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Many years ago an elderly nun and her assistant called to our door to 'spread the Word'….a suggestion that we pray the rosary before a statue of Our Lady of Fatima… a novena for the conversion of Russia. This was at the beginnings of Michael Gorbachev's noble attempt to redeem communism, to create a genuinely democratic socialist egalitarian and prosperous society with 'communism' being the ideal to be striven for. Could this be what she had prayed for, I asked her? The soviet courts had always been courts of (vague) socialist morality, rather than actual courts of law. And the democratic centralist power structure created a hierarchy of petty tyrants answering to ever higher levels of absolute power. Fear! Firstly Gorbachev, when he achieved the top position of General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, devolved power, not to the 'people' or to any assembly or soviet, but to the actual legal system. He himself was a lawyer. His famous slogans were 'Glasnost' and 'Perestroika'. Glasnost, usually translated as 'openness', meant much more than simply freedom of speech. Under the soviet tyranny is was said that very deep friendships sometimes evolved as to speak openly of the limitations of the, supposedly perfect, system would have been foolhardy to say the least. Who could one trust? 'Be not afraid' to speak openly would have been a more accurate translation of Glasnost. And this free debate both inside and outside the Party would create a situation of Perestroika; a restructuring of the hopelessly inefficient centrally planned economy and the creation of a largely publicly owned, but efficient and human centred economy. Human centred? The first areas of soviet life where opposition to Communist Party policy was openly tolerated were what might be termed 'Green' issues. Where human health issues were in conflict with industrialisation a true communist society would encourage independent monitoring by the public. Human health problems due to reckless industrialisation had been a dreadful feature of the USSR. Openness in industrial planning created a situation where brave people tested the waters in the courts and there the issues were adjudicated on their genuine merits. There had been a form of liberalisation under Khrushchev but he always had had the final say as to what was or was not to be allowed. The authorisation for the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn came from Khrushchev himself. He alone had the authority to allow such things. In Gorbachev's Soviet Union the law was the law. A soviet newspaper's staff had elected their editor as the law required, who then began calling for a multi-party system for the USSR. Gorbachev requested that the paper should moderate its position, but the staff, after much deliberation, re-elected the editor and there was really nothing Gorbachev could do. The current director of a major Russian ballet company described how he first came to prominence when he was elected as director by the company workers during the Gorbachev era, with revolutionary ideas as to how ballet should be staged. "And not even a Party member," the old cadres muttered to themselves in horror. Grass roots democracy was sweeping through a society that had always been hidebound by rigid authoritarian dogma. There was one, and only one, significantly free and fair election in the USSR. Traditionally there was only one candidate in each constituency which everyone was required to endorse. One had the constitutional right to request 'the pen' in order to cross off the candidate's name and thus vote against the Communist Party but such an act of recklessness would result in arrest and imprisonment on supposedly unrelated and invented outrages against socialist morality. I remember seeing Gorby on the RTE News taking 'the pen' and waving it before the TV camera as he was about to cast his vote. Constituencies with a number of candidates often had only Communist Party candidates but these had to campaign on their position regarding the rate of reform. Approximately one quarter of constituencies had only one candidate but this candidate had been selected by the local party in a relatively open manner and in the knowledge that the electorate could vote down an unsuitable candidate. The candidate would still have to campaign to be elected. A significant number of such candidates, in single candidate constituencies, were voted down. The Congress of People's Deputies, composed of part time politicians, was an assembly of 2500 members. These then elected the Supreme Soviet from their members, 500 full time politicians. About one third of Deputies were nominated directly by Soviet institutes and cultural societies - one deputy was appointed by the Soviet Philatelist Society - the other two thirds were directly elected. 15% of candidates were non-Party - but not 'anti'-Party - candidates and 20% of those elected were non-Party. Andre Sakharov, the father of the Soviet H-bomb, was denied a direct nomination to the Congress by the Soviet Institute of Sciences; his dissident past made him seem too radical. I remember seeing it on the RTE News. And some days later the same news slot pictured him addressing a public meeting and garnering enough signatures to get him on the ballot as a non-Party candidate: all legal and above board. The Institute of Sciences then relented and gave him a direct nomination to the Congress. Boris Yeltsin, the former mayor of Moscow who had been expelled from the Party over his frustration at the slow pace of reform, got himself on the ballot as a non-Party candidate by the constitutionally valid citizens' nomination method and won the Moscow Central seat by a landslide, defeating his archrival the conservative Igor Ligachev. Yes, 80% of the members of the Supreme Soviet were Party members but there was free debate and a high level of free voting within socialist cultural constraints. At the time it was the norm to use vague quotes from Lenin rather than the rigid dogma of previous eras - "From each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs" - and then a pragmatic roll-back from this ideal to suit the needs of a functioning economy and society. Remember America similarly starts from the ideal of individual liberty and then rolls-back to the degree required by a functioning infrastructure. In the US Senate there is not the strict government/opposition divide that we have in Europe; almost an assembly of independents. Soviet non-Party deputies, observing from outside the Party, acted as a form of democratic monitoring and Party deputies ranged from neo-Stalinist in sympathies to radical democrats. Glasnost may have let the democracy genie out of the bottle but what of perestroika? I remember an RTE News team openly filming in the USSR, in a bread shop. One woman vociferously denounced Gorbachev. "The second time this week the bread has been delivered stale," she loudly proclaimed. "Twenty years ago you would have been arrested for speaking like that," countered another, "give Comrade Gorbachev a chance." "Where is perestroika," responded the first woman, holding a stale loaf. "You cannot eat free speech." One factory worker defended the Soviet guarantee of work but complained that the products he was making were all but worthless. Where then was the dignity of labour even if 'work' was guaranteed? This was a far cry from the "everyone is happy here in the Soviet Union" statements of the old days. It may have been that perestroika was impossible in practice but the end came when the conservative wing of the Communist Party attempted a coup. This gave Yeltsin his chance and communism finally failed. Well, at least it was given a chance, perhaps. I myself had mixed feelings when the Berlin Wall came down. Recently I saw a television program on Soviet art. The narrator was rightly scathing on some Stalinist excesses but there was an obvious tendency to view only 'dissident' art as great and the art of those who worked within the system, and remember most people did, as worthless or at least suspect. An elderly sculptor who had spent most of his working life within the system, as most people did, but was still highly regarded as an artist, made the point that they were cut off from the art of the West and so evolved differently. But while he blamed the Communists for betraying a noble ideal he insisted that the people were not better off now. "No!" he said. "Now there is the worship of money: millions… instead of noble ideals." In Putin's quasi-democracy in Russia the Communist Party is the second biggest in the Duma. Putin is suspected of ordering the murder of journalists (dissidents if you like) critical of his methods but the manipulation of the media is the chief modern method of repression - repression without people really realising it is occurring. Pravda is the Russian word for truth. It was the name of the main Soviet newspaper which was notorious for obvious lying propaganda. Stalinist media always portrayed a ludicrous fantasy ideal society that contrasted starkly with real soviet society. And it was absolutely forbidden to comment on this discrepancy. Soon after the Wall came down there was an election in the reunited Germany. Would it be the Christian Democrats, probably with junior partners the Free Democrats, or the Social Democrats, possibly with the Greens? We turned on Sky News for the results. The Christian Democrats had won, so the possibility of the Greens in government would not arise. But had the Greens got enough votes to win seats? We waited for news. And waited. There were banner headlines on Sky announcing that the PDS, the Democratic Socialist Party - the former Communists, had won a handful of seats in eastern Germany. But the Greens, according to Sky News, did not exist. We found out elsewhere how many seats the Greens won, but we knew where to look… for the Truth.
Brendan Burke MA(Phil)
20th February 2010 |