Tensions that could undermine Kremlins leaders

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Tourist pictures of Soviet Tajik people at tea. but the reality is one of oppression and discrimination against Asiatics by Russian leaders. those involved in sculpture or evolving towards sculpture, both colour and the two dimensional surface were also rejected.

Malevich was the most important of the Suprematist painters and his work is represented in the exhibition by a number of canvasses and designs covering nearly two decades of work.

Productionism's demand that the artists become workers in society was interpreted differently by different artists. Some interpreted this in the spirit of Mayakovsky's call to make the streets into canvasses, some more prosaically. The stern apoliticism of Suprematism was bound to break up under such pressures and in time a number of Russian avant-garde artists, Kandinsky, Pevsner and, perhaps most importantly for the developments of Soviet art, Gabo, emigrated.

Most of those who stayed deserted the architectonics of Suprematism for architecture and design for use.

TRATULS Notwithstanding this development, the aesthetics of Suprematism and some of its utopianism survived in the theatric and film constructions, the posters of the Stenberg brothers, sculpturo-architectural projects like those of Tatlin, book designs like those of El Lissitzky and Rodchenko and in other areas of applied design.

The trouble with this exhibition is that it is not extensive enough to illustrate this range of development. Although Costakis' collection lof which this is only one-tenth) is huge, it - not unnaturally - tends to stick to conventional art forms like the easel painting, although the years covered by the collection were precisely those that saw a big departure from easel painting.

One reason why Costakis was able to amass such a vast and valuable collection was that when he began buying these pieces the artists and trends represented in the exhibition were considered by Stalinist officialdom to be for the most part "anti-proletarian" and worthless.

Plastov's "Collective Farm Threshing" - featured prominently in the 1959 Royal Academy exhibition of Russian painting — was more to the taste of the bureaucracy.

But while the mailed fist of Stalinism was decisive in irradicating the trends so vividly displayed in the Costakis collection, it must be admitted that the avant-garde artists' distance from the tastes of the masses had already prior to the stern edicts of the state's Socialist Realism placed the artists before the choice: applied art or no art.

How the Soviet artists faced up to the complex problems posed by the new society provides us with an exciting intellectual drama, and the Costakis exhibition gives us an insight into its dynamics. HARRY SLOAN reviews the novel "The Fall of the Russian Empire' by Donald James (Granada paperbacks).

FROM a best-selling novel entitled 'The Fall of the Russian Empire' most socialists would legitimately fear the worst. Par for the course would be naive, blood-curdling and exultant stories of the triumph of "Western democracy" over brutish, bureaucratic 'Marxists" possibly involving heroic deeds by the SAS or the US marines, or at the very least nerve-tingling exploits by some virile and promiscuous Western superspy.

But Donald James' novel is very different from this stereotype. The "Fall" he describes is one arising primarily from the internal contradictions of the bureaucratically mismanaged economy and totalitarian society; and the term "Empire" is not used to present the usual caricature of the USSR as an expansionist power bent upon "world domination" but to draw the analogy between the Kremlin's present-day oppression of national minorities and that of the Tsars prior to the 1917 revolution.

Though unashamedly a work of creative fiction (the 'action' begins in 1986 and is written as if it is a retrospective piece of historical research), James' story is pieced together on a foundation of real problems existing within the USSR.

First and foremost he draws attention to the national antagonisms produced by the Great Russian chauvinism of the Kremlin bureaucracy.

The novel looks at their implications, both for Soviet society as a whole; in which a whole patchwork of nations are forcibly held together, and in particular for the effectiveness and cohesion of the Soviet armed forces, which in the last resort las we have seen in Poland) form a vital line of defence for the bureaucracy against the working class.

This problem of chauvinism is by no means new. As a legacy of the old Tsarist regime, Great Russian chauvinism was vigorously combatted by Lenin: Stalin's brutal insensitivity to the feelings of the oppressed was a major factor in Lenin's conflicts with him in his dying days. James actually refers to 'the dying Lenin's prophetic denunciation of Joseph Stalin."

Yet it was Stalin at the head of the rising bureaucracy, who was to set the pace of policy towards the nationalities within the Soviet Union after Lenin's death.

By 1939, as Stalin, Hitler and other reactionaries bartered over the people and territory of the Ukraine, Trotsky was pointing to the legitimate grievances of the Ukrainian people, the dangerous growth of reactionary, Ukrainian nationalism, and raising the slogan for united, free and independent workers' and peasants' Ukraine."

•'The bureaucracy strangled and plundered the people within Great Russia too.But in the Ukraine, matters were further complicated by the massacre of national hopes. Nowhere did restrictions, purges, repressions and in general all forms of bureaucratic hooliganism assume such a murderous sweep as they did in the Ukraine in. the struggle against the powerful, deeply rooted longings of the Ukrainian masses for greater freedom and independence."

(1938-9 Writings, p.302)

Later Trotsky referred i to the "revolutionary national uprising which represents nothing else but a single segment of the political revolution" against the Kremlin.

Since that time, the Stalinist crimes against the non-Russian nationalities have been multiplied many times «over, with Stalin's wholesale deportation of the Crimean Tartars, repression of the Ukrainian uprising: 99d pect" nations occupied by Axis forces in the war.

And since the war the rising poulation of Asiatic nationalities within the USSR have formed a growing component of the Soviet Union's conscript armies, officered by a largely Russian High Command.

James' book is no Trotskyist text: it projects the emergence of a strident chauvinism amongst the Russian population of the USSR exarcerbating elements of alientation and revolt among the oppressed nationalities: and he sets such a scenario against a background of acute dislocation of the chronically mismanaged economy and a breakdown in the tottering Soviet agriculture industry.

As additional factors, he brings in the stresses and strains of sustaining the flagging Stalinist economies of Eastern Europe, a major shortfall in Soviet oil production, a slump in gold prices, and simmering leadership crisis in the Kremlin.

Goaded beyond endurance, Russian workers in Leningrad begin to organise clandestine unions: when the bureaucrats call in the troops they find their army divided, and as they step up the repression of political dissidents, creating once again vast gulag-style camps of the Stalin era, they create unwittingly a vast horde of utterly desperate opponents of the regime, made up again of chiefly the downtrodden and oppressed national minorities.

To produce his chronicle of upheaval and internal revolt, James is forced to overstate the various actually existing components of' the economic and social crisis in the USSR. He is also forced to understate the cohesion between the various wings of the Kremlin bureaucracy when faced with a crisis.

Yet his projection of the emergence of a Stalin-like veteran figure in the form of Semyon Kuba leaves out of account any possible top level opposition to a restoration of mass purges and slave labour camps.

But the novel is an interesting exercise in projecting the implications of present-day bureaucratic rule for the long-term stability of the Soviet Union.

It is also interesting in avoiding any identification of the "Soviet system" with Marxism and Communism. The leader of the Leningrad union movement, Joseph Densky is described as 'a communist". The defecting secret policeman, Letsukoy, who joins the opposition, is attracted not to Western "democracy" but to Densky's vision of communism.

And in the final cataclysmic chapters, the fall of the "Russian Empire" leads to no idealised conclusion, but to a chaotic, brutal picture of rape, pillage and destruction at the hands of the most bitter and alienated victims of Stalinist The picture, in short, is one of a form of "political revolution" produced by social and economic pressures but without revolutionary leadership or programme even on the level spontaneously developed by the Solidarnosc movement Poland. It does not topple, but rearranged the Kremlin bureaucracy.

In real life, we might reasonably expect the political gains and cruel lessons arising from the Polish events to figure prominently in the development of a mass workers' revolt in the USSR.

But the fact remains that we cannot rely on spontaneous social forces alone to create the movement for the overthrow of Stalinist rule: a Trotskyist poliical party is needed to fight for a perspective of restoring revolutionary rule by workers' councils and defence of the nationalised property relations after the defeat of the Kremlin bureaucracy.

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Socialist Organiser no. 154, November 10 1983 Page 10