Between the two poles of Blairite accommodation to neo-liberalism
and nationalist populist accommodation to xenophobia lies a socialist
left of many millions in the former Soviet Bloc in search of socialist
advance. These people can be found in the parties from the Ukrainian
left in the East to the Czech Communist Party and the German PDS
in the West, from the Lithuanian left in the North to the Bulgarian and
Albanian Socialist Parties in the south. Throughout the region, the left
and the labour movements have now experienced almost a decade of
what Michael Ellman has aptly called Katastroika. They have watched
the impoverishment and humiliation of tens of millions of people
suffering the degrading consequences of what the pitiless Western
powers call Economic Reform, while in the former Soviet Union and
parts of South Eastern Europe barbarism itself remains in sight.

In such conditions, brought about in the first place by the far from
inevitable failure of the Soviet project to offer a sustainable and
credible alternative civilisational model to the advanced capitalist
countries, it is hardly to be expected that the left in Central and
Eastern Europe could quickly turn forward to the task of offering a
new perspective of advance towards social progress and emancipation.
What is at issue is, rather, its longer-term potential, which we can only
begin to assess through a sober analysis of its most recent trajectory.
This is what this article seeks to provide, concentrating on three main
themes.

First, we must track the many differing political and ideological
trends and configurations of trends in the different Communist Party
leaderships in the 1980s for these profoundly shaped the subsequent
course of left politics during and after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc.
The initiative for actually dismantling the political systems of the Bloc
actually came from within some of these leaderships, in other words
’from above’. Popular movements from below against Communist rule
played some part, notably in Bohemia and the GDR, but their role has
often been greatly exaggerated in the West.

Secondly, and the other side of the coin of Western images of ’civil
society’ against ’totalitarianism’, we must examine the degree to which
large parts of civil society remained attached to the values of socialism
and indeed (though to a lesser extent) to the Communist Parties
within the region. This has, on the whole, been widely under-rated.
While electorates overwhelmingly rejected the authoritarian political
system of single party rule, significant and in many cases large parts of
the electorates retained perceptions of the former ’single parties’ which
were much more sympathetic to their record than ’totalitarian’ theory
could allow for. The interactions between these parties, the new
Western-backed Social Democrats and the sections of electorates still
oriented towards socialist values have demonstrated just how many
links have been maintained between the former ruling parties and their
societies: only in the Czech Republic out of all the countries of the
former Bloc has a Western-backed social democratic party become
stronger amongst parties to the left of centre than the former
Communists.

And thirdly, the directions taken by the various post-Communist
Parties have also been shaped quite strongly by the parties’ perception
of the new geopolitical situation in which they have found themselves.
We will explore all these themes with reference to three sub-regions in
what used to be called Eastern Europe: East Central Europe, known
often today as the Visegrad countries; South Eastern Europe, particularly Bulgaria and Romania (leaving to one side the tragic special case
of Yugoslavia); and Russia and Ukraine amongst the former Soviet
Republics.

 I. THE LAST ATTEMPT AT REFORM COMMUNISM

The collapse of 1989-91 and the subsequent evolution of the post-
Communist Parties was shaped, of course, by the Soviet Communist
Party leadership’s attempt to reform the political and economic systems
of the Soviet Bloc between 1985 and 1990. Gorbachev gained allies for
the political aspect of his reform project from powerful groups in the
Polish P W leadership and in the Hungarian HSWP leadership. [1]
When these latter two groups !gained majorities in their respective
central committees at the start of 1989 a political opening towards
liberal democratic pluralism was initiated within the Soviet Bloc.

These steps in turn destabilised the Communist Party leaderships in
the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, all of whom had
been resisting the Soviet leadership’s programme of political democratisation. Moreover, unlike Gorbachev, the Hungarian democratisers
were already committed to introducing capitalism along with liberal
democracy and by 1989 this was also largely true of the Polish
Communist leaders as well.

Gorbachev’s reform project could be summarised in terms of three
main planks: ending the party’s political monopoly and moving
towards political pluralism arbitrated by free elections; attempting to
end the conflict with NATO, replacing it with what might be called a
cosmopolitan liberalism; and scrapping the doctrine of the Bloc as an
autonomous economic system, seeking to integrate it into the institutions of the capitalist world economy.

Ending the Party: Political Monopoly

By the mid-1980s the Stalinist political model of the single party
system had long since lost its legitimacy, even within the party nomenklatura
themselves. During the collapse of 1989 no significant
sections of the Communist Parties continued to try to justify a single
party system. At best the political monopoly was justified as an
instrument both to preserve the Soviet Bloc - the argument for
stability - and to maintain the socialist economic system. [2]

The CPSU leadership had come to the conclusion that the lack of
free discussion and circulation of information was crippling Soviet
development, and between 1985 and 1989 Gorbachev gradually
dismantled the vertical political control mechanisms through the
campaigns first for ’glasnost’, then for ’democratisation’. In June 1988,
the 19^th Party Conference of the CPSU scrapped the Stalinist constitutional principle of the ’leading role of the party’ - by agreeing that
the CPSU would have to achieve leadership by gaining popular
support, instead of having it paranteed constitutionally.

In Hungary competitive elections had been initiated in 1985,
though without allowing full party pluralism; early in 1989, the
HSWP Central Committee decided to-move towards full-scale liberal
democratic competitive politics. In Poland minor elements of subordinate pluralism had existed within the political system since 1956
(notably the small, independent Catholic political groups, represented
in parliament and the media) but the PW’s dominance had been underwritten constitutionally since the mid-1970s. It had then been
challenged by the rise of Solidarity in 1980-81, followed by martial law
and the suppression of Solidarity in the early 1980s. In attempting to
re-engage the population with the regime, the PUWD leadership had
resorted to trying to use referenda and had liberalised the media, but
these methods were judged to have failed by 1988 and from the
autumn of 1988 parts of the PUWP leadership were openly calling for
radical change within the political order. This wing of the leadership
then triumphed in early 1989 when the Central Committee decided to
hold round table negotiations with the remnants of the Solidarity
leadership in order to pave the way for free though partial parliamentary elections in the early summer of 1989.

Although other party leaderships sought to resist the dismantling of
the ’leading role of the party’ and the turn to liberal democratic
pluralism, it is striking that only one of these leaderships had the
confidence or energy to try to resist the democratic challenge in
practice through the use of significant force: that was the nationalist
Ceausescu in Romania. Even in the USSR, the attempted coup of
August 1991 against the loosening of the bonds of the USSR was a
feeble, lethargic effort. [3]

The Break with the Primacy of Power Politics

A second fundamental pillar of Stalinism was the primacy which it
gave to state force and great power politics in the international arena.
Both Lenin and Trotsky were acutely aware that the triumph of
Communism was ultimately dependent upon the power of international Communism as a social movement and they sought to rebuild
the energies of this movement both within Russia itself after the civil
war and internationally. But under Stalin, the primacy of state power
politics over all other values became fundamental, both in domestic
and international affairs. While in the second world war this emphasis
on the military aspect of Communism seemed eminently justified, its
continuation and even accentuation during the post-war period was to
have catastrophic consequences, leading to Soviet ’overreach’ in East
Central Europe, locking the USSR and its allies into trying to compete
militarily with the USA and its allies -instead of competing on the
central front of social and cultural models of development, distorting
Soviet economics and undermining the attractiveness of Soviet society.

The break with this Stalinist legacy was the most dramatic and
obvious side of the politics of the Soviet leadership under Gorbachev:
its ending of the Brezhnev doctrine its increasingly unilateral measures
of disarmament and military disengagement and its adoption of new
military ideas of minimum sufficient defence. All these changes were
allied to a downgrading of state force for dealing with opposition in
domestic life. This aspect of Gorbachev’s programme, of course,
profoundly affected the thinking of the Communist Party leaderships.
The lesson drawn in much of the literature is that this is what led them
to open their regimes to political democracy rather than attempting to
resist popular pressures. But this aspect is almost certainly exaggerated
as far as Czechoslovakia and the GDR is concerned. [4]
They realised that
their entire geopolitical context was being transformed and thus also,
in the case of the East-Central European Visegrad countries, their
relationship with West European capitalism.

From Antonomous Economic System to
Integration in the World Economy

During the Stalin period the Soviet leadership had convinced itself that
it could develop limitlessly on the basis of its own resources and
internal division of labour without significant participation in the
international capitalist economic system (a position which, of course,
Zinoviev and Trotsky disputed). This belief continued to be a central
tenet of official Soviet Bloc thinking right through the Khrushchev
period and into the early 1970s. The nomenklatura of the Bloc
believed that on the basis of their own autonomous economic system
they could overtake the capitalist world and thus ultimately triumph,
provided only that the Bloc was not once again subject to external
attack. But at least from the early 1970s, confidence in this idea was
progressively undermined with the Communist Party leaderships
themselves. The USSR itself could not even feed its own population
without importing grain from the capitalist world. During the 1970s
various East Central European party leaderships sought to integrate
their economies more deeply in the capitalist market, and when their
policies failed, some of them (notably the Polish, Hungarian and East
German leaderships) felt unable to draw back from even deeper international integration.

From the very start of his Generzl Secretaryship this became a
central pre-occupation of Gorbachev and his team. The strategic
concept was to make Soviet integration into the institutions of the
world economy possible by destroying the ability of the Western
powers to continue branding the USSR as an enemy state rather than
just a social competitor. Domestic political democratisation and the
turn away from power politics were to help to make this drive for international integration more possible.

For the reform Communists in the CPSU, this turn towards international economic integration was not supposed to be accompanied by
the social integration of the USSR into capitalism. Gorbachev hoped
for one world economy with two social systems, and indeed he hoped
that international economic integration would revive the socialist
project within the USSR itself. The Hungarian party leadership, on the
other hand, were committed by the late 1980s to Hungary’s return to
capitalism. The Polish PUWP’s nomenklatura was also increasingly
convinced that this was the only possible path for a Poland in which
the industrial working class had lost allegiance to the Communist
Party. This Hungarian and Polish view was not accepted by the
majority of the leaderships in the other East Central and South East
European Communist parties. While the Czechoslovak Communist
Party was ready to accept political pluralism, it remained committed to
preserving a socialised economy. The PDS leadership and government
in the GDR took a similar stance until, in February 1990, it felt unable
to resist the collapse of the socialised economy. Similar resistance to
capitalist restoration was maintained both by Iliescu in Romania after
Ceausescu’s overthrow, and by the Bulgarian Socialist Party during
1990.

At the same time, these parties resisting capitalist transformation
lacked any common economic policy platform. This was equally true
of the Gorbachev leadership of the CPSU, which signally failed to
produce any coherent strategy for economic reform and whose
economic policies simply plunged the economy into deeper crisis. In
these circumstances large parts of the managerial nomenklaturas of the
Soviet bloc abandoned their efforts to maintain the socialised
economies and began a scramble for property rights, leaving the
Communist parties in their tens of thousands or using their party
connections for largely illegal transfers of property.

 II. THE COMMUNIST PARTIES’ ELECTORAL BASE AFTER THE COLLAPSE

East Central and South East Europe.

Opinion surveys during the 1980s in the Visegrad countries and the
GDR showed that significant minorities of the population supported
the ruling parties. Even after the imposition of martial law in Poland,
polls in 1984 showed that 25% supported the Communist Party
leadership, 25% were hostile to it and 50% either had no opinions or
did not wish to express them. [5] Furthermore, the 25% supporting the
party tended to hold socialist social values, particularly egalitarianism
and nationalised property, while those hostile tended to be anti-egalitarian and in favour of the free market: Polish society was thus politically polarised on a left-right basis, with the PUWP supporters
occupying the left. The same poll evidence shows majorities of the
population supporting various central aspects of the social principles of
state socialism.

Similar evidence is available for neighbouring countries. From 1985,
competitive elections were taking place in Hungary, and these demonstrate that as late as 1989, the Hungarian Communists were gaining
30% or more of the vote [6] and such votes were indicative of support for
left-wing political and social values. Polling in the GDR tells a similar
story. Polls conducted there between 20^th November and 27^th
November, 1989, showed the Socialist Unity Party (SED) as having
the largest percentage of support of any party - 31%. [7] In
Czechoslovakia polling in December 1989 showed majority support
not only for socialised property but for central planning. [8]
This pattern
was equally evident in the Soviet Republics and in South Eastern
Europe.

A further very important feature of political developments in the late
1980s and early 1990s has been the survival of the official unions of
the State Socialist period as the dominant trade union confederations
during the transition to capitalism. [9] They survived despite concerted
efforts to weaken them on the part of governments of the Right, and
of Western bodies like the ICFTU and the AFL-CIO. In Hungary, the
main trade union centre, MSzOSz, retained some 3 million of its 4.5
million 1988 membership in 1991. [10] The Polish official union, OPZZ,
emerged with 4.5 million members in comparison with Solidarity’s 2.3
million members. The same pattern held in Czechoslovakia where the
official federation, CSKOS, predominated. [11] In Bulgaria the official
unions faced the most serious challenge with the emergence of an
initially strong new union centre, Podkrepa, but after rising from
about 350,000 at the end of 1990 to over 600,000 at the end of 1991,
Podkre a’s membership declined to about 225,000 by the start of
1993. The old official federation’s membership also declined, from 3
million at the end of 1990 to 2.5 million at the end of 1991 and only
1.6 million at the end of 1992, but its dominance within the trade
union field was maintained. In Romania, the official unions also
remained the strongest, although they fragmented into competing
centres in the early 1990s. The continuing role of official trade unions
has also been evident in the former USSR.

The official unions of the Communist period thus turn out not to
have been mere transmission belts for a ’totalitarian’ state without a
significant social base; there was a substantial trade union constituency
remaining in these organisations to be won by parties of the left if they
were prepared to orient themselves towards it. [12] The strong showing of
the socialist parties during the first part of the 1990s is thus scarcely
surprising. Indeed, the puzzle is why these parties did not do much
better in the first post-1989 elections than they did - why their votes
were lower in the GDR and the Visegrad zone than polling evidence
from the 1980s would have suggested. One explanation could be that
erstwhile Communist supporters were temporarily swept up in the
wave of enthusiasm for a transition to capitalism in 1989-90 and
switched their support to the parties of the free-market right. This does
seem to have been an important factor in the GDR elections of March
1990. Polling in early 1990 showed over 60% of the GDR electorate
holding social democratic or socialist opinions, yet Kohl’s campaign
promises swung a big majority for the Right precisely in the traditional
social democratic Saxon strongholds, leaving the PDS with only
16.3% and the SPD with only 21.8%.

On the face of it the same effect seems to have operated elsewhere.
In 1990 and 1991 opinion polls showed large majorities in favour of
so-called ’market economies’ in Poland, Hungary, the Czechoslovakia
and Bulgaria, with a majority the other way only in Romania. This
support had dropped massively by 1994 (except in Romania where
there was a reverse trend). [13] But this evidence of enthusiasm for the
market among large parts of the electorate does not explain why the
still large minorities hostile to the introduction of the capitalist market
did not fully turn out for the ’post-Communists’. The reality is that
there were large numbers of abstentions; many of those who told
pollsters they favoured a market economy must have decided not to
vote. In the 1989 Polish elections, less than 50% of the electorate voted
for Solidarity: the turn-out was low. In 1991 when the first full parlia-
mentary elections in Poland were held, total turn-out was 43%. In the
1993 Parliamentary elections both the turnout (52%) and the vote for
the SDPR went up substantially and detailed analysis has shown that
this correlation was central to the SDPR’s success. [14]
Parties of the
Centre and Right in Hungary also failed to gain support from over
50% of the electorate on a low turnout, and the party that called fairly
explicitly for free market capitalism, the Alliance of Free Democrats,
gained only 21% of the votes cast.

The high abstention rate in Poland and Hungary suggests another
puzzle: why was it that in the only two countries where the ruling
Communist Party leaderships took autonomous decisions (in February
1989) to move towards pluralist democratic political systems, and
where they had been campaigning for years for ’market reform’, did the
Communists perform worst of all the Communist parties in the
region? If the great issue of these elections was freedom (and the free
market) against totalitarianism, why did these two parties perform
worse than the two parties that resisted democratic change and the
market - the East German and Czechoslovak parties? [15]

This points to the possibility that the poor performance of the Polish
and Hungarian parties had nothing to do with freedom versus totalitarianism, but was linked to another feature that distinguished these
two parties from the Czechoslovak and East German parties. This was
the fact that their party leaderships had for some years been vigorously
promoting policies which tended to contradict the socially egalitarian
ideologies of their parties - policies of increasing marketisation and
increasing social differentiation - with increasingly negative effects on
those sections of the population in whose name they ruled: policies
which were not being promoted by the Czechoslovak and East German
parties whose economies were more successful under centralised
planning. [16] Evidence from the results gained by smaller parties in the
Hungarian elections tends to confirm this view that the HSP’s low vote
was partly the result of its pro-Market orientation. While the HSP
gained 10.9% of the vote a further 8.8% of votes went to small parties,
mainly further to the left on the issue of marketisation. The HSW
gained 3.7%, but more significant is the fact that a group of
Agricultural Technicians stood on the single issue of opposing the
break up of agricultural co-operatives and gained 3.2% of the vote; and
some local political leaders from the HSWP days stood separately from
the HSP as a network of local leaders and gained 1.9%.

Research on all these issues still needs to be undertaken. What has
been offered here is nothing more than a set of hypotheses based upon
some empirical pointers. But it would certainly explain the rather
general revival of the fortunes of these parties as the 1990s progressed:
their levels of support were returning to the trend of the 1980s. And
they did so despite strenuous efforts by anti-Communist parties and
the media to delegitimise these parties. It would also suggest another
conclusion: that a significant minority of electorates may have held
social values to the left of the post-Communist Party leaderships and
may indeed still do so.

Meanwhile in what may be called, in a broad sense, the Balkans, the
’post-Communists’ tended to emerge from the first elections as the
strongest parties. This occurred in Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia,
Montenegro, and later Albania. [17] These initial successes were not
momentary: these parties retained strong support even if they were, in
Bulgaria and Albania, subsequently to go into opposition.

Russia and Ukraine

In the Soviet case far more than in East Central Europe, the popula-
tions experienced the collapse of both the single party system and of
the Union itself as something external to them and traumatic. After 5
years of growing economic crisis under the auspices of the reform
Communists’ ’perestroika’ there was great disillusionment with the
Gorbachev leadership, and the elections for the Congress of Peoples
Deputies showed hostility on the part of voters towards candidates
from the party apparatus. But popular political allegiance was transferred to other leaders and groups within the CPSU nomenklatura,
particularly those at Republican level offering republican rather than
all-Union solutions to daily problems. This was true both in Russia,
where former Politburo member Yeltsin sought to build his base as a
leader of the Russian federation, and in Ukraine where the party leader
Kravchuk championed the idea that Kiev could solve problems better
than Moscow. [18]

These developments have often been viewed as the rise of ethnic
nationalism against Communism but outside the Baltic States and
parts of the Caucasus this view is very misleading. [19]
At the time of the
Soviet Union’s collapse, ethnic nationalism was a very minor force in
the three big Slav republics and in Kazakhstan. And republican nationalism, though hostile to ’Moscow’ as the all-Union centre, was not
necessarily anti-Communist. This picture appeared to be transformed
utterly by the failed coup of August 1991, which was followed by the
banning of the Communist Parties of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in
the autumn of that year. [20] But these prohibitions were ambivalent steps
which by no means signified a unified popular hostility to the
Communists. On the other hand the last two years of the CPSU had
been a drawn out and increasingly chaotic fragmentation and paralysis
which undoubtedly did much to undermine public support. The
banning of the CPSU at the same time enabled the Communist
nomenklatura groups in power at republican level to free themselves
from political constraints and maintain their positions of power, while
also freeing themselves from All-Union party disciplines. And it
enabled hundreds of thousands of members of the managerial nomenklatura to easily turn their backs on Communism and throw
themselves into the scramble for private wealth.

Continuing support for the Communist Party in Russia could not
be tested until the party was refounded in February 1993 with a
declared membership of about half a million. Over the next three years
its support grew rapidly from 12.4% (6.7 million votes) in the
December 1993 elections to 22.3% (15.5 million votes) in the
December 1995 elections (to which should be added another 5 million
votes of other basically Communist forces). In the first round of the
Presidential elections in June 1996 the Communist candidate
Zyuganov gained 24 million votes and this figure climbed to just under
30 million, or 40.4% of the electorate, in the second round.

In Ukraine the Communist Party leadership responded to the ban
of August 1991 by forming a Socialist Party of Ukraine in October of
that year. Its relationship to the former Communist Party of Ukraine
was ambiguous: its leader refused to declare it the legal successor of
the Communist Party but most of its members considered it as such.
Its membership rose from a mere 29,000 in 1991 to 80,000 in 1994,
making it by far the largest party in Ukraine. [21]
When the Communist
Party of Ukraine was able to re-emerge legally in the summer of 1993,
at least half of the membership of the Socialist Party left to join the
Communists, who claimed a membership of over 130,000 in October
1993. In the parliamentary elections in the spring of 1994 the
Socialists, Communists and Agrarian parties formed an alliance which
gained a substantially larger share of the vote than any other party.
The official first round result overall for the alliance was 21.78% but
this seriously underestimates left support because the electoral system
encouraged many to stand as ’independents’, including many
successful candidates allied to these left parties. [22]

Within the left
alliance the Communists gained by far the largest share of the votes –
14.84% as against 3.7% for the Socialists and 3.24% for the
Agrarians.
At the same time, both in Russia and Ukraine, public opinion’s
continued support for collectivist economic and social values and for
social egalitarianism and social security is far more extensive than its
support for the post-Communist Parties themselves. In 1996, opinion
polls continued to show, for example, an absolute majority of the
population preferring big industrial enterprises to be state owned
rather than privatised. [23]

The failure of Western-backed social democratic parties to mount a
significant challenge to the former Communists anywhere in the
region apart from the Czech Republic is due above all to the fact that
these parties failed to demonstrate any serious commitment to social
egalitarianism and social welfare: they were simply too far to the right
in their social programmes to gain an audience. [24]

 III. DIVERGENT PATHS FROM SOVIET ORTHODOXY

If there has been a general pattern of continuing electoral support for
socialist parties throughout the former Soviet Bloc, the directions in
which the parties have travelled since the start of the 1990s have varied
greatly. The different parties’ directions were influenced by four main
factors: where the parties stood electorally in the aftermath of the
collapse; the geopolitical position of their country in the new international situation; the dominant trend in the party leadership after the
collapse; and the party’s location within the national political system.

The Parties in East Central Europe

In the Visegrad countries, the former Communists all were ousted
from power in the first general elections, while at the same time their
countries were being rapidly drawn into the Western alliance’s sphere
of influence. In both Poland and Hungary, the dominant groups
within the new ’post-Communist’ parties were firmly committed to
becoming the dominant centre-left parties very much along the lines
of the Party of the Democratic Left (PDS) in Italy. They also re-oriented themselves towards support for the European Union and
NATO, eventually championing their countries’ membership in both.

The Polish Socialists did, however, include supporters of a traditional
social-democratic persuasion, seeking privatisations and to limit the
erosion of social welfare provision. The Hungarian Socialist Party has
a small Marxist left with some intellectual influence, as well as a more
pronouncedly neo-liberal wing even than the Polish socialists.

The Czechoslovakian Communist Party leadership, on the other
hand, attempted to maintain a Marxist orientation, while accepting a
liberal-democratic political framework. It refused to change its name
and opposed the capitalist transformation of the country, adopting a
stance somewhat like that of the French Communist Party under its
present leadership. With the division of Czechoslovakia, the Czech
Communists have maintained this course, while the Slovak
Communists have divided, one branch being prepared to co-operate
with nationalist formations hostile to the free market while the other
has sought alliances with social democratic formations.

In Bulgaria, the post-Communists won the first elections and have
been the ruling party for much of the 1990s, though currently in
opposition. The consequence of their electoral victory was that many
of the linkages between the party and state economic management
groups, broken in countries where the former ruling parties were
placed in opposition, remained strong. At the same time, Bulgaria’s
geopolitical position placed the party in an unusual international
environment: it was not earmarked by the West European states to be
drawn rapidly into their sphere, while for the USA, preoccupied with
the Yugoslav wars, the most important goal for Bulgaria was political
stability rather than Shock Therapy. In consequence, the BSP retained
a leadership which, though internally divided, was much more
concerned with handling the economic crisis of a country strongly tied
economically to the former USSR than with engaging in rapid social
engineering towards capitalism. The party continued to include strong
Marxist currents and to retain strong attachments to collective forms
of property both in the countryside and in the industrial sector, despite
the leverage offered to the West by Bulgaria’s very heavy debt burdens
and extremely fragile financial system. With the Dayton Accords and
manoeuvring between the USA and Russia over NATO enlargement,
however, Bulgaria became a target of intense Western interest and its
financial difficulties were used by the IMF powers to destabilise the
BSP government, leading to a continuing grave crisis within the party
itself.

The Romanian political transition was carried through by a combi-
nation of potentially radically opposed forces: a popular uprising
against the Ceausescu dictatorship and a palace coup by Ceausescu’s
formidable praetorian pard. Political leadership was seized by the pro-
Soviet wing of the Communist Party under Iliescu. This group then
successfully stabilised a new regime by simultaneously banning the
Communist Party and transferring its’ forces into a new National
Salvation Front (NSF). In 1992 the NSF split into two separate
movements, one led by Iliescu, the other by his former Prime Minister,
Petre Roman. The Iliescu group then formed a Party of Social
Democracy of Romania (PSDR) in 1993, while another group, led by
Verdet, established a Socialist Labour Party, claiming allegiance to the
traditions of Romanian Communism. The Iliescu group remained the
dominant party in all elections up to the autumn of 1996, when it lost
power to the Centre Right. [25]

With the Soviet collapse at the end of 1991, Iliescu’s new Party
oriented itself towards the introduction of capitalism, though initially
of a strongly ’national-capitalist’ rather than ’globalised’ variety and
with a declared commitment to continued welfare provision. The
PSDR’s privatisation programme was geared towards passing the
ownership of the bulk of enterprises into Romanian hands rather than
offering large scope for foreign buyers. Since the Ceausescu
government had paid off Romania’s debts, the IMF had little leverage
against this orientation in the early 1990s. [26]

But Iliescu’s orientation shifted in an increasingly Europeanist
direction; signalled and reinforced by Romania’s acceptance into the
Council of Europe in November 1993. [27]
The government gave up its
earlier attempts to re-annex Moldova. In October 1995 the PSDR
broke its alliance with the extreme right Greater Romania Party and
during a visit to Washington Iliescu called the leader of this party and
the leader of another allied far right party ’Romania’s Zhirinovskies’. [28]
Hand in hand with this has been Iliescu’s positive response to the
election of the HSP in Hungary in 1994, expressed in his desire to
settle disputes with Hungary over minority and territorial issues,
through an ’historic reconciliation’ treaty between the two countries. [29]

The Post-Soviet Parties in Russia and Ukraine

The collapse of the USSR, and way it collapsed, profoundly shaped the
new parties of the left in both countries from 1992. The reform
Communists around Gorbachev accepted the banning of the CPSU in
August 1991 and lacked the energy or cohesiveness to form a new
party. When they did try to establish a presence they did so on the basis
of accepting a capitalist transformation, while trying to insist that this
capitalism should be humanised by social democratic values. They
were thus swiftly marginalised as a serious force in Russian politics.

Although various efforts were in fact made to create social democratic
parties, support at the polls for groups roughly equivalent to Western
social democratic parties has been insignificant: not more than 1%.
Those prepared to maintain the networks of the banned Communist
Party and to rebuild it when it was re-legalised were therefore
overwhelmingly those who had opposed the Gorbachev reform effort
of the second half of the 1980s. This leading group also bitterly
opposed the break-up of the USSR and Yeltsin’s programme for
restoring capitalism. And they were able to draw upon the networks
already established within the Russian Federation section of the CPSU
before the collapse, networks with a strong traditional Stalinist stance.

Led from its foundation in 1993 by Gennadi Zyuganov, the
Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) leadership has
proved tactically astute and sophisticated in building a formidable
coalition against the Yeltsin government. When the leadership of the
Russian Parliament was goaded by Yeltsin’s break with the constitution
into trying to seize control of Moscow television by force, Zyuganov
opposed this as a trap. Despite the extensive evidence of the Yeltsin
government’s fraud in the 1993 referenda and elections, the CPRF
stuck to a strictly electoral strategy. It also sought to claim the mantle
of patriotism for itself while repudiating links with the quasi-fascist
party of Zhirinovsky. It thus displaced Zhirinovsky as the main
opposition to the government until by 1996 Russian political life was
polarised between the Communist Party and a government camp
including Zhirinovsky’s party. And while strongly championing the
reconstruction of the USSR, Zyuganov also criticised from the start
Yeltsin’s military attack on Chechnya and holds that the recreation of
the Union should be on a voluntary basis (although other prominent
figures within the CPRF were more positive towards Yeltsin’s military
adventure).

At the same time, the CPRF’s definition of Russia’s predicament and
of its own tasks sets the party apart from any other of the post-
Communist Parties of the former Soviet Bloc. It presents the
catastrophe which has overcome the country as if Russia has been the
victim of something akin to a Western invasion and colonisation. The
party’s programmatic task is thus defined as a kind of national liberation struggle by all patriotic forces in all classes against imperialist
capitalism and its anti-patriotic and largely criminal Russian stooges.
The CPRF must then lead a national democratic struggle, drawing in
not only workers and intellectuals but also patriotic capitalists. As
Zyuganov explained in his speech to the CPRF Congress in April
1997, the restoration of ’rampant capitalism’ is resulting, in practice
’in the progressive colonisation of Russia’. Or rather, it is a qualitatively
new form of waging war against our country. The dirty money, lies and
provocations with which the fifth column arms itself have proved no
less devastating to Russia than the incursions of Batu, Napoleon, and
Hitler put together. In essence the Third Patriotic War is already raging
in the wide territories of our country. . . .’ [30]

The CPRF’s economic programme calls for taking the commanding
heights of the economy back into state hands, especially ’income-
generating enterprises’, and renationalising
the banking sector, without
excluding a role for private ’national capital’ and small private
businesses. It aims to crack down on capital flight, squeeze the dollar
out of the domestic economy, restore the state monopoly of foreign
trade in strategic sectors, ’strike resolutely’ at criminal structures and
corruption and increase taxation on non-productive property while
easing taxation on commodity production. The party’s political
programme is centred first on returning power from the Presidential
executive to parliament. But the party also champions the ultimate aim
of reconstructing Soviets, to which labour collectives will nominate
their representatives, and Soviets are counterposed to the liberal
conception of the division of powers. As Zyuganov put it to the 1997
Party Congress, ’[The Soviets] shape unity of action among power
structures.’ These goals are supplemented by a distinctive set of
ideological themes and symbols, stressed by the Zyuganov group.
These have been well brought out by Jeremy Lester [31] who stresses that
for Zyuganov the ethnos is the main ’agent of history’. And the Russian
ethnos is integrally connected to Russian Communism. So too is the
Russian orthodox Christian tradition.

These ideas are by no means universally shared within the CPRF.
Although dominant since the party’s founding, the Zyuganov group,
which is most closely associated with the nationalist themes, is
probably an ideological minority within the party. There are strong
currents much closer to the outlooks of West European communists
and there are also currents closer to Western social democratic ideas.

The Ukrainian post-Communist Parties provide an interesting
contrast with the CPRF. After being a conservative bastion of
opposition to the Gorbachev leadership in Moscow the Ukrainian
Communist Party split before the break-up of the USSR, with the
dominant group led by Kravchuk adopting a statist republican nation-
alism against the Gorbachev leadership in Moscow. This generated two
currents of opposition to the Kravchuk wing of the CPU within the
Party: conservative Communist opponents both of Gorbachev and of
Kravchuk’s nationalism, who favoured a return to Brezhnevite
principles within a single Soviet Union; and a modernising current, led
by Oleksandr Moroz, the leader of the Communist deputies in the
Ukrainian parliament, which also favoured the separation of the
Communist party of Ukraine from the CPSU.

Unlike Yeltsin, Kravchuk made no attempt to introduce Shock
Therapy into Ukraine. He declared that there were two main problems
for Ukraine to solve: economic reform and state building, but that the
priority was state building. This orientation appealed both to right-
wing Ukrainian nationalists in the Western Ukraine and to the
Communist-oriented Eastern Ukraine which was strongly hostile to
the introduction of capitalism. Behind this position, large parts of the
former nomenklatura proceeded to pillage the country’s assets in ways
very similar to those in Russia, with Kravchuk turning a blind eye.
Against this background, Moroz sought to rally the Communist
constituency in the country to the Socialist party formed in October
1991 while the CPU remained banned. He tried to develop a left
socialist platform for economic modernisation, the development of a
private sector but retaining a large state sector and a strong social
security policy.

With the reappearance of the Ukrainian Communist party, Moroz’s
Socialist Party lost much of its base and membership to the reformed
party. The latter expressed strong solidarity with the CPRF and
declared its aim to be the restoration of the USSR, seeking a return to
the status quo ante of the Brahnev years. At the same time, it did not
subscribe to the messianic Russian nationalist themes of the Zyuganov
group and in its Eastern and Southern Ukrainian heartlands it was
much more directly and strongly a champion of the cause of the indus-
trial workers against their managements and against the local and
regional bosses linked to first, Kravchuk, and then his successor
Kuchma. And in national politics the CPU was prepared to seek
alliances with Moroz’s Socialist Party.

Thus the main themes on the Ukrainian left were much closer to the
language of the Western Communist and left socialist movements than
was the case in Russia, where the CPRF appears, in European terms,
to be sui generis.

 IV. CONCLUSION: DIVERGENT PATHS OF RETREAT

The main political fact throughout the region during the 1990s has
been the terrible blow delivered to the self-confidence, organisation,
living conditions and health of the great bulk of working people in all
the countries concerned. This shock has thrown the post-Communist
parties into ideological and programmatic retreat. Only the Czech
Communists have felt able to hold onto a perspective of both
transcending capitalism and retaining the democratic and working
class commitments familiar to Communists in Western Europe.

Similar currents exist in nearly all the other parties and amongst
socialist intellectuals throughout the region, but these other parties
have tended either to attempt to follow the path already trodden by the
Italian PDS towards a strategic accommodation with current capitalist
dynamics, or have tended to attempt a nationalist appeal against the
drive eastwards by Western state and business interests.

The Polish and Hungarian post-Communist Socialists are not just
accommodators to casino capitalism. They are also important
defenders of secular and democratic, anti-nationalist traditions. The
Polish socialists have also avoided some of the more extreme versions
of capitalist deregulation and privatisation. But what neither of these
parties has been prepared to do has been to take a stand in defence of
the principles of social citizenship and at least a minimal social egalitarianism. In this they have been to the right of their own electorates,
very much in the mould of Blairite politics in Britain.

In Romania and Russia, on the other, hand the successors of the
ruling Communist parties have sought to develop a nationalist-populist resistance to Western capitalist expansion eastwards. In the
Romanian case this type of politics was launched by the state executive
itself after the overthrow of Ceausescu and its aims were as much to do
with attempting to stifle deeply antagonistic tendencies within the
ranks of the National Salvation Front and Romanian society as with
attempting to develop a project based on socialist values. The Iliescu
government’s attempts to manipulate extreme right, quasi-fascist
groups for its own political advantage brought great dangers for
Romania’s Romany population and its flirtation with irredentist
projects towards Moldova had nothing to do with any form of
socialism. The Iliescu government was subsequently prepared to sign a
Treaty with Hungary designed to settle the potentially explosive issues
of border recognition and Hungarian minority rights. But its very
capacity to exploit xenophobia at one moment and repudiate it the
next was symptomatic of the fact that both the NSF and its successor
PSDR were less like stable political formations and more bands of
followers of a state leader.

In Russia, the CPRF leadership’s nationalist political stance also
takes it very far from either the Socialist or
the Communist traditions
of the West European left. Its definition of the situation facing the
Russian people is basically false. Russia has been destroyed not by the
force of a Western imperialist invasion but by the demoralisation and
corruption of the ex-CPSU nomenklatura. While the weak, open
economies of the Visegrad countries were brusquely subordinated to
the diktat of the main Western capitalist powers, the West had very
little coercive leverage over Russia when the USSR collapsed in 1991.
The Yeltsin government had no need of the IMF credits offered in the
summer of 1992, unlike its Polish or Hungarian counterparts. Alone
amongst the countries of the region, Russia could have avoided dependence on the IMF/World Bank, despite the defaults of many of the
countries which owed it debts. Western capitalist penetration of Russia
was the result of the free choice of the Yeltsin regime, with, of course,
powerful inducements from Western capital to allow themselves to be
bought. And this decision to open Russia to Western capital was in
turn the result of the utter demoralisation of the Soviet nomenklatura
inherited from the Soviet period. No longer believing in the Soviet
project, these bureaucrats have engaged in an orgy of criminal asset-stripping, with disastrous consequences for the economy and the
Russian people.

The IMF’s role in Russia has been more or less unprecedented in
IMF history: it has supplied billions of dollars to the Yeltsin
government largely regardless of that government’s previous
compliance with IMF conditionality in order that the government can
use the money to sustain domestic political support. The IMF has
done this in order to help secure a central objective of the Clinton and
Kohl governments - preserving Yeltsin in power. While Western
governments encouraged the dollarisation of the economy and facili-
tated capital flight, responsibility for these developments must still lie
with the Russian government.

It is, of course, also true that the activities of Western financial
operators in Russia and the policies of Western governments have been
immensely destructive of Russia’s economic assets. Western governments have wanted to weaken Russia and have also wanted to gain
control of its energy and raw material resources. And the economic
programme of the CPRF does address a great strategic choice as to the
future of Russia: because of the exportability of the country’s vast
energy and raw materials, the Russian state could take what might be
described as a Nigerian path in which the development of Russia’s
internal market and of the domestic industry to serve that market is
ignored in the interests of a small group of compradors controlling a
state which survives through the revenues derived from exporting
energy and raw materials. That path would lead to the end of any
democratic development in the country and to the long-term continuation of the present impoverishment of the Russian people. By
emphasising national economic development, a strong state industrial
sector and a nationalised banking sector, the CPRF does offer a
progressive alternative development strategy for the country. All of this
means that the CPRF would be justified in saying that it is defending
the Russian nation as a whole from the slide into impoverishment and
peripheralisation. Back at the end of the 1920s Trotsky warned: ’The
Soviet system with its nationalised industry and monopoly of foreign
trade, in spite of all its contradictions and difficulties, is a protective
system for the economic and cultural independence of the country.
This was understood even by many democrats who were attracted to
the Soviet state not by socialism but by a patriotism which had
absorbed some of the lessons of history.’ [32]

Trotsky added that a restored
Russian capitalism ’would be a dependent, semi-colonial capitalism
without any prospects’ which would occupy a position somewhere
between the third-rate position of Tsarist Russia and the position of
India.

The CPRF also has to its credit the enormously important fact that
it is a party of legality and a defender of constitutional government, in
stark contrast to the Yeltsin government which has repeatedly shown
itself ready to flout constitutional norms and the most elementary
standards of legality, practising electoral fraud and chicanery in its
drive to hold onto power and enrich the families of its ministers and
their retinues. In short, the CPRF is the main bastion of constitutionalism within Russia today. It also has to its credit the fact that it has
pushed the quasi-fascist so-called Liberal Democratic Party of
Zhirinovsky, which in 1993 was the main opposition to the Yeltsin
government, to the margin of the Russian political system. It has also
fought the authoritarian demagogy of General Lebed.

Yet the CPRF’s Zyuganov leadership promotes ideas which have
nothing in common with any tradition of the socialist Left and which
cannot be excused by the need to seize the patriotic banner from the
Right. Zyuganov himself seems attached to some of the very worst
aspects of the intellectual heritage of the Stalin years and to mark an
ideological regression in comparison even with Brezhnev. His nationalism suggests a Russian spiritual superiority over other nations and it
also contains disturbing suggestions of some sort of inner, organic
unity of the Russian nation. Zyuganov’s vision of the Soviets as
expressing this supposed unity and as being superior to a supposedly
destructive division of powers is very far from the conceptions of
socialist democracy advanced by Lenin. If in the political field the
CPRF has combatted the fascist Right, in the field of ideas and
symbols, the Zyuganov leadership has made concessions to a Russian
obscurantic mysticism which has nothing to do with the left. The
party also has more than its share of people who hanker after a revival
of Russian power politics. Within the CPRF itself there are, however,
also many who utterly reject such themes and it is to be hoped that
those who oppose Zyuganov’s nationalism will grow in influence and
help to reconnect the Communist movement in Russia with the Left
in the rest of the world.