On Aug 18, 2011, at 9:56 AM, SA wrote:
> At first it gave me pause to read that BK said this before Gorby's radical turn. But then I thought - a Trot *would* say that, wouldn't he? Wasn't that always their line? A stopped clock...
I dunno, Trots can be right sometimes. As three-word descriptions go, "deformed workers' state" isn't bad.
> On the CPSU bureaucracy: that's exactly the point. It was a *top-down* bureaucracy, and Gorbachev was the top.
I'm no Sovietologist, but I don't think that's true. There was a lot of internal jockeying and faction and consensus-building. It wasn't Stalin's CPSU anymore. This was the formation that produced Brezhnev and Chernenko, for god's sake. And it was the party that installed Gorbachev, knowing full well what his intentions were. There was a lot of continuity between the early Gorbachev and the Andropov days.
Gorby wanted to reform the Soviet system, not destroy it. And he was eventually pushed out - by other members of the CPSU. As David Kotz and Fred Weir point out in Revolution from Above, in most "revolutions," the old order gets kicked out. Not in the USSR - most of the top officials in Russia and other CIS governments after the collapse of the Union were former Communists. The pro-capitalist Yeltsin gang was a faction of the Party.
At the time, Kagarlitsky said, "We have the most flexible elite in the world. In just a few years, they went from being Communists to social democrats to capitalists."
Doug