September 4 — Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, the two darlings of the imperialist bourgeoisie and the architects of capitalist restoration in the USSR, moved Sept. 2 to abolish the Soviet parliament, the Congress of People's Deputies.
By Sept. 3, fearful that the masses might intervene in this unconstitutional process, the Gorbachev-Yeltsin counterrevolutionary grouping hurriedly called the Congress back into session and presented them with a new plan to restructure the government. But in this plan all the basic powers of a parliament are transferred away to the republics, which themselves have no general authority beyond their respective republic territories.
The power rests completely in the hands of a small group picked by Yeltsin and Gorbachev. Forcing the Congress to accept this complete usurpation of power is an outrageous form of coercion.
The present Congress of People's Deputies in the USSR was elected in 1989 on the basis of universal suffrage. The defenders of the pro-capitalist restoration hailed it as the first attempt at a democratically elected congress representative of the people.
According to the current constitution and all previous ones, the USSR has a bicameral government. All legislation has to be approved by both the Congress of Deputies and the Congress of Nationalities. Where there is a disagreement between them, each chamber selects a committee to negotiate with the other.
As we have said before in these pages, the Congress was a bourgeois parliament. While not as representative of the masses as the Soviets under the Leninist regime, nevertheless it offered the people an opportunity to be heard. The Congress was acclaimed by the bourgeoisie everywhere as an important step toward democracy. They praised, indeed flattered the Gorbachev regime for promoting it.
Nevertheless, the bourgeoisie was fearful of the fact that at least one third of the deputies were Communists.
The announcement that the Congress was to be dissolved — on the "recommendation" of Gorbachev, Yeltsin and a handful of leaders of the republics — is clearly unconstitutional. It is a step toward establishing a heavy-handed bourgeois dictatorship.
Whether this happens or not depends on the masses of workers and peasants and the people in general. Can they rise to the occasion to halt the process of counterrevolution that is leading to a totalitarian form of government?
The Gorbachev-Yeltsin group's fear of the masses was pointedly underlined on the Sept. 3 broadcast of "Crossfire" on CNN. There Professor Jerry Hough from Duke University, the only U.S. bourgeois analyst of the USSR to correctly predict Gorbachev's election in 1985, characterized the general strike called by Yeltsin as a flop. He said the demonstrations in Moscow at Yeltsin's White House were small. And that Gorbachev is supported by only a part of the Soviet Army that is "Western oriented."
Gorbachev announced he was acting in concert with Yeltsin, his so-called rival. In reality, Yeltsin is a fellow conspirator who holds a more extreme bourgeois restorationist view than Gorbachev. They have nevertheless united to abolish the one popularly elected governmental organ that can pass legislation and order the executive to carry it out.
This effort by Gorbachev and Yeltsin to shore up their authority, made in concert with several leaders of the republics, is wholly illegal and unconstitutional. Assuming these leaders from the republics have authority back home — which is doubtful — they have no authority to order the abolition of the one governing institution that was elected by the masses throughout the entire Soviet Union.
How could all this possibly happen? It comes on the heels of a reign of terror unleashed against communists and progressives throughout the country following the Emergency Committee's attempt to halt Gorbachev's course of capitalist restoration. First came banning the Communist Party and removing many top government and party officials. Several were reported as suicides.
The former Soviet foreign minister and ambassador to the U.S., Alexander Bessmertnykh, told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda that the denunciations and accusations following the failed coup attempt were "a direct copy of what happened in 1937. Even when the president says the Emergency Committee are criminals — he has no right to do that [without a trial]."
The Congress of People's Deputies, which met today, scarcely had a quorum. Hundreds did not show up because of intimidation, arrest and persecution. Many may be in hiding. Deputies suspected of opposition to the Gorbachev-Yeltsin takeover are being accused of supporting the coup.
Who is carrying out this intimidation?
At the October 1988 session of the USSR Supreme Soviet, a paramilitary police force was established. This paramilitary police force is not under the jurisdiction of the military or the security forces. It is active in intimidating, arresting and otherwise terrorizing communist and progressive legislators, officials and rank and file.
There are also private armed organizations. It is not well known, but the Werich Foundation, a right-wing U.S. group, have been active for years in the Soviet Union, training security forces for the private sector. A union of detectives has been formed. Other private security organizations guard so-called cooperatives, which are private enterprises, against the masses.
This is a counterrevolutionary challenge to the established security forces under the KGB. It is a structure parallel to the state apparatus at a time when the latter appears to be paralyzed and divided, only its top officialdom having been appointed by Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
Gorbachev says he has to reorganize the government in order to avoid an economic catastrophe. But these are the very same words Hitler used when he grabbed power after dissolving the Reichstag in 1933. His excuse for assuming dictatorial powers was that he'd be better able to deal with the disastrous economic situation, high unemployment and so on.
Let no one forget that Hitler couched all his assaults on the working class in demagogic terms. Even the name of his party — the National Socialist German Workers Party — was meant to encompass all sorts of elements, but he mobilized them against the working class organizations.
Gorbachev and Yeltsin are now ruling by decree. They have strong-armed the Presidium, the executive committee of the Congress, to dissolve itself under threat. What about parliamentary immunity? The presiding officer has immunity, but are the rest of the deputies being harassed, even threatened with imprisonment?
This dissolution of the Congress of People's Deputies has to be put into perspective. First they were threatened to the point where many didn't even show up. Then they were confronted with a so-called recommendation to dissolve. This has all the earmarks of a classical counterrevolutionary coup .
The initial reaction of the leading imperialist press organs — the New York Times, Washington Post, others — was to merely report that a new leadership is being established. They failed to call attention to the fact that their favorites, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, have dissolved the one legal, popularly elected governing body in the USSR, which the bourgeoisie until recently praised as an achievement of glasnost and perestroika.
Some of the progressives in the USSR are calling this a second coup attempt. It should be noted that when the Emergency Committee tried to take over two weeks ago in order to halt the counterrevolution, it did so a few days before the USSR Congress was to meet. Its perspective was to have the new leaders ratified by the Congress and the Presidium.
What has happened now, however, is a classical counterrevolutionary coup. Its aim is not to get ratification from a popularly elected, democratic institution, but to dissolve the Congress. It has already banned the Communist Party. It is really allowing only those groups that support Yeltsin or Gorbachev to function. These two can only be called a dictatorial duumvirate.
The monolithic imperialist press plays down the significance of imperialist intervention. Yet there are constant consultations between Gorbachev and Yeltsin and the imperialist leaders, especially John Major, Margaret Thatcher and George Bush. Even Gorbachev in his public speeches this week attributed his success in large part to international support. By that he meant the intervention of the Western imperialist powers, particularly the U.S. and Britain.
However, the recently forged alliance between Gorbachev and Yeltsin is a precarious, unstable setup in view of the contradictions between them that have not been altogether erased.
Much of the capitalist press is concerned with the centrifugal forces that appear to be dissolving the Soviet Union. This should be weighed against the stark fact that the republics are an integral part of a 70-year-old economic system.
The republics are forced to stick with the union for economic reasons. If they juridically or politically separate, it should be remembered that was their legal right in the first place. It was never denied by any legal or constitutional provision.
Most of the current leaders in the republics were put in by the Gorbachev forces, who ousted others who failed to go along with their program for change. These leaders' legal authority extends only to the republics. They have no authority over the Congress of the USSR. Yet its dissolution is being presented as an action taken by Gorbachev along with the heads of most of the republics.
Only a complete restoration of bourgeois private property — only the final dismantling of the economic system — could lay the basis for the full dismemberment of the USSR.
The fact that Gorbachev and even Yeltsin have gotten together to save the economic integration of the republics is a confession of their inability to peacefully destroy the socialist sector, the achievement of 70 years of technological, scientific and industrial development.
In order to understand the U.S. attitude toward the current struggles in the USSR, we must know first of all that the imperialists are not disinterested observers. Rather, the failed resolve of the Emergency Committee in the ill-fated coup against Gorbachev and Yeltsin was due in large measure to the immediate intervention of all the imperialist powers. These were the same allies that just last winter carried out a merciless and genocidal war against Iraq.
To fail to take account of the U.S. hand in the counterrevolutionary developments in the USSR is to ignore what is probably the most important factor in the subsequent overthrow of most of the government.
A coup is the product of acute instability in social and political relations. The political and sometimes the class structure may be on the verge of collapse. If this coincides with a period when the masses are passive or indifferent, or have not yet entered the political arena, then a coup d'etat can be the outcome.
There are areas of the world where coups occur more or less regularly. They are the product of acute conditions and, moreover, are instigated and promoted by foreign powers.
The U.S. imperialist establishment is the supreme architect of such coups. More than any other ancient or modern empire, the empire of finance capital has accumulated experience in manipulating governing groups in subjugated countries. It has set up and then overthrown many a dictator, replacing them with democratic faces. Imperialist businessmen in these countries often appear unconcerned with the changes in progress, saying they are "doing business during alterations."
The immediate, objective basis for the attempted coup in August was the imminent signing of the union treaty. It was a treaty of disunion that threatened to dismember the Soviet Union not just politically but as an economic union based on socialist construction.
It threatened to fracture the integrated scientific, technological and industrial infrastructure of the USSR, which is still based on a planned economy. By virtue of that fact alone, it threatened to disintegrate the military-industrial complex and to divide and split up the military command.
A greater danger to the Soviet Union could scarcely be conceived except for outright intervention by the U.S.
In reporting events in the USSR, the imperialist media drip with sanctimony and self-righteousness. One would never know that the history of the U.S. is one of savage repression of Native, Black and other oppressed peoples and ruthless exploitation of the working class. To these preachers of democracy, capitalism is the only natural, civilized society. The fierce blows against working people here, the decline in living standards, the attempt to codify into law outright strike-breaking activity — all these throwbacks to the 19th century are ignored in their reality.
They present the evolution of the capitalist system as an example of pure democracy. But in reality we have a plutocracy based on the rule of bankers and industrialists. In the epoch of imperialism, their reign depends on genocidal wars and suppression of the insurrectionary colonial peoples.
We are told that the United States is and always has been a democratically constituted state, free from coups. This is a fiction cultivated by bourgeois historians and the capitalist press.
No, coups in the United States have had great historical significance. An examination of them will help to illuminate the current crisis in the USSR.
Let us begin with the coup carried out with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It was followed by the assassination of his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, five years later when he was running in the Democratic primary for president.
John Kennedy had won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960 after a bitter, venomous struggle against Lyndon Johnson, his right-wing opponent. Johnson was regarded by many at the time as the epitome of racism, a representative of the Southern Dixiecrat view of the rising civil rights and Black liberation struggles.
After President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Johnson was sworn in as president within hours. One of his first acts in office was to send a memorandum to the Chief Justice of the United States, Earl Warren, asking him to conduct an investigation. Johnson, widely regarded by the broad progressive movement as a prime suspect in the assassination, showed the greatest contempt for public opinion by taking it on himself to set up investigation, which was properly under the jurisdiction of the attorney general Robert F. Kennedy.
As Johnson later recalled in his autobiography, "I knew it was not a good precedent to involve the Supreme Court in such an investigation. Chief Justice Warren knew this too and was vigorously opposed to it. I called him in anyway. Before he came, he sent word through a third party that he would not accept the assignment. He opposed serving on constitutional grounds." (Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point [New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971].)
What could be more crass, more offensive to prevailing opinion, more absurd than the prime suspect in the assassination coup appointing an unwilling investigator?
This is the very ruling class that is now talking so sanctimoniously about the unconstitutional coup in the USSR.
The Warren Commission report was a complete whitewash. It overlooked the deeper causes of the assassination.
First, there was the Pentagon military command's dissatisfaction with Kennedy's conduct of the struggle with Cuba. They had favored a simultaneous strike by U.S. naval, army and air forces after the collapse of the mercenary group masked as liberators who had invaded Cuba in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs.
On the very day Kennedy arrived in Dallas, The Dallas Morning News carried a full-page advertisement accusing him of treason and being in effect an agent of Moscow. It was signed by Bernard Weissman, a carpet salesperson. Weissman told the Warren Commission he didn't know where the funds for the ad came from. But an investigation showed that the John Birch Society had put up most of the money. Weissman could only have been a front for the CIA, the FBI and/or the ultra right.
Another element in the assassination was the racists' fierce anger against Kennedy over the burning issue of civil rights.
There was another coup not long after that is equally significant. It involved President Richard Nixon.
Nixon succeeded Johnson, basically as a result of the polarization in the country arising out of the genocidal war against Vietnam. The most right-wing faction of the imperialist bourgeoisie, headed by Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay, urged nuclear bombing of Vietnam when he called publicly for authority to "bomb the Vietnamese back into the Stone Age."
But he and his colleagues could not carry the rest of the military establishment or the ruling class. A greater and more significant portion, while of course wanting victory in Southeast Asia, believed they could overwhelm the oppressed masses in that area by sheer military preponderance and economic might.
But with each succeeding day, especially after the great Tet Offensive, the ruling class began to have doubts about the entire project of subjugating such a revolutionary people 10,000 miles from the U.S.
In the meantime, the very foundations of the imperialist military establishment began to be shaken by an unprecedented anti-war struggle together with the most significant revolutionary upsurge of the Black masses. The ruling class became divided over whether to continue its mad, adventurous policy.
Under these circumstances, Nixon, the 1968 Republican presidential nominee, promised a way out through victory and negotiation with the USSR and China. It was all calculated to end the Vietnam war with "honor." All this while continuing a racist, merciless bombing of Vietnam, Laos and later Cambodia.
Once he became president, Nixon was besieged by both left and right within the establishment, and by an aroused, progressive mass anti-war movement and civil rights rebellions. Nixon found both the FBI and CIA unsuitable or unwilling instruments for his plans to win the wars at home and abroad.
He called a secret and illegal meeting with all the intelligence chiefs on June 5, 1970. Its objective, as we wrote later, was to achieve "a plan to widen the government's domestic spy network and increase its efficiency." ("The meaning of Nixon's June 5 conspiracy," Workers World, Aug. 24, 1973) However, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover broke away from the conspiracy because he refused to yield bureaucratic control over his personal domain.
Nixon then established an independent spy network that became known as the Plumbers.
The ruling class, unprepared and unwilling to continue the war, used what were in reality minor infractions of bourgeois conduct in high office (the Watergate scandal) to threaten impeachment and drive Nixon from office.
These were in effect coups. But they are never given their right name by bourgeois historians. The same is true when we consider the Civil War in the United States and its outcome.
The victorious North at least programmatically stood for the liberation of the Black masses from slavery and the restoration of their rights as free people, together with their rights to property and land ("40 acres and a mule").
Of course, Marxists must relentlessly demonstrate that the outcome of the war was a victory for Northern capitalists as against the slave-holding oligarchy. We must energetically expose the hypocrisy of the Northern capitalist class in relation to its pretensions for freedom of the Black masses.
Nevertheless, while the basis of the struggle was a clash between two antagonistic and irreconcilable social systems — chattel slavery and wage slavery — the slaves were in an insurrectionary mood. They were organizing, taking arms in their own hands and acting as a revolutionary class.
It belittles the significance of the Civil War to reduce it to only a struggle between the North and the South, without taking into account the resoluteness and heroism of the Black masses. That this class was beginning to act in its own interest for liberation was a vital factor in the struggle.
President Abraham Lincoln was the mediator in this class struggle.
The revolutionary whites in the progressive, anti-slavery movement in the North all understood that the struggle was for the liberation of the Black masses and against slavery. Liberation meant full liberation and not compromise.
The considerable reservoir of racism that also existed in the North was initiated and generated by the capitalist bourgeoisie. They had an economic interest in overturning the Southern oligarchy, but feared and distrusted any kind of real freedom for the slaves. They were afraid the former slaves could easily ally themselves with the Northern working class.
Having crushed the Southern oligarchy, the Northern armies marched into the South with the specific mission of assisting and implementing the freedom of the slaves.
Within days of the end of the Civil War, Lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson became president. Lincoln's death amounted to a successful coup. His assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was not a "lone gunman" but a Confederate sympathizer involved in an elaborate conspiracy.
Johnson, the new president, was a southern Democrat. The radical Republicans denounced him for his Reconstruction program.
The Reconstruction period is generally regarded as lasting from 1865 to 1867. At the beginning, Johnson tried to shift control of the South from the old planting aristocracy, which had been defeated, to small farmers and artisans by disenfranchising Confederate officers and making certain property liable to confiscation.
He appointed provisional governors in the Southern states. Under these governors, most Southern states abolished slavery and ratified the 13th Amendment. But then they enacted the so-called "Black Codes," which made it virtually impossible for the freed slaves to exercise their civil and democratic rights.
Soon the Confederate leaders who had earlier been disenfranchised were being elected to state and federal offices. The Radical Republicans in Congress, led by Thaddeus Stevens, refused to seat these Southern representatives, and passed various Reconstruction acts designed to protect Black people. These included an act enlarging the Freedmen's Bureau and a Civil Rights Act, passed over President Johnson's vetoes.
Black civil rights were incorporated in the 14th Amendment. The Radical Republicans enacted the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which set up five military districts in the South and made U.S. Army authority supreme. Congress then voted to impeach Johnson four times, the last time in 1868. He was not convicted — that took a two-thirds majority — but his program was scuttled.
Reconstruction was finally ended in 1876 after the disputed election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden. In order to win the electoral commission's votes for Hayes, the Republicans agreed to withdraw Federal troops from the South. In this Compromise of 1876, the revolutionary masses, who had never been given the land, were crushed as the North withdrew its armed forces. This left the former slave owners free to reimpose a reign of terror and reduce the Black people to landless sharecroppers.
A student looking up examples of coups in the United States, however, would find none in any of the history books. The very people who speak so disparagingly of Soviet history participate in a cover-up of the real struggles in U.S. history.
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Last updated: 19 February 2018