The bureaucracy imagined it would rule, like tsarism, for a thousand years. Yet, in a very short space of time, all its dreams turned to dust. In only two and a half generations, the bureaucracy had utterly exhausted any progressive role it may have played in the past. From a relative fetter on the development of society, it had become transformed into an absolute fetter. Thus, what was beginning to look like a fixed and permanent order of things now stood exposed for what it always was – a temporary historical aberration which was doomed to be swept away in the coming period. By the late 1970s, all the chickens came home to roost.

Just take the following example from a key sector of the Soviet economy. The old gas and oilfields were becoming depleted, but the USSR had almost unlimited resources in west Siberia alone, which they could not develop. Why? In one year alone, in 1983, 20 per cent of Soviet oil wells were out of action because of lack of repairs, incompetent management and shortage of labour. This was 2,000 more wells than anticipated. Why was there a labour shortage for work on the oil rigs? Bureaucratic planning concentrated everything on production but often neglected housing and recreation facilities for workers. Such things were usually given low priority. Given the fact that the oil and coal in Russia is often situated in the most remote and inhospitable regions, it is not surprising that many workers did not want to go there. In spite of high wages, there was a high labour turnover.

In the last decades, the ruling clique tried all manner of combinations involving decentralisation, recentralisation, re-decentralisation. To no avail. Some, like Isaac Deutscher, imagined that the bureaucracy was going to reform itself out of existence. Vain hope! The privileged ruling caste was prepared to do anything for the working class – except get off its back! A modern economy producing one million different commodities each year could not be organised properly without the conscious control and participation of the majority of society. But the introduction of a regime of workers’ democracy would have immediately spelt the end of the power and privileges of the bureaucracy, which they could not accept.

More than 30 years ago, we explained that every year anything between 30 and 50 per cent of the wealth produced by the Soviet workers was lost through bureaucratic mismanagement, theft and corruption. By the mid-1970s, as we have seen, the rate of economic growth had been lower than the major capitalist powers in the period of the world economic upswing or even in some years of economic decline. In 1979 the GDP grew by 0.9 per cent, in 1980 1.5 per cent, and about 2.5 per cent in 1981 and 1982. The bureaucracy acted as a gigantic brake on the economy, which had been slowing down for decades, weighed down by the burden of parasitism, chaos and outright sabotage.

Rampant corruption and crime represented a cancer which riddled the body of Soviet society from top to bottom. The shameless looting of the state by the bureaucracy was well documented and numerous examples appeared in the Soviet press. In 1984 the manager of Gastronom Number One, a high-class food store in central Moscow, was shot for corruption. When police dug up his garden they found bundles of rotting roubles he had not had time to spend. By the late 1970s, things had gone so far that there was a black market, not only in blue jeans and ballpoint pens, but in steel, coal and oil. This was known in the West as ‘the parallel market’. And woe betide the manager who tried to ignore it!

There was a case reported in the Soviet press of the manager of a department store, a model member of the Komsomol, who announced to his assembled staff on the first day that he would not tolerate any stealing, corruption or blat[1], and that only the official state prices must be paid for deliveries. Within a week, the store faced bankruptcy. No goods were delivered and the shelves were empty. The manager drew the necessary conclusion and fell into line with the accepted practices. There were millions of such examples.

In the early 1980s, Soviet society had reached a complete blind alley. The whole of the bureaucratic system was on a knife edge. Not only in social relations but in the development of industry too, the contradictions between the economic basis of the Soviet Union and the role of its bureaucratic leadership had become extreme. The ruling bureaucracy was split in several directions over which path to take. The mass movement of the Polish workers around Solidarity in 1980-81, with its clear revolutionary potential, was a warning of the processes that could take place in Russia if nothing was done. Even the aged Brezhnev, hoping to dissipate the discontent that was beginning to build up, was stirred into berating the so-called Soviet trade union leaders for not ‘representing’ the interests of their workers. The ruling elite was clearly worried.

The sclerotic nature of the system was graphically reflected in the geriatric leadership which became a standing joke. Brezhnev was artificially kept alive by the Kremlin doctors and specialists when he was clearly a walking corpse. This was no accident. The ruling elite was deeply divided and worried about the future. They feared that the death of Brezhnev would open up the floodgates. When he finally went the way of all flesh, they first settled on Yuri Andropov, who appeared to be a substantial figure, with his background in the KGB. Paradoxically, this meant that he was more in touch with reality, since in a totalitarian state the secret police are almost the only ones who are well informed. It is probable that he realised how dangerous the situation had become and was planning some kind of reform from above. But Andropov died unexpectedly in 1984. The ruling elite then settled on Konstantin Chernenko as a compromise candidate, but he let them down by dying only one year later. The succession was thus left open to the younger Mikhail Gorbachev, who had been promoted by Andropov.

This consummate representative of the ruling elite was quite prepared to strike blows against a section of the bureaucracy upon which he rested in order to preserve the power, perks and prestige of the ruling caste as a whole. In the same way, for more than a century, Russian tsarism frequently attempted to preserve itself by administrative reforms, such as the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, balancing between the classes, at times attacking the interests of sections of the bureaucracy and the gentry and even attempting to lean on the ‘people’ in order to do so.

The election of Gorbachev as Party secretary in 1985 proved to be a turning point. Gorbachev’s speech at the 27th Congress of the Communist Party, together with his speech to the January 1987 plenum of the Central Committee, marked a new stage in the process. Speeches by Kremlin leaders attacking corruption, waste and inefficiency were nothing new, but Gorbachev’s reforms went much further than anything put forward in the previous 30 years. He called for a loosening of the bureaucratic stranglehold in the economy and in Russian society generally. Gorbachev advocated greater ‘democracy’, the election under certain conditions of factory managers, elections within the Communist Party and other such reforms. These attempts to reform the Stalinist system were seen as necessary to loosen up the economy and provide an impetus to economic growth. This process took place under the banner of glasnost, and perestroika.

These proposals were nothing to do with genuine workers’ democracy, which is incompatible with the bureaucratic system, but were simply aimed at removing the worst log jams in the stagnant Soviet economy. The crisis of the Soviet economy, the split in the bureaucracy that these measures of ‘reform’ represented, were symptomatic of the turbulent period that was unfolding in the Soviet Union. In his campaign to reform the system, Gorbachev partially lifted the lid off a seething cauldron of corruption, crime and discontent throughout all the Republics of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev realised that the situation could not continue without the danger of a social explosion. Enormous discontent had accumulated within Soviet society. Thousands of examples of corruption had been given in the Soviet press.

In his report to the 27th Party Congress, Gorbachev justifiably boasted that in the last 25 years:

The fixed production assets of our economy have increased seven times over. Thousands of enterprises have been built and new industries created. The national income has gone up nearly 300 per cent, industrial production 400 per cent and agriculture 70 per cent. Before the war, and in early post-war years, the level of the US economy appeared to us hard to attain, but it was really in the 1970s that we have come substantially close to it in terms of our scientific, technical and economic potential and had even surpassed it in the output of certain key items. These achievements are the result of tremendous effort by the people. They enabled us to enhance considerably the well-being of Soviet citizens…

However, Gorbachev was compelled to admit:

At the same time difficulties began to build up in the economy in the 1970s, with the rates of economic growth declining visibly. As a result, the targets for economic development set in the CPSU programme and even the lower targets of the 9th and 10th Five-Year Plans were not attained. Neither did we manage to carry out fully the social programme charted for this period. A lag ensued in the material basis of science, education, health protection, culture and everyday services … the economy, which has enormous resources at its disposal, ran into shortages. A gap appeared between the needs of society and the attained level of production, between the effective demand and supply of goods.

Gorbachev also exposed the chronic bureaucratic waste in the agricultural sector:

Reducing crop and livestock produce losses during harvesting, transportation, storage and processing is the most immediate source of augmenting food stocks. We have no small potentialities in this respect; the addition to consumption resources could amount to as much as 20 per cent, and in the case of some products, to as much as 30 per cent. Besides, eliminating the losses would cost only between a third and one half as much as raising the same amount of produce.

He concluded:

Today the prime task of the party and the entire people is to resolutely reverse the unfavourable tendencies in the developing of the economy, to impart to it the due dynamism and to give scope to the initiative and creativity of the masses, to truly revolutionary change.

In an attempt to lean on the workers, demagogic attacks were made on the bureaucracy:

Owing to a slackening of control, and a number of other reasons (?), groups of people have appeared with a distinctive property mentality (?) and a scornful attitude to society. Working people have legitimately raised the question of rooting out such things. It is considered necessary in the immediate future to carry out additional measures against parasites, plunderers of socialist property, bribe-takers and all those who embark on a path foreign to the work-oriented nature of our system.

And again:

We are justifiably exasperated by all sorts of shortcomings and by those responsible for them … hack writers and idlers, grabbers and writers of anonymous letters, petty bureaucrats and bribe-takers. (Quoted in The Times, 26/6/86.)

It was admitted that Party leaders had “lost touch with life”, and that they encouraged “toadyism … and unbridled praise for people of rank”. (Daily Telegraph, 26/2/86.)

Cautiously, moving from above, Gorbachev encouraged an element of freedom of criticism, but always within the prescribed limits. The Soviet press was full of the most outrageous examples of the rapacity of these gangsters with their bloated salaries, official limousines and unchecked expense accounts. Slavishly the foreign Communist Party press had reprinted these stories without comment. The same people who for decades justified every crime of Stalinism, talking about the ‘wonders of socialism’ in the USSR now said precisely the opposite without so much as blinking.

  1. An untranslatable Russian word, originally derived from thieves’ slang, in Soviet parlance it signified the use of personal connections to obtain illicit gains.

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