- From Soviet Globalism to Russian Imperialism
- Lost Globalisation
- Soviet Elites Reverting to a Ruling Class
- Talking Turkey
Was the Soviet collapse a failure of socialism? Or a failure from the 1960s of the strongest single socialist state? A failure caused by rival nationalisms, and a reluctance to move on from 1930s visions?
At a time when many Westerners cooed over Francis Fukuyama’s promise that the Soviet collapse meant that everyone would now accept Western liberal capitalism, I thought otherwise:
“The Post-1956 Failure of Pro–Moscow Communism…
“Back in the days before Khrushchev the CP were the local representative of the crude, repressive but often highly effective World State that Stalin & Co. were trying to build. There was a real popular link between this growing World State and large numbers of working people, as well as any number of disaffected intellectuals. It was a democracy of sorts, and one that looked set to remake the world along the lines originally envisaged by Lenin.
“Khrushchev destroyed this democracy in 1956. He created as much confusion among Communists as the Pope would create among Catholics if he were to say that Jesus was not after all the Son of God. In no sense did Khrushchev encourage the rank and file of World Communism to start thinking seriously about their own past. Some people mistakenly saw him as meaning this – the Hungarians, for instance, whom he crushed with tanks later on in 1956. The reality was that Khrushchev threw the movement into chaos by arbitrarily changing the beliefs that millions of ordinary people had built their lives around.” (https://wordpress.com/stats/post/5910/gwydionwilliams.com 1991).
I had nothing major to correct or add in 2006, when I wrote History: the end of Fukuyama(https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/past-issues/before-2018/isolated-labour-affairs-pages-before-2015/fukuyama-on-history-after-the-gulf-war/).
The West in the 1980s had stabilised after the protests of the 1970s, but mostly because of confusion and a loss of hope. No one actually said ‘the people united can still be pig-ignorant and self-harming’, but many former radicals felt it in 1972, when Nixon was re-elected in the largest landslide election victories in American history. Yet the ‘conservative’ position was no more attractive, with Nixon discredited in 1976. It began what continues to be an era of confusion. Most Anglos remained convinced of the transcendental merits of parliaments but not parliamentarians. Law but not lawyers. Free-market business principles, but not the honesty or good intent of most of the people actually running businesses.
In 1991, the disintegrating Soviet Union was to copy this same folly, letting the neo-liberals go much further than had been allowed in the West. They took up Adam Smith’s claim that an ‘invisible hand’ would somehow stop anything too bad from happening. But in the real world, the ‘invisible hand’ remained broadly invisible.
Anti-socialist notions were badly mistaken, and caused post-Soviet Russia to waste its potential and get overrun with crime and fraud. And between 1976 and 1991, the People’s Republic of China was able to move on from 1930s values without ever surrendering to the unhealthy mix the West was offering.
But saying this leaves open the question of what it was that went wrong in the Soviet Union.
From Soviet Globalism to Russian Imperialism
Was the Soviet Union imperialist?
My answer is ‘only from 1956 to 1989’. Before that, it was an authoritarian version of World Socialism. One that was working honestly and successfully for ideals shared with a much wider global community. The only realistic builder of the World State that many socialists and other radicals saw as necessary for world peace.
The Soviet invasion and overthrow in 1956 of a left-wing and popular government in Hungary was a Russian-dominated version of Leninism using crude military force to crush the will of a sovereign state. They then repeated the process in Czechoslovakia in 1968. That can be seen with hindsight as the beginning of the end for the Soviet experiment (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/very-old-issues-images/magazine-001-to-010/magazine-007-july-1988-2/the-1968-invasion-of-czechoslovakia-doomed-the-soviet-union/).
Hungary had been the most willing of the Middle-European allies of Nazi Germany in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Pre-war Czechoslovakia had been a victim, and its socialist government had been promised Soviet support if France would defend them against Hitler. Home-grown Leninism had always been strong there, and still was in 1968. Communists got 31% in the free elections in 1946, and despite years of Russian oppression it still got 13.6% in 1990.
Stalin, who’d always understood the power of nationalism, had accepted the defection of Yugoslavia in the 1940s, when he had other options. In 1944, he’d rejected the option of conquering Finland when the Nazi retreat left it vulnerable. They had not joined the wider war, and the small community of Finnish Jews had been safe. But those Jews also had to do regular military service when this was objectively pro-Hitler. And Finns helped starve Leningrad by being part of the blockade. But allowed to choose its own future, Finland opted for a great many Moderate Socialist measures.
Interestingly, Stalin did also try to ramp down the Cold War. In 1950, he suggested a unified and neutral Germany (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_Note). He might earlier have hoped to win over Germany as a whole. The Communist Party of Germany had got nearly 17% in the last vote before Hitler came to power. And neutrality was later the solution for Austria. Along with Yugoslavia, this would have made a permanent neutral zone between East and West. But the West rejected it, perhaps seeing that West Germany could be a vast asset in a future European Union. 70% of the land area after eastern annexations to Poland, and 80% of the population. And it seems that the supposed danger of Russian tanks rolling westwards was not a real worry for the top decision-makers when there was a chance to end it.
This event remains almost unknown, and gets left out of every survey of the period that I’ve seen. The idea of Stalin as a blunderer who just happened to smash Nazi Germany was so entrenched that no Western writer wanted to know. And most of those who still defend him remain stuck in the politics of the 1930s.
Khrushchev could have revived the idea of a neutral Germany when he supposedly tried for peace with the West. But was he ever sincere? Actions speak louder than words. Everything he and Brezhnev did suggests that conquest was still the real aim. And invading Afghanistan 1979 confirmed this to many. There were even people who saw it at the time as another step to an ‘inevitable’ Soviet conquest of a feeble West. That’s one of many awkward truths that most commentators who lived through that era see fit to withhold from more recent generations.
Lost Globalisation
Many things perished in the 1960s and 1970s, that might have happened with a different post-Stalin leadership. Whether people would have seen a World State as a dream or nightmare has become irrelevant: it is now very unlikely to happen within the lifetime of anyone currently alive. It does no good to speak of a world without borders when the bulk of the population say no.
Recently I saw a Quora question asking why we even needed separate countries. I pointed out they said it in English, which is the official language or an official language for only one-fifth of the world’s population. Also spoken fluently by at most one-fifth of the world’s population, and often not the same people.
Around 10% of Indians are fluent in English, and its status was given at the insistence of the 43% of Indian citizens who are not fluent in Hindi.
More than 80% of Scandinavians are fluent in English, but probably would not use it for things they rate as important and where their own language would be understood. They can speak English but do not feel in English. And the same is probably true for most populations where two or more languages are widely understood. The five sovereign Scandinavian states do important business in their five different languages, four of which would have been a single language in mediaeval times. Norway peacefully seceded from Sweden in the early 20th century, as did Iceland from Denmark in 1944. Neither are members of the European Union, and both Sweden and Finland were not in NATO before the recent artificial panic over Russia’s rescue of Russian-speakers in Ukraine (https://gwydionmadawc.com/my-blogs/ukraine-the-current-conflict/). And in that, incidentally, the undoubted guilt of the Russian-dominated Soviet Union before 1989 has helped give believability to the false story about general Russian expansionism.
The closest we ever got to a single world authority was in the early 20th century, as European empires were increasingly able to suppress functional but unrecognised small states in territory other Europeans had given them the rights to (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/46-globalisation/what-was-the-minimum-for-sovereign-states/). And many believed that eventually one Empire would absorb the rest. Such thinking helped make the elite of the British Empire keen to destroy an increasingly powerful Germany (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/problems-magazine-older-issues/how-the-british-establishment-planned-world-war-one/).
How close did we come? I made a rough estimate of 54 in 1916 – world wars do not stop imperial expansions. But the victors did their best to break up the defeated European empires, when some sort of multi-national federation might have done better. And did in fact do better in Yugoslavia, until the West decided it ought to be destroyed.
Currently there are 193 UN members, while Switzerland, the Vatican and Palestine have observer status. Several more regions have limited recognition but are functionally independent –ex-Soviet Georgia has a stand-off with the previous Soviet autonomous regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. DeepSeek said 5 to 9 globally, depending on the criteria used.
The best we can hope for is a future in which all sovereign states have their borders frozen, unless the existing state chooses to let them go. Not always just, but we live in a world of spreading nuclear weapons and versatile drones that could carry nerve gas. So far there are only disputed claims of occasional Russian use, and maybe just tear gas. But at the time of writing, Iran remains able to hit both Israel and the USA’s Arab allies. And there are all sorts of other conflicts, either active or likely to flare up again later.
In an imperfect world, I prefer peace to justice.
Soviet Elites Reverting to a Ruling Class
The word ‘revolution’ gets misused to apply to radical changes within the existing system. And sometimes also for a region fighting a successful war of independence: notably in the USA. These normally leave most of the existing rich and powerful in a secure position. Changes within the USA between the 1780s and 1830s were maybe less radical than what happened back in the United Kingdom.
A real revolution is where most of the existing rich and powerful get swept away. This happened by stages in the French Revolution – the initial compromise with a constitutional monarch might have worked. And failed to happen in China in either 1911-12 or 1927.
If you think that a society can sweep away the existing rich and powerful without getting nasty and authoritarian, you are not dealing with reality. Europe’s Colour Revolutions were shifts within elites that had moved on from an imposed Soviet system. The Arab Spring movements either failed or led to a chaos no one had wanted. It came closest to working in Tunisia, but the new system disappointed. There was popular support for the elected President becoming a new authoritarian boss. Few Tunisians believed in the transcendental merits of parliament but not parliamentarians: they just noticed that the messes had not been fixed.
Regarding revolutions, it is entirely normal for early leaders to get swept aside. Mostly because differences in belief that were acceptable among a united opposition become key matters when the opposition becomes the government. And where people excellent at making speeches denouncing those in power often proved inept when trying to achieve something if actually given power. That was Kerensky’s fate – he had no better idea than to continue the war and do no better than the Tsar had managed. Had he made a firm commitment to land reform and allowed Ukraine to separate under German hegemony for the sake of peace, things might have been very different.
As everyone knows, replacement of leaders happened to an astonishing extent in France. It did not help that the early leaders were lawyers who failed to handle actual popular politics. And Lenin threw out almost all of his important socialist rivals, with Trotsky mockingly suggest they lie quietly in the dustbin of history. Not anticipating that he would soon be joining them there, of course.
In France, Napoleon stabilised a system that had been badly governed by several versions of a parliamentary system. He gave the French what most of them wanted, and it was not Napoleon who began the military aggression beyond ethnic French territories. But he missed several chances to stabilise the regime. If he’d stopped or had died after 1807 and the defeat of the Fourth Coalition, Europe might have had something like late 19th century values much sooner and much less painfully.
In the new Soviet Union, Lenin authorised a Mixed Economy, but unfortunately the system failed to work well. Stalin produced a viable alternative, and was all along was aware that some sort of major invasion of the Soviet Union was coming. But sadly, the post-Stalin leadership was a mix of unrealistic hopes and failure. The immense burden of matching the USA in the Cold War stunted their economy – but events since 1991 show that the USA did indeed need to be limited. The error was not to encourage US moves to moderation, which happened to a small extent under Jimmy Carter and was then reversed by Reagan.
In China, Mao had hoped for a moderate New Democracy, but had little choice but to be radical when the USA kept up a 20-year fight to restore the ineffective Kuomintang. People say that only Nixon could have gone to China, which is true, but probably only Mao could have received him. Only he could have allowed an initial opening-up. Things went further under Deng, but Deng sensibly kept criticism of Mao within sensible bounds.
In the crisis of 1989, the leaders were vastly stronger because they had never denied the continuity with Mao (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/42-china/42-1-chinese-politics/communist-chinas-1989-fight-for-survival/, https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/42-china/communist-chinas-survival-after-the-tiananmen-crackdown/). The mix that existed was in many ways what Mao’s initial idea of New Democracy would have been if the USA had not been implacably hostile. A real threat of a US invasion existed till Nixon made peace in the early 1970s, and finally dropped the claim that the Taiwan regime was the legitimate government of all China.
In the Soviet Union, Khrushchev’s main error was to think he could talk of compromise with the West, but crush any attempt by pro-Soviet regimes in Middle Europe to act on the logic of this.
There was also a sad failure on the matter of women’s rights. Nothing new happened under Brezhnev’s rule, when the West was copying and then overtaking the best of what Communism had done. One particular instance – Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 was the first woman in space, with the USA having refused to allow female astronauts. But the Soviet leaders somehow decided she’d been very nearly a failure. She was strained after having been the only woman to have ever made a solo space venture, but they failed to send any more women on any sort of mission until 1982. And that was only when the USA had decided to include at least one woman among the seven on the early Space Shuttle missions.
It turned out that the women could do everything the men could. Had that been the Soviet pattern between 1964 and 1981, the loss of vital support from radical women might have been less drastic.
None of this was because of socialism. It was a series of avoidable errors, many of them resulting from a failure to honestly apply what had long been accepted as socialist principles.
Talking Turkey
With World Government dead, what were the chances for a world of free and equal sovereign nations? The Soviet Union had a mixed record – dominating their neighbours, but also helping anti-colonial movements.
But when the Soviet hegemony collapsed, the elite of the West started behaving in a much more bullying and domineering manner. Not just with wars, but also cultural attitudes.
Born 1950, I learned to say Sri Lanka and Myanmar and Malawi and Zambia and Zimbabwe, rather that the older Ceylon, Burma, Nyasaland and the two Rhodesias. Beijing, Mumbai and Kolkata rather than Peking, Bombay and Calcutta. Most serious news agencies did the same. That’s why I was astonished when Western pundits and media flatly refused to accept it when the Turkish Republic officially defined their name for English-speakers as Turkiye rather than Turkey.
There were several good reasons for the Turks to want it. The new spelling and pronunciation were closer to what the Turks themselves say. What many European nations already have in their own language: French has ‘la Turquie’. Turks had a right to be offended by the English mispronunciation of their national name, and to sharing it with a food-bird that’s an outsized and rather absurd relative of the grouse.
‘Turkey’ in English usage also has a wider and insulting meaning. And ‘it’s a turkey’ mean flop, failure, or something absurd. A sovereign nation whose name was mispronounced as Grouse would also be likely to want to change it.
Even if the Turkish Republic had gone mad and decided that they wished to be known in English as Boaty McTurkface, that would have been their right. An aspect of sovereignty.
The issue was Western elites showing a lack of respect. The elite and their obedient media people decided that the Soviet Fall meant that they could roll back everything they’d conceded since the 1930s.
For the elite – what I call Upper London – anti-Fascism was never a real belief (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/d-nazism-and-the-guilt-of-upper-london/). It was fascist Italy that decided to make a war between imperial powers into an anti-fascist war by attacking France when it was visibly failing. But Churchill then decided to gamble the future of the British Empire on repeating the crushing of Germany that he’d helped see through in the previous World War. And Hitler foolishly helped him by not letting it be known how moderate a peace he was privately willing to settle for (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/44-fascism-and-world-war-2/how-hitler-might-have-had-a-victorious-peace/.)
Britain and the USA found that only treating the Soviet Union as a partner gave them a chance of victory. Most of the formidable German army died or was captured there (https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams/Nazi-Germany-Was-Defeated-in-Russia).
If the Soviet Union was increasingly an aberration in the 1960s, it was also the champion of many modern values before the 1950s. They became obstructive, only after Soviet power got human equality and anti-racism accepted by the liberal West.
Liberal hero John Stewart Mill was very happy to work in the London offices of the East India Company, as his father had. He was quite definite that the Muslims and Hindus of the Indian subcontinent were in no way fit to rule themselves (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/998-from-labour-affairs/the-french-revolution-and-its-unstable-politics/040-politics/how-john-stewart-mill-twisted-the-idea-of-liberty/).
Mill made a half-accurate forecast about China: “if they are ever to be further improved it must be by foreigners.” But advice from foreigners similar to Mill led to failure and warlordism: the centuries of tradition that make the West’s imperfect parliamentary system viable were shallow even in superficially-Westernised Shanghai and Tianjin. And in Hong King, no one thought of giving mere Chinese any significant authority until nearly the end – and even then Thatcher missed the chance to give the final Governorship to an ethnic Chinese (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/46-globalisation/46-1-more-on-globalisation/opium-city-the-story-of-hong-kong/).
China was saved by Global Leninism: a more realistic vision of Western values brought first by Europeans and Euro-Americans, and then adapted by Mao to be much more effective in Chinese conditions.
In the 1940s, imperialism was never explicitly condemned by the new United Nations. It was openly practiced by at least four of the founders: the United Kingdom, France, The Netherlands, and Belgium. The United States was less bad: racist at home, but they freed The Philippines in 1946, while Puerto Rico has a majority preferring complete merger to separation from the USA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Puerto_Rican_status_referendum). And American Samoa has freely chosen to settle for self-rule and no automatic US citizenship.
The Union of South Africa was a founder member, despite denying votes to its non-white majority. And maintained a mandate over South-West Africa that was declared illegal in 1971, but only ended with the independence of Namibia in 1990.
The United Nations was a very imperfect alternative to a World State before the 1960s. It remains imperfect, but for at least the next few decades it is the best we can hope for.
Lenin created the Soviet Union as the liberated portion of planned World State. Had anti-Bolshevik Poles lost a brief war that developed from Pilsudski’s Poland invading Ukraine, it could easily have been a much bigger Soviet Union with enthusiastic German participation. Poles might have been won over: there were always a minority of Leninists among them.
It would have been a different world, in my view a much better world. But it was not the world that actually developed. And unlike the Trotskyists and unlike Europe’s remaining Soviet-style Communists, I see it as something that’s very unlikely to be created for the foreseeable future.
Western nations defined the world as a collection of sovereign states. We’d be much better off if we insisted that our elites start actually obeying the rules they themselves wrote.
It helps that the US attempt at hegemony has basically failed. Back in 2019, I spoke of how the West ‘Fails in Five Civilisations’ (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/the-west-fails-in-five-civilisations/the-west-fails-in-five-civilisations-2/0). The trend has only got stronger since then.
Labour Affairs 