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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 4/11, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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The "specter of communism" is haunting the world's capitalists again.
Ever since millions of Russian workers voted Communist in the Dec. 17 Duma elections, the U.S. corporate news media have tried to play down and distort the vote's significance.
But behind closed doors at the State Department, the Pentagon and CIA headquarters, maneuvering is surely under way to prevent a Communist candidate from winning June's presidential elections.
Russians may vote for socialism. But Washington's champions of "democracy," capitalist-style, have no intention of letting them have it.
The Russian vote was more than a political rebuff to the Wall Street moneymakers and their new junior partners on Gorky Prospect.
Washington spent trillions of dollars after the end of World War II to destroy socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. As far as the bosses of corporate America are concerned the industrial wealth and resources of the former USSR now belong to them.
They are outraged at the slightest show of resistance to the corporate plunder of the former Soviet Union. And they are terrified by the prospect of an anti-capitalist uprising by Russia's working class.
One theme of U.S. television and press coverage of the Russian vote was that those who voted Communist were "only" older people--a "dying generation," as they cynically call the millions who defeated Hitler's war machine and rebuilt their devastated homeland.
What if that were so?
Older people do not automatically "yearn for the past," as the media analysts imply. Older Black people in the United States don't yearn for the days before the civil-rights movement. Older U.S. workers don't look back wistfully to the 1930s Great Depression or the days before industrial unions, Social Security and the minimum wage.
It is a powerful statement if a generation who lived most of their lives under socialist construction want to restore Soviet power.
In reality, the election returns show clearly that Russians voted by class, not age. Communist returns were much higher in industrial districts, such as the Urals, the Red Belt cities around Moscow and the mining regions of Siberia, as well as in national-minority regions and on collective farms.
In these regions, workers haven't gotten paid for months, male life expectancy has fallen into the 50s and parents cannot afford milk for their children.
Pro-capitalist parties did well in cities like Moscow and Leningrad, where the "new Russian" bourgeoisie is concentrated and many live by speculation. But even in these cities, Communists won in the working-class districts.
Another big-business media theme is that those who voted for Communist candidates weren't really voting for socialism. White House spokesperson Michael McCurry pointed out that Gennady Zyuganov and other leaders of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) are not the "Bolsheviks of old."
After the election, Zyuganov said that when the Duma opens in January, his party's fraction will focus on tax reform, increased social spending and protective tariffs for Russian industry. An editorial in the KPRF newspaper Pravda Rossiya called for more foreign investment in the Russian economy.
But that's not why millions of workers stood lined up for hours in sub-zero temperatures to put check marks by the hammer and sickle of Soviet power. When he meets with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as he did last fall, Zyuganov may speak of private investment and a mixed economy. When he speaks to Russian workers, however, he denounces capitalism and Wall Street, praises Lenin, and calls for socialism and restoring the Soviet Union.
Zyuganov was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union who criticized Gorbachev's capitalist reforms. In the eyes of the masses, he is identified with the Soviet state.
The U.S. media also ignored the unexpectedly strong showing by the Communist Workers of Russia for the Soviet Union (KTR). This bloc, led by the Russian Communist Workers Party (RKRP), wants full restoration of socialist ownership and Soviet power.
KTR had no access to television and was completely boycotted by the Russian media but still won nearly 5 percent of the overall vote. Individual KTR candidates were elected in Moscow, Leningrad and Sverdlovsk.
The Dec. 19 Wall Street Journal admitted that the total pro-Communist vote was over 30 percent of the total vote. Voter turnout was 65 percent, higher than in most U.S. elections. Even so, there were millions of workers too disillusioned with the system to vote at all. But that doesn't mean they can't be mobilized in a struggle.
Several smaller Communist parties, including the All-Union Communist Party-Bolshevik, called for an electoral boycott.
In a news conference the day after the election, KTR leader Viktor Anpilov offered to support the KPRF's presidential campaign if it calls for a complete reversal of privatization and restoring Soviet power.
Zyuganov seems more inclined to a bloc with capitalist "opposition" figures like right-wing nationalists Vladimir Zhirinovsky and former Gen. Anatoli Lebed or "liberals" like Grigoriy Yavlinsky of the pro-U.S. Yabloko party.
Such alliances would likely face opposition from the KPRF rank and file, which, in the words of a Wall Street Journal editorial, "hasn't changed much." Neither Zhirinovsky nor Lebed opposes privatization, and both supported Yeltsin's October 1993 coup against the elected Soviet parliament.
Zyuganov will likely face criticism at the KPRF's upcoming plenum, set for Jan. 8, and there may be other contenders for the party's presidential nomination. KTR will hold a congress on Jan. 27.
Finally, in true "democratic" style, the corporate media brag that mass opposition at the polls cannot stop privatization. They point out that Yeltsin's 1993 constitution renders the Duma virtually powerless. And as the October 1993 massacre demonstrated, Russia's new capitalist class now has an armed state apparatus at its disposal.
So did the czar. December 1995 was not the first time Russia's working class voted for socialism. They voted for it with arms in hand in the October 1917 Revolution. They defended it for four years against Western invasion and civil war.
They voted for it with their blood in the war against Hitler.
The Wall Street money makers and their Washington representatives know this very well. That's a big part of the reason for the U.S. military buildup in Eastern Europe today. It is a loaded gun aimed at the workers of all the former socialist countries, including the former USSR.
Throughout the Soviet Union's existence, its people were threatened by German tanks and U.S. nuclear missiles. The U.S. military threat was a major factor in the overthrow of Soviet power.
The working class of Russia has a right to free their country from the grip of U.S. monopoly capital and restore Soviet power. They have a right to wage that struggle free from overt or covert intervention by the CIA, NATO or the Pentagon.
The working class of the United States must defend that right. After all, workers in Russia and the United States share a common enemy.
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