The rich privileges that make Kremlin leaders

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JOHN O'MAHONY summarises some rect about bureaucratic privileges in the USSR Ibombs !

North West Youth CND and Labour Party Young Socialists branches are organising a Jobs Not Bombs march from Manchester to Blackpool on September 23 to 27, finishing with a lobby of Labour Party conference.

Details. Youth March, Barnes Wallis Building, UMIST, Sackville St, Manchester (061 236 MANY millions of workers throughout the world believe that the Soviet Union is socialist.

In the last fifty years, the very idea of socialism as understood, for example, Marx and Lenin, has been scaled down and turned inside out to fit what exists in the USSR.

But the USSR and the other states more or less modelled on it are in no sense socialist. Socialism is the self-rule and self-organisation of the working class. In the Stalinist-ruled societies, the working class is savagely repressed by a bureaucratically organised ruling elite which has vast social and economic privileges.

In some of their features, the USSR and its replicas are more distant from socialism than a capitalist society like Britain. Leon Trotsky, who remained a defender of the Soviet Union against capitalist restoration to the day he died at the hands of Stalin's assassins, wrote this stark comparison into the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International in 1938:

"As in fascist countries, from which Stalin's political apparatus does not differ save in more unbridled savagery, only preparatory propagandistic work is possible today in the USSR".

Rule

He was not saying that the USSR was fascist. He polemicised vigorously against any such notion. He was recording and summing up what existed in the USSR under the rule of the bureaucracy. He was preaching to the revolutionary socialists whom he was trying to org. anise in the Fourth International, mortal class hatred of those who rule in the USSR.

For though the nationalised property established by the October Revolution continues to be the basis of the social system in the USSR, there has been a political counter-revolution.

The caste of bureaucrats, entrenched within the totalitarian political structure which Trotsky compared unfavourably to fascism, has DOMOO •C• 9114 or 4905). But the bureaucrat's shelves are seized control of the state and of all the commanding heights of society and the economy.

The society they lord it over is post-capitalist. The roots of its system of collectivised property are in the great working class revolution of 1917. But they rule over it in their own way, in their own interests.

They plunder and rob the working people. They maintain a savage police state, to keep the working class down and to defend their privileges.

Hard facts about this bureaucratic elite are rare. The bureaucracy rules in the dark and pretends that its privileges do not exist.

Now the Sunday Times has published excerpts from a forthcoming book by Konstantin Simis, a Russian layer expelled from the USSR in 1977. Simis, who was himself part of the elite, paints a picture based on direct knowledge and experience of the privilege and corruption.

He points out that though the media in the stacked high USSR are forbidden to provide details of the life style of the privileged, there is nevertheless widespread awareness of it: the 'fat cats' depend on a vast network of cooks, chauffeurs, bodyguards, and personal seryants, and these talk.

He makes the following assessment of comparative wages:

"The average monthly wage for manual and office workers, according to official data in 1979, is 164 roubles, before taxes. Aceording to my own calculations, however, the minimum required for a family of three to live modestly is 250 roubles, about £189. (I use my own figures here because the official statisties are secret.

At the same time the salary of the minister of defence or the president of the Academy of Sciences (2000 roubles a month) is almost 30 times the legal minimum wage of 70 roubles a month.

If all the legalised perquisites given to a minister or an academy president are also taken into account, then without exaggeration a minister's monthly income will run to as much as 4000 roubles - at least 60 times the minimum wage paid to a manual or office worker".

Higher floors

Simis cites his own experience as a research assistant the Institute of Soviet Legislation. "For 80 to 90 kopeks I could get breakfast in the second floor snack bar in the presidium building) which was better than any I might find in a good restaurant for 4 or 5 roubles. But on the second floor we could not get either Americ. an cigarettes or Scotch whisky: they were available only on the highest floors.

The higher the floor, therefore, the lower the prices, and the wider and more luxurious the range of available merchandise".

Members of the Politburo have a better deal still: "without restriction and completely free of charge, they can get anything they want in limitless quantity"

"Each Politburo member has his own personal palace on the Black Sea in the Crimea or in the Caucasus and in the neighbourhood of Mscow, although they are not the private property of the official. These palaces stand in huge parks and are serviced by staffs of cooks, chauffeurs, gardeners, hairdressers, doctors and gamekeepers and so on.

They are screened by high walls surmounted with barbed wire, by high tension wires, and by photoelectric surveillance systems. Armed agents in the command of the special section of the KGB's Central Office keep guard round the clock in the palaces and their grounds".

In short the bureaucrats have their own 'economy' within the economy that serves the working class - a private "socialism' within mass deprivation and protected by savage repression.

The workers, of course, are forbidden to organise trade unions to defend themselves (the official 'trade unions' , with which the TUC maintains links, are not in any sense unions, but part of the apparatus of police-state control over the workers -just what they were in Poland until the 1980 workers' revolt pushed them aside).

The ruling caste also gets goods denied to the working class:

"Among the privileges which come with the membership of the highest levels of the ruling caste, the most important of all is a secure private supply of food and such daily necessities as clothes, shoes and so forth.

Since the forced collectivisation in the late '20s and early '30s, the entire country has constantly suffered from a shortage of food. Ine ruling elite, however, which is concentrated in the main in Moscow, gets its supplies through the Kremlyovskaya Stolovaya (the 'Kremlin canteen'), which can be used only by people with special passes: in other words, the members of the elite, their families, and their servants.

People with access to the Kremlyovka are divided into two categories: those in the first category are given a monthly voucher 80 roubles, those in the second get 140 roubles. These vouchers can be used... to pay for meals in the Kremlin dining room, at which the diner is also given a package of food for breakfast and lunch, as it is officially known...

But few recipients of dining room vouchers use them in this way. With the same 80 roubles worth of vouchers, an official can buy in the Kremlin stores enough food to feed a family of four for a month, with complete, first. rate meals (including caviar and other expensive delicacies such as brandy, wine ano high-grade vodka)"

Variants of this system of privileges exist throughout the USSR for the local elites.

Is the Stalinist elite then a ruling class!

Leon Trotsky once put it like this:

"The Soviet oligarchy possesses all the vices of the old ruling classes but lacks their historical mission".

It is rapacious, parasitic, savage in its own defence. It came to power in a bloody and one-sided civil war. As Trotsky described it:

"The substance of the [Stalinist political counterrevolution] was, and could not fail to be social in character. It stood for the crystallisation of a new privileged stratum 1920s] there were two pretenders to this role: the petty bourgeoisie [merchants, small capitalists and rich farmers and. the bureaucracy itself. They fought shoulder to shoulder against the resistance of the proletarian vanguard When that task was accompl ished [1927-8] a savage struggle broke out between them...

¡The bureaucracy made al concerted effort to present its struggle against the petty bourgeoisie for the surplus products and for power as the struggle of the proletariat against attempts at capitalistic restoration...

The new social basis of the Soviet Union became You know, Yuri, I'm not getting any younger. and soon power must pass to Stalin paramount. To guard the nationalisation of the means of production and of the land, is the bureaucracy's law of life and death, for these are the social sources of its dominant position. That was the reason for its struggle against the kulak...

The bureaucracy took for itself that part of the national income which it could seize either by the exercise of force or of its authority or by direct intervention in economic relations. In the matter of the national surplus product the bureaucracy and the petty bourg. eoisie quickly turned from alliance to enmity. The control of the surplus product opened the bureaucracy's road to power".

In fact the only thing the ruling elite lacks to make it a ruling class is that which has made ruling classes progressive for their time and place: a necessary and irreplaceable role in the economy.

Class?

The capitalist class, for example, developed the once historically progressive capit alist system. The bureaucracy in the USSR did nothing comparable.

There was a political counter-revolution against the working class within the collectivised system set up by the workers' revolution.

The bureaucracy is wrecking the economic system - which demands consoious planning and control by those who operate it -rather than allow the workers to control society.

It copies the greed and viciousness of old ruling classes, but lacks both stability and social legitimacy because it is in sharp antagonism with the economic system. The electrified barbed wire expresses their real relationship with Russian society, and in the first place with the working class.

Simis brings this out clearly. Discussing the fact of widespread personal corruption at the top of the bureaucracy, he asks why do people with such privileges take bribes?

He thinks the first and most important reason:

.. is the fact that none of the material benefits showered on a member of the ruling elite actually belongs to him: he owns no thing.

The dacha [country house], the chauffeur-driven car, access to the Kremlyor. ka - it all belongs to the state, and he enjoys it only while he occupies his official position. If he loses his position in the ruling apparatus, he automatically - literally the next day - loses every. thing that was his".

Collectively the bureaucracy have the privileges of a ruling class. But the individual bureaucrat has no owner ship rights. This is not a fully developed ruling class but an unstable and crisis-ridden gang of parasites whose privileges rest on their jealously protected monopoly of political power and the social power that arises from it.

The economic system on which they rest will be cleaned ap and restored to the rule of the workers in the USSR. The workers' revolt in Poland - as in Hungary before that -showed how: by a workers' political revolution against the bureaucracy.

The workers of the USSR will take back the nationalis. ed property, which is a potential basis for democrat ic workers' self rule and as such must be defended against any attempt by imperialism to overthrow it.

We must help the workers of the USSR against the vicious parasites. Information such as Simis's needs to be spread in the labour movement, where there are many illusions in the 'socialism' of the USSR, China, Cuba, etc, and some of the best militants are infected to one degree or another by Stalinism. (Even many self. proclaimed Trotskyists in the IMG have now come out as uncritical worshippers of the Stalinist state in Cuba).

And we need to give every practical help we can to aid the workers in the Stalinist states in developing their own organisations. The TUC should break off all connections with the policewhich protects the 'fat cats. of the Moscow Kremlin and the other Kremlins.

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Socialist Organiser no. 101 September 23 1982 Page 12

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‚Inhs Job 10U

the younger men of your generation.

state 'unions' that are part of the totalitarian apparatus

ISAD POWER MUST PASS TOTHE YOUNGER MEN OF YOUR GENERATION!