Tomo III de Revolución, restauración y crisis en la Unión Soviética

In the second half of 1991 culminated the process opened in Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse and implosion of the USSR, its political «Soviet» system and the monopoly of the «Communist» Party. Was it the end of communism, against which the masses and oppressed Nations rose up, demonstrating the failure of Marxism and the utopia of the socialist path?

In the second half of 1991 culminated the process opened in Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse and implosion of the USSR, its political «Soviet» system and the monopoly of the «Communist» Party. Was it the end of communism, against which the masses and oppressed Nations rose up, demonstrating the failure of Marxism and the utopia of the socialist path? So was preached in the West and East by all the representatives of the bourgeoisie, including those who until then had been ruled by invoking the legacy of Lenin («God praying and with the mallet giving»), as the leaders of the CPSU.
A huge anti-communist and counter-revolutionary ideological campaign was triggered, that was intertwined with the offensive deployed, since the 1980s, by the capitalists and the imperialist powers against the working class and against the Nations and oppressed peoples.
By then, the genuine Marxists-Leninists in the world, and also in Argentina, proclaimed that the fall of those despotic and oppressive political regimes was the un-mask of the really existing capitalism in those societies since many years before. The monopolist bureaucratic bourgeoisie of state, in the context of a brutal economic, political and ideological crisis, threw their «mask» of socialist: actually it was the crisis and the failure of «false communism», with which they had concealed the exploitation, fascism (of Hitlerism type, as Mao Ze Dong formulated in 1964) and imperialism. It was a crisis and a regime change, with the background of decline and collapse of the USSR as a superpower, and the subsequent conversion of Russia into a secondary imperialist power, at an already multipolar world.
At the time, Carlos Echagüe, leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Argentina, published the first volume of his work “Revolution, Restoration and Crisis in the Soviet Union”, dedicated to the building of socialism in the USSR, since the revolution to victory against fascism in the Second World War. “Socialism proved its superiority” was a dense work of historical reconstruction and an underpinned solid defense of the first victorious proletarian revolution in history, and of the struggle for the construction of a socialist society, which was unprecedented in complexity and heroism.
Later, in 1995, he published the second volume: “The capitalist restoration”. On the basis of the postwar reconstruction, this book threw light on the acute struggle of classes within the socialist society and on the factors and causes, both, objective and subjective, that enabled a new bourgeoisie, incubated within the Party, to seize power (it was included an evaluation of errors of Stalin and of Marxists Leninists of CPSU from the revolutionary proletarian perspective). Its dominance was expressed in the revisionist orientations of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of CPSU and was consolidated by a coup d’ état in 1957. The capitalist restoration was the result of these events, unfolding in the Jruschovians’ period.
The study of Echagüe culminates in the present volume, focusing the history, characteristics and specific contradictions of the monopolist capitalism of Soviet State, its peculiar features – as to the degree of centralization and the entanglement of the «public» and the private «black» system, etc. – . It is based on a thorough analysis of the existing relations of production and also on the class nature of the State.
It is, then, about the historical evolution, since the 1960s, of the USSR and its ruling class, the monopolist bureaucratic bourgeoisie of State, with its wings: either orthodox or liberal, centralized or decentralized, in the “eras” of Jruschiov, Brezhnev and Gorbachov. The book thoroughly addresses both the economic and the social and political roots of the expansion of Social-imperialism (socialist in words and imperialist in fact) in the bipolar era of the two superpowers. A process with significant events: since the intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 to the invasion and war of Afghanistan from 1979 to its break deadlock and its defeat. An imperialist expansion also suffered the Argentine people, as long as the Soviet Union and their interests in the country constituted the major supports and beneficiaries of Videla’s dictatorship in 1976.
This third volume includes, along with new materials and perspectives that give the years since 1991, a rich reconstruction of the crisis and the end of the USSR, as well as the trends and main features of the post-Soviet era, from Yeltsin to Putin. This provides important elements for the anti-imperialist struggle of the present in Argentina and Latin America.
Not only the research conducted by Echagüe in the last fifteen years has made possible enrich and corroborate with multiple new data the reconstruction carried out by the author and his thesis. This volume is actually the culmination of a persistent work, both militant and scientific, which dates back in the early 1970s.
In 1968, young Marxists Leninists from Argentine repudiated in a public demonstration the Soviet invasion to Czechoslovakia. This position led to revolutionary Communists to identify, in 1972, the capitalist as well as exploitative nature of the Soviet leadership. And, in 1974, they got deeper in those definitions on the basis of the contribution of Mao Zedong, revealing the Social-imperialist nature of the Soviet State and its economic system in that period, which was crucial to give account of their penetration in Argentina. Also, they addressed the main theoretical and political Maoist contribution about the continuation of the struggle of classes in Socialism, which enlightened the profound causes of the capitalist restoration in the USSR, and delineated, with the experience of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, the way to continue the revolution during Socialism.
In 1974, Echagüe published «The other imperialism», that contributed so crucial to these issues, diving in depth in the restoration of capitalism operated in the USSR from Jruschiov and in its capitalist monopolist character, imperialist, according to the rigorous Leninist definition. This pioneer book was underlined by Horacio Ciafardini in his bibliographic commentary in the journal «Los libros” in 1975 (commentary that is reproduced as an appendix to this third volume).
Since then, many decades of revolutionary struggle, national and worldwide, have passed; struggles against imperialism, in particular, against the two superpowers, and revisionism. It was in the heat of the struggle, and at the service of it, that the author developed his thorough research and drafted his thesis, which also were reflected in the book «The Russian social-imperialism in Argentina» (published in 1984, after the withdrawal of the dictatorship ), as well as in several works about the economy, the society and the soviet policy, since the Social-fascism of Brezhnev to the advent of Perestroika of Gorbachov, most published in the journal “Revista Argentina de Política y Teoría”.
In this work, an overview of the revolutionary struggle and scientific research is capitalized and condensed, with the guide of the most advanced theoretical development of Marxism – the scientific summary of the socialist experience contributed by Mao Ze Dong –. Such a path has expressed with precision and details a material that is, without doubts, irreplaceable in Latin America and the world, for the depth of the analysis and the richness of the data for the historical deciphering, the controversy and the future research and reflection on the topic.
This work reveals hidden spots, «taboo» subjects of the contemporary political debate, shut by the liberal ideas and social democrats or revisionist of Marxism, through the stigma of the «failure of socialism» and the disqualification of the proletarian revolutions of the 20th century as an aberrant and irrational «detour» of history. Concealing their gigantic achievements and accomplishments for the benefit of the majority, including the role of the communists in the defeat of Nazi barbarity, they hide the capitalist restoration and its causes, and the bourgeois nature of the ruling class in the USSR since 1957 (issues raised, such as has been pointed out, in the first two volumes).
The first truth that this third volume of the work of Echagüe raises is that the regime in the Soviet Union, since the end of the 1950s to its implosion, far from being a development of Socialism (that is defined under the label of «Stalinism»), it was, precisely, the result of its refusal, its defeat, fruit of the class struggle inherent to the transition from capitalism to communism under the dictatorship of the proletariat. As well, after the alleged «Real Socialism» proclaimed by the Brezhnev’s hierarchs, this book perceptively enlighten the really existing capitalism and its particular forms, the fruit of its peculiar origin, including its «mask». The ruling class had to use the ideological forms of the former power of workers, but emptied from their contents and inverted their senses, in order to validate their dictatorship over the masses, and to ensure their own internal unity, manipulating the international communist movement and using it for its expansion and global dispute with US imperialism.
The work of Carlos Echagüe revealed in depth that as ideological regime it was «a lie made system», a lie that the bourgeoisie and revisionism still persist in upholding nowadays.
It also provides rich elements for the necessary reflection and an in-depth discussion on the achieves and the insufficiencies of the pioneer socialist revolutions of the 20th century, the material factors, as well as the political and ideological ones, for capitalist restoration, and the lessons to be learned here for developing the theory and the revolutionary struggle of the present and the future.
Secondly, this book illuminates four decades of world history, which stay alive in the route of life of several generations; because it makes evident the true imperialist nature of the soviet policy, immerse in the dispute with the US imperialism since the 1960s. It helps to clarify the strong counter-revolutionary role played by the USSR with respect to the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist boom of those years and its afterward destiny. This favored a correlation of forces adverse to the working class and to oppressed peoples of the world, to which it was added the capitalist restoration in China since the end of 1978.
This factor is essential to explain the imperialist reactionary offensive in the politics, economy and ideology on a global scale since the 1980s to the 90s. While that reality is sidestepped or distorted, there will generate false stories and will obscure the deep understanding of the worldwide and national historical development of the past decades.
In sum this work, with riches of historiography -as it offers a great wealth of information and testimony on the history of the USSR, which are not often known in Latin America neither in the world- , gets to the bottom of urgent issues of a past disproved, that is straight conditioning our most immediate current situation. In the midst of the deep crisis of capitalism that has been sweeping the world, the book provides necessary conclusions to guide the struggles of the present and the future of the working class and the oppressed peoples, facing to the future revolutionary waves that inevitably will come up in the twenty-first century.