A NOVA DEMOCRACIA BRASIL: Mikhail Gorbachev, enemy of the Soviet people and the world proletariat, died

We publish this article published by A Nova Democracia and like to mention some points related to the topic:

1. The tendency of revisionism in power to restore capitalism with its most suitable form of government: bourgeois democracy; and the correlated struggle of both the revisionist factions.

2. Empires will fall, especilly important for the younger comrades, for which the vita of the recently passed Queen Elizabeth II is likewise exemplatory.

3. The old revisionism ‘needed’ a world war to culminate its decomposition, modern revisionism just passed and finalised its bancruptcy without a ‘twilight of the gods’. A destiny the rotten ROL, revisionist and capitulationist, will share.

Editorial staff of ci-ic.org

Mikhail Gorbachev, enemy of the Soviet people and the world proletariat died

On 30 August the reactionary Mikhail Gorbachev died. Former revisionist leader of the social-imperialist Soviet Union, Gorbachev was responsible for the liberalisation of the state capitalist economy of the USSR – as a way of trying to stop its bankruptcy – with the implementation of measures known as “Perestroika” (restructuring) and “Glasnot” (opening up), and for the dissolution of the USSR. His plan was to unleash, converging with US imperialism and the whole world reaction, a counter-revolutionary offensive and to throw the name of communism, of the great socialist fatherland that had been the USSR, into the mud, spreading to the four winds that “capitalism won over communism”, that “communism died”, that the “Cold War” was over and that an era of world peace was opened, guaranteed by the domination of US imperialism over the world. Gorbachev established himself for the rest of history as the real enemy of the Soviet people and the world proletariat.

As soon as the news of the death of this shameless reactionary spread, the media monopolies – mouthpieces of the imperialist bourgeoisie -, as well as the institutions and leaders of imperialism, rushed to elevate Gorbachev’s “legacy” and his role as a “leader of world peace”. The imperialist Joseph Biden, president of the United States (US), stated that “Gorbachev was a man of remarkable vision”, an “exceptional leader” and “who believed in glasnot and perestroika not just as slogans”. French reactionary president Emmanuel Macron referred to the Soviet revisionist as a “man of peace”. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson expressed his admiration for Gorbachev’s leadership during the ‘cold war’. Pope Francis, responsible for covering up the crimes of the military regime’s torturers in Argentina, expressed his condolences to those who see Gorbachev as a “respected statesman” and expressed his admiration for [Gorbachev’s] “visionary commitment to harmony and fraternity among nations”. Finally, the leader of the US imperialist tool United Nations (UN), António Guterres, declared that he was “deeply saddened” and that Gorbachev was a “unique politician”, a “towering world leader, a committed multilateralist, and a tireless admirable. .of peace”.

From the list of individuals who defend Gorbachev as a “leader of world peace”, all of whom are leaders of imperialist nations promoting brutal exploitation, war and terror against oppressed peoples, one can easily conclude what role this impostor played in history.

The imperialists ignore – or at least forget to mention – Gorbachev’s role as a supporter of the “war on terror”, a predatory strategy of US imperialism directed against the oppressed peoples of the world, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East… . What they really celebrate about Gorbachev’s life was his dirty role, participating in the general counter-revolutionary offensive and for boasting, from all corners, as the last leader of the USSR (which was no longer socialist), that communism had no longer responded to the needs of the world.

USES THE DEATH OF AN IMPOSTOR AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO ATTACK SOCIALISM

All the leading newspapers of the imperialist nations took the opportunity to slander the dictatorship of the proletariat and the USSR as a reign of police terror and indiscriminate persecution; and to ridicule Comrade Stalin as a bloodthirsty dictator and socialism as poverty for all.

While the USSR was a socialist nation, led by the proletariat, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union followed the line of Lenin and Stalin – thus, before the revisionist coup of 1956 – the USSR promoted development and prosperity as never before for such broad and deep masses of the people.

SOCIALIST CONSTRUCTION IN THE COUNTRYSIDE

Before the revolution, land concentration in Russia reached enormous rates and the situation of the peasants was one of misery and indebtedness. While 28,000 landowners owned 67.5 million hectares of land, more than 10 million peasants shared approximately 80,000 hectares. In 65% of cases, the peasants were poor, 34% of them had no farm machinery and 30% owned no horses. According to Emile Dillon, who visited the Russian countryside before the Revolution, “Russian peasants go to bed at six or even five o’clock in the winter because they cannot buy oil to relax. They have no meat, eggs, butter, milk, often not even cabbage, they live mainly on black bread and potatoes. Alive? He languishes on an insufficient amount of food”.

After the revolution, the landlords were expropriated and the land was distributed among the poor and middle peasants. Led by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and educated in the new society, under a new production regime, the peasants began to produce more and more collectively, until they became kolkhozes and sovkhozes, production collectives. The kolkhozeses and sovkhozeses began to expand around 1927, after ten years of Stalin’s struggle against the Bukharin factions in the CPSU, which advocated the expansion and encouragement of individual landholdings for the middle and rich peasants. In that year, Stalin accelerated the industrialisation of the country towards the production of industrial machinery to increase the output of the kolkhozes. As a result, the number of peasant families organised in this type of property jumped from 286,000 in October 1927 to 1 million in June 1929. In the five-year plan established by the CPSU in 1929, it was foreseen that by 1932-33, 10% of peasant families would have organised themselves into kolkhozes. By February 1930, 31.7% of these families had already joined the collective farms. Large-scale collectivisation, driven by the deepest masses of the peasantry, was proceeding in leaps and bounds. By June 1936, collectivisation had reached 90.3 per cent of the peasant families. In addition, each family was entitled to its own individual property, where they could keep three large animals, ten rams and sheep, a farm sow and an unlimited number of poultry and rabbits.

Collectivisation and industrialisation of the countryside were responsible for a highly expressive increase in production. Investment in agriculture increased from 379 million roubles in 1928 to almost 5 billion roubles in 1935. Before collectivisation, the grain harvest was about 71.7 million tons per year. In 1935, that rate reached 90.1 million. Five years later, production was 118.8 million tons of grain.

The industrialisation of the countryside – with higher productivity and less effort – allowed the peasants to devote more time to intellectual and leisure activities. The improvement of life was also part of the directives of the CPSU Central Committee, which stated that “the construction of kolkhozes is impossible without the consequent improvement of the cultural standards of the kolkhoz people”. Thus, the shortening of the working day together with the structure that the Soviet socialist state gave to the hinterland (schools, correspondence courses, kindergartens, theatres, cinemas, libraries, radio stations) significantly raised the quality of life of the peasantry, previously subjected to the feudal brutality of the big landowners. The peasants, who soon realised the advantages of the new economic regime, began to defend it tooth and nail. The French economist Charles Bettelheim reports that, during the occupation of Nazi German troops in Soviet territories, the peasants fought valiantly to maintain the kolkhozian model of production. The Soviet Alexander Zinoviev, despite being Stalin’s opponent, could not help but state that, whenever he asked the peasants if they would return to the individual production model, they all answered with a “categorical negative”.

STALIN’S HEROIC INDUSTRIALISATION

Socialist construction did not only take place in the countryside, where the peasants achieved record harvest rates. In the cities too, Stalin’s Soviet Union, supported by the broad masses of the people, advanced industry and workers’ prosperity in a way never seen before. Russia, once a semi-feudal, de-industrialised country, was transformed in a few decades into the industrialised Soviet Union. Anna Louise Strong, an American journalist working for the Soviet newspaper Moscow News, said that “never in all of history had progress been so rapid”.

The preparations for industrialisation were carried out with the campaign to increase the membership of the CPSU, especially of working-class origin. The campaign led to an increase of about 3,700 members between 1928 and 1930, while the percentage of working class members rose from 57% to 65% during the same period.

The intellectual Emile Dillon, who was not very sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, said: “Everywhere people think, work, organise, make scientific and industrial discoveries. In fact, it is not a nation, in the old world sense, but a strong and grounded people. The Bolsheviks have achieved much more than they claimed and more than seemed attainable by any human organisation under the difficult conditions in which they have operated”.

In 1920 Lenin had proposed a general plan for the electrification of the country. In 15 years, the country was to build around 30 power stations with a capacity of 1.75 million kWh, according to the plan of the leader of the October Revolution. Under Stalin’s leadership, the USSR reached a capacity of 4.07 million kWh in 1935.

The voluntary and conscientious work done by students, teachers and employees who, moved by the enthusiasm to build a new society and not to work in the service of a scout, devoted their days off to unskilled work in the factories. John Scott, an American engineer who worked in the Soviet Union, attributed the responsibility for this development “to Stalin’s political sagacity, perseverance and tenacity” who, fighting against the revisionist positions of Bukharin – who advocated the importation of goods – and understanding industrialisation as a class struggle, defended the development of Soviet industry and the independence of the socialist fatherland.

As in the countryside, the quality of life in the city also improved significantly. Workers began to have access to culture and to produce their own proletarian art. The people started to have access to education and literacy. With the Likbez (eradication of illiteracy) campaign, adult literacy rates rose from 32% in 1917 to 60.9% in 1926. By 1939, some 89.7% of the country’s adults could read and write. Life expectancy in the country, despite World War II, also grew exponentially. In 1924, when Stalin took over, life expectancy in the Soviet Union was 44 years. When the communist leader died in 1953, his legacy was a life expectancy of 62 years for the Soviet people. In the cities, raising the quality of life was also part of the Soviet state’s policies. In 1946, during a stocktaking speech, Stalin declared: “Special attention will be paid to the expansion of the production of consumer goods, to the raising of the living standards of the workers through the continuous lowering of the price of all commodities, as well as to the widespread construction of all kinds of scientific research institutes.

GORBACHEV, CONTINUATOR OF KHRUSHCHEV AND TRAITOR TO THE SOVIET PEOPLE AND THE LEGACY OF LENIN AND STALIN

Gorbachev, by implementing Perestroika and Glasnot, as well as other measures that deepened capitalist restoration in the USSR and liberalised the country, continued a legacy begun in 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev, who began the process of destroying the socialism built under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin. Khrushchev, the first revisionist leader to actually assume power in the Soviet Union, was responsible for, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR, touting his “secret report” to attack, with lies, the great communist leader Iosif Stalin, the dictatorship of the proletariat and Marxist-Leninist ideology. Inspired by the modern revisionism of Ernest Browder, Khrushchev formulated his rotten theories of the “Two Alls” (All People’s State and All People’s Party) to initiate the application of capitalist political, economic and social measures, and the “Peaceful Three” (Peaceful Transition, Peaceful Coexistence and Peaceful Emulation), seeking to bury the class struggle of the international proletariat, diverting it to support reactionary regimes in their own countries, claiming that socialism can be achieved by parliamentary and electoral means.

To ensure the establishment of his measures, Khrushchev carried out persecutions and assassinations against hundreds of true communist followers of Lenin and Stalin, such as Georgiy Malenkov, Lazar Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov. Malenkov was removed from office, expelled from the CPSU and internally exiled. Kaganovich was directed to work as director of a potash mine in the Urals and then expelled from the Party and forced to live as a pensioner in Moscow. Molotov was, in 1957, sent as ambassador to Mongolia and, in 1962, was expelled from the CPSU. Kaganovich and Malenkov were readmitted to the CPSU in the 1980s, but died in high esteem for defending Marxism-Leninism and the great Stalin.

Thus began the period of capitalist restoration in the USSR, first with a tendency towards social-fascism, under the leadership of a corporatist fraction of the bourgeoisie, and then – in the Gorbachev period, with the liberalisation of society – with a tendency towards bourgeois democracy, with the predominance of the demolitionist fraction of the Russian bourgeoisie.

Although it says that communism is dead, the reactionaries all over the world still waste tons of paint trying to bury it with lies. Deep down they know that the general crisis of unprecedented decomposition of imperialism, together with the struggle of the peoples of the world and the struggles led by the real communists, are opening a new era of revolutions. Today more than ever, in order to survive, it is vital to try to demonise revolution and communism. However, it will be ineffective.