Dear Boris Yeltsin:
You, the president of the Russian Federation, have come to the U.S. on June 18. This week marks the 50th anniversary of the launching of Hitler's infamous military invasion of the USSR on June 21, 1941.
That event and the subsequent defeat of the Nazi armies by the army and people of the USSR had enormous significance. So it seems strange to me that there are few if any commemorative articles or analyses. These would ordinarily flow like water from the many bourgeois academics in the U.S. Yet it is being passed over almost in silence.
The Nazis' treacherous act must have come as a big surprise to Stalin as well as to his close supporters in the Politburo and Central Committee. As for you, I fear that your current visit to the U.S. will culminate in a somewhat similar surprise.
Stalin thought he had outmaneuvered the Western imperialist democracies by making a nonaggression pact with Germany. He knew well that the Western capitalist powers were using the Munich Pact they made with Hitler to direct his aggressions toward the USSR. Actually, the Western imperialist democracies were in collusion with the Nazis at that point.
But Stalin thought the nonaggression pact with Germany was a tremendous, brilliant coup that would stave off an imperialist attack against the USSR for a long time. He thought that perhaps the imperialists would fight among themselves and the USSR would, at least for a period, live in splendid isolation.
The USSR would supply Germany with much-needed raw materials, grain and other agricultural products. Germany would supply the USSR with much-needed industrial equipment. Years earlier, even the Bolsheviks had counted on that happening once Germany became a workers' republic.
Boris Yeltsin, you should know that when the Nazi attack against the USSR began, there was glee — real joy — in very significant sections of the U.S. ruling class. No less than the future president of the United States, Harry S. Truman, publicly said, "If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible...."
The New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, two significant ruling class organs of mass circulation at that time, applauded this line of thinking. Admiral William Harrison Standley and his naval attache, who were sent on a mission to Moscow by Averill Harriman, had conflicting views on the progress of the war. One hoped for a Nazi victory and the other was hesitatingly for the USSR.
It was only after the Japanese imperialists attacked Pearl Harbor and entered the war on the side of the Nazis that things changed. All this you should know very well.
You and your colleagues, along with Gorbachev, Ryzhkov and others, have been in a race to get to Washington hoping for a similar rapprochement with the U.S. You've been falling all over each other in your indecent haste to get the ear of the bankers and high government officials, including Bush and his aides.
Lately there's an endless stream of Soviet delegations to the U.S. and U.S. delegations to the USSR. All have the supposed objective of quickly remedying the disastrous economic situation in the USSR on the basis of what amounts to a restoration of capitalism.
Before you face a deluge of reporters and dignitaries from the State Department and elsewhere, you should sit down in your hotel room and read several items that will give you a better view of what you are facing.
The first is a significant story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal of June 17. Its headline is "U.S. living conditions are slipping, and were even before recession. Taking account of inflation and taxes, people find they have less to spend."
The writer notes, "As local taxes mount and public services decline, people in such strapped communities as New York are well aware that their living standards are slipping. So are the growing ranks of those left jobless by the recession. But are U.S. living standards overall beginning to erode? It appears so. The erosion, moreover, predates the recession."
This admission — from one of the most important organs of high finance and industry — should be an eye-opener to anyone in the USSR who believes that the streets of the U.S. are paved with gold, and that it is only necessary to cement good friendly relations with the U.S. government for the bankers and industrialists to open their purses and demonstrate their largess.
Boris Yeltsin, you and all your colleagues, including Gorbachev, have been peddling this nonsense. It is bound to boomerang.
There is another article, this one in the New York Times of June 16, which is more relevant to your current mission. You should read it. It very nearly projects a collapse of the whole U.S. banking system.
The Times article shows that the bankruptcy of hundreds of savings and loan banks in the United States is beginning to affect the huge multinational banks. The entire banking system is in danger of a catastrophic financial crash like the one capitalism experienced in the 1930s.
You are scheduled to speak at New York University, the biggest private university in the country. You ought to notice that today students in the U.S. can't find any free universities — unlike you, who got a free education from elementary school through university and were assigned a job thereafter.
One hundred years ago, a free university system was established in New York City. Today students there have to pay a very substantial part of their income for their education.
Two years ago CUNY students went out on strike against a big tuition hike. But the government won, and thousands of students couldn't afford to come back. This year, just a few weeks before you arrived, the students once again went out on strike because of another increase. They occupied many of the buildings; some still face criminal trial for their action.
Boris Yeltsin, you should take note of this. You got your education free in a workers' state.
If you can find the time you should also notice the poverty and homelessness in every major city of the United States. Every city of any size is cutting back on health, sanitation and social services because of the financial crisis the great cities of the U.S. face.
I could go on and on. But you are more concerned with what you can accomplish by way of making the big deal. You want to be the one to rescue the USSR from its current economic crisis. You want to establish a relationship with the U.S. in which the USSR will become an integral part of the "new world order" and peace and cooperation will reign supreme.
So, Boris Yeltsin, I would direct your attention to two more reading items. One is an article in the New York Times on May 15 about Robert Gates, President Bush's nominee to be chief of the CIA. The Times article refers to a 1983 speech in which Gates asserted that the enemy is not only the USSR, but Russia, too.
Said Gates: "The threat posed by the Soviet Union — by Russia — is the lineal descendant of the same threat Western civilizations have faced for three and a half thousand years: it is the threat posed by despotisms against the more or less steadily developing concept that the highest goal of the state is to protect and foster the creative capabilities and the liberties of the individual."
Now, Gates is no young eager beaver coming to the CIA with a new idea. He's an old-timer within the inner circle of the Reagan/Bush capitalist administration. He reflects a viewpoint in U.S. ruling circles. His aim is not merely to undo the USSR as a socialist state, but to undo the USSR altogether — including above all the Russian Federation of which you are the president. It would be wise for you to take him seriously, lest you suffer the same kind of surprise Stalin did when the Nazis opened up their cruel and unprovoked aggression against the USSR.
Here it would be wise to look over another document. The writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a letter to the Politburo in the early 1970s. At that time the USSR and China were involved in military skirmishes with a dangerous potential of turning into an all-out war.
Solzhenitsyn wrote a letter advising the Soviet leadership to abandon the struggle for communism and help construct a new model state based on the old czarist model. Why?
As all the world knows, he is most viciously anti-communist and rabidly anti-democratic. He differs from Sakharov, for instance, who was pro-Western. Solzhenitsyn is strictly oriented toward Russia. He hearkens back to the days of the czarist autocracy. Solzhenitsyn sees Western bourgeois values as in conflict with his feudal moral concepts.
But he is not given to exercises in futility. He had another matter in mind with his letter.
As an ultra-nationalist, he foresaw the possibility of an all-out war between China and the USSR. While he didn't say it in his letter, he was most concerned that the U.S. would be only too glad if the two giant socialist countries got into this kind of fratricidal struggle. Then the U.S. with its military machine could move in on the USSR, dismember it, and use it as a base from which to establish a new military-industrial complex hemming in China and threatening it with extinction.
You ought to know also that Walter Lippman, the renowned foreign policy commentator who was considered an eminent spokesperson for a liberal U.S. foreign policy, publicly suggested that China was too big and should be divided.
This is what the Bush administration really entertains: dismember the USSR and, for the next period, hem in, contain and if necessary disarm China. This is the new world order. The real one — not the figment of imagination you, Gorbachev and the others are cultivating. You have embraced a transformation of the USSR into capitalism because it is supposed to bring prosperity, peace and cooperation with the imperialist powers.
With respect to Solzhenitsyn, in the early stages of his career when he was still a prisoner in the USSR, the U.S. grabbed onto him as a literary luminary who could be useful in the ideological struggle against the USSR. He would bolster the image of the U.S. as the democratic proponent of a new world order. But they soon got disillusioned with him.
Hedrick Smith, one of the better-known students of the USSR, conducted extensive interviews with Solzhenitsyn for his book The Russians and came to the conclusion that Solzhenitsyn was anti-American. Solzhenitsyn understood that the U.S. was no different than the other rapacious capitalist powers; he didn't want to lead a crusade for U.S. imperialism. He wanted to find a way to bring back the old czarist system and compete with the U.S. rather than cooperate with it in the new world order.
It is no accident that Solzhenitsyn, who now lives in seclusion on a farm in Vermont, has time and again refused invitations to go back to the USSR. That is because he realizes that you and your group are transitional figures, as is Gorbachev. He is from another school of thought, however reactionary-utopian it may be. But he is certainly on to the wiles of U.S. imperialism. And he lent himself to them only as long as it served his interests.
Boris Yeltsin, you and your fellow collaborators, including Gorbachev, Ryzhkov and the others, have swallowed the U.S. imperialist bait, hook, line and sinker. There is not the vaguest hint that any one of you understands the real objectives of U.S. imperialism or the situation in which you find yourselves. You are living in a totally imaginary world that can only lead to the kind of disastrous surprise Stalin got when the Hitlerites launched Operation Barbarossa.
The way you have all been conducting yourselves, especially in the last three or four years, is an embarrassment to a communist like myself who has carefully observed developments in the USSR for over half a century. Some of the things you do are incredible. You fumble and bumble and make the kind of stupid errors that can only be grist to the mill of all the imperialist powers.
Take yourself for instance, Boris Yeltsin. When the Russian parliament was about to meet a few months ago, you panicked in fear that you would be ousted from your position. So you hurriedly demagogued your way into rousing all the bourgeois elements in Moscow to hold a demonstration that was obviously calculated to intimidate the deputies.
You certainly knew that most of the deputies were ex-Communist Party members; others were trained and cultivated by the CP. The fact of the matter is that the government apparatus, beginning with the smallest soviet all the way up to and including the Congress of Soviet Deputies, is still mostly Communist or ex-Communist. Only a narrow grouping is really bourgeois in the sense that they want a restoration of capitalism or even of the old czarist regime, which is ridiculous. At most, the espoused nationalists got 6% of the vote; most of that is just rotten trash. There has still not been a spontaneous upsurge of bourgeois elements in the sociological sense.
Why all the nervousness, the maneuvers, and finally an attempt to intimidate the Russian parliament? It's fear, Boris Yeltsin.
You are afraid of the masses themselves, afraid of the unknown in what you've embarked upon, afraid that you are building a house of cards. You fear that you have embarked on a course that by this time you must intuitively know is impractical and leads nowhere.
After trials and tribulations, after sufferings, economic and social catastrophe, the masses will again rise to the occasion. They will call you all to account for your disastrous experiments in capitalist restoration.
So you became nervous and fidgety, scared that you would be ousted by people you should know are not the type to take rash measures. Amazingly, though, Gorbachev went you one better. He called out the army. The situation merely called for assuring, with minimum police measures, that the demonstration would be orderly. But Gorbachev too suffers from the same disease, even more: fear of the masses, fear that the whole thing is based on a misconception, that the restructuring is leading nowhere, that it is a bourgeois fantasy.
It is these incredible blunders that delight the hearts of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
There's one other thing you must take into account. The ruling circles in the Bush administration have got your number. They know about your vulgar behavior last time you visited the United States. It was carefully documented in the capitalist press here. They didn't try to discredit you. They printed it in quite a low-profile way. But there it was.
They also know that you phonied up an attempted assassination story. They know you got yourself into so many contradictions about it that the only way you could get out was to open a huge assault against the Gorbachev centrists, blaming them for all the economic chaos and disorder in order to divert the issue.
It was a fascist trick. Many in the U.S. capitalist establishment recognize it as the type of thing Huey Long would have done. He once mobilized a mass demonstration at the state house in Louisiana and tried to intimidate the legislators.
A well-known liberal commentator in the New York Times, Tom Wicker, wrote a book in which he claimed that Long actually meant to be a liberal. Some of the measures he introduced and carried out were indeed liberal. But that was only because the Roosevelt administration had embarked on a series of reforms, some of them almost revolutionary for the time, under pressure of the masses. Huey Long took advantage of that.
Now, Boris Yeltsin, who are you going to meet in Washington if they decide to meet with you? So far you've got this bunch of Harvard whiz kids who are going to teach you how to bring capitalism to the USSR. In our view, it's a burlesque. It's so patently ridiculous.
Not one of the big bourgeois economists in the administration is involved in this maneuver. Yet you and Gorbachev have sent down your best, most capable economists so they can be taught how to bring about capitalism. It boggles the imagination.
Gorbachev is now in another part of the world, virtually begging to get into the conclave of the seven imperialist powers and participate as one of them. But they wouldn't let him in. He can only meet with them individually in his attempt to get the imperialist powers, especially the U.S., to expend enormous sums — many billions of dollars — to help rescue the Soviet economy.
But the imperialists are not interested in rescuing the Soviet economy. They are interested in advancing money for profitable investments. At the moment, and perhaps for years to come, the USSR does not appear to them as the safe and secure investment they seek.
You have only to read any one of the capitalist newspapers to see that's what they're saying. Nevertheless, Gorbachev continues to reach for a will-o'-the-wisp.
Up to this moment the imperialist governments have extended just a minimum of credit to the USSR. And they only did that after getting a humiliating capitulation on what, since the Bolshevik Revolution, had been considered a sacred principle of Soviet foreign policy. That was to never pay back the loans taken out by the czarist government for the imperialist war of 1914-1917, in which so many millions of people were killed.
This was one of the anti-war demands of the Bolsheviks, and they lived up to their promise when they canceled the debts. Through civil war, military intervention, the Nazi invasion and the Cold War, the imperialists were never able to get the Soviet Union to even talk about paying the czarist war debts.
It took Gorbachev to negotiate the payment. He was promised that this would ease the way for the imperialist governments to open their purses and provide guaranteed loans.
Thus, on Jan. 22, 1988, Soviet and West German banking officials revealed that the USSR had agreed to pay off czarist Russian debts to Switzerland in return for Swiss approval of a bond offering. It was the result of long negotiations with then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of England, who talked Gorbachev into it. The idea was that this would provide an incentive to the capitalist governments to facilitate loans to the USSR.
But little has happened since then. This should be differentiated from the arena of the commercial banks, which have extended to the USSR loans that now number something in the realm of $30 or $40 billion. There is uncertainty as to whether the USSR can make interest payments under current circumstances. Such is the situation with a country that was only a few years ago the most credit-worthy government in the world.
Notwithstanding glasnost, there is great secrecy surrounding the financial operations of the Soviet banking system as they relate to international transactions with the imperialist powers. As the squeeze by the imperialists for payment of interest and principle continued, it reached a point where the USSR had to deplete its gold reserves. The USSR is the second largest gold producer in the world after South Africa. It has had to transport gold bullion in large quantities for the payment of debts. This will surely aggravate the economic crisis.
Now there is a rush to convert the ruble into foreign currencies in order to normalize trade and commerce with the imperialist West. This would be a sign of health if the Soviet economy were growing and there was economic and political stability. But under current circumstances, the rush to convert the ruble into foreign currencies can only serve to aggravate the situation. Furthermore, with the Soviet government relying so much on imperialist good will, it is now easier for the imperialists to organize a run on the Soviet ruble.
There is practically no area of international commerce and diplomacy where one can see an uplifting development for the USSR. In all his visits abroad, Gorbachev has been flattered no end. But there have been no material advantages for the USSR. Wherever he goes he fears to tread on U.S. toes.
When his visit to Japan was arranged, it appeared to be the one diplomatic opening of advantage to the USSR. Japan is the one imperialist government in a position to advance loans without first getting the permission of the U.S. If the visit had any diplomatic objective other than so-called good will, it must have been to obtain loans for investments and industrial projects. It would also give the USSR an opportunity to show some independence from U.S. imperialism.
Instead, a series of articles appeared in the Soviet press written in such a hostile manner as to deliberately close the door to any negotiations on the Kuril Islands — a leftover, secondary issue between the two governments. It was a favorable time for negotiations precisely because of the so-called end of the Cold War. Neither the U.S. nor the Japanese military had a hard and fast position on this. But the Japanese were confronted with a fait accompli.
In 1956, Khrushchev had signed an agreement that opened the door to negotiations on these islands. Gorbachev's visit was supposed to be a continuation of that process, but under much more favorable circumstances for the USSR.
The islands are populated by Russians. If the Kuril Islands had any strategic significance they would certainly have attracted the attention of the Soviet military, which would have made itself heard. Instead, however, the voices raised in the Soviet press reflected rank Russian chauvinism concerning the fate of the Russians in the Kurils if they were taken over by the Japanese. That could easily inflame Russian public opinion in a racist way, as happened in England with the Malvinas.
Thus, the longest negotiations Gorbachev ever attended were a complete failure. He himself characterized them as fit to go into the Guinness Book of World Records and having accomplished nothing. So the one window of opportunity to show some disengagement from U.S. imperialism and at the same time win some loans or contracts for industrial development was thrown to the winds to satisfy Great Russian chauvinism.
In your book Against the Grain you say that Russia is a super-rich country. One might well agree with you, Boris Yeltsin. But so are Brazil, Indonesia, the Middle East and certainly a great part of Africa. You seem to overlook one of the most elementary concepts of Marxist economics. Riches in capitalist society are not only use values. If that were all that was involved, this planet would have very few problems indeed, because the riches could be distributed in accordance with a plan and with the needs of the people.
You talk about use values. But you have come to the United States to talk to the capitalist politicians and bankers on the basis that these use values are also commodities with exchange value. And therein lies the problem.
The imperialists at the other end of the table view the USSR's natural wealth and the Soviet economic and technological infrastructure from the viewpoint of its exchange value. They understand the most elementary lesson of Marxism that you have forgotten: that a commodity must have an exchange value as well as a use value.
There's a superabundance of natural and technological wealth all around, created by nature and by workers. But its value to the capitalists is only significant insofar as a profit can be made. These elementary propositions should be understood by one who had the opportunity to be trained in Marxist economics.
In other words, these riches have to have salability. They have to be exchanged in such proportion and under such circumstances as are compatible with the capitalist profit mode. If this were not so, Japan would not be the powerful capitalist economy it is. And Brazil would not be in the situation it is today.
Look at a Newsday report (June 17) on Brazil: "A majority of Brazilians do not have access to clean drinking water. The nation has virtually no sewage treatment of any kind. In the cities, raw sewage is dumped into the ground or into conduits that cast untreated sludge into the ocean. In the countryside, open-pit latrines are the rule. Well water is often contaminated with deadly bacteria. Even without cholera, which is now spreading, diarrhea and stomach infections are a major cause of death among the poor."
Yet Brazil, judged by its natural wealth and some of its industrial infrastructure, is a very rich country. The problem is that Brazil is part of the capitalist mode of production. Its riches, its use values, are only taken into account insofar as they become commodities for exchange.
At the current time, contemporary imperialism is in the doldrums. It is true that one of its characteristic features is the search for markets all over the world, for investment and exploitation. But for now and perhaps for years to come, these markets are glutted. This is true despite or perhaps because of the dizzying development of high technology. Previous technology, to which millions of labor hours were devoted, becomes obsolete precisely because of the speed with which newer technology becomes more easily marketable.
Stalin's death for the first time presented an opportunity to the Soviet leaders to arrange for an orderly succession. More important, they had a chance to reappraise not only Stalin's personal leadership but the political and economic situation in the USSR.
The ascension of Khrushchev as secretary of the party ended in a secret trial of Lavrenti Beria, then the minister of internal affairs, which was hailed by the world press and, not without justification, in the USSR itself. But it was not carried out in the spirit of revolutionary working class democracy. Followers of the Stalin faction were ousted one by one and then as a group, without the necessary preparation and openness that was essential not only for a reappraisal of the Stalin era but to politically reform the Soviet state.
The leadership was incapable of doing this. Moreover, there were fears of the imperialists — and of the masses at home, from whom they have only a narrow margin of legitimacy, which for the party was inadequate for a broad-based revival of working class democracy.
Khrushchev seems to have panicked in the course of preparing for the 20th Congress of the party in 1956. Instead of an orderly, open discussion of the Stalin era, he seems to have sort of spilled his guts in a secret report, which could only have demoralized large sections of the party. The secrecy of the report was short-lived. The CIA soon printed it in the New York Times, probably adding much that was not in it. To this day, the actual report has not been published. An orderly succession in the spirit of working class democracy was missed.
Similarly, the death of Chernenko in 1985 offered a real opportunity for reevaluation in the spirit of revolutionary Marxism, in the spirit of socialist construction and the advance forward to communism. Chernenko's illness was well known. There was sufficient time for discussion and preparation.
Unquestionably, groupings were formed. The pro-socialist left was headed by Ligachev, who was not a politician but more in the nature of an ideological leader. Gorbachev was in the center. And you, Boris Yeltsin? You preferred to place yourself at the extreme right.
What was the issue? In the 1980s the growth of the Soviet Union had slowed somewhat as against the growth in the Western capitalist countries. That was the problem. Call it stagnation or whatever, there was unquestionably a slowing of growth. But there was not a fall-off in industrial production. There was not a crisis in consumer goods industries. There was not a crisis in agriculture.
There have been many explanations tendered by bourgeois sources. The 1987 book Blood in the Streets by James Davidson and Sir William Rees-Mogg had this to say: "While the Soviet Union could turn in respectable rates of economic growth so long as it was industrializing, it was doomed once the world economy shifted from slabs of steel to producing complex silicon chips."
Either commentaries have all been to the effect that the Soviet economy could grow only as long as heavy industry was king, but once the computer revolution came along it fell way behind.
Many bourgeois commentators — some of them authoritative — have argued that is the basic cause of the decline in the Soviet Union's growth rate. But by the time of Chernenko's death, you and the other comrades had ample opportunity to discuss and evaluate the basis for this decline. At the very next plenum of the Central Committee, the question of modernizing the technology and industrial equipment of the USSR was the most important point on the agenda. It was agreed to embark on a vast program to bring up to date the scientific-technological revolution.
Boris Yeltsin, you were one of those who voted for it. You all agreed on it. But subsequently, in smaller groupings, and especially in the Politburo, a sharp change in perspective occurred. Instead of identifying the need to rationalize the infrastructure of the USSR as the principal task facing the party and the country, the orientation became to create new social relations — in other words, to embark upon a course of social counterrevolution.
You could have used your engineering training to fight for what originally was the perspective outlined in the 1985 plenum of the Central Committee. You could have offered your expertise to help in the modernization program so a scientific-technological revolution could change the industrial infrastructure of the USSR.
Instead, you not only went along with an attempt to reverse the course of socialist construction, but took the far right position. So now, Boris Yeltsin, you find yourself in the position of being the leader of the counterrevolutionary restorationist movement.
You took the road of a bourgeois politician. You placed yourself at the extreme end of the developing factionalism in the summits of the Communist Party leadership. You scented the growing strength of the bourgeois stratum, especially in the big cities of Moscow and Leningrad, the old fortresses of the proletarian revolution and of the working class. You scented that the social composition had changed, offering a vehicle for an "independent" road.
You became the leader of the Inter-Regional Group in the parliament, which is notorious for being subsidized by the CIA. What is a small subsidy for some 30 or 50 parliamentarians to the CIA? They did it in Nicaragua. And the U.S. has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in a nuclear race with the USSR. This, by comparison, is small potatoes. Who knows how many others in this bourgeois parliament have been subsidized in the same way? Yeltsin, you should ask yourself: are you leader or captive of the bourgeois counterrevolution?
You are finding, moreover, that this counterrevolution — and that's what it amounts to — can't be accomplished by the reactionary forces in the USSR alone. You can't reverse the social and economic system by the narrow stratum of the bourgeoisie and their ilk in the USSR. To accomplish a complete overturn of the years and years of socialist construction will require substantial penetration by U.S. finance capital. In reality, the situation is rotten-ripe for you and Gorbachev to mortgage the USSR on the altar of capitalist reconstruction in the Soviet Union.
But you forget a secret of social systems — primary communism, chattel slavery, feudalism, capitalism. None of these social systems ever really disappears until its potentialities have been exhausted. The same also goes for socialism. The potential for the development of socialism has not been exhausted in the USSR. Its development has always been constricted by a predatory imperialist power that has never allowed the Soviet Union to breathe a moment in peace. To now bind it hand and foot to the imperialist banks and the Pentagon is the kind of perspective that appeals only to outright renegades from communism and puppets of imperialism.
Boris Yeltsin, the best thing you can do for yourself and for the USSR is to pack your bags and unceremoniously leave the U.S. without any commitment. Explain to your colleagues and comrades at home that the road to capitalist restoration would make all of Russia a neocolonialist base for imperialist aggression, especially against China. This would be the real darkness at noon.
Last updated: 19 February 2018