Crisis in the USSR

My own discussion, and a translation.

These readings, published by the Australian left group Socialist Action, are from the Gorbachev era. Many leftists in the west hoped Mikhail Gorbachev might set the USSR on the road to a bright socialist future. In fact he was trying to rescue the existing system at the expense of the working class. He failed, and ultimately presided over the collapse of the Soviet system.

In 1989 I visited the USSR to have a look for myself. In preparation I read the Soviet press and wrote some articles, including one called Gorbachev and the Fate of Socialism. This was a tiny contribution to a wider effort, inside and outside the USSR, to gain a hearing for an alternative, critical Marxist point of view. For the most part it was a lost cause. But in the process, I made what appears to be the only translation of a remarkable polemic by the Soviet historian Yurii Afanasiev.

You might find the language strange. Soviet official "socialism" had its own bizarre jargon, two items of which became radical chic buzzwords in the west. These were glasnost (openness or, more literally, transparency) and perestroika (restructuring). Many Soviet citizens, it should be said, saw them as tired old clichés. But something important really was happening, and revolutionaries had to work out where they stood. I supported glasnost and opposed perestroika. My views in more detail will emerge from these documents.

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