Stalinism: It's Origin and Future. Andy Blunden 1993
The International Break-Up of Stalinism
III: Poland
Just as Poland had shown the way in the political revolution in the 1950s, the final crisis for Stalinism in Europe was anticipated in Poland. Two years after the crushing of the student revolt in 1968, the industrial workers of the northern ports showed their strength. The following story is excerpted from Neal Ascherson’s The Polish August::
Gdansk and Gdynia, December 1970
‘On 12 December 1970, Warsaw radio announced a series of steep and unexpected price changes. ... The average was only 8 per cent .. but flour rose by 16 per cent, sugar by 14 per cent and meat by 17 per cent. ...
‘12 December was a Saturday. On the following Monday morning, three thousand workers from the Lenin Shipyards at Gdansk marched on the provincial headquarters. They were ordered to return to work. Angry crowds began to roam Gdansk, and stones were thrown. The city militia failed to hold the masses back and general tumult spread. The Party headquarters and other buildings were attacked, and fires started.
‘On Tuesday, 15 December, the workers of the Paris Commune Shipyard in Gdynia stopped work and demonstrated in the main streets. In Gdansk, where a general strike was proclaimed in the morning, the police opened fire on the demonstrators and men were killed on both sides. In the fighting, the Party building and the main railway station were burned down. The following day, the rebellion spread to the near-by towns of Slupsk and Elblag, and there were reports of sympathy strikes elsewhere. The men and women of the Warski Shipyards prepared to strike.
‘...the responsibility for the decision to use force, rather than negotiate, plainly lies with Gomulka ... A message from Brezhnev advising a political rather than a military solution to the crisis, discredited his whole approach ... he suffered a slight stroke ...  was bundled back to hospital and Gierek was elected First Secretary. ...
‘By the weekend, Poland was close to a national working-class insurrection. The fighting had almost ceased, but work was stopping throughout the country, and a general strike was only hours away. On the coast workers were in control of yards and factories; at Szczecin, they had set up a complete parallel city government, based on an elected inter-factory strike committee which kept order in the streets and organised essential supplies. Among the twenty-one demands drawn up by the Szczecin strikers there figured for the first time the call for independent trade unions under the authority of the working class, and for the resignation of the existing Central Council of Trade Unions (CRZZ). ...
‘a local newspaper ... detonated the next explosion at Szczecin [by publishing a faked photo of workers in the Warski Shipyard pipe department supposedly supporting increased production targets].
‘Now the workers demanded cancellation of the price rises, free Party and trade union elections, a workers commission to take over the yard, a full correction of the pipe-shop fantasia in the newspapers and the presence of Edward Gierek and the prime minister to discuss their grievances. ...
‘On the afternoon of the 24th, several taxis appeared at the gate of the Warski Shipyard in Szczecin. A tall, grey-haired man got out of one of them and had some trouble in persuading the pickets that he was indeed Edward Gierek, First Secretary of the PUWP. He had brought with him the new Prime Minister, Piotr Jaroszewicz, General Jaruzelski and Franciszek Szlachic, the Minister of the Interior ... there followed nine passionate hours of face-to-face argument about the past and the immediate future.
‘Gierek’s approach, repeated the next day at Gdansk, was to appeal disarmingly to class loyalty. He was a worker, who had won coal with his hands in the pits of France and Belgium; they were workers too ... he brought it off. The workers were impressed that he had come to them, and they were inclined to trust him ... Normal working slowly resumed in the days after his visit’.
Ascherson continues with the following important observation:
‘December 1970 also confirmed the split in the Polish opposition which had developed since 1956 and which had been manifest in the outbursts of March 1968. Intellectuals took almost no part in the events. In March 1968, the students of the Gdansk Polytechnic had announced: We solidarise ourselves above all with the Polish working class, but they had received no support from that class. On the first day of the December 1970 demonstrations, the shipyard workers marched to the Gdansk Polytechnic and called on the students to join them. They stayed indoors.
‘This was a movement of the workers alone, which lacked any clear strategic idea of how to maintain its impetus. Religious or anti-Soviet feelings were not prominent in their demands, ... instead the strikers constantly reaffirmed their fundamental belief in socialism and in the possibility of a better Party leadership which could introduce both the economic and democratic reforms they asked for. In the early days of the revolt, some marchers sang The Internationale and carried red banners. The true extent of their isolation and exploitation in Polish society had not yet dawned on the workers. In the following ten years, they were to learn many bitter lessons’. [142]
The split between the working class and the intelligentsia which was manifest in the Czechoslovakia, France and Poland in 1968 was now manifesting itself in a new form. When the workers of the industrial north of Poland challenged the Stalinist government, they received no support from a socialist-leaning intelligentsia. The Polish workers did not cease to struggle, but the nature of their leadership and their political perspectives began to change.
Radom, 1976
Another eruption of strikes happened in Warsaw and, with rioting, in the big town of Radom south of Warsaw. When Edward Gierek introduced a sudden increase in prices in June 1976, widespread rioting broke out and the Communist Party’s headquarters was torched.
The 1976 strikes did not overthrow the leadership, which survived for another four years.
After the June 1976 events, there was an upsurge in opposition groupings. Most significant was the KOR (Defence of Workers Rights) set up to defend victimised workers and their families. Jacek Kuron was one of the KOR’s most prominent leaders. Kuron had been imprisoned in 1967 as a result of revolutionary-Marxist criticism of the Stalinists. The KOR was something different however. In the KOR, the left intelligentsia had formed an alliance with the Catholic clergy against Stalinism. This alliance was made in May 1977 in the Warsaw hunger strike. Afterwards, Adam Michnik published an article putting the defeat of the pre-1968 opposition down to the split between the Marxists and the Catholic Church. Kuron stated that the Church ‘had to oppose the system that placed restrictions on the liberty of the individual, which is a fundamental Christian value and a value of our entire culture’.
Kuron abandoned the perspective of renewal of working class leadership and the replacement of Stalinism by a revolutionary-socialist or democratic workers’ state. Both Kuron and the clerics recognised the fact that the Stalinists rested upon the working class. Consequently, the new anti-Stalinist alliance was based on a perspective of steering the workers away from defence of workers power to capitalist democracy.
This new perspective - the overthrow of workers power by the working class - is summed up in the words of Jacek Kuron in 1989:
What I would most wish is to be a social-democrat in a proper capitalistic country. But for that I have to build this proper capitalistic country first.
Thus, the perspective of this new opposition could be described as social-democratic. The KOR directed its agitational material to the working class and established the nuclei of independent trade unions in the shipyards. In 1979, KOR had 34 members: Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik and Jan Litynski from the Warsaw University struggles in the 1960s, well-known intellectuals of the older generation such as the writer Jerzy Adrzejewski, the actress Halina Mikoloajska and the economist Edward Lipinski, and 5 of them had fought against the Red Army in 1920!
The Birth of Solidarity, 1980
From 1976 on, there were continuous labour protests across Poland. The ranks of the Polish United Workers Party were becoming more and more restive. Party meetings frequently dissolved in chaos. When the Pope of Rome toured Poland in June 1979, almost a quarter of the total population of Poland welcomed him from the roadside. The visit was followed by a year of militant protests.
Poland’s foreign debt amounted to $18 billion. The ratio between the lowest and highest wage was 20:1. Investment in education, health care, social welfare, leisure and housing declined from 29% in 1961-65 to 19% in 1971-75. Investment in replacement of plant and equipment was a mere 15-20% of total outlays, compared with 60-70% in the GDR and Czechoslovakia, leading to a catastrophic deterioration in industrial capacity.
The corruption and parasitism of the ruling clique was rampant:
the Polish TV boss, Maciej Szczepanski, not only lived like a millionaire on state funds, with many villas, four live-in prostitutes, a $2 million yacht, two government helicopters for his private use, foreign jaunts, the opening of a Polish TV bureau in Nairobi with the sole function of organising safaris for the boss and his retinue, but also bought into a meat-processing factory that serviced radio and TV canteens and placed funds in an account at a German bank.
[In 1980], charges of abuse of power in order to gain illegal material benefits turned out to be substantiated in no fewer than 3,422 cases [including] the former First Secretary of the CC and two secretaries in the CC Department, 23 First Secretaries of provincial committees and 34 Secretaries of provincial committees ... 7 Deputy Prime Ministers, 18 Ministers and heads of equivalent central offices, 34 provincial governors and 30 vice-governors of provinces. [143]
The remaining loyalists of the Polish United Workers Party looked to the Eighth Congress of February 1980 to take measures to address the mounting social crisis. When the Eighth Congress failed to come up with any dramatic changes, the authority of the PUWP virtually dissolved.
The Chairman of the trade union federation, the CRZZ, was replaced, but to no avail. Protests and strikes continued. Kuron was jailed again. Religious groups criticised the government. A worker burnt himself to death to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Katyn massacre.
When the government introduced a new price increase on 1 July 1980 they did so extremely cautiously. There were no riots or demonstrations - workers simply downed tools, set up strike committees, and put in for a compensating pay increase. Factory managers immediately conceded. However, the strikes continued and the scale of pay rises demanded gradually escalated, reaching typically 20 per cent by early August. The KOR acted as an information exchange, keeping workers informed of strikes and settlements. This work was carried out by Kuron and a female assistant working from his father’s flat in Warsaw. There was no general strike, but by the end of August every region of the country except the Upper Silesian coal-fields had been affected.
In mid-July, railway workers at Lublin blocked the main rail link to the USSR and put forward broader economic demands, as well as the call for an end to press censorship and trade unions that would not take orders from above. The Lublin workers settled for a 20 per cent pay rise, but had sown the seeds that would sprout in Gdansk.
Throughout the summer of 1980 almost the entire country joined a peaceful mutiny. In early August, the KOR announced that it would henceforth act, not just as an information exchange, but as an active inter-factory link.
On 14 August, a small group of workers calling themselves the Free Trade Union Committee of the Coast, distributed six thousand leaflets calling for the reinstatement of sacked member, the crane driver Anna Walentynowicz, and a cost-of-living pay rise. The Free Trade Unionists had organised a rally in defence of 25 workers (including Lech Walesa ) sacked as a result of a protest commemorating the deaths of four workers in 1970. In preparing the strike, the Free Trade Unionists collaborated with a small nationalist group called Young Poland. At 4:30 am they put up posters at the gates of the Lenin Shipyard and a running meeting began over the demands. By 6:15 am, the morning shift refused to start work and a mass meeting began. As workers argued with the manager, Lech Walesa was hoisted over the fence and took charge. An occupation of the yard was declared and a list of demands drawn up. The next day all the shipyards in Gdansk and Gdynia joined the occupation-strike. The tactic of occupation-strike had been widely applied in Poland in the 1930s, and proved an exceptionally effective tactic in the conditions of the 1980s.
The government did not come to Gydnia but left negotiations in the hands of the manager of the shipyard. They also cut off telephone communications in the area. Workers’ initial demands were for a 2,000 zloty flat pay rise, reinstatement of sacked workers, family allowance increased to the level enjoyed by police, earlier retirement and better food. The strike spread to other enterprises in Gdansk and Gdynia and new demands were added by the workers: free access to the mass media, release of all political prisoners and the right to establish independent trade unions.
By two days later, Walesa had negotiated a 1,500 zloty (about 25%) pay rise at the Lenin Shipyard, reinstatement of sacked workers, no victimisations and a monument to the victims of 1970 and recommended a return to work.
At this point, a delegation from the 50,000 workers who were on strike in the city, led by public transport workers, barracked Walesa from outside the fence and accused the shipyard workers of selling them out: If you abandon us, we’ll be lost. Buses can’t face tanks! shouted their spokesperson, the tram driver Henryka Krzywonos. As workers left the yard, others furiously argued for a continued strike. Ewa Ossowska, a leader of Young Poland, stood on a barrel and appealed to workers to stay on strike. Walesa changed his mind.
After a period of total confusion, the occupation was renewed. Alina Pienkowska, a young nurse from the Lenin Shipyards and a member of the Free Trade Union,  toured the city ensuring that strikes were maintained. More delegations arrived from the city. The more radical minority of the Lenin Shipyard strike committee and delegates from twenty other strike committees set up the Interfactory Strike Committee, MKS.
A sixteen-point list of demands was drawn up:
free trade unions, to be organised by the  MKS;
an end to state interference in the official trade unions;
the right to strike;
a five day working week;
earlier retirement;
better food supplies and abolition of the commercial meat shops.
A huge cross was erected at the Shipyard gate, and Father Jankowski gave the first of many sermons there the next morning. The religious symbols and rituals were used by the strikers to inhibit attacks by the Army, to raise morale and the level of mobilisation and integration of the strikers. It would be wrong to see the movement as being actually motivated by Catholicism.
The government began protracted negotiations with the strikers. The workers insisted that the reinstatement of telephone communications was a pre-condition to any negotiations, a demand which they won. Each side brought a panel of experts to the negotiations. For the strikers, the KOR and the Catholic KIK provided support. According to one of the participants, the sociologist Jadwiga Staniszkis, the negotiations went smoothly on account of the fact that the experts on both sides were all from the same Warsaw milieu.
To the surprise of the strikers’ advisers, it soon emerged that for the workers the bottom line was the demand for the right to have an independent trade union, and that no compromise was going to be given on this issue.
On the government side, they were willing to concede on almost all the economic demands, and would negotiate on the broader political demands, but the right to have independent trade unions was non-negotiable. In the end, the government preferred to grant recognition to the Gdansk MKS, but not recognise the right to form such bodies, thereby forcing workers elsewhere in the country to carry out their own strike action to win their own independent union.
The bottom line issue in the negotiations turned out to be the question of the leading role - the question which was to  become the litmus test of Stalinist regimes in 1989. The negotiators and experts, including Walesa, were surprised to find how hard workers resisted the demand of the government to write into the agreement that the signatories recognised the leading role of the PUWP. In the end, the workers accepted the leading role being written into the preamble to the agreement. However, the leading role dispute carried on long after the end of the occupation when the government blocked registration of the union over the phrasing of independence versus leading role. The registration dispute continued over a number of months with further nation-wide strike action over the issue of the formal independence of Solidarity.
Because the Gdansk agreement had left the negotiation of wages in the hands of the official trade unions, organised not along geographical but along trade lines, the movement failed to achieve its aim of levelling out the wages structure by means of a flat-rate pay increase. Reforms to pensions, family allowances, minimum wage and the health system were achieved however.
Solidarity recruited at a phenomenal rate, and easily penetrated the ranks of the ruling party. By late 1980, one-third of PUWP members were also members of Solidarity. According to Andrzej Gwiazda, a leader of Solidarity at this time, the PUWP leadership also encouraged PUWP members to join and take leading positions in Solidarity. In this way, the Polish bureaucracy hedged its bets for the future.
The politics advocated by Solidarity leader, Lech Walesa, like the right-wing of social democracy in the West, drew little from the traditions of working class politics. He kissed the Pope’s hand and openly greeted Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as friends.
Within the ranks of Solidarity, a range of left-wing and Marxist tendencies fought against Walesa’s populist leadership and the struggle of the working class for a political perspective took place within the leadership of Solidarity. The Solidarity apparatus also grew to vast proportions, at its peak employing 44,000 full-time employees, compared with the pre-1980 ‘branch’ trade unions, with 13,000 officials, and the Party apparatus of 11,000 employees.
In December 1980, Rural Solidarity emerged, and quickly recruited half a million members, all private farmers, not farm employees. Rural Solidarity received reluctant recognition from the government in April 1981 thanks to active support from Solidarity.
The new government under Stanislaw Kania repeated the same old words about the need of the Party to listen to the criticism of the workers and correct their past errors. Rhetoric against ‘anti-socialist elements’ which had ‘misled’ the workers cut very little ice even among the middle-ranks of the Party where Solidarity membership was high.
The emergence of Solidarity as an independent mass trade union organisation was the beginning of the end for Stalinist rule in Europe.
The tenuous social compromise which allowed the PUWP to continue ruling Poland was based on the shared fear of all sections of Polish society of the Soviet Army returning and re-imposing its direct rule. This fear now proved insufficient to prevent an open challenge to Stalinist rule by the entire working class as well as the peasantry, the Catholic Church and the intelligentsia. The leadership of the PUWP and the government was racked by a continual crisis as it proved incapable of resisting the growth of Solidarity.
How Solidarity defeated Stalinism
The organisation of the Polish Opposition as a trade union, rather than a political party or soviet-type organisation marked the turn of the Polish workers away from political power, their final disillusionment with the possibility of the renovation of the workers’ state. They did not ask the state to change its class nature. They did not ask to be admitted to the corridors of power, nor did they attempt to replace the state with a new state. Like the trade unions in a capitalist country, they sought simply to pursue the economic demands of the workers, without concern for the economic or political consequences of their demands - that was a problem for the government, not the workers!
This perspective did not originate from the narrow self-interest characteristic of trade union ideology however. The shipyard workers quite specifically fought for a flat wage rise and for improvements in the welfare service, demands which were aimed at meeting the needs of the great majority of Polish workers who were on lower wages than the relatively privileged shipyard workers. Thus, the movement in the shipyards was a class response, the search for an alternative road to socialism. The fact that the Polish workers were prepared to destroy a deformed workers state in the process reflects the abandonment of one particular road to socialism, but not necessarily socialism as such.
Late in 1980, one of the Solidarity centres circulated copies if Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, with the aim of emphasising the need to transform the trade union consciousness of the movement to political consciousness. Through its journal Robotnik (Worker), KOR also encouraged Solidarity to adopt a wider political agenda.
For the mass of workers, the main issue was the complete independence, both formal and actual, of their organs (not only Solidarity and the Interfactory Committees, but also the ‘official’ trade unions) from the influence or control of the Party or the State. The demands for press freedom was a means to an end: without press freedom and free access to the mass media for workers’ organisations, there could be no guarantee of non-interference and freedom of organisation. While Party members were frequently nominated to leading positions in Solidarity bodies, it was clear from beginning to end that the workers would never accept Party control or nominations in any form. Consequently, the workers rejected absolutely any chance of the PUWP co-opting Solidarity.
KOR’s perspective in this period was more or less to create an organised opposition to the Communist Party. This opposition could transmit the demands of the various sectors of Polish society to the ruling party and negotiate changes. The outcome would not threaten the right of the PUWP to rule nor risk Soviet intervention. Thus, rather than challenging outright the state structures of Poland, the KOR counselled the workers to infiltrate them, to transform the bogus factory committees or peasants co-operatives and so forth into genuine bodies. In other words, far from seeking the overthrow of the state, the KOR sought to use the workers’ movement to exert pressure on the government.
On the other hand, having lost the leadership of the workers’ movement, the government’s strategy was to entice the leaders of the new unions into a workers’ control movement, to involve them in drafting changes in economic management and industrial democracy, and in any way they could co-opt the new workers’ leadership and get the workers’ leaders to share responsibility for delivering the workers’ demands. Invariably this would lead to workers becoming party to the imposition of austerity on themselves. This technique had been successful in the past in repairing the breakdown of the Party’s connection with the workers’ movement.
The second line of defence for the PUWP was the social contract, more or less in line with the perspective of the KOR. This view was expressed by the Gdansk First Secretary, Tadeusz Fiszbach, as follows:
‘The independent unions are increasingly to be understood as one of the guarantees for the stabilisation of our public life. Although our Party did not bring about their creation, it is in these new organisations that it has the best chance to find today the conditions for an active participation in national life by the vital forces in the nation’. [144]
However, if the various sectors of Polish society were represented to government by their own non-government organisations, with the workers organised not in a workers’ party, but in Solidarity, the PUWP would be reduced to nothing more than a club for government bureaucrats! And who would hold state power?
In reality, the Polish state rested on the working class, even if the bureaucracy had become little more than a kind of managerial caste extracting profits from the Polish workers on behalf of the foreign capitalist banks. If the Polish workers brought it down, they must either replace it with a new state of they own or state power would be taken by the bourgeoisie [145] .
What a contradiction! That the workers’ state could be destroyed by the workers themselves! As Jacek Tittenbrun puts it in the preface to his book The Collapse of Real Socialism in Poland:
Why has ‘real socialism’ collapsed in Poland? The shortest answer to this question would be as follows: it was abolished by the Polish workers. For someone used to conceiving of reality in terms not of real interests and class contradictions but of ideological and legal representations - distorted as a rule - this contention will be hard to accept. How so? Is it possible for workers to abolish a workers’ state, to come out against workers’ and people’s authorities and a workers’ party? [146]
In this sense the perspective of the KOR which would actually lead not to the reform, but to the destruction of the workers’ state and the re-construction of capitalism in Poland, coincided with the perspective of the Polish working class.
This was by no means the first time a workers’ organisation had lost its usefulness to the working class and been abandoned by the workers. [147] The problem here was that the Polish workers had no leadership or perspective by means of which the PUWP and the Polish workers’ state could be reformed or replaced before it was destroyed.
The West was not unaware of the role of the Polish government. As Jacek Tittenbrun puts it:
Despite their hostility to the ‘communist’ authorities in Poland, Western governments did not lend any significant support to the workers’ rebellion directed against these authorities. What is more, they did not even forewarn Solidarity leaders of the impending crackdown although they knew all about the Polish authorities’ plans thanks to Kuklinski, a high-ranked Polish officer and CIA agent. For the workers defeated the joint efforts of the Polish government and Western bankers to maximise repayment of the debts through the decrease in consumption and living standards of the population and the increase in export surplus. [148]
Newsweek reported on April 20 1981 that ‘the Polish strikers had taken the idea of freedom altogether too literally, and the West was now as anxious as Moscow to damp them down  ... several bankers have privately admitted that they would feel much safer if Russian tanks rolled into Poland’.
Under severe pressure from the Soviet Union and with explicit but private support from the West, martial law was instituted on 14 December 1981. Solidarity was illegalised and its leaders interned. The institution of martial law, with an army general as head of state, marked the abandonment of the workers-state form of the Polish government. This was the inverse side of the abandonment of a workers-state political perspective by the Polish workers. In forming Solidarity, the Polish workers not only demonstrated their alienation from the state, they also generated the reflection of that alienation in the state itself. If the Polish workers no longer aspired to control the state, then the state no longer needed the facade of workers’ democracy.
Political revolution, the perspective of the European workers’ movement from around 1953 to around 1970, implied the reform of the workers state by revolutionary means. Social democracy, which became, in effect, the perspective of the European workers from around 1976, implied the counter-revolutionary overthrow of the workers’ state by reformist means.
Despite the imposition of martial law, the Soviet Union did not invade Poland and Soviet troops did not intervene. The state continued to gradually undermine the foundations of social ownership. While it did not absolutely embrace a capitalist perspective, it had lost all remnants of its proletarian character. Over the next seven or eight years, the capacity of the state to rule was gradually worn down to nothing. The economic crisis continually worsened as Poland slipped further and further into debt to Western banks which continued to underwrite Poland’s budget deficits.
IV: The Crisis of the Soviet Working Class
The Brezhnev leadership clamped down on the opposition which had grown up during the Khrushchev years. They were well aware however of the necessity of maintaining their social contract with the industrial working class. As a result, they took care to be more generous to workers on wages than was Khrushchev and responded swiftly to any and every sign of protest from the workers.
In the first decade after 1964, there were literally hundreds of workers’ protests in the Soviet Union, often in the form of violent spontaneous outbursts. According to reports in samizdat documents, the women, who received on the average 50 per cent of men’s wages and still bore the burden of housekeeping and shopping and felt the shortages more acutely than the men, took the initiative in the majority of cases. The first feminist samizdat document, Women and Russia: An Almanack to Women about Women, was circulated in 10 copies in 1979, criticising the patriarchal structure of the Left as well as of Soviet society generally, apparently independently of any influence by Western feminism.
While strikes became gradually more frequent from the early 1970s, none reached the scale of the Novocherkassk events of 1962.
The vast majority were wildcat or lightning strikes lasting only a few hours or at most a day or two. They tended to be over purely local grievances such as poor working conditions, management’s failure to observe safety regulations or the raising of work norms, and were settled quickly and on the spot. According to Elizabeth Teague [149] there was no perceptible increase in the level of organisation of the participants in the two decades from 1964. Although protests would be triggered by local abuses or grievances, these grew from an underlying and widespread hatred of the regime. Writing in 1966-69,  the dissident author Andrei Amalrik described the discontent of the Soviet workers as passive discontent:
The workers, for example, are bitter over having no rights vis-a-vis the factory management. The collective farmers are resentful about their total dependence on the kolkhoz chairman ... Everybody is angered by the great inequality in wealth, the low wages, the austere housing conditions, the lack of essential consumer goods, compulsory registration at their places of residence and work....  the wide discrepancies in wage levels, extreme annoyance at the existence of special closed shops and stores in which the ruling elite are able to buy goods which cannot be bought in ordinary shops, and with other ways in which the nation’s wealth is unfairly distributed. [150]
Information about workers struggles in the Soviet Union is scant however. The Soviet dissident Vladimir Borisov claimed that strikes are quite frequent in the Soviet Union, but that ‘in my own personal experience, no more than 10 per cent of major strikes, let alone minor ones, become known’. [151] The extreme sensitivity of the bureaucracy to workers’ protests was reflected in the well-established pattern by which they dealt with the protests:
It is interesting to note the speed with which these outbursts develop and how quickly they spread if the bureaucracy fails to contain them by cordoning off the city in which they occur. [152]
In general the Soviet authorities give in immediately and, if it is a movement of some magnitude, it often happens that a Politburo member comes straight to the spot to satisfy the demands - at which point the movement stops. Afterwards, they begin to hit out at the organisers. The latter are arrested or at least laid off work and, as it is illegal not to work, that comes to the same thing in the end. [153]
The strike was used by Soviet workers as a protest of last resort. The strikes that do break out were localised, spontaneous and unorganised. However:
A more common variant is the so-called Italian strike, in which workers turn up at the factory but in practice do no work. I know about this tactic both from my own experience and from samizdat. As a rule, once a strike breaks out, the workers’ demands are satisfied. But for that very reason, they are soon followed by repression against the organisers. And since most workers live in the provinces, they lack one vital means of defence - access to world opinion through contact with foreign correspondents. So strike organisers often simply disappear into mental hospitals without a trial, or else provocateurs are used in order to charge them with assault or hooliganism.’ [154]
This method proved effective in suppressing the independent organisation of the workers. In 1977, the Ukrainian miner Vladimir Klebanov attempted to organise the Association of Free Trade Unions of Workers in the Soviet Union. The Association became known as the Union of the Unemployed, because all its members were soon unemployed. Klebanov was confined in a mental hospital in 1978, and the Association was eradicated.
As the living standards of Soviet workers declined as a result of the decline in the economy and the parasitism of the bureaucracy, the workers became increasingly alienated from their rulers. An American author George Feifer, who revisited the USSR in 1980 after 10 years, observed a collapse of civic morale due, he said to the virtual disappearance of commitment to Marxism-Leninism. It was as if the American Bible Belt had lost its belief in God:
Falling consumer satisfaction and the collapsing belief in socialism have dragged down the shopfloor morale to an all-time low ... The ordinary Russian has lost his optimistic belief that his life will get better, and is losing faith in what he now calls his ‘unworkable system’. [155]
Feifer reported comments that Soviet society in its middle levels is becoming a society of thieves ... The assumption that ‘everybody steals’ is erasing the nation’s sense of right and wrong.
The deep-seated social malaise is described by the Soviet journalist Konstantin Simis. He described Brezhnev’s Soviet Union as a land of corrupt rulers, ruling over a corrupted people:
The Soviet Union is infected from top to bottom with corruption - from the worker, who gives the foreman a bottle of vodka to get the best job, to Politburo member Mzhavadnadze, who takes hundreds of thousands of rubles for protecting underground millionaires; from the street prostitute, who pays the policeman ten rubles so that he won’t prevent her from soliciting clients, to the former member of the Politburo, Minister of Culture Ekaterina Furtseva, who built a luxurious villa at the governments expense - each and every one is afflicted with corruption [156] .
In the words of the former Party First Secretary in Azerbaijan, Geidar Aliyev:
‘In an atmosphere of abuse of official position, corruption, whitewash and contempt for honest labour, the initiative of the masses cannot fail to diminish; moral indignation holds sway and gives rise, among many social strata, to a state of despondency and apathy. [157]
This deep alienation of the Soviet workers, their loss of all loyalty and commitment to the system, while being denied all avenues for redress or protest, was reflected in the growth of a range of social problems. The press railed against the evils of alcoholism, absenteeism and labour mobility. According to Pravda on 11 December 1982, as a result of alcohol abuse:
building sites come to life on Tuesdays instead of Mondays and are deserted again by Friday; while on pay-day the women wait for their husbands at the factory gates to prevent them from drinking their pay packets away.
According to Soviet statistics, for every 100 workers there are 30 incidents of absenteeism every day. Each period of absence is said to average 1.6 hours ... no more than 10 per cent of workers were at their workplace during the final hour of the shift ... 73 per cent of the workforce regularly too time off during working hours to attend to personal business.
A Kiev newspaper reported in 1982 that young workers were given the worst job, and frequently not in the specialities for which they had been trained. As a result only about 80 per cent of the young entrants remain each year at the enterprises to which they have been assigned. The Secretary of the Moscow city Komsomol committee reported in 1983 that nationwide, 60 per cent of those quitting their jobs were young people. In effect, such people are voting with their feet .
When Solidarity burst on to the scene in Poland in 1980, everybody, not least the Soviet leadership, anticipated a sympathetic response from Soviet workers. In the Baltic States, and to a lesser extent the Ukraine, workers were indeed following events very closely. The British Communist Party paper, the Morning Star, published the comments of a woman in Riga, Latvia, as typical:
Events in Afghanistan are remote from us here, but Poland - well, we have a long history of close ties with Polish culture ... We know the Poles have more freedom to travel than we do. Frankly, we are envious that the Polish workers have been able to strike and to win concessions from their government.
The US correspondent, Andrew Nagorski, who was in Moscow in 1980 reported:
It seemed clear that the Polish events were having a considerable effect on many Lithuanians. No-one we talked to expressed anything but sympathy for the Poles.
The Soviet bureaucracy responded by taking all possible action to limit contact between the Western USSR and Poland, including the interception of mail. In April 1980, the Ukrainian Patriotic Movement issued an appeal in support of the jailed unionist Vladimir Klebanov and urged Ukrainians to organise trade unions at their workplaces, and there was also an attempt to found an independent union known as Unity in the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa.
To the surprise of probably everybody however, sympathy for the Poles did not penetrate greatly beyond the Western USSR. Journalists from Radio Liberty conducted an opinion poll to determine the attitude of Soviet citizens to the events in Poland. Typical comments were: It is impossible to introduce the right to strike without bringing about the overthrow of the regime, Our economic system would not be able to withstand this kind of freakish notion, May God preserve us from strikes. They would only lead to famine. [158]
On the other hand, Solidarity received messages from underground groups such as the Russian Committee for the Aid of Polish Workers:
‘In the name of the majority of the Russian people - whose voice has been replaced by Party slogans - we salute your just struggle for your rights ... your movement should give a mighty impulse to the struggle for democracy in the socialist countries ... We will make every effort to ensure that your movement receives broad support in the USSR’.
Other messages were received from human rights activists in the Baltic States and from the Ukrainian Church. The anarcho-syndicalist Free Inter-professional Association of Workers (SMOT) welcomed Solidarity and circulated messages of support from Soviet authors. A Samizdat bulletin called Sotsialist-82 wrote:
Don’t burn down the PUWP committee, form you own! This slogan guided the movement along the best path possible in the circumstances, that is the path of mass non-violent resistance and class organisation ... this was a revolution that was socialist in its goals. The concurrent democratisation of the political system and socialisation of the means of production focussed the attention of the whole world on the Polish experiment.
While many dissidents and militant workers expressed their solidarity with the Polish workers, they also tried to grapple with the fact that the Soviet workers had so far been unable to emulate their Polish brothers and sisters. In an Open letter, a machine operator from Togliatti, Mikhail Zotov said:
The authorities fear the truth, their refusal to grant the masses the right of free speech, their determination to rule the people not by means of dialogue but with an iron rod - such methods will not bring the authorities any good. In Poland this kind of rule has forced the people to strike and led to the establishment of free trade unions. Here in Russia, this kind of policy has so far given rise among the people only to infinite moral apathy. And it is perhaps here that one should seek the causes of drunkenness, idling, theft, careless attitudes toward labour discipline, and so on.
Vasyl Stus, a Ukrainian poet who died in a Perm labour camp in 1985, commented:
In the light of the Polish events, the weaknesses of the Helsinki [Human Rights Monitoring] movement become even clearer, in particular, its cowardly respectability [159] . Had it been a mass movement of popular initiative with a wide programme of social and political demands, had it aimed at eventually taking power, then it would have had some prospect of success. As it is the Helsinki movement is like a little child that wants to speak in a deep voice.
Nevertheless, the resistance of Soviet workers continued to grow, if gradually. There was a strike of Togliatti workers in May 1980 which was supported by thousands of workers, and 170,000 were laid off as a result of the action. A strike at a tractor factory in Tartu, Estonia lasted for two days in October 1980 and a number of strikes took place in the Ukraine in 1981 including three in March/April 1981 in Kiev, and there was a two-day strike in a large motorcycle factory in Kiev in August 1981 against cuts in piecework rates and bonuses. All these strikes ended when the authorities gave in to the workers’ demands. At a bus factory in Gorky, there was a strike in May 1982, in which leaflets were circulated at meetings saying If the norms are raised, we’ll do the same as in Poland. [160]
How did the Stalinist bureaucracy react to this rising threat from the Soviet workers? Elizabeth Teague pointed out that the reaction of the Communist Party leadership was succinctly advertised in the official slogan of Soviet Trade Unions:
1978: More widely encourage socialist competition and the movement for a communist attitude to work!
1979: Play an active role in the management of state and public affairs, in the resolution of political, economic, social and cultural questions! Improve socialist competition and the movement for a communist attitude to work!
1980: Play an active role in the management of state and public affairs, and in the management of the working and living conditions of the workers!
1981: For the further development and improvement of socialist competition.
Initially, the bureaucracy displayed considerable fear that the Soviet workers would follow the Polish example. In particular, they saw that the role of the official trade unions as instruments for the imposition of labour discipline, and the denial to Soviet workers of any means of pressing their industrial interests threatened to lead to the overthrow of the whole system.
Consequently, there was a big effort to respond to workers’ complaints, to give workers more of a voice in the management of enterprises and a crackdown on official corruption. The campaign against corruption was short-lived because, as Andrew Nagorski reported:
During an anti-corruption campaign like this you can get five years in prison for taking a $70 bribe and a lot of people are hurt. But the authorities discovered that without bribes and the second economy the system doesn’t work at all ... Within a couple of weeks, ... complaints were so widespread that the government had begun quietly backing away from the entire campaign. [161]
In the words of Harry Gelman:
‘In a sense, the regime’s toleration of the unplanned second economy is tacit recognition that more concessions must be made to consumer services than the official allocation of resources would otherwise permit. Attacks on corruption thus threaten to shrink this extra margin usurped from the planners for the consumer by the second economy’. [162]
Simultaneously, there was an all-out campaign of counter-propaganda to convince the workers of the virtues of real socialism. However, this ideological approach was inadequate. The growing scarcity of commodities resulting from the continuing decline in the economy was creating fertile ground for the growth of discontent. Consequently, the Soviet leadership accepted that ultimately their only defence against a workers’ revolt was to resolve the economic crisis. Increasingly throughout the 1980s, their attention was focussed on finding a solution to this crisis.
Yuri Andropov took the helm after the death of Brezhnev in November 1982 until his own death in February 1984. Andropov, former head of the KGB, had a genuine revulsion for the corruption and parasitism which he saw among his colleagues.
According to Zhores Medvedev:
‘High party officials became entitled to a free dacha - to at least two if they were important enough, one close to their apartment for weekends and the other in a resort area like the Crimea. For each member of the Politburo there was an official residence in Moscow, although theoretically these were government property and the Politburo members retained their own private flats. The official residences were provided with salaried personnel: guards, waiters, cooks, maids, secretaries, etc. In Brezhnev’s time ‘maids’, ‘cooks’ and ’secretaries’ were sometimes euphemisms for high-class call-girls, employed for the pleasure of the party dignitary himself or for his guests. The dachas became more and more palatial in style, with swimming-pools and tennis courts, all built at the expense of the state. In addition, Brezhnev gave every high official the right to have a specially stocked hunting forest guarded and banned to ordinary hunters, near Moscow or elsewhere’ [163] .
For the last 16 years of his life, including his period as head-of-state, Andropov lived in a single-bedroom flat. Brezhnev had lived a few floors below in a palatial apartment occupying a whole floor. Andropov maintained files on his CPSU colleagues and did not shy of using this information against them when the time came. By this means he discredited Brezhnev and his closest associates and successfully secured the leadership when Brezhnev died.
Andropov initiated a campaign for labour discipline - against absenteeism, idleness, drunkenness, etc and crime. For several months after his accession to leadership there were vigorous press campaigns against idleness, and swoops on recreation areas to check for absentees. An atmosphere of fear was created.
However, this strategy failed to improve productivity. In February 1983, Vladimir Kostakov of Gosplan’s Economic Research Institute wrote in Literaturnaya Gazeta::
The acuteness of the problem connected with labour discipline requires us soberly to acknowledge that all the measures so far taken ... have proved ineffectual and should not be relied upon in future. What seems to be the problem is that all these measures left the existing mechanism untouched - above all, the system of material and technical supply. There is an ever more urgent need for fundamentally new solutions: correlation of central planning and local initiative; genuine freedom and genuine responsibility in the operation of enterprises and associations.
In April 1983, Izvestia pointed out that maybe the finger of blame was being pointed in the wrong direction:
‘Stronger discipline is unimaginable without correct organisation of work and reliable supplies of raw materials and spare parts. We are receiving many interesting letters on this topic. And truly, what’s the use of coming to work on time if there’s nothing to do when you get there?’ [164]
After the death of Andropov in February 1984, Chernyenko took a different tack. He emphasised the need to accelerate housing construction and increase the production of consumer goods, reduce the share of heavy manual labour in the economy and raise wages. Chernyenko also first developed the notion that the economic crisis could be tackled only by an expansion of democracy, not its suppression.
So, while the Polish workers were rocking Stalinism to its foundations, provoking the imposition of martial law, the Soviet working class remained relatively docile. The Soviet working class was by now totally alienated from the State, but they lacked any leadership capable of organising that hostility. The Soviet trade unions had even reverted to their former role of encouraging socialist competition and abandoned even the pretence of defending workers’ interests. How was this possible?
The failure of the Soviet opposition to achieve the success which Solidarity had achieved was the subject of considerable soul-searching among Soviet dissidents. Many suggested that one important factor was the almost total lack of contact in the USSR between the dissident intellectuals and members of the working class. They contrasted their own role with the crucial role played in 1980-81 by Poland’s dissident organisation KOR in helping strikers to formulate their demands.
In November 1981, the dissident journal, Varianty, said:
‘For us, the main lesson [of Poland] is that we must seek the springs of our action in the needs of society ... make concrete criticisms and put forward practical programmes ... until now the secretary of the local Party Committee has been incomparably closer to real, everyday life than Sakharov and the members of the Helsinki Monitoring groups. One of the lesson of Poland is of course the necessity of combining a mass movement with clandestine social and political organisations whose structure is secret’.
Varianty conducted a survey of workers’ attitudes to the dissidents and the Polish events. This typical response from a Moscow worker sums up the failure of the Soviet dissidents:
The authorities are afraid of everything but to fear a link-up between dissident circles and the working class is as absurd as being afraid of meeting a jaguar in the Moscow Forest. Unfortunately there’s no likelihood of it at present. And the authorities know that as well as we do.
Afghanistan [165]
In April 1978 the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan overthrew the repressive regime of ‘Mad’ Daoud. The PDPA welcomed aid from the USSR, but it was riven by factional disputes of its own; its success in overthrowing Daoud was possible only because of the breadth and extremity of Daoud’s repression. In June 1979 the more right-wing of PDPA’s 3 main leaders, Karmal, fled and was given refuge in Prague. Fighting continued, and the more left-wing Amin gained the upper hand over the ‘waverer’ Tarakki. Amin forced through land reforms and other would-be progressive measures in such a way that instability and opposition began to escalate dangerously. The Soviet Stalinists organised a secret meeting in Moscow between Tarakki and Karmal, and Tarakki agreed to return to Kabul and remove Amin. Amin was one step ahead however and Tarakki was shot, but Amin publicly broadcast Afghanistan’s continued friendship with the USSR.
Amin however, refused Soviet military intervention, and fearing the collapse of a friendly regime in Kabul, Soviet Special Forces raided Amin's palace on 27 December 1979 and murdered him and immediately flew three divisions of the Red Army into Kabul, confident that the situation could be stabilised easily. Karmal was whipped out of Prague and installed as head of state.
From there, things only got worse. The Islamic movement in neighbouring Iran was in full swing. Up till then, the USA were the main ‘devil’, but Western intelligence agents were not slow to utilise the opportunity provided by the incompetent, reactionary and provocative Soviet intervention in the region. Aid flowed thick and fast to the mujaheddin rebels. Afghani national feelings had been inflamed and the success of the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran inspired them to victory.
The USSR stood to gain nothing economically from the invasion. Afghanistan was predominantly illiterate, poor and largely nomadic, with little in the way of natural resources outside of a ferocious nationalism. It was a loser from start to finish. While providing the world with the spectacle of Vietnam-war-style helicopter gunships strafing poor villages, the Soviet troops were in fact facing weaponry far more sophisticated than that the imperialist used themselves in Vietnam, and they took severe losses.
In May 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev began the withdrawal completed in February 1989; after which Afghanistan descended into further inter-factional fighting, the fabric of their rural and nomadic society having been more or less destroyed by a decade of modern warfare. US forces had trained the young Islamic fundamentalists in modern warfare, and given them the hand-held rocket launchers they used against the Soviet gunships, but neglected to train them as to when to stop fighting the foreign devils or instructing them in the building of the social framework of the modern society that had invented the ultra-modern weapons they carried.
The war in Afghanistan injured the Soviet Union deeply. The economy could not sustain it. And the people were in no condition for war, far less a foreign, unjust and losing war. The world would have to live with the fall-out of the Afghan War for long after.