With the death of Boris Yeltsin, the bourgeois press honoured a man who they considered heroic but flawed. Even they can see that the new Russia is a long way off from being a decent society. But they honour a man whose intransigence meant that an uprising led to a counter-revolutionary conclusion and abolished the Soviet Union. This mobilisation was a response to the jailing of Mikhail Gorbachev by the army.
Mikhail Gorbachev was the Soviet leader who saw unpleasant bureaucratic characteristics within the Soviet Union and wanted change. His two main reforms were known as Glasnost meaning openness and Perestroika which meant a limited freeing up of the market place.
Whilst Gorbachev did not himself aspire to overthrow the Soviet Union, his reforms promoted the very class forces whose interest was in doing so. These Yeltsin mobilised very effectively and the Soviet Union was destroyed.
The formation of the Soviet Union was the major social gain of the twentieth century. It was a beacon of progress throughout the world. It was the inspiration for social transformation throughout the world. It inspired socialist revolutions. It inspired progressive wars against imperialism. It inspired radical reform movements.
In Australia, the Australian Labor Party took up the socialist objective to head off the communist movement. History has shown how shallow their commitment to socialism has been.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union everything has gone backwards (with the exception of South America where there have been some significant revolutionary movements). But there has been a genera trend towards counter-revolution. For a start, there has been a counter-revolutionary flow-on. The whole of Eastern Europe has gone capitalist. Post-capitalist states such as China and Vietnam have gone significantly to the right. Cuba is isolated. National liberation movements have abolished any commitment to socialism (real or rhetorical). For social-democratic parties, socialism is a dead letter.
Throughout the world, as well as in the Soviet Union working and poor people have suffered. The movement has been set back decades.
The fall of the Soviet Union has led to a rise of religion. In the imperialist west the religious right is on the ascendency. In the East, especially the Middle East, religion is seen as a bulwark against imperialism. Communists nor communist influenced national liberation movements are not fighting imperialism but El Quaida is! Of course its terrorist methods won�t work. But its heroic actions are looked upon as a beacon of struggle by victims of either Israel or the USA.
The ideological damage created or enhanced by the Yeltsin counter-revolution has been immense.
Things are much worse in the Soviet Union today. Some will respond to this by glorifying the Soviet Union�s yesterday. This we must not do! It is the mistakes of yesterday which led promoted the counter-revolutionary forces which were victorious in Russia. We must make a Marxist analysis.
The analysis of Lenin and Trotsky are the tools we must use to make this analysis. Lenin described the bureaucracy as being �the internal enemy�. He was indeed correct. Trotsky in his book The Revolution Betrayed showed how the method of Stalin and Bukharin led to the promotion of bureaucracy and counter-revolution.
The collapse of the Soviet Union does not repudiate Marxism, it vindicates it. Class struggle does not end when the dictatorship of the proletariat has been established. The proletariat must establish hegemony over the non-proletarian groupings that remain after the revolution. Doing this requires the Marxism method which was abandoned by the Stalinists.
Boris Yeltsin deserves to be remembered as the most significant counter-revolutionary of the twentieth century.