Soviet bureaucrats undermine defence of workers’ states
There is no doubt, as John Ross argues in his article ‘For a Nuclear Free Europe’ (Vol 7 No 3) that the possession of nuclear weapons by the USSR has been a factor in preventing nuclear war. The kind of pre-emptive attack on the Soviet workers’ state that Washington dreamed of in the late 1940s became impossible once the USSR could threaten retaliation with its own bomb.
However John is right to stress that this ‘in no way implies acceptance of the policies of the Kremlin bureaucrats.’ As he notes, their ‘guiding policies of peaceful coexistence and socialism in one country entail total reliance on a framework of military defence against imperialist aggression’, rather than basing themselves on the struggles of the international working class.
It is important to emphasise this because Soviet policy undermines the struggle for unilateral disarmament in Western Europe and the USA, as well as struggles for national liberation in the semi-colonial world. Most important, it cuts across the defence of what has been achieved in the workers’ states — the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of the state ownership of the means of production, laying the basis for a planned economy.
This has been true throughout the post-1945 era. The bureaucracy’s stress on deals with imperialism through international negotiations meant, for instance, that the Communist Party [illegible] seriously disoriented nuclear disarmers in the West by breaking a moratorium on above-ground nuclear tests, on the grounds of ‘shocking’ Washington into negotiating a disarmament pact.
Today the bureaucracy still treats the peace movement in the capitalist countries as levers in its diplomatic initiatives to which it has no obligations in return. But the expansionist warmongering nature of imperialism is such that ‘negotiations’ on arms ‘limitations’ have always meant an increase in the nuclear weapons held by both sides.
The American socialist Joseph Hansen pointed out a few years ago that this has nothing to do with bolstering the military defence of the USSR: ‘On the issue of nuclear bombs, what constitutes an adequate number? It appears to me that a stockpile large enough to obliterate humanity once marks a natural quantitative limit so far as use values are concerned ...
‘But the fact is that each side possesses a stockpile much larger than needed to wipe out all human beings at once. Both have stockpiles sufficient to obliterate humanity many times over. The figure may be hundreds of times over to believe some estimates.
‘To me it appears quite clear that the Kremlin, by participating in this mindless race, is dealing terrible blows against the defence of the Soviet Union. For no matter how huge the Kremlin’s stockpile might be or how accurate its delivery system, the Soviet Union cannot escape the fate of the rest of humanity once the bombs begin to be exchanged.’
The level of military spending by the bureaucracy — producing severe distortions in the Soviet economy, a point not unnoticed by Washington, reflects its political approach: what the Soviet constitution called ‘safeguarding the interests of the USSR’, which has come to mean the safeguarding of the bureaucracy’s own material privileges. This of course includes a policy of fierce repression against all those who question this setup.
The extent to which the Soviet Union has been forced onto the defensive by this policy was shown recently when US President Reagan addressed the assembled Houses of Parliament in London. His speech contained the following challenge: ‘I am prepared to offer President Brezhnev an opportunity to speak to the American people on our television, if he will allow me the same opportunity with the Soviet people.’ He threw down this gauntlet knowing full well that the Kremlin bureaucrats — unlike say Fidel Castro — would be petrified at the prospect.
There can be no greater condemnation of the Soviet leadership than the fact that they can make Ronald Reagan appear to be a champion of free speech and international dialogue. Their policy of military buildup plus summit negotiations with Washington only aids imperialism in waging war and threatening to destroy the world with nuclear weapons, Socialists must approach the question in a totally different way: through consistently championing the struggles of the exploited and oppressed in a way that leads to the world wide extension of the post-capitalist property forms that we defend in the Soviet Union.
Martin Meteyard, Glasgow