above”) and Marxist Leninist (Keeran and Kenny’s “Socialism Betrayed”).
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Thanks for appreciating them, comrade!
I have been recently doing a comparative reading on the Soviet collapse and it really highlights the malfeasance of the Soviet Politburo. I think while it holds that one of the basic principles of historical literacy is avoiding the “great man” theory pitfall, the particular nature of socialist democratic centralism means that socialist political systems are particularly vulnerable to reverberations from the top. In terms of its negatives, we can dialectically see the downsides of the practice in how parties with enforced democratic centralism like the CPUSA and DSA can throttle downstream radicalism and also in terms of the USSR’s “revolution from above.”
This was the revelation that, in part, compelled Mao to launch the Cultural Revolution and “bombard the headquarters” but the contradictions were never resolved and there is still no answer to how such a “revolution from above” can be truly thwarted. For example, if someone like Li Qiang, who is China’s present premier and from all appearances appears to be a financier Shanghai liberal, takes over the CPC after Xi, there are no real mechanisms in place to block a Chinese Gorbachevization if the material conditions are sufficiently conducive. It’s there a relevant question of paramount importance for all socialist systems, whether at the party grassroots organizational level or at the state level, today.
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The CPUSA’s national leadership is known for stifling any move towards radicalism by local chapters. The most charitable interpretation for their leadership is that the fear of becoming scapegoated like Eugene Debbs was, whose imprisonment killed off the SPA, is one where no electoralist approach has yet found a solution for a century later.
For the DSA, I was specifically referring to the DSA’s National Political Committee, which notoriously de-chartered their Palestine/BDS working group in 2022 after the DSA endorsed an Iron Dome-voting Zionist congressman. My understanding from individuals who were part of the DSA’s East Bay chapter, which partly led the opposition to the attack on the Palestine working group, was that the DSA NPC, through the move and their subsequent conduct, had been, and gave off the impression during the dispute, attempting to exercise a de facto sort of democratic centralism, which was unsupported by the DSA’s constitution. From what I understand, nowadays, their present issue appears to be an overcorrection towards the other direction, most recently exemplified in the fight with the DSA-LA chapter over LA’s new mayor.
Very good analysis.
Cockshott’s inability to stop talking about LGBT+ issues he knows nothing about is deeply, deeply frustrating, but I think his presentation on this is useful:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
“Socialism in Power” argues that the failure to control the illegal second economy gave a class basis for counterrevolution, including corruption and weakening party standards.
If the bolsheviks (and the other socialist radicals) had been better at working together instead of ending up infighting (or not had to die defending the revolution and their people from the Nazis) they might have been able to build a stronger and more capable party which could have maintained higher standards. (See “History and Critique of a black legend” by Losurdo)
Lastly if the “market socialism” reformers had actually been competent, had concrete and testable plans for economic reform and for what they wanted “market socialism” to be, maintained and strenghtened party power and party standards, embraced marxism-leninism instead of washing it out and leaving it behind, and handled the question of nationalities better then they might have been able to follow a “dengist” path.
https://www.voachinese.com/a/heqinglian-blog-defeat/1755452.html
中共总书记习近平曾于2012年12月“南巡”，引发了观察人士认为“习宗邓”的猜想。但最近人们才知道，中国官方公布习的“南巡”讲话时是不完全引证，近日据说是全文的版本在网上流传，媒体称让期盼政改的人读后深感失望。其中最有名的一段话是他谈到当年苏联崩溃时所说：“最后戈尔巴乔夫轻轻一句话，宣布苏联共产党解散，偌大一个党就没了。按照党员比例，苏共超过我们，但竟无一人是男儿，没什么人出来抗争。”
其中“竟无一人是男儿”，典出五代后蜀国主孟昶妃子花蕊夫人《口占答宋太祖述亡国诗》。全文是：“君王城上竖降旗，妾在深宫哪得知；十四万人齐解甲，更无一个是男儿。”谈苏共亡党“亡国”之教训，竟引用失国君王之妃的名句，说明习总心头的压力很大很沉重。
In December 2012, Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, undertook his Southern Tour, prompting speculation among observers that Xi was following in Deng Xiaoping’s footsteps. However, it has only recently come to light that the Chinese authorities did not publish Xi’s Southern Tour remarks in their entirety. A version purported to be the full text has recently circulated online, and media reports say that those who had hoped for political reform were deeply disappointed after reading it.
One of the most widely noted passages concerns the collapse of the Soviet Union:
“In the end, with just a few quiet words, Gorbachev announced the dissolution of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and such an enormous party simply disappeared. In proportion to party membership, the CPSU was larger than ours, yet not one among them was a real man; hardly anyone came forward to resist.”
The expression “not one among them was a real man” (竟无一人是男儿) alludes to a poem attributed to Lady Huarui, consort of Meng Chang, the last ruler of the Later Shu kingdom during the Five Dynasties period. The poem, traditionally titled A Spontaneous Poem in Reply to Emperor Taizu of Song on the Fall of the Kingdom, reads:
The king raised the surrender banner atop the city walls;
How could I, secluded deep within the palace, have known?
One hundred and forty thousand soldiers laid down their arms;
Not one among them was a real man.To discuss the lessons of the Soviet Communist Party’s demise—the fall of the party and the state—by quoting a famous line from the consort of a monarch who lost his kingdom illustrates just how immense and heavy the pressure weighing on General Secretary Xi’s mind truly is.
Maybe it is a controversial opinion here on lemmygrad, but I don’t think the impact of the Great Purge was entirely positive and was, in many ways, a worse version of the Cultural Revolution. The Stalin Model was not sustainable. Legitimate critics of it like Bukharin were killed off, so post-Stalin, you didn’t have Deng-like figures who wanted reform while also genuinely believing in maintaining the socialist project. You either had people who wanted to conserve the Stalin Model dogmatically, or opportunists who were just in office to enrich themselves. As it became more and more clear that the model was unsustainable, the proportion of the latter increased over the former.
By the time it became obvious that reform was necessary or they could not go on, the only people in power to actually reform were people who did not believe in the system anyways. I mean, Gorbachev was a self-described social democrat, yet was put in charge of the most powerful communist party on earth. There is clearly something wrong there that was much more deep than one man himself. Many of his “reforms” were intended to try and make the USSR more similar to a liberal social democracy, such as bringing back the separation of powers, which directly paved the way for Yeltsin to overthrow the whole system.
I’m not so sure that the “Stalin model” was inherently unsustainable. Certainly the political configuration that took shape during his time had serious problems and turned out to be brittle, but the economic model i think was solid and workable, especially if it had been further developed rather than undermined. I think that a kneejerk dismissal of the planned economy simply because China succeeded with a different model is premature, not least of all because we now know much more about how to efficiently deploy technology to manage complex economic systems.
As for the Purges, this is one of those “What If” questions that may never have an answer. It is entirely possible that they did too much damage in the long run, but at the same time, if without the Purges the war against the Nazis would have been lost – and i think there is good reason to believe that there was a very dangerous fifth column in the USSR at that time that could have fatally undermined the war effort at the most vulnerable and critical point for the Soviet Union – then that point is moot since there would never have been a “long term” for socialism and the Soviet people if the Nazis had won.
I view the Stalin Model as something that was born out of necessity given the circumstances at the time rather than something that was intended to be the most optimal in the long run. The fascist invasion was telegraphed well in advance, and at the time there was no guarantee that the entire industrialized world wouldn’t gang up on the USSR to crush communism. The USSR under Stalin had no choice but to start building as much heavy machinery and weapons factories as they could ASAP, and the Stalin Model was optimized for that. Same goes for the purges, doing it wasn’t ideal but they had to root out turncoats before the Axis invasion began, Joseph Goebbels himself lamented that the USSR had done the purges in his dairy and believed it ruined their plans.
China under Deng by contrast had loads more breathing room. The US had just been defeated in Vietnam a few years prior reliving China of the possibility of US troops on it’s immediate border, and the West as a whole was still occupied with the USSR as it’s main enemy. When the US otherwise would of started messing with China under the George Bush Jr. administration the US’s attention got diverted again by the War on Terror, giving China even more time.
I think the problem with the purge was not necessarily those who were purged, but that there was no next generation to replace them.
Yes in China Deng survived, but honestly from what ive seen of Bukharin im not sure if the two are entirely comparable. But the crucial thing is that there was a generation of CPC members that could survive the turbulence of reform and opening up, the June 4th incident, etc.
This wasn’t just the purge of course, given ww2 took more CPSU members, but if you look at China, the DPRK, and Vietnam compared to the USSR and eastern Europe, id say its the people’s ability to have faith and interact with the system that led to their survival compared to eastern Europe’s downfall.
Its hard to say exactly, since I think the collapse of the USSR is probably one of the best examples where Marxist Longue durée analysis should be used.
However, if I can try at least
1.Preventing Krushev’s secret speech/takeover in general
This is probably the lynchpyn of the whole thing. You had many young comrades coming into the party [most notably Yeltsin and Gorbachev] and Krushchev’s first act would essentially shatter faith in the system high and low, much as how the Thermidorian reaction shattered the revolutionary spirit of france and gave way to Bonapartist cynicism.
Not only that, but the so called “anti-party group” generally had the better economic policies, and more experience.
2.An earlier Detente if possible
Obviously this is as much the west’s ball game as it was the USSR’s. But putting so many resources into the military was one of the leading reasons of the decline. The Cuban missile crisis, ironically enough, was probably a missed opportunity for more comprehensive agreements on the matter.
3.The party remaining connected to the people
This one is a bit obvious, which is why its here instead of at the top. But the problem that occured with Perestroika is that the USSR was like a pressure cooker. There needed to be some way to release the steam and there never was. Breshnev was probably a really good example here of what not to do. His period in office didnt solve problems, leading to this pressure build up.
This also goes for eastern Europe in general tbh. Although I do agree with soviet intervention in the most high profile incidents, so im not sure about that tbh.
Overall what probably killed it most was the sino-soviet split, which, while Krushev was important, was brewing from the days of the internationale. [The third int is its own topic I’ll probably talk about one day though]
Very well formulated! I completely agree with the first point. I’m not so sure however that Detente with the West was ever really possible. Even China’s Opening Up was only possible because it was seen as the lesser threat to global imperialism, and its split with the USSR could be used to undermine the bigger threat. The last point is of course broadly correct, especially about how Brezhnev failed to course correct, but i think we would need to analyze more in depth what could have been done to provide that “pressure valve”. The Sino-Soviet split was devastating but it was also itself a symptom of the deeper problems with the course of the USSR post Stalin (though this by no means implies that China did not make its own very serious errors, especially in foreign policy).
Really hard to pinpoint anything specific, they were forging new ground and their mistakes are a natural and intrinsic part of that process.
Something akin to the cultural revolution that China underwent would be my first guess but again it’s really speculative to a level that might not be useful to organizing today
Look, I know talking about this is very controversial, and I admit I don’t know much about the subject, but I think the main political mistake was to have the USSR take the form that Lenin permanently defined as: “The important thing is not to provide material for the ‘pro-independence’ people, not to destroy their independence, but to create another new layer, a federation of equal republics.” It may have been the right tactic at the time, following a bloody civil war caused by imperialist invasions from the West, but the problem with this, in my opinion, is that it would create too many terrible vulnerabilities throughout the country in the long run, as we’ve already seen. You might say to me, “So you’re saying the USSR should never have existed.” Not at all; I think this form of political organization is necessary and inevitable in its early stages due to the weakness of forces in a given republic. But as the USSR developed, as the imperialist powers increasingly sought to impose sanctions, sabotage, spread disinformation, and use every possible means to make the revolutionaries betray their proletarian cause, I believe they should have consolidated the republics into a single one, following the model of Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, and China.
This is something I’ve never fully understood: wouldn’t it have been more strategic to educate the masses about the need to unite all the federal republics into a single one, so that it would be stronger, more enduring, and better prepared to face both internal and external enemies? Because, logically speaking, if you forever rely on the argument that the independent republics that formed the USSR united voluntarily, then sooner or later nationalist forces will grow strong enough to say: “Well, we can separate voluntarily, because we are independent republics.” Any of them could have replied, “We’d rather build socialism the Yugoslav way; no, we have no need to belong to the Union,” and no one could say anything, because they have the right and the consent to do so. I think this is a mistake.
Once again, I repeat: I don’t know much about how to organize a socialist state politically and administratively, but for example, when I read this in the 1922 Constitution of the USSR:
ARTICLE 3. The sovereignty of the member Republics is limited only in the matters indicated in the present Constitution, as coming within the competence of the Union. Outside of those limits, each member Republic exerts its public powers independently; the U.S.S.R. protects the rights of the member Republics.
ARTICLE 4. Each one of the member Republics retains the right to freely withdraw from the Union.
ARTICLE 5. The member Republics will make changes in their Constitutions to conform with the present Constitution.
ARTICLE 6. The territory of the member Republics cannot be modified without their consent; also, any limitation or modification or suppression of Article 4 must have the approval of all the member Republics of the Union.
or in the 1936 version:
ARTICLE 13: The Union of Soviet Socialist-Republics is a federated state, formed on the basis of the voluntary association of Soviet Socialist Republics possessing equal rights, namely:
ARTICLE 16: Each Union Republic has its own Constitution, which takes into account the specific features of the Republic and is drawn up in full conformity with the Constitution of the U.S.S.R.
ARTICLE 17: To every Union Republic is reserved the right freely to secede from the U.S.S.R.
ARTICLE 18: The territory of the Union Republics may not be altered without their consent.
or the one from 1977:
Article 70. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is an integral, federal, multinational state formed on the principle of socialist federalism as a result of the free self-determination of nations and the voluntary association of equal Soviet Socialist Republics.
Article 72. Each Union Republic shall retain the right freely to secede from the USSR.
Article 76. A Union Republic is a sovereign Soviet socialist state that has united with other Soviet Republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
I wonder: wouldn’t this be exploited by reactionary forces sooner or later in a future where internal counterrevolutions in the various republics gain momentum? Wouldn’t it have been better to centralize them all, not for moral reasons, but because circumstances dictated it? And you might say to me, “Well, what you’re trying to find is precisely what’s called the USSR, the supreme state.” But if that were the case, then why are independent federal republics needed in the first place? Why do we need the concept and reality of the dictatorship of the proletariat if we can voluntarily abandon it? I see a huge contradiction here that the imperialist states exploited to the fullest. In other words, according to the constitution itself, one could infer that the USSR was a treaty, something like the Warsaw Pact. And instead of consolidating this dictatorship of the proletariat, it moved away from it, not merely due to issues of betrayal per se (which is what actually happened), but because the constitution itself influenced this outcome.
I am not saying you are wrong, but there is some nuance to this.
then sooner or later nationalist forces will grow strong enough to say: “Well, we can separate voluntarily, because we are independent republics.” Any of them could have replied, “We’d rather build socialism the Yugoslav way; no, we have no need to belong to the Union,” and no one could say anything, because they have the right and the consent to do so. I think this is a mistake.
Throughout history very rarely have splits or nationalist movements been hindered by whether “they have the right or consent to do so”. I.e., the problem is movements like these reaching critical mass rather than what the rules are once they do.
For what it’s worth, i think you are correct, though this is far from the full explanation.
This is a very big question spanning decades, starting at least with the election of Khrushchev, but I’m sure longer. Ask a dozen people and you’ll get a dozen different answers. In terms of ultimate cause, I doubt any singular event/decision can be blamed. See also overdetermination.
