Why the Soviet Union Imploded – Jeffrey Sommers (pt 1)

Paul Jay

Hi. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. I’m Paul Jay. In a few seconds, we’ll be back with Jeffrey Sommers to talk about the death of [Mikhail] Gorbachev and the demise of the Soviet Union. Don’t forget, there’s a donate button at the top of the website. If you’re watching on one of the other platforms like YouTube or one of the various podcasts, come on over to the website where you can donate, and you can get on the email list, which is quite important. If you’re depending on YouTube subscriptions, don’t depend on them very much because YouTube seems to do its best to suppress us. At any rate, be back in a few minutes.

In a recent article in CounterPunch, Jeffrey Sommers writes:

Excerpt

“Terror and tyranny in the USSR arose more from war and the demands of state security services required to survive, and the paranoid politics it enabled, rather than any “inevitable” path from the socialist path taken. Once the USSR was passed the generation having gone through this trauma (and leaders linked to that generation), a communist party head emerged that sought a return to an ideology anchored in democratic socialism.”

Paul Jay

That attempt, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, failed.

Now, joining us is Jeffrey Sommers, a professor of political economy and public policy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where he also serves as a senior fellow at its Institute of World Affairs. In addition to his academic work, he’s been published in outlets such as the Financial Times, The New York Times, Project Syndicate, The Guardian, The Nation, Social Europe, and often CounterPunch. Thanks very much for joining us, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey Sommers

Paul, fantastic to be here.

Paul Jay

There’s a lot to unpack in this paragraph I quoted, so let’s start with that. Many people are going to argue that all the existing forms of socialism were not very democratic once the revolutionary movements consolidated state power, and that’s, some people argue, inevitable, including some people on the Left. So let’s unpack that paragraph of yours.

Jeffrey Sommers

Oh, sure. Figures like Friedrich von Hayek, who was writing at the beginning of the Cold War, asserted in his probably most famous work that “socialism is,” as he said in the title of that pamphlet or book, “the road to serfdom or a kind of slavery that was inevitable. It was path dependent, and that is where you would end up.” Well, I think Gorbachev proves just the opposite. That is not inevitable in terms of the final destination for what Francis Fukuyama and others would call the end of history. If you were looking at socialism and thinking that would be its end, it was not.

Now, as you rightfully asserted, all of the examples of state socialism we’re familiar with were all born out of that Soviet experiment and its terrible experience with the Civil War from 1918 to 1921. The traumas of the Stalinist period followed by World war II, as your guest, Noam Chomsky, and Daniel Ellsberg rightly reference, the need to have an enemy for the United States. Being locked into that Cold War created the model for not only the direction that the Soviet Union went when guided by those leaders from Joseph Stalin through to those that were attached to him in one way or another. All of these other examples of countries that tried to pursue a, I guess for lack of a better term, a national development model within the context of that Soviet example that they looked at.

They set up their own versions of the KGB, and they had states which were rather overbearing. Quite interestingly, Gorbachev, the first top figure, the first General Secretary of this Soviet Communist Party that is entirely delinked from that Stalin period and its leadership, takes the country in an entirely different direction. It’s not inevitable that socialism has to end up like not all of these state socialist experiments have, but it is possible for another direction. All of that said, we should certainly be very wary and learn from the examples of the Soviet Union and the mistakes that were made.

Paul Jay

At the time of the Soviet Revolution, there was a big debate. I’m no expert on this, but my memory of it all is, I guess is it [Inaudible] on one side, maybe [Karl] Kautsky and [Vladimir Ilʹich] Lenin, and they were arguing that [Karl] Marx and [Friedrich] Engels had said that socialism was only possible in an advanced capitalist country, essentially when capitalism had produced very internally rationalized monopolies, but in an externally chaotic economy and that creates the conditions for socialism. Lenin was arguing, “yeah, you may be right, but the weak link of imperialism is all these countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and that’s where you’re actually going to have the revolutions so we can make it work.” They were arguing, “well, no, you can’t.”

Did it turn out that Lenin was wrong? Some people argue if he had lived, he would have adapted. Is that the fundamental underlying problem, that if you try to build socialism– my uncle used to have this line; he was a lefty all his life. He says, “socialism in a backward country is backward socialism.”

Jeffrey Sommers

Well, you certainly have the debate, as it was framed, correct. Of course, there wasn’t a lot of room for agency here. The Bolsheviks found themselves in charge of a country. They just collapsed. They were the only ones that, in effect, had a program for what to do for an empire that had absolutely been devastated by war. Its people were hungry, and they had a program and were willing to move forward.

It’s a question that is counterfactual, which will never really, I think at least in the near term, know the answer to. You’re right. It absolutely whipped up controversy. It’s the reasoning that Marx and Engles laid out for how you could have a successful socialist revolution. At the same time, it’s interesting that all those revolutions occurred in backward parts of the world system. By backward, it means so much pejoratively, but just in terms of their levels of development.

Mark Beissinger at Princeton just published a new book this year, The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion, which deals with some of those contradictions. They’re certainly interesting questions, but did Lenin give rise to Stalin? In some ways, yes. In all ways, no. It’s not an easily answerable question for that reason. There are just too many contingent variables, and we don’t have the ability to play out alternate scenarios.

Paul Jay

In terms of learning lessons from it, one of the lessons is you can’t judge the potential of socialism by the attempts to build socialism in countries that, in some ways, weren’t ready for it, at least not at the pace. I’ve always thought– and this may also have to do with external factors like threats. The Soviets knew about the rise of fascism in Germany and Japanese imperialism. They knew that from 1931. It wasn’t news to them what was coming. The external factor was a big factor from early in Stalin’s time. They’re preparing for the possibility of some kind of war. On the other hand, the pace, in terms of agrarian reform and other things, the pace at which Stalin conducted it required such force, and instead of dealing with what was possible, they tried to make it possible.

Jeffrey Sommers

Yeah, the old Soviet historian who spent some time in the camps Moshe Lewin, used to say, “the rapid industrialization of the 1930s was possible without using the degree of force that Stalin did use.” The conditions in which the Soviets found themselves during the 1930s were very tricky. Not only did they have all of these external threats, which were very real, as we know, but additionally, there were world market conditions that were highly unfavorable for their development.

For example, there was this debate at the end of the 1920s that these market reforms of the new economic policy which were instituted after the Civil War in the Soviet Union to rebuild and restart its economy. They were successful to a certain level. They brought themselves back in terms of GDP to their 1913 pre-World War I levels. Then they felt that they hit the ceiling where they couldn’t develop any further without capital, which they didn’t have access to, foreign investment capital. You had figures like Nikolai Bukharin, [Yevgueni] Preobrazhensky, and others who did not want to take this really hard war, communism, complete central, command economy planning turn. Of course, [Leon] Trotsky was arguing for something just like this.

When the Soviets did decide to make that policy turn in that direction, one of the things they were counting on was world grain prices being at roughly the level that they were at in the middle of the 1920s to fund the acquisition of the machinery, the factories, the tool, and dye equipment, that they would need to industrialize. What happened instead was that by the time the Soviets under Stalin launched this effort, grain prices had collapsed by 50%. They had to make this decision; do we go forward anyway, or do we back off? Going forward would mean literally stealing grain from peasants in order to send it off for export to acquire the capital needed to buy machinery. That’s what happened. You had Stalin, essentially, making war on peasants when they rationally refused to turn over their food to the central government that was not, in effect, paying them for it.

By the way, Boris Kagarlitsky wrote about this in a book published about a decade ago. It was just a really marvelous work called Empire of the Periphery. He lays this out very nicely. He would be a great person to talk with about this specific point.

Paul Jay

Yeah, I interviewed him about the current situation. In fact, maybe we should get the two of you guys on together.

Jeffrey Sommers

He’s an old friend of mine.

Paul Jay

Alright, good.

Jeffrey Sommers

I should say this. We should not state that Lenin was some pure, nice, pleasant figure. Bertrand Russell, of course, has that one anecdote about when he spoke with him. Lenin was talking about how they were going to take care of the manorial elites and have them swinging from the trees or whatever. To Bertrand Russell’s mind, Lenin seemed to be enjoying this conversation a little bit too much. I referenced this in my article, not the Bertrand Russell anecdote, but that Gorbachev and Putin, in their old strange ways, reflect the two sides of Lenin’s personality. Gorbachev represented the side of Lenin that really believed in democracy and wanted to create a Soviet economy of worker councils and all the rest. That’s ultimately where he wanted to go, even if he wasn’t taking them there at that time. Putin represents the brutal ruthlessness of Lenin in terms of achieving and implementing his goals.

Paul Jay

In that paragraph I quoted, you say that Gorbachev came back to that social democratic ideal of the revolution–

Jeffrey Sommers

Yes.

Paul Jay

–and the Soviets, these worker councils that were so much the instrument of the strategy of the successful revolution, which seemed very democratic and raucous in terms of they would have meetings, argue, have votes, and so did the party. I read transcripts or reports on meetings of the Central Committee in the mid to late ’20s, the Congresses particularly, and they were arguing and fighting, and there were factions. They were quite democratic.

Jeffrey Sommers

Right.

Paul Jay

Was that simply not sustainable? If not, why? Because that seemed to have this revolutionary democratic character, and boy, it certainly turned into its opposite.

Jeffrey Sommers

Yeah. [Vyacheslav] Molotov– an old anecdote from about 20 years ago. There was this political economist in the 20th century, someone of our generation, that we would all know very well. People today, unfortunately, have forgotten him. His name was Andre Gunder Frank. Gunder was staying with me in Riga at that time. He was looking for something to keep him busy. He was an insomniac. I gave him a copy of this book that had just been published by a Russian poet named Felik Chuev. It’s a 750-page set of interviews that he had done with Molotov over the course of 30 years, from the 1950s until his death in whatever it was, 1986 or 1988. I warned Gunder that he wouldn’t be able to put it down, and of course, he couldn’t. It’s just fascinating.

What Molotov, of course, argued in that book because he was pushed on this point several times, “well, why did you kill all of these people?” Molotov, on one level, said, “eight of those ten people were guilty.” So he admitted to an error rate of 20%, which was horrible enough. Then he said, “well, look what happened in World War II. Do you think we could have fought that war with all this factionalism?” It’s the point that you’re mentioning, Paul. “There’s no way we could have successfully executed that war and prevailed if we have this endless debating society going on.”

I think that was the view of Stalin and some like-minded people that went along with him; this democracy just would not do if you were trying to develop the country and its capacity in terms of industrialization and all the rest. It took that tragic turn. That’s another counterfactual that we’ll never know the answer to. I mean, could they have survived a very tricky environment, not only in Europe but internationally in the early 1940s, without having done what they did?

Paul Jay

I think an important point of context is that the so-called Democratic West, at the same time, in the ’20s and ’30s, was absolutely barbaric in terms of how it treated Asians, Africans, Latin America, and to a large extent, their own people. I saw a figure for the British Empire. Over the 300 years of the British Empire, an Indian historian estimated that the Brits killed 1.5 billion people. There’s no parallel to the war crimes of the British Empire. It was Britain, the United States, and all the rest that were the external threat to this socialism. They were dealing with some democracies here.

Jeffrey Sommers

No, we weren’t dealing with choir boys there, that’s for sure. Although, there was one real choir boy among all of these leaders, and that was Joseph Stalin. When he was a young boy, he actually was a choir boy. 

Paul Jay

Literally.

Jeffrey Sommers

Yeah, literally. Mike Davis, famed Verso author, and former labor organizer and academic. He had that rejoinder to the work that was published on the death toll. The Black Book of Communism, it was called. It was published about 20 years ago. They got out the Burroughs adding machine, and they started tallying up all of the numbers of people who had died tragically under communist governments. Mike Davis got out his own Burroughs adding machine and started punching in all of the figures and came up with an even higher number, which is the book called Late Victorian Holocaust, and it did show the tragic death toll, of course, of imperialism.

I, in fact, had my own small contribution to this. I published a book on the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. I wanted to get it out at the centenary marking the conclusion of that event, and so I published it in 2015. Fifty thousand Haitians died in that occupation. Big powers often do very bad things to maintain order. I don’t even want to get into a debate comparing these. They’re not apples-to-apples comparisons, only in the sense that countries, especially big powers going through modernization, seem to do very bad things when going through this period of, say, capital accumulation. That said, as we used to call them bourgeois democracies, they do have a space for resistance built within them, and it’s tolerated at various levels.

Paul Jay

Internally.

Jeffrey Sommers

Yes.

Paul Jay

Within their own countries, yes.

Jeffrey Sommers

Exactly right. It’s not very well tolerated abroad. Within their own countries, they do because they need to have some degree of social peace. The middle class, as it expands– in the suburban U.S. Canadian sense, which actually doesn’t exist, but in the 1960s and ’50s, the two cars, the suburban garage, and all that. The builders and controllers of capital, pretty soon, their kids became church ministers sometimes, or they became academic professors, or they became heads of nongovernmental organizations. The change in class composition of these democracies made them, in some ways, more tolerant of some change and even challenges to the social order at home. Not all social order, of course, but they did build in some protection. It’s not the same thing–

Paul Jay

Also, the workers, for at least a certain amount of time, had some leverage, unions, and fought for these democratic rights internally.

Jeffrey Sommers

Absolutely.

Paul Jay

Let’s park that and stick on the Gorbachev, Soviet thing for now. My only point was I was agreeing with a point of your article. The external threat to this new Soviet republic was very real, and these actors, the British, Americans, and Europeans, seemed so benign the way history is written. They were vicious colonialists and really barbaric. The threat as an external factor in all this was serious.

Jeffrey Sommers

I just want to raise one quick additional point which will make everyone unhappy, and that is that it’s also possible that while the Soviet Union was under constant attack from abroad, which it was, even without that, it still would have evolved in the way it did. We just can’t prove otherwise.

Paul Jay

Well, I personally think if they were going to try to build socialism the way, at the very least, Stalin– and I don’t want to personalize it so much. He was the leader, but he had a whole class of academics, intellectuals, and policymakers. It wasn’t all just him, but at any rate, to try to build it at the pace they had to build it, that’s the big question mark for me. This is only from the point of view of not judging whether Stalin– we don’t have to decide who gets into heaven or not, and I assume Stalin wouldn’t make it. That said, if you want to learn some lessons from it, maybe they could have gone a hell of a lot slower, especially in agriculture. I didn’t know this thing about the price of grain. I get that. To have to quickly get to nationalizing the land, state farms, and expropriating land– like, I made a film. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but probably not. I made a film called The Albanian Journey: End of an Era. I spent a lot of years in and out of Albania before the fall of the Communist Party, Party of Labor of Albania, and afterward. They actually went a lot more slowly than the Soviet experiment. They didn’t go to collective farms right away. They kind of talked people into it. They persuaded. At least, that’s the way I understood the history. I mean, I wasn’t there. Go ahead.

Jeffrey Sommers

Well, interestingly and fascinatingly, even the Soviets knew this was a failure. So after World War II had concluded, and as the GDR, the German Democratic Republic of East Germany arose, all these communists in the Soviet bloc, they internalized all the ideological arguments of the Soviet Union, and they wanted to replicate them. The Soviets were trying to hold the Communists of the GDR back, saying, “actually, you don’t want to go ahead with this collectivization of agriculture. This was done for very specific reasons. We laid over this post de facto justification for it that it was the best way to do it. There were other more complicated reasons, which people just wouldn’t understand– the average person, let alone peasant. So, don’t do this.” In the GDR, they were like, “what do you mean? This is obviously the best of doing it.” They had developed their own set of intellectuals who internalized these arguments and psychologically were just completely committed to them.

Now, as it turns out, in the Soviet bloc, they did end up, for the most part, going slower on collectivization and other things for that reason. Places where they didn’t, unfortunately, were the Baltic states, which were incorporated into the Soviet Union as actual republics. This is where it really, in terms of development today, this is where it makes a difference; whether or not you got incorporated into the Soviet Union or were merely under their control to have been incorporated within them. It tended to do more damage.

Paul Jay

The other thing– we’re going to want to get back to your article. Just to let people know, we’re going to do more than one segment here because Jeffrey’s article is so rich that one paragraph will take us off for half an hour conversation, and then we’ll keep going. I’ve often thought, or always think, that one of the problems is once you get to a really modernized industrial economy, how the hell can you have central planning on such a scale with a pencil and paper?

Jeffrey Sommers

Yeah.

Paul Jay

I once had a stockbroker explain to me, say to me, “before computers, subprime mortgages, most of what goes on on Wall Street right now, it couldn’t happen because you can’t do it with a pencil and paper.” It took digitization. It took computers. I don’t understand how they thought they could have central planning of a modern, fully industrialized, complicated economy and not lead to massive bureaucracy when you don’t have computers and let alone artificial intelligence, which I think is important because now maybe there actually are conditions that have a planned economy in a way that doesn’t get so bureaucratized.

Jeffrey Sommers

Right, and our economy is highly planned, as we know. It’s not just everyone doing their own thing, but sure, you couldn’t do this with paper and a pencil. When you’re coming from a very backward state, central planning seems the way to go. What it does is it marshals all of the resources of the economy and ensures that they are all moving in one direction, which you’re absolutely right. What happens when you reach a certain level of economic development? That very same model that was so necessary to help you to achieve industrialization on this accelerated basis becomes an impediment. Then you start adding new layers on top of that. What happens when you get into the second generation of people who have lost that revolutionary zeal and all they know is that they are no longer on the farm, literally. They’ve received high levels of education, and they’ve received lots of education to the extent that they have started to recognize where they are on the socioeconomic ladder globally. They don’t like the comparisons anymore, especially if you’re in the KGB, which did tend to attract, well, not so much the best, but the brightest. They looked at themselves and said, “why the hell aren’t we as rich as these guys? I mean, we’re every bit as smart as them.” Then they start beginning to question the entire basis of a system that is not rewarding them to the level that they see as being commensurate with the Western democracies.

As these systems, when they’re young and they’re producing high rates of economic growth, opportunities, and modernization, sure, there is plenty of support, always some dissenters, of course. Overall there is plenty of support. Once that starts to fade, then you’ve got a problem. The whole corruption issue, I don’t want to blame that too much, but it very much was real, and it did have a corrosive effect or impact on the system, which made it ungovernable, to some extent, at a certain point, or at least, very difficult to govern. It unleashed all sorts of tendencies that were damaging to the economy and society generally.

Then there’s also– to go back to the faults that were almost inherent to the model, at least in terms of being born out of civil war and then Stalinism. One of the things that Stalinism did was made people so distrustful.

On one level, you could counter with, hey, if you were building a new steel factory, Magnitogorsk, in the 1930s, and you were a worker that had come from nowhere, and all of a sudden you received an education as an engineer, you were working with others, and it was all very dynamic and open, and it felt great. For so many people, what Stalinism created was a sense of fear, an inability to trust anyone, and a retreat, ultimately, into private life. It’s exactly what socialism was not supposed to do. I mean, it created a hyper-private life model where you sat around the kitchen table with your immediate family members and invited only trusted friends, very trusted friends, for conversations about how things really are. That sense of distrust was very damaging to the system.

I watched your interview with Aleksandr Buzgalin, and he was absolutely right. You had these openings during the [Nikita] Khrushchev period, and then, of course, under Gorbachev as well. I have spent years and years and years in Latvia. There was this attempt by ethnic Latvians themselves to reform communism. They were called the National Communists. The ethnic Latin Stalinists, plus the Soviet generals, ganged up on the National Communists to get rid of them because they were threatening to destabilize the system. This did not come to Khrushchev’s attention until very late in the game. Khrushchev came blowing into Latvia at one point. He said, “what the hell is wrong with you guys?” This [Eduards] Berklavs guy, he was the head of the National Communist. So he was the head of the Council of Ministers. “This is exactly what we need. He’s shaking things up. He’s blowing through the bureaucracy. He’s getting stuff done, and then you guys are sending him not quite to Siberia but to the Euros for seven years. This is atrocious.” Anyway, the problem was recognized by people like Khrushchev and some others. This was not the model that you wanted, but that bureaucracy became just too powerful, and it ultimately took full control.

Paul Jay

I want to correct one thing I said earlier, that all the existing forms of socialism or attempts to build socialism ended up in authoritarianism, a dictatorship, or something. Actually, Venezuela is an exception, at least for quite some time. I was there several times during the [Hugo] Chavez years. It was an attempt to build socialism, and it was as democratic as one could possibly imagine, at least during the Chavez years. It doesn’t mean there were some bureaucrats and hacks in power. There were, and I met a few of them during Chavez’s time.

On the whole, what was going on amongst the people in terms of people’s councils, organizing, and the opposition actually perhaps too much freedom to own television channels. The coup against Chavez in 2002, to a large extent, was organized through television channels that were owned by the rich. I think Chavez made a mistake by not putting them in jail afterward. It was amazing how many of the people that helped facilitate that coup never paid the price for it.

In the end, I think there’s a lesson Chavez didn’t learn from the Soviet Union. This was go slow. He tried to fight on every single front at the same time. He wanted to have agricultural reform, fishing reform, and every kind of reform instead of just focusing on the oil sector and solving that first. If he had gone more slowly, we might have seen something that was working with a socialist agenda and very, quite democratic.

Jeffrey Sommers

It’s possible. I’m no expert on Venezuela. I haven’t been there, so I’m not going to comment on it other than the one criticism that I would have of Chavez. They did neglect the cash cow, which was oil. In other words, they were not making investments for noble reasons. They were trying to invest in the social sector, but they really needed to invest more in keeping the technology of the oil industry current. They were not making the investments to the degree that they did and that caused some problems later.

Paul Jay

And using the money they did have to also diversify the economy. They thought high prices would last forever. My only point is there’s lots of evidence that socialism doesn’t have to– there are ways to develop it. If the external factors allow, and that’s a big deal because if the Americans were about to invade, I don’t think it would have been so democratic.

We’re going to do a second segment, and we’re going to focus on how Gorbachev’s reforms lay the groundwork for the rise of the oligarchs and the rise of what [Aleksandr] Buzgalin calls “Jurassic capitalism”. Join us for the next segment with Jeffrey Sommers. Thanks, Jeff.

Jeffrey Sommers

You bet. Great being here.

Paul Jay

Thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.news. Please, again, don’t forget the donate button. Come on over to the website where you can donate. Most importantly, get on the email list because there’s no doubt if you’re watching this on YouTube, YouTube is suppressing people that are subscribing. We’re getting tons of mail from people saying that YouTube just is not letting them know. By the way, you are supposed to hit the bell or something like that up top to make sure you get alerts. We’re getting emails from people that have done that and still don’t get messages. For people who don’t know the history, YouTube tried to suppress several of our stories. It was only because Matt Taibbi wrote a piece about censoring us and directly questioned YouTube that they backed off a little bit. At any rate, thanks for joining us on theAnalysis.news.