What exactly is being planned for April 25 in the Russian Republic? Is it a mere referendum? Is it just one of those electoral processes that replaces one set of politicians with another? Why has this referendum attracted such worldwide attention?More importantly, why is every sector of the capitalist establishment in each and every one of the imperialist countries solidly in support of Russian President Boris Yeltsin? They all regard his success as crucial.
The all-important aspect of this referendum is that the imperialist powers are not content with just wishing Yeltsin and his cabal of counterrevolutionaries a successful outcome. They are actively supporting him with more than good wishes or promises.
Just look around and see what is really happening in relation to this momentous development. It is momentous because of the flagrant intervention of the imperialist powers. They are intervening in such a shameless manner that it rivals outright military intervention of the kind these powers carried out immediately following the victory of the October socialist revolution in 1917.
It was not enough that the Clinton administration accorded Yeltsin a summit meeting in Vancouver, ostensibly to extend loans and grants to his government to the tune of $1.6 billion. Clinton then ostentatiously proclaimed that the sole purpose of these loans and grants was to help Yeltsin win the referendum. Such brazen interference in the internal affairs of another country at any other time would have been rudely rebuked.
The Congress failed to reject U.S. aid
If it could speak with a clear and unambiguous voice, the Congress of Deputies would have roundly denounced Yeltsin for soliciting aid from the country that had been the irreconcilable enemy of the USSR and of its workers and peasants for many decades. It failed to do so. Instead of roundly rejecting this grant, this form of bribery and corruption, the Congress confined itself merely to ill-conceived rhetorical rejoinders against Yeltsin, without specifically and categorically branding the loan as bribery and as crass intervention in the internal affairs of Russia.
More than that, the Congress failed to exercise its right to supervise the electronic and press media, which are state-owned and are pledged to support state policy, although not necessarily presenting only the state's position. On the contrary, the Congress permitted state property, that is, the media, to be slanted almost entirely in favor of the loans and grants. So the media played up the graciousness of the imperialist powers, particularly of the United States.
It is a measure of how public opinion is being manipulated in a thoroughgoing bourgeois and pro-imperialist direction in favor of hostile class forces. The vast powers of the electronic media in particular are given free rein to mold public opinion, slanting the news in a bourgeois direction.
Those in the media are virtually unmindful that their livelihood comes from a proletarian revolution that created a press freed of complete subservience to the private interests of the capitalists and financiers who had owned it and who in turn were beholden to the czarist aristocracy.
Referendum threatens gains of revolution
Now the gains of this whole revolution are threatened with being turned around. It is a situation totally unprecedented for a great country where one of the greatest industrial and technological miracles has been accomplished by the workers. A referendum is to be held that potentially is to decide whether the social and political gains of the revolution are all to be reversed in favor of capitalist restoration.
It is good to pause and look around at what is happening in Russia. The unrestrained increase in the cost of living has eaten away savings in the banks that took workers years and years to accumulate. The dismantling of factories in the interest of private capitalist ownership, the threat to decollectivize the land and sell it to absentee landlords--all this is what is scheduled to emerge if the Yeltsin cabal of counterrevolutionaries, who organized this referendum, succeed in their objectives. A timid, vacillating and compromising Congress of Peoples Deputies has allowed it to take place.
But there is much more. As of April 14, the finance ministers of the seven most powerful imperialist countries, the so-called G7--the United States, Germany, Japan, Britain, France, Italy and Canada--are meeting in Tokyo in one of their annual gatherings. They were originally scheduled to meet sometime late in the summer.
Why move the meeting up to mid-April? Scheduling these imperialist conclaves is a formidable organizational task. Rescheduling it on short notice is contrary to their custom and tradition. There must be an important basis for this move. The basis is the referendum in Russia.
Under guise of aid to Russia
The objective of this conference of pirates and thieves is to literally dangle billions of dollars in aid before the Yeltsin counterrevolutionaries to make certain that their monetary influence will decide the outcome of the referendum. Of course, they do it in the guise of aid to Russia. The fine print that accompanies these loans and grants is something else.
How reminiscent of what happened after World War II, when the imperialists averted a revolutionary outcome for the workers in Italy and also in France with the so-called Marshall Plan. The ostensible purpose then was to reconstruct Europe from the devastation caused by the Nazis. In reality the aid was given to firmly entrench capitalist governments subservient to U.S. imperialist interests.
These imperialist bankers and finance ministers have for months dinned the same message into the ears of the masses of Russia, and Yeltsin has echoed them almost daily. They have been saying that in order for prosperity to eventually come from free markets and capitalism, it is necessary to sacrifice now. This sacrifice takes the form of cuts in social services of all kinds, including wages, medical care, education and other benefits.
Now, all of a sudden, like a bolt from the blue, Yeltsin has come out for an almost totally opposite program. He not only doubled the minimum wage, but also increased social benefits and wages for the workers. This is the most phenomenal turnaround in the quickest possible time. In the words of the Washington Post (April 14), "He is furiously courting the voters with a mixture of populist promises, and warning of social chaos if the electorate turns him down."
Such turnarounds were a striking characteristic of the period of the rise of the Nazis in Germany. They freely handed out demagogic promises to attract the most desperate elements of the population who had been reduced below poverty levels. This is what Yeltsin is doing now. His unrestrained demagogy is a resort to the Nazi prototype of electioneering.
Where does this put the conservative bankers, industrialists and financiers in the imperialist countries who are forever dinning into the ears of the workers the necessity for belt-tightening and cuts in social services and benefits? How can they tolerate such unrestrained demagogy? The answer is that Yeltsin's lies are prearranged with the imperialist bankers.
What Congress of Peoples Deputies can do
What can the Congress of Peoples Deputies do at the present time? While the influence of communist deputies is still small, the Congress's constituency, the working class, is the largest and most decisive social class. And resurgence in communist organization is now commanding the interest of even the most rabid, pro-bourgeois press in the West.
The Congress can and should call upon the mass of the people to organize against the counterrevolution. It could call for mass resistance and a mighty demonstration, at least in the principal cities of Russia. It could call such an action for May Day, which in Russia more than anywhere else in the world is a day with great revolutionary tradition. This day has always had mass appeal for the workers. In addition, May Day has always been anathema to the forces of reaction, and strikes terror in the hearts of the bourgeoisie and all counterrevolutionaries.
Nothing so demonstrates where a movement is really at in times of crisis as when it calls upon the masses to come out in the streets. That is the way it was in the three great Russian revolutions of the past: in 1905, in February 1917 and in October 1917.
Such an action can only strengthen the rejuvenation of socialism in Russia.