The revival of Russian communism
- By Heiko Khoo
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China.org.cn, December 8, 2011
![Weak pole [By Jiao Haiyang/China.org.cn]](http://images.china.cn/attachement/jpg/site1007/20111208/001372acd0b5104abcc903.jpg "Weak pole [By Jiao Haiyang/China.org.cn]") |
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Weak pole [By Jiao Haiyang/China.org.cn] |
It is fifty years since Yuri Gagarin took mankind to the heavens, and twenty since the collapse of the Soviet Union. These events played a decisive role in the fate of humanity.
So the revival of the fortunes of the Russian communists in the recent parliamentary election should be seen as an event of global significance. A horrified Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State, bemoans the continued strength of 'hardline communists', whose support is based on popular discontent with the consequences of the dissolution of the USSR.
The economic decline began in 1991 and it took ten years before the Russian economy returned to the same level of production. During this time the masses were impoverished, and the wealth produced by the blood and sweat of the Russian workers was swindled out of their hands by such means as voucher-based mass privatisation, which was followed by a wider transfer of state owned assets to private hands. This resulted in a tiny handful of oligarchs gaining personal ownership of the nation's natural resources and monopolies. The business class engaged in massive capital flight, laundering their money through Western markets.
The end of collectivism and the rise of capitalism acted like an epidemic stalking the nation, former communist countries underwent the world's worst peacetime mortality crisis in the past 50 years, resulting in millions of additional male deaths in the 1990s. To this day, life expectancy in Russia is below that of 1961, when Gagarin flew to space in the era of hope, collectivism and dignity.
In 1961, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union worked out plans to overtake the USA by 1980, laying the basis for a 6-hour working day, free housing, transport, energy and a society of abundance. The dreams of the early 1960s were not realised, due to the over-nationalisation of the economy, combined with corresponding bureaucratic structures of economic coordination, which generated lethargy and passivity instead of dynamism and innovation. Prices were unresponsive to market impulses, and the poor quality and quantity of consumer goods reinforced a tendency towards general social listlessness. When capitalism took power in the 1990s, the social benefits of the universal planning system in health, education, housing, and scientific development were systematically eradicated; the resistance against this destruction was minimal.
The government under President Yeltsin did all it could to assist the plunder of national resources, claiming that shock therapy was required to rapidly install a new ruling class, for fear that gradual change would provoke a Communist comeback. In the presidential elections of 1996, the oligarchic entourage mobilised their finance and resources to ensure that Yeltsin scraped to victory against the Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov. Widespread fraud was used assist this electoral victory, but Western leaders expressed no concerns about this and declared the vote to be 'free and fair'.
An economic collapse in 1998, connected with the Asian financial crisis, saw the Russian currency devalued and savings collapse. Yeltsin stepped down in 1999, handing the Presidency to Vladimir Putin, who presided over an era of booming state revenues. He reordered relations between political power and the oligarchs, demanding that the billionaires refrain from direct political opposition. Bolstered by a rise in energy prices, Russian GDP returned to 1991 levels in 2001 and then nearly doubled in size, before the world economic crisis hit in 2008. Economic growth brought real improvements in living standards, a reduction in unemployment and a halving of the number of those living in poverty.
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