Communists would do better if they realised that Gorbachev wasn't a traitor. He was a comically committed Leninist and he got most of his worst ideas (like basically every move to empower the different nations of the USSR, which would ultimately lead to them all leaving, or his economic policies, which were inspired by the NEP) from reading Lenin. He destroyed the USSR not because he saw the light of neoliberalism and converted, but because he believed he could recover its "true" origins before it became corrupted and stagnant.
This doesn't tell us anything about Lenin, who had been dead for decades, but it does tell you where LARPing as Lenin and treating Lenin like the biblical truth will take you. You have to understand the situation as it actually exists in the here and now, not by shoehorning it in to the texts of long dead heroes. Your analyses should start from reality and work towards useful predictions, rather than starting from dogma and working towards reconciling it with reality.
Gorbachev's failure is substantially worse in light of his loyalty to the cause.
I agree but this should be on the main board.
>>2845206>He was a comically committed Leninist retard
>>2845206>Communists would do better if they realized that Gorbachev wasn't a traitor. He was a comically committed Leninist This is a terrible reading, there's a mountain of evidence, that Gorby was driven by vanity and narcissism. Gorby revealed state secrets to Thatcher, when he visited the UK in 1984. He is a traitor.
There's also Yakovlev's notes.
https://media.alexanderyakovlev.org/fond/issues-doc/1023389
>The political conclusions of Marxism are unacceptable for the emerging civilization, which is looking for a path to reconciliation, mitigation of the initial conflicts and contradictions of existence. – YakovlevIf gorby was truly a Leninist, Gorby should have arrested Yakovlev, for saying some of the most un-Leninist sentences ever written.
>>2845338How could an idiot reach this level of importance in such a huge, complex party? I know it was terminally decadent and increasingly filled with retarded nationalists since Breznhev became lobotomized but still that's not the political ascention an idiot can make.
>>2845472because the party form is garbage
>>2845477And what’s the superior alternative?
>>2845206Dissolved the party. Also Yakoklev. Not even Deng dissolved the CPC. It just doesn't apply here.
>>2845486He should have dissolved the CPSU and merged it into the CPC, turning the Soviet Union into a Chinese province, this would have solved every issue.
>>2845477What is your alternative?
>>2845483finding that out is the supreme task of communists today, but they're mostly interested in LARPing the CPSU
>>2845472he was the face of the conspiracy behind him
>>2845582>>2845564the party form continues to reign supreme…
>>2845490>gorbachev should have solved the sino soviet splityes he should have done a lot of things but he was not on the side you think he was.
>>2845483cooperatives, unions, and mutual aid groups must united under a militant organ. not a party, which is primarily bureaucratic and only secondarily militant, but an army, which is primarily militant and only secondarily bureaucratic
>>2845593supremely wrecked by liberals, I agree
>>2845593>elect a lib>he can now do whatever he wants in the name of democratic centralismsounds like the easiest shit to infiltrate and wreck
>>2845598>>2845599There are much bigger liabilities than liberals, like communists. Look at the CPGB-ML and stare into the abyss. Marching with a Stalin banner can get you out of being a lib but not out of being totally useless.
Parties fail because they have bad institutional incentives long before they take power. Even if a party was the correct form for the USSR (dubious) and China (plausible!) for almost every other country it's jumping the gun and creating a little LARP vehicle for people who couldn't get a local councillor elected* but issue statements and insight like they're already running the country.
*note that I say
couldn't, it's not that a party must be electoral to justify itself, but a party which is institutionally incapable of winning a low level election is worthless. The CPC could absolutely run a successful local council election campaign, in theory. The various "communists" of most places, on the other hand, cannot. They are more impotent than random independent people campaigning on trash collection being too infrequent and so on. Random individuals often have more organisational skills than every communist party in their country combined…
>>2845610>Parties fail because they have bad institutional incentives long before they take power. Even if a party was the correct form for the USSR (dubious) and China (plausible!) for almost every other country it's jumping the gun and creating a little LARP vehicle for people who couldn't get a local councillor elected* but issue statements and insight like they're already running the country. truth nuke. also I think it is funny there is so much hate for diversification of strategy when such a thing would make the movement much harder for its opponents to predict
>>2845700>>2845610>>2845477>>2845486>>2845582We are all stuck in the imageboard form. We might as well burn our stupid brains out trying to answer this question instead of talking about fucking star wars and shit
>>2845610In Greece the KKE has mayors, local councillors & some parliamentary mps. But that's not the party's main strategy for power: In fact it rejects the party-state model generally speaking. Rather it gives preference to unions, youth education, disaster relief, and other community measures.
someone like gorbachev was made inevitable by the awful state of the union and any problems he exasterbated had their talons in moscow's neck decades before he showed up, if anything, he's tragically brave in willing to try anything besides remaining a geriatric petro state
>>2845610at least the cpgb-ml run a rug business that takes some skill.
Like all reformists, he just stumbled over an accusation I hear all the time
>You say Marxists represent the interests of the proletariat, yet you seem to disagree with the ones who desire turbo capitalism? Curious.
it’s confusing desire with interests and although many of the people demanding economic and political “reforms” were in most economic senses proletarian, that doesn’t necessarily mean they need to be heard as competing representatives of the proletariat with their own political parties and “co-operatives”, lest you find yourself suddenly contending with counter-revolutionaries rather than reformists.
It starts off with
>Am I not proletarian? Am I not to be heard!?
and ends with
>I don’t care if the proles are unhappy with my new sweeping powers, if they won’t surrender then fire a tank at them
>>2848697Is it really self determination that was to blame though? Wasn't it just the most obvious point of separation from a state that was obviously failing? No surprise that there was a lot less nationalist agitation until people felt "man this country sucks, I wish we weren't part of it".
>>2848739none of these men are serious contenders outside of romanov who, even less radical than andropov (a difficult feat) would've continued the brezhnevite stagnation into oblivion before, like the rest, spending the rest of their lives blaming their mistakes on jews, the west, etc.
>>2845206>Communists would do better if they realised that Gorbachev wasn't a traitor. why would they "do better" if they realised this?
>>2845610>There are much bigger liabilities than liberals, like communists. Look at the CPGB-MLMLs are anti-communist tho
>>2848807>none of these men are serious contenders outside of romanovGrishin, and Shcherbytsky had a chance also. Shcherbytsky, and Romanov were the best picks.
Romanov had his own ideas, with his connection to Leningrad.
Shcherbytsky was in favour of improving planning. And was a great Soviet party official.
>andropovAn overrated what if leader. Andropov promoted all the officials, and advisors, that created much of the framework of Gorbachev's policies.
>>2845218great book & agreed. gorbachev def thought of himself as a committed leninist for a while. but he got bored of it and wanted to do whatever let him keep getting applause
he was a fucking moron. not an evil guy, not a good guy either, he was a genuinely stupid man with a massive ego. before i read this book i felt some pity for him and thought he was mostly an idealist who was just some combination of incorrect and incompetent. but if half the descriptions of gorbachev in this book are accurate, he was pretty simply just a well-connected clown with some rhetorical ability. the problem with the late USSR isnt even gorbachev, its that all the systems in place and people occupying them allowed gorbachev to happen.
>>2848836>grishinthought openly taking advantage of a terminally ill old man would make him popular, ngmi
>shcherbytskysinglehandedly turned ukraine against the soviet project (whilst playing right into gorbachev's hands) before dying a month later
>romanovrecord suggests nothing significant besides worsening the military-industrial death spiral
>andropovschroedinger's general secretary, look inside the box and you'll find everyone's personal set of should've, could've and would've
none of these men would've done anything more than delay gorbachev or whoever took up his mantle next, they may have even worsened the problem
>>2849446did we read different books? gorbachev, regardless of his failures, was unquestionably one of the most cunning and ambitious statesmen of the 20th century. the soviet system he looked to turn on it's head was bowed, sure, but nowhere near broken enough to have allowed him to ascend the general secretariat a buffoon
>>2849556setup shop in china i mean
>>2849556Gorbachev didn't, ownership structures and responsibilities of USSR enterprises were unclear so western businesses looking for partnerships often had to wait while soviet managers went "wait, can we do that?", also Gorby changed the political system and undermined party rule. At one point foreign lenders noped out on the USSR because they knew they could lose their shirts if the CPSU fell or if Gorbachev was couped by hardliners, which wasn't a problem for foreign borrowing before he came in and destabilised things. Even then, he brought McDonald's and Pizza Hut.
>>2848739And if any of them had won, you don't seriously think you'd just get a Gorbachev next? Even if Gorbachev was directly appointed by the CIA (cope), the fact the USSR allowed itself to be subverted in that way would speak to a fundamental structural failure.
>>2845218The narrative of gorbachev being a moron doesn't mesh with the fact in order to become gensec, you had to be a ruthless political operator.
He was really good at politicking within the party, but unable to solve actual problems. I think the party by that time turned into such a carereesm machine that by the end it produced gobrachev
The Soviet Union failed the same way every worker co-op fails, because that’s all any Leninist state ever is
>>2850791>The narrative of gorbachev being a moron doesn't mesh with the fact in order to become gensec, you had to be a ruthless political operator.That's fair. The book is mostly about his tenure as General Secretary, not his ascension to it. I know he was Andropov's chosen successor and I'm sure he could shrewdly walk the hallways of power, but once he became the most powerful man in the Soviet Union all of those skills seem to have left him or proved useless. He just wasn't up to the task he imposed on himself and the Soviet people or wasn't willing to do what was needed, partly because he and many others abhorred violence (unlike Yeltsin a few years later).
Have you read Taubman's biography on Gorbachev by any chance? I imagine it has a lot more about his rise to power.
>>2850791>>2850828gorbachev was a moron. he was not a moron. but he did everything useless and wrong in power. maybe there's a third possibility. he was a comrpomised person.
>>2850842The CPSU letting a compromised person get to general secretary probably tells you something about the state of the party for allowing it to happen
>>2849565>Even then, he brought McDonald's and Pizza Hut.Then it's all worth it
>>2850842Party discipline went to the gutter when Breznhev became senile and it got filled with mentally retarded wannabe-plutocrats and petty nationalists from non-russian republics trying to loot as much shit for themselves as possible.
The party imploded because a non-negligible amount of it's cadres wanted to loot the copper wires to become "rich" so they could pay for fancy cars and bang extremely mid prostitutes.
>>2850842The USA seemed to have no idea what was going on until it was over and flip flopped between Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The color revolutions of the past decades often have the marks of foreign intelligence agencies all over them, yet what would be the biggest and most intricate undermining of a geopolitical rival in all of history does not seem to have any.
I don't really see any indication other than that the fall of the Soviet Union was entirely endemic, beyond the pressures of the Cold War.
>>2850858Ideas are a material force in the world
It might be enrirely possible that the soviet union simply fell for liberal values and lost faith in its own project.
The party is not just for organizing stuff, it's the thing that structures the masses' subjectivity itself. When that's gone, it's ogre
I think the reason the party became disoriented is because they declared socialism too early, and became blind to actually existing class contradictions still going on in society.
I don't even know what they could've done to avoid it, China's still around partially because they looked at the soviet union rotting and thought "ok, don't do that". The disadvantage of being the first
>>2850864>I don't even know what they could've done to avoid itRe-instating the NEP after the WWII reconstruction
The Bolsheviks should have voluntarily stepped down from power when the German revolution failed, it’s really that simple
Brezhnev Doctrine was based haters gonna hate
>>2851063Failed reformists who ultimately conceded control of the state to non-communists?
>>2851003>control 20% of earth>revolution fails 2,000 miles away>immediately surrendertrots have brain damage
>>2851327That was where all the factories were, you would have needed a combination of German industry and Russian manpower to make it work, history proved this
>>2850791>unable to solve actual problems.gorbachev and his system could've survived the crisis if glasnost and perestroika (less so the latter, neither absolutely) stayed the course and did initially resolve a lot of long-term issues but thanks to a number of both internal and external factors careerists bent him over backwards and then spent the next decade squealing about jews or whatever
>>2851330industry and factories, of course, being exclusive to germany, which as we know did not completely capitulate an offensive war to an industrialised russia within the same half of that century
>>2851333The timing was off, it’s like if you don’t stir the risotto enough or don’t have the chicken broth
>>2851331Prestroika was fundamentally ill conceived. If you have a centralised ration economy, that will have problems but
basically works. If you introduce some elements of markets while retaining holdovers from the old system, market logic will favour hoarding cheap rationed goods and reselling them at higher prices rather than producing them yourself. The gap between supply and demand will cease to be medicated by rationing and start being mediated by higher prices (without any incentives for higher production as in a real market economy, and so without ever resolving to bring prices down and the abundance of goods up), while the low prices from rationing will disappear as hoarders have cleared the shelves. Being half way between a market economy and a non-market economy in this fashion is the worst of both worlds, a sort of anti-social democracy where you take from the poor to give to the rich, where market logic destroys the old system while conferring none of its usual benefits and functionality.
Combining it with political reform which made it impossible to take the necessary unpopular short term steps was just the icing on the cake. If you read collapse you'll find a hilarious recurring tendency for economists to recommend austerity to deal with looming external bankruptcy (the USSR had to import goods thanks to perestroika flopping) only for the democratic deputies in the russian and soviet legislatures to childishly vote for
more spending, more imports, and vetoing any tax rises on the business that were looting the state.
>>2849472>did we read different books? gorbachev, regardless of his failures, was unquestionably one of the most cunning and ambitious statesmen of the 20th century. the soviet system he looked to turn on it's head was bowed, sure, but nowhere near broken enough to have allowed him to ascend the general secretariat a buffoonsure he was cunning and ambitious, but his talent seemed to be convincing others to go along with projects and plans, rather than any capability to actually succeed at those plans. the book consistently describes instances of gorbachev pushing through when he shouldve accomodated more criticism, and instances in which he folds and takes easy compromises when he shouldve taken a harder line. its genuinely comical how often he does the wrong thing, and how he sidelines his best advisors in favor of people who end up misguiding and undermining him.
my impression is that he might have been a good diplomat, but he never should have been the guy at the top giving orders.
>Gorbachev’s leadership, character, and beliefs constituted a major factor in the Soviet Union’s self-destruction. He combined ideological reformist zeal with political timidity, schematic messianism with practical detachment, visionary and breathtaking foreign policy with an inability to promote crucial domestic reforms. Those features made him unique in Soviet history. His aversion to force and violence, however, was typical of his generation, shared by many, even conservatives. This points to a deeper cultural and social transformation of the Soviet elites during the decades after Stalin. They turned out to be surprisingly feckless when the political and economic storm came. Gorbachev’s aide Georgy Shakhnazarov, who observed the Politburo’s collective paralysis of will, called it a systemic crisis. No one in the Politburo could stomach enacting painful reforms or, if need be, maintaining order through force. The policies that Gorbachev favored, appeasing the intelligentsia and devolving responsibilities to the republican ruling elites, constituted a road to chaos, not to better reforms. This enabled and legitimized runaway separatism in the Baltics and in South Caucasus, and, ultimately, in the core Slavic republics of the USSR.
>Gorbachev’s indecision and decentralization of power alienated and fragmented the Party nomenklatura. The empowerment of republican institutions and nationalist movements left Soviet functionaries with only one choice: to “go nationalist” and identify themselves with ethno-territorial interests, republics, and regions. The fact that the first fully free elections of March 1990 took place in the republics, not nationwide, propelled the decomposition of Soviet elites along nationalist lines. This pushed Soviet politics in the same disastrous direction as in Yugoslavia at the same time. He rejected the notion of class struggle and had it dropped from official Soviet stance ffs.
>>2851292General Jaruzelski was a back to the basics leader, he inherited a complete mess from the reformist Gierek who destroyed the Polish economy despite having little to no national debt from the Gomulka era.
>>2851786That was in 1988 and followed from his other bad decisions kneecapping the capacity of the USSR to conduct foreign policy.
so gobachev was a complete idiot or traitor.
why was the rest of the party going along with it? like why do they all just say "yeah okay sure let's strip class struggle from the party line"?
"Gorbachev did …." alone? nobody else worked along with him, he was a supreme dictator above all?
>>2851968>why was the rest of the party going along with it?They weren't after initially being relatively enthusiastic about his ascension, but by devolving authority away from the center he disempowered them. The only reason he kept them around at all was because he thought (paraphrasing here) he couldn't leave the rabid dogs off the leash.
>>2845206You're retarded uygha. You aren't supposed to do another NEP after industrializing. Gorbachev went to Sweden and shit and thought he could replicate the Social Democracy that was formed by USSR influence under a small homogeneous nation in the USSR.
>>2851829Gierek was a lion. Jaruzelski should have Rosa luxemburged Wałęsa, and since he didnt do that, he was a traitor to PZPR and the Polish People's Republic
Over 10 million people from 1991-2001 died from the USSR collapsing because of healthcare collapse and economic collapse across former soviet states btw.
>>2852104>>2852052Read collapse before posting.
>>2852281The price of freedom
>>2845206>This doesn't tell us anything about Lenin, who had been dead for decades, but it does tell you where LARPing as Lenin and treating Lenin like the biblical truth will take you.trvke
>>2849556gorb: dissolved the party
deng: did not
>>2851968most of the party agreed reform was necessary, and gorbachev was respected by many as one of andropovs apprentices. much of the party was out of touch with the general perspective and concerns of average soviet resident. the political culture had long been ossified into cliqueish yes-manning and bureaucratic webs of quid pro quo. the structure of the party had too little room for earnest debate, and collective decision making had largely been reduced to angling for career security and advancement of your clique, which meant minimizing personal risk and accountability. gorbachevs clique made use of the lack of intraparty democracy, the stagnation of political culture, and a wide desire for reforms, to assemble and push through a set of priorities and programs that not only degraded the partys own influene, but handed influence and legitimacy to competing seats of power in the republics and in industry.
>>2852301youve gotten a few replies from people whove reaad it arguing that the book is perfectly compatible with thinking gorb was a moronic incompetent, and to the extent he was a "committed leninist" it was only through his own mangling of lenin to fit a poorly conceived social democratic ideology that idealized the west
>>2845206>every move to empower the different nations of the USSR, which would ultimately lead to them all leavingWe see Ukraine today in a civil war that removed half of Ukraine's population simply because Ukraine pursues "united in indivisible" policy aka the shit that Whiteguards pursued in Russia during the Revolution and which made it so all the nationalities of Russia fought for communists.
>economic policies, which were inspired by the NEPWrong. NEP led directly into Stalinist economy, what Gorbachev did was prepare for privatization of assets via any kind of excuse imaginable to carry it out.
>>2851829not really he was an opportunist cuck, like most of the ppr leaders. i blame the ussr for destroying the kpp in the 30s and cursing poland to be ruled by mediocre managers for eternity.
>>2851361clarifying, i don't believe perestroika was the only or even best option, alternatives (nikolai shmevev/vladimir popov's proposals, OGAS, etc.) could've probably produced better outcomes for both it and glasnost specifically because they appreciated the social forms that made them work and didn't have to work off first principles (the NEP, early bolivarian revolution, yugoslavia, etc., imperfect as they were)
the supreme soviet was right to oppose gorbachev/yeltsin's austerity measures, their position vindicated by the appalling state of the former ussr today
>RSFSR doesn't have a president
>Yeltsin doesn't have the numbers in the RSFSR legislature to create the post (2/3 majority) or the money to run a Russia-wide referendum (which could bypass the need for a 2/3 majority)
>Gorbachev's stupid meaningless new union treaty referendum (useful only for going "look, nobody wanted the USSR to collapse!" on leftypol.org 40 years hence) solves this because they can just add an extra question about creating a RSFSR presidency to this referendum in Russia, which the legislature can do with a simple majority vote and which will cost them nothing. For good measure they tag on another question about maintaining the territorial integrity of the RSFSR and the authority of the Russian president over autonomous regions
Jesus fucking Christ, Collapse is just 600 pages of Gorbachev slamming his dick in a car door with the best of intentions but no fucking idea what he's doing
>>2853969exactly, but i think its a stretch to say he had the best of intentions. he was mainly ego-driven and wanted to be remembered as a great-man savior, a position that led him farther towards seeking out western and imperialist clout the more that the western media and diplomats humored him. the funniest part is the US & NATO didnt even particularly want, let alone expect, the USSR to collapse. better to have a unified 2nd rate power to equal parts exploit & compete against. not to say that the US didnt quickly jump on the decaying corpse of the soviets ofc.
that said i do pity him, hard not to when you read how regularly he fucked things up or stuck his head in the sand. i dont think he wanted things to be worse, my guess is that he just didnt have a sense of the real stakes involved & was equal parts delusional and self absorbed. he definitely wasnt the only incompetent moron high in soviet politics, and not the most incompetent, but there were also more competent and intelligent people trying to course correct at so many moments. and he climbed and sweet-talked for the job for most of his life. i feel pity just at the second hand embarassment but also incredulity & disgust
>>2854920i think you're both being too charitable to gorbachev's intentions and not appreciating the direction he walked through the river, let alone its thick mud and strong currents, gorbachev's biggest ideological inspiration toward the end was social democracy (late perestroika, new union treaty, 500 days programmem etc.) and both this and many of his failures are not entirely his but can also be laid at the feet of the soviet system that, even outside of it's disregard to even some of the most basic tenants of marx/engles' socialism, was byzantine and filled with self-interested bureaucrats and careerists, the very same that strangled ogas
>>2854953yeah wasnt even my intention to be particularly charitable but i get your point. im not even sure he sincerely believed in his brand of social democracy any more than he did his earlier brand of leninism. but if you read his later interviews and statements and can get past has contemptible his refusal of any accountability is, he did seem genuinely dishearted by the dissolution and the state of the former union states in the 90s going forward. thats not sympathetic but it does make him a bit more pitiable as a historical "character" compared to completely unfeeling snakes like yeltsin
>>2853969>presidency It needs to be said, that the office of President, was a pure Gorbachev creation, on the advice the traitor-wrecker Alexander Yakovlev. Yakovlev has advocated for a presidency multiple times, he got his wish in 1990.
There is a story of Yakovlev telling Anatoly Chernyaev, [in said man's diary], of Yakovlev convincing Gorbachev, of changing the political system, and taking loans from western countries.
>The Diary of Anatoly Chernyaev: January 28, 1990Chernyaev: On Monday there was PB, discussing the “CPSU Platform” composed by Skakh and me and edited by M.S. The level [of discussion] is hopelessly bad. Although Egor did “quiet down” and was not too aggressive, though he did say that he is strongly opposed to “a multiparty system.”
By the way, M.S. picked new secretaries for the PB: Usmanov, Stroev, Girenko, Manaenkov, etc. “Good guys.” But they shouldn’t be above the level of a mid-level oblast committee. Why should they be in the highest echelon? He himself keeps talking about intellectual potential!
We spent the whole day in his office. He did not give up his positions on the multi-party system and private property, but ordered that we make it “more rounded.” He agreed with me that the term “Marxism-Leninism” should not be allowed into the Platform.
The next day Shakhnazarov and I went back to Volynskoe—we had three days to work. Although he assigned the social-economic section to Boldin and Petrakov (a corresponding member, his new adviser), we still had to rework what they sent us.
The work was boisterous and exciting. We pretty much had to rewrite the main parts of the text; not without some Shakhnazarov-Chernyaev conflicts. But I was compromisingly stubborn and even declared to Zhorka—“then we will offer alternative texts: your version and my version.” M.S. laughed about this… Shakhnazarov has a very strong legalistic, jurisprudential “flux,” which separates him from Soviet realities and goes against Gorbachev’s tactics of introducing new (even purely Western) ideas without provoking the mastodons (this is not always good and proper, but on the whole it was this technique that brought success to democratization and glasnost)
Yesterday we presented the material to M.S. He went over it and the new draft was sent out to the PB. Yakovlev appeared at Volynskoe unexpectedly. At first I thought maybe M.S. sent him to manage over us for a bit. Turned out it was “worse…” In strict secrecy he told me that M.S. called him to his office twice, and once even came over to Yakovlev’s office himself.
He is frustrated, anxious, and lonely. Asking what to do with Azerbaijan, Lithuania, the economy, “radicals,” “social-democrats”… and people are on the edge.
What did Yakovlev say he told M.S. (and the latter listened)?
<Yakovlev: “You have to act. The biggest obstacle to perestroika and your entire politics is the Politburo, then the Plenum. There is no need to convene it so often. If you continue to delay taking power, everything will fall apart. In the next couple of weeks, maybe instead of the Supreme Soviet that is scheduled for the middle of February, you should convene a Congress of People’s Deputies and establish presidential power. Let the Congress elect you president.” (By the way, M.S. agreed with this in principle even in Novo-Ogarevo and the idea was even included in the second draft of the Platform, which was at the PB on January 22nd. But there wasn’t enough resolution to do it immediately, without delaying it till May or the fall).
<“Thus,” A.N. [Yakovlev] continued, “to concentrate the real, plenipotentiary State power in your hands, removing the Politburo and even the talkative Supreme Soviet from the levers of power.”
< Yakovlev: “In the next few days before the Plenum, which is now scheduled for February 5-6,” Yakovlev continued, “appear on TV and make a direct appeal to the people, accepting full responsibility for the truly emergency program according the formula: land to the peasants, factories to the workers, real independence for republics, not a Union state, but a union of states, multi-party system and the practical rejection of CPSU’s monopoly, large loans from the West, military reform—get rid of the generals and replace them with Colonels, recall troops from Eastern Europe, liquidate the Ministries, sharply reduce the apparatus—all forms of it, etc. Plus, special emphasis (in the TV speech) on a series of emergency economic measures (in principle— private enterprise; apparently, Slyunkov, who is in opposition to Ryzhkov-Maslyukov, has a preparatory paper on this)… Furthermore: start the process of replacing Ryzhkov. You cannot make any reforms with a Premier who thinks on the level of a factory director, with State Planning that was raised on the methods of the military-industrial complex.”
<Gorbachev: “And who instead?” M.S. asked Yakovlev
<Yakovlev: “There are plenty of people, you just have to take them more boldly, that’s what a revolution is for!” [leftypol poster: Fuck you, Yakovkev.]Yakovlev did not let me know what M.S. agreed with and what he didn’t. M.S. followed his usual course, telling Yakovlev to “go to Volynskoe, lock the doors there and don’t tell anyone a word. Take a couple trusted people with you who know how to write, and prepare a speech for TV, we’ll go from there.”
I responded to Yakovlev: in a word,
<Chernyaev: we are talking about a coup d’Etat here…
<Yakovlev: “Yes,” A.N. agreed. “And we cannot delay.” [leftypol poster: Now you see how dangerous this guy was.] Yakovlev is also very opposed to rescheduling the Party Congress to June. M.S. agreed to this at the meeting of workers and engineer-technical personnel in the Kremlin on January 18-19th.
Yakovlev is against it because the apparatus together with the “working class” will send to the Congress the kind of people who will break the necks of both Gorbachev and perestroika too. The Congress will oppose itself to the parliament and we will have chaos… In general, Yakovlev is proposing that the Party is “pushed aside” right now—let it go down the path of the SED and the CPCz, PUWP, i.e. to fall apart or turn into one of the social-democratic parties (Yu. Afanas’ev already created an association of social-democratic parties in Tallinn), etc. A rebellion has indeed started in the party, but as they say, it is ambiguous: the Leningrad affair, Bogomyakov was expelled in Tyumen, in Volgograd it was Kalashnikov. The CC apparatus in Baku expelled Vezirov from the Party. But who is replacing them? Younger and worse people— anti-Gorbachev representatives of the very “working class,” the mythology of which Gorbachev can’t seem to shake.
Gorbachev is hesitating… Thus, the coming week (the CC Plenum (5-6 th), if it’s not cancelled) could be decisive. It could… but most likely will not be. But we really cannot delay any longer.
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