Vladimir Putin’s recent election to the Duma, the Russian parliament, confirmed yet again what had been obvious before: that Russian democracy is a complete travesty.
Needless to say, Putin’s United Russia party won half of the votes cast (or rather counted by Putin’s venal Election Commission), retaining its absolute majority in his rubber-stamp legislative body. Alexey Navalny’s Strategic Voting campaign of casting ballots for anyone but United Russia (which he had aptly renamed the Party of Crooks and Thieves) may have made a minor dent, as its support went down from 54 percent in the previous election. But if so, Navalny’s strategy only boosted the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, or CPRF, which came in second with around 20 percent.
It is six of one, half a dozen of the other. The CPRF is a fake opposition party just as United Russia is a fake ruling party. None of the parties allowed into the Duma do anything except create a Potemkin village facade which no one in or out of the country believes. In Soviet-occupied East Germany there used to be several stunted “democratic” parties that existed entirely for show. Similarly, in Soviet times, the Ukrainian and Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic used to have their own seats in the United Nations, pretending to have an independent national voice.
The CPRF are card-carrying members of the clown cart known as the Russian Duma. Their ticks of the trade are nostalgia for Leonid Brezhnev and sanctimonious Orthodox Christianity that would make Vladimir Lenin spin in his mausoleum.
And yet a genuine communist party could have been useful as a member of the opposition.
When Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, taking advantage of the political turmoil brought about by a protracted military conflict and the ensuing power vacuum, they started to execute and jail people to implement their harebrained economic and social policies. Whatever could be said for the old Russian Empire, prior to World War I, it had been enjoying remarkably fast economic growth and modernization, and going through rapid social change. The Bolsheviks benefited from that progress but they also threw away most of the advantages, laying the groundwork for the current economic, social and cultural backwardness not only of Russia itself but of the former constituent republics of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine.
But history would have been very different — and Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics would have looked very different as well — had the Bolsheviks remained in opposition in a democratic government. There was a very small chance of that happening when they suffered a defeat in the one and only free election in the Soviet Union, ending up in a minority in the Constituent Assembly. But of course, Lenin promptly dissolved it and imposed a one-party rule.
The truth is that of the policies which the Bolsheviks advocated were subsequently implemented across Europe and in the United States. They demanded an eight-hour workday paying a living wage and offering a paid vacation. They supported strong trade unions defending the rights of ordinary workers against the bosses.
They further believed that all citizens are entitled to free education, health care and government-provided old age and disability pensions. They believed in the equality of sexes and races. They proclaimed complete self-determination for all nations and were opposed to colonialism and exploitation of colonial labor and resources.
When they grabbed power the Bolsheviks failed to implement many of those ideas — or else implemented them in a skewed and perverted form. Had they been in opposition, they would have been more persistent, demanding a more thorough implementation. A democratic government, fearing their popularity among voters, would have put much of their program into effect. This is what happened gradually in Western Europe under pressure from strong communist parties and because democratic leaders believed that class struggle had been a key ingredient in the rise of radical movements such as communism and fascism.
The same thing took place in the United States — more than a decade earlier. In the 1930s, after the shock of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt pushed through programs that blunted some of the harsher edges of capitalism, freely borrowing some of the Bolsheviks’ ideas.
After the end of World War II, the United States found itself locked in a bitter ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. The Cold War was viewed in Washington in terms of fighting for the hearts and minds of ordinary people in the Soviet Union and around the globe. The Soviet insistence that only a communist government could create acceptable living conditions for the working population acted as a foil for American policies. American politicians (both the Democrats and the Republicans) took considerable pride in — and derived considerable propaganda benefits from — the fact that American industrial workers enjoyed middle-class living standards and lived incomparably better than Russian workers in their proletarian paradise.
Civil rights battles against segregation were an American phenomenon, but the response by the federal government was at least in part a reaction to the relentless Soviet accusations of racism that hit home in many decolonizing countries in Africa and Asia.
Economists tend to blame the obscene rise of inequality in the United States on the high-tech revolution, robotization and outsourcing of production. However, the same trends didn’t create the same conditions in Northern European countries. There was instead a clear correlation between the demise of the Soviet Empire and the end of the ideological debates of the Cold War on the one hand and the deterioration of America’s safety net and the breakdown of social cohesion on the other. Certainly, the US government, which promoted higher living standards for most social groups in the country in the earlier post-World War II decade, has pointedly rejected such responsibility after the collapse of communism.
While external pressure was diminished, domestic pressure was lacking completely. Largely due to the impact of the Cold War, not only militant communist groups but even far more moderate democratic socialist political entities, have been eliminated from the American political landscape. Instead, the country’s ideological center has shifted sharply to the right. The glaring vacuum of left-wing opposition is only now starting to be filled by the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which remains far too small and lacks serious influence even in its own party.
Roosevelt’s New Deal, initiated after his election in early 1933, was a way to save capitalism from communism. Only gradually did Adolf Hitler come to be seen as a threat during Roosevelt’s first term. However, in America, the pro-fascist sentiment was quite strong in the wake of the Depression, and it was the success of New Deal measures that made the right-wing ideology less attractive. Likewise, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis which increased the level of economic uncertainty for many Americans, so many in the country didn’t turn not on the real culprits — the US banking system — but saved their bitterest hatred to the liberal educated elites, minorities, and other “un-American” elements.
