Socialist Voices in the Soviet Union
Afanasyev, Yuri & Zaslayskaya, Tatyana
Here are two influential Soviet reformers, known for their fundamental criticisms of the society and their desire to move toward some form of democratic socialism. Yuri Afanasyev is a historian...
...YURI AFANASYEV 192 • DISSENT European Revolutions Everyone understands that we began these revolutionary reforms because we had reached an economic dead end and we had to find a road to real progress...
...We must return to the basic principles of Lenin's socialism—democracy, humanism, market economics, civil peace, and the rest...
...In particular, we have to open up new social-economic roads for millions of people that will allow them to identify with the means of production—to feel they are the owners and masters of property and that their income depends on how it is used...
...He changed his thinking in the early 1920s and had only begun to work out a new model, based on the NEP, when he died in 1924...
...The majority of the working class came from the countryside...
...Nor could Lenin have foreseen, almost seventy years ago, all the problems of our time...
...Here I must protest the formula, widespread even among supporters of perestroika, that we can simply return to Lenin, repent, receive his blessings, and move onward...
...Now they are educated and well informed...
...Workers were uneducated, knew only their narrow slice of life, and had nothing...
...Stalin transformed the Bolshevik party into some kind of sect and created a huge bureaucratic state apparatus...
...They felt themselves to be cogs in a gigantic machine...
...It must democratize social relations...
...It was lagging behind the world economically, technologically, and scientifically, and mass dissatisfaction was growing more acute...
...The country had entered a crisis...
...We can't say Stalin was both bad and good...
...It was counterrevolutionary and it affected the foundations of the Soviet system...
...What I want for my country is real not fictional socialism, where people can be happy as creators, not just as consumers, and where they will be able to pursue all of their talents...
...The bottom is no longer willing to work efficiently, and the top can no longer force it to do so...
...By the 1980s, fifteen to eighteen million functionaries administered this statist system, from Moscow to the thousands of enterprises...
...But I remain convinced that the primary reasons for the need for perestroika were not the sluggish economy and rate of technological development but an underlying mass alienation of working people from significant social goals and values...
...Stalin imposed a regime of discipline on the workers, suppressed the intelligentsia, created millions of prisoners under the control of the NKVD, and built a state on blood and terror...
...That is a foolish way of thinking, more of a religious idea than a political-historical one...
...Now we have to squeeze Stalinism out of ourselves drop by drop...
...The bureaucratic-command system can no longer direct and control them...
...Here too perestroika means beginning the work of building socialism anew...
...We have to recognize the full extent of the so-called deformations he introduced into our life...
...We must move forward with Lenin's help, but we will have to find our own solutions to our problems...
...This social alienation is rooted in the economic system formed in the 1930s, which made state property, run by a vast bureaucratic apparatus, the dominant form of ownership...
...I would even say that perestroika must be a second socialist revolution in the Soviet Union...
...TATYANA ZASLAVSKAYA SPRING • 1990 • 193...
...Only conclusions based on the full historical truth can give conscious supporters of perestroika the strength and theoretical approaches to start again on the road to true, democratic socialism...
...Norton), which consists of full-length interviews with a variety of Soviet reformers and intellectuals .—EDs...
...They affected everything...
...Yuri Afanasyev is a historian and member of the Supreme Soviet...
...Therefore, half-truths about the past will lead to half-measures today, which will lead to the collapse of our last chance to break out of this terrible situation...
...We are not dealing with a deformed socialism but with an inhumane, regimented system whose foundations still have not been eradicated...
...That is why I say perestroika must be a social revolution...
...I do know that this system no longer works because people have changed enormously in the last fifty years...
...We take these statements, with permission and thanks, from an interesting new book, Voices of Glasnost, edited by Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina van den Heuvel (published by W.W...
...Stalin repealed the New Economic Policy (NEP), which Lenin saw as a way to socialism...
...It requires broad participation and activism on the part of the masses...
...Where people will feel like human beings and not feel constantly oppressed...
...So everyone also understands that restructuring the economy is our most pressing task...
...The claim that socialism was being built camouflaged the emergence of some other kind of system, maybe some kind of Asiatic despotism...
...Therefore, if we want people to be creative, productive, and efficient, we have to change the whole system of social relations...
...And we still must work out a full conception of socialism...
...Personally, I think the Stalinist 1930s were our Thermidor, when the socialist revolution was thwarted and Stalin carried out an anti-Leninist coup d'etat...
...For fifty years it was said that this was public property and belonged to everyone, but no way was ever found to make workers feel they were the co-owners and masters of the factories, farms, and enterprises...
...We no longer have Stalinism in the top leadership, but we still live in the system Stalin created in the 1930s...
...They have a much higher standard of living, apartments, free medicine, free education, and they don't have to work hard to get it...
...This will shock some people, but it is not so strange...
...It must bring about a fundamental redistribution of power, rights, freedoms, wealth, and control of property among the various strata and groups that make up the Soviet Union...
...In the course of collectivization, he enslaved the peasantry and destroyed it as a class...
...If we really believe that socialism is a precious idea, we cannot take an on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand approach to that period, as so many people do...
...I don't know...
...The usual idea that we have some kind of socialism today, at least some kind of deformed socialism, doesn't hold up to historical scrutiny or logic...
...That is also why perestroika cannot be carried out only from above...
...Tatyana Zaslayskaya is a sociologist...
...Maybe this system was necessary in the 1930s, when the country was so terribly backward...
...The revolutionary transition from feudalism to bourgeois capitalism went through several stages over many decades...
...Could Lenin have imagined, for example, that in 1989 we would still be rationing food and only just learning democracy...
...I do not accept this totalitarian course as inevitable, necessary, or socialist...
...Perestroika must uproot all vestiges of Stalinism from our life...
...Man is resilient—you push and he pushes back...
...But Lenin didn't live long enough to develop a full conception of socialism...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
