Walter Daum
On Thu, 6 Jan 2000 22:19:13 +0200 Russell Grinker said:
>
>I think this analysis emphasises too much the role of mass struggle in the
>demise of Stalinism and under-estimates the role played by the bureaucracy
>in the process. The transition process in the Soviet Union/Eastern Europe
>was initiated from the top downwards. It was ironically the bureaucracy -
>not the masses - which concluded that it could no longer carry on in the old
>way. The bureaucracy was a social stratum in search of a new identity and a
>new role in society. This led Gorbachev and his fellow travellers to chuck
>"Marxism-Leninism" and the leading role of the Party out of the window and
>introduce the market, hoping that they could transform themselves into a new
>ruling class running a restored capitalism. While the masses became active
>as a result of this, they were in almost all cases excluded from real power.
>They did not "destabilise the regimes" - it was the bureaucrats' experiments
>which achieved this. A visit to any of the Soviet Bloc countries at the
>time would also have made clear that, if anything, it was the intelligentsia
>and not the working class that was mobilised around Gorbachev's experiments.
>
>Russell
>
>