/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

The referendum didn't mean shit. It was another retarded move by the imbecile-in-chief Gorbachev intended to save the Union he had already doomed, but in fact gave the opponents of the Union's continued existence another set of shovels to dig its grave.

The question was:
>Do you consider necessary the existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedoms of all persons of all nationalities will be fully guaranteed?
What the fuck does this even mean? It's like they were too afraid to ask "Do you want [SR] to secede from the Soviet Union?", because it might not have gone their way. The additional questions added by the SRs make things even more questionable.
>Almost all the participating republics conducted the referendum in their own way. In Kazakhstan and Ukraine, the very question was altered and was even more ambiguous than the one proposed by Gorbachev. The majority in those two republics voted “Yes” in favor of their sovereign republics joining “a union of sovereign states.” In other words, they could proceed with full independence, but then join some kind of a commonwealth without a federal government. Ukraine’s Supreme Soviet added another question to the national question, asking the population to vote on its July 1990 declaration of sovereignty. The majority of Ukraine’s voters approved the declaration; they supported the “anti-constitutional” move that Gorbachev’s referendum was supposed to counter. And three Western regions in Ukraine held their own local referendum, in which people voted for secession from the USSR. The Ukrainian leadership, wrote the British ambassador during an official visit to Kiev on 20 March, was boosted by the referendum results; the majority in the republic had voted for the republic’s “sovereignty.” Kravchuk and others “radiate the feeling of confidence” in themselves and in their ideas of a future Ukraine.91This avalanche of referendums buried Gorbachev’s grand design almost entirely. Most crucially, Yeltsin and his supporters got what they wanted. The idea of the Russian Presidency received the support of 56,860,344 out of 79.7 million voters, three-quarters of the total. Some 21 million voted against the proposal. In Moscow and Leningrad, the support was 77.85 percent and 78.53 percent respectively—while only 50 percent of the same voters supported Gorbachev’s Union Treaty. In eighty-four autonomous regions of the Russian Federation, Yeltsin’s project won by a solid majority. This outcome affirmed his policy of preventing national separatism within the Russian Federation. Only three autonomous regions, among them the Tatar autonomous republic (renamed “Tatarstan”), held their own referendums and did not participate in the Russian one.92 For Yeltsin and Democratic Russia, as one retrospective assessment went, “the referendum campaign was a rehearsal for the presidential campaign.”93 The thrust of this campaign was against Gorbachev. Voting down “Gorbachev’s Union,” as Democratic Russia leaflets read, would mean support “for our Fatherland, the toil and blood of our ancestors, our Nation, Faith, and for our future.”
So if anything, it seemed like the masses were listened to just fine. They voted YES to "equally sovereign republics", not YES to "the existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics".

>>2928605
The referendum was a farce. Ukraine for example voted for an independent military, currency, fiscal policy, etc, but totally in the union you guys!! Other republics pulled similar stunts.

Gorbachev would be your argument against it, and his mere election is a condemnation of the entire ruling class. China got it right and the USSR blundered itself to death.

>>2928630
And to answer your clearly written and unambiguous question, yes. The way the Soviet state was set up allowed for the emergence of a situation where a couple of dudes could write the Union out of existence in the woods of Belarus.

How is this a deboonk of demcent rather than an affirmation of it?

>>2928630
>imbecile-in-chief Gorbachev
Nah, he was the end-result of the bureaucratic shithole that was the USSR.
God bless you, Mr. Gorbachev. Without you, the state would have never withered away.

>>2928672
Zubok makes the point that there were alternative paths and that it was really the disastrously ill informed reforms initiated by Gorbachev that overdetermined the collapse. I'm not sure if they could have managed to stabilise the situation and overcome systemic flaws with the more conservative reforms intended by Andropov or a shift to a Chinese-style state capitalism, but I do think Gorbachev being a retard played a major part whether this was the inevitable finale of Soviet socialism or not. Maybe putting this much blame on everybody's least favourite GenSec is a bit too great-man-theory-ish, but whatever.

>>2929040
This makes Gorbachev look even better, omg.
THANK YOU MR. GORBACHEV FOR FINALLY WITHERING THE STATE AWAY.

>>2929042
Present state of things: aufgeheben

>>2928605
I think it's evidence against hyper centralization. The CPC claim's their political system is too decentralized for a Gorbachev or a Yakovlev to wreck things the way that they did.

As the wrecker Yakovlev said himself: "The Soviet totalitarian regime can only be destroyed through glasnost and the totalitarian discipline of the party, while hiding behind the interests of improving socialism."

Love how MLkiddies always focus on Gorby as the "big bad guy", while ignoring the two decades of stagnation under Brezhnev, where only the military was properly funded, and civil society was left to rot with outdated means of production, inefficient production methods, shit wages and shit commodities.
Working under the table was common place, and cynicism was the prevalent mood among proles, nobody believed in the official party ideology anymore.

The top-level of bureaucracy until Gorbachev were dying boomers like Andropov (who promoted Gorbachev in the first place) and Chernenko who barely reformed anything, while the Western bloc was undergoing deep transformations.
Add to that the rise of movements like Solidarność in Poland and then the 1986 Riga protests in Latvia, and basically everybody knew the Western bloc won the Cold War by the 1980s, and Gorbachev had no choice but to deeply reform the USSR.

He certainly could've done it better, so a clown like Yeltsin couldn't have been allowed to completely destroy and impoverish Russia by privatizing everything and offering state companies to a new class of oligarchs for peanuts, but if there is someone to blame for the collapse of the USSR, it's Brezhnev, not Gorbachev.
Let's face it, you might seethe at Khrushchev for being a "revisionist" and some Carlylist nonsense about him betraying Stalin, but he was the last leader of the USSR to actually give a shit about civil society and the production process outside of the military sector. After Brezhnev and his clique of boomers couped him, the USSR was done for.

>>2929095
They don't want you to know the Dnipro mafia brought the USSR to its knees and is still working to this day as the hand behind zelensKKKy

>>2929095
All Gorbachev did was hasten the inevitable. Like what was the alternative? Stagnate into irrelevancy? The USSR was rotten from the start because of the nomenklatura. This began under Lenin and was cemented by Stalin. Khrushchev tried to fragment the nomenklatura, but Brezhnev's dumbass couped him.

>>2929103
I mean he could have done Glasnost but not Perestroika

>>2929141
>I mean he could have done Glasnost but not Perestroika
"Glasnost" was worse than Perestroika. "Glasnost" was a state driven campaign organized by Yakovlev and the liberal intelligentsia against the Soviet people.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220718180837/http://www.soviet-empire.com/ussr/viewtopic.php?f=110&t=52073

Perestroika [which mean restructuring] was somewhat inevitable, but the form that would take would have been different if it was anyone else in the 85 politburo. No one in that politburo would have created a presidency, or do way with article 6 of the constitution. And I doubt anyone else other than Gorby, would have had the same delusions that he had with the west.

Gorbachev is historical evidence against Marxism-Leninism

Liberals are wrong that you can vote against elite interest. Anarchists are wrong you can have an agricultural let alone industrial society without elites. MLs are wrong that elites from the lower classes won't act like other elites eventually. Tech-optimists are wrong that AI can serve above elite interest.

So who's right?

>>2929392
Maybe no one is right and no one will ever be right

>>2928644
How would you have prevented it?

>>2929040
the USSR was unironically determined by great man theory more than most countries.

without lenin coming back and writing the april theses, the bolsheviks would have just gone along with the february revolution and the provisional government indefinitely, because at least it's not tsarism

without gorbachev being a fuckup, the USSR wouldn't have died in the horrible way it did

without stalin, the entirety of 1927-1953 would have been completely different.

>>2929592
The whole point against great man theory is that other people would've filled those roles instead in a determinist view of history, not "what if I removed that person with time travel power before they did their great thing"

>>2929161
>arvhice link
Do you happen to have the PDF mentioned in that post? It seems much better for reading.

>>2928605
>>literally ALL the republics voted to maintain the USSR
that is not true

>>2929628
Yep. Here you go.

Alexander Yakovlev, Glasnost, and the Destruction of Soviet Societal Consciousness by Soviet78 [PDF version]

>>2929592
Great individuals have their place in history objectively, but that don't come from nowhere. Nor can they conjure things because of some "great quality". Material and structural forces always have the primary role in historical development.

>Stalin: Yes, of course, Peter the Great did much to elevate the landlord class and develop the nascent merchant class. He did very much indeed to create and consolidate the national state of the landlords and merchants. It must he said also that the elevation of the landlord class, the assistance to the nascent merchant Class and the consolidation of the national state of these classes took place at the cost of the peasant serfs, who were bled white.

>As for myself, I am just a pupil of Lenin's, and the aim of my life is to be a worthy pupil of his. The task to which I have devoted my life is the elevation of a different class-the working class. That task is not the consolidation of some "national" state, but of a socialist state, and that means an international state; and everything that strengthens that state helps to strengthen the entire international working class. If every step I take in my endeavor to elevate the working class and strengthen the socialist state of this class were not directed towards strengthening and improving the position of the working class, I should consider my life purposeless.

>So you see your parallel does not fit.

>As regards Lenin and Peter the Great, the latter was hut a drop in the sea, whereas Lenin was a whole ocean.

>Ludwig: Marxism denies that the individual plays an outstanding role in history. Do you not see a contradiction between the materialist conception of history and the fact that, after all, you admit the outstanding role played by historical personages?

>Stalin: No, there is no contradiction here. Marxism does not at all deny the role played by outstanding individuals or that history is made by people. In Marx's The Poverty of Philosophy and in other works of his you will find it stated that it is people who make history. But, of course, people do not make history according to the promptings of their imagination pr as some fancy strikes them. Every new generation encounters definite conditions already existing, ready-made when that generation was born. And great people are worth anything at all only to the extent that they are able correctly to understand these conditions, to understand how to change them. If they fail to understand these conditions and want to alter them according to the promptings of their imagination, they will land themselves in the situation of Don Quixote. Thus it is precisely Marx's view that people must not be counterposed to conditions. It is people who make history, but they do so only to the extent that they correctly understand the conditions that they have found ready-made, and only to the extent that they understand how to change those conditions. That, at least, is how we Russian Bolsheviks understand Marx. And we have been studying Marx for a good many years.

>Ludwig: Some thirty years ago, when I was at the university, many German professors who considered themselves adherents of the materialist conception of history taught us that Marxism denies the role of heroes, the role of heroic personalities in history.

>Stalin: They were vulgarizers of Marxism. Marxism has never denied the role of heroes. On the contrary, it admits that they play a considerable role, hut with the reservations I have just made.

>>2929738
>the footnotes are the same text size as the main text
reeeeeeeee

>>2929754
I didn't put the PDF it together. Besides, the footnotes provide excellent citations and sources.

[Book image from Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power: The Post-Stalin Era by bourgeois liberal historian Vladimir Shlapentokh.]

the irony of justifying a vanguard of the proletariat by stalling that the latter are too stupid to dictate themselves as, without exception, power immediately sees the former strive to become porkies or take as many with them as they can trying
>zubok's could've, would've, shou-
great man polsci babble aside, who cares? you get porky paradise w/o meaningful democracy beyond the local level #1917 except they mortar fuckups instead of giving them KKKongreSSional seats to make western leftists calling other western leftists western leftists soy face because why read readily translated chinese journals, or russian in this fairytale

democratic centralism is a big meme that meant nothing post-10th congress and hasn't meant anything since

>>2929993
What’s your positive alternative? Sortition? Anarchism? Mandatory rotating political work for every proletarian?

>>2929999
the worker's/military opposition and democratic centralists had (mostly) the right idea, having relinquished the more unserious bolshevik left-communist positions of 1918 in favour of something actually founded in a popular base, practical experience and strong theorists, e.g. shlyapnikov, kollontai, etc., trade union question aside (which i think they could've gone even further w/regarding factory committees but, even with that said, the metalworkers' union's platform was better than that of the 10 or any of trotSSKKKy's proposals) but by 1928 the union was moreorless set on the course to gorbachev

There surely exists a better timeline in which there is no "August Coup". Because the CPSU manages to launch the nukes, instead. And rightfully plunges this traitorous world into the cold darkness it deserves.

Billions should have died.

>>2930213
communism is when you kill people

>>2929995
It was inevitable because they were capitalists from the start. Lenin is rotting in hell for creating the USSR and setting workers back thousands of years.

>>2930248
no that's capitalism get your definitions correct

>>2928630
This book was nice
My favorite part was when shit was collapsing and everyone was begging gorb to take emergency powers, even Yakovlev, but he was like "I don't know that would be fucked up, I don't think Lenin would do that."

>>2930680
>Please ignore the capitalist imperial powers that set workers back
Yeah, like getting on a train organized by WW1 German imperialists

>>2930692 (me)
This uygha helped organize BOTH Lenin's return to Russia and Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch. The more you know.

some senile cowboy actor tells you to tear down a wall and you fold like laundry and do it? what kind of man are you mr gorbachev?