Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

by Michael Parenti

Much of precommunist Eastern Europe, as with prerevolutionary Russia and China, was in effect a Third World region with widespread poverty and almost nonexistent capital formation. Most rural transportation was still by horse and wagon.

During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did.

In fact, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, these countries had known little political democracy in the days before communism. Russia was a czarist autocracy, Poland a rightist dictatorship with concentration camps of its own, Albania an Italian fascist protectorate as early as 1927, Cuba a U.S.-sponsored dictatorship. Lithuania, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria were outright fascist regimes allied with Nazi Germany in World War II.

In 1992, the presidents of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Russia demanded that their parliaments be suspended and they be allowed to rule by presidential decree, with repressive measures against “hardliners” and “holdovers” who resisted the free-market “reforms.” Their goal was not power to the people but profits to the privileged.

Gorbachev then demanded that the Soviet Congress abolish itself. It had remained too resistant to change. Actually the Congress was not opposed to democratic debate and multi-party elections; these were already in practice. It resisted an unbridled free-market capitalism, and for that reason would have to go.

Gorbachev repeatedly cut off the microphones during debate and threatened singlehandedly to abolish the Congress by emergency decree. He forced a vote three times until he got the desired abolition. These strong-arm methods were reported in the U.S. press without critical comment.

A socialist critic of communism, Boris Kagarlitsky argued, “In fact, there was no coup at all.” The soldiers were unarmed and confused, the tanks called out were undirected, “and the leaders of the so-called coup never even seriously tried to take power.” The real coup, says Kagarlitsky, came in the aftermath when Boris Yeltsin used the incident to exceed his constitutional powers and dismantle the Soviet Union itself, absorbing all its powers into his own Russian Republic. While claiming to be undoing the “old regime,” Yeltsin overthrew the new democratic Soviet government of 1989-1991. In late 1993, facing strong popular resistance to his harsh free-market policies, Yeltsin went further. He forcibly disbanded the Russian parliament and every other elected representative body in the country, including municipal and regional councils. He abolished Russia’s Constitutional Court and launched an armed attack upon the parliamentary building, killing an estimated two thousand resisters and demonstrators. Thousands more were jailed without charges or a trial, and hundreds of elected officials were placed under investigation. Yeltsin banned labor unions from all political activities, suppressed dozens of publications, exercised monopoly control over all broadcast media, and permanently outlawed fifteen political parties. He unilaterally scrapped the constitution and presented the public with a new one that gave the president nearly absolute power over policy while reducing the de...

Yeltsin, the “democrat,” twice suspended publication of the Communist party newspaper Pravda. He charged it exorbitant rent for the use of its own facilities. Then in March 1992, he confiscated the paper’s twelve-story building and its press and turned full ownership over to Russiskaye Gazeta, a government (pro-Yeltsin) newspaper.

Yeltsin exercised monopoly control over Russia’s television networks, enjoying campaign coverage that amounted to nonstop promotionals. In contrast, opposition candidates were reduced to nonpersons, given only fleeting exposure, if that. Yeltsin’s reelection was hailed in the West as a victory for democracy; in fact, it was a victory for private capital and monopoly media, which is not synonymous with democracy, though often treated as such by U.S. leaders and opinion makers.

Instead of being transformed into capitalist states, some communist nations were entirely obliterated as political entities. Besides the obvious example of the Soviet Union, there is the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, which was absorbed into the Federal Republic of Germany. South Yemen was militarily attacked and crushed by North Yemen. Ethiopia was occupied by Tigrean and Eritrean forces that imprisoned large numbers of Ethiopians without trial; expropriated Ethiopian property; suppressed Ethiopian education, business, and news media; and imposed a “systematic enforcement of tribalism in political organization and education”

The former communist nations are being recolonized by Western capital. Most of their foreign trade is now controlled by multinational corporations. Like Third World countries, they are increasingly deprived of each other’s markets. The once heavy and mutually beneficial commerce between them has been reduced to a trickle, as their economies get tied into the investment and extractive needs of global capitalism.

“The hundreds of millions of dollars spawned by Western aid programs have mainly benefited the Western companies which headed east to board the aid gravy train.” When Rumania inaugurated an over-the-counter market for trading privatization shares, the $20 million in “start-up costs were largely covered by the U.S. Agency for International Development

Since going private, ZiL, the huge Moscow plant, saw its production of trucks slump from 150,000 to 13,000 a year, with almost 40 percent of the workforce laid off. In April 1996, the remaining workers petitioned the Russian government to take back control of ZiL. In the past, ZiL workers and their relatives “had unshakeably safe jobs” at the factory. They lived in apartments and attended schools provided by ZiL. As babies they spent their days at the ZiL day care center, and when ill they were attended to by ZiL doctors. “I was raised in a country that cared about its workers,” said one machinist, who now was sorry he had opposed that system (New York Times, 5/8/94).