And They Tore Down The Berlin Wall - Part I

This week in 1989 was one of the most historic in recent times. In Berlin, a city divided after the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, the wall came tumbling down. And that made it both a good and a bad time to be a socialist. In the first of a two part blog series, I will look at the wider ideological and political ramifications of the wall's fall in terms of what preceded it and as to the events that followed, particularly as they have impacted on the Western left..

In 1989, I became a member of the NewLabour Party. That party (led by Jim Anderton) was formed in response to the post-1984 New Right reforms initiated by the Fourth Labour Government. Many ordinary Labour Party members and activists flocked to the new democratic socialist/social democratic party's banner convinced that neo-liberalism was failing and that a return to Keynesian social democracy was necessary.

Post the Berlin Wall's fall any legitimate moves to challenge the neoliberal agenda (as the formation of the NLP represented) were simply characterised by the business and political elites (both here and overseas) as being a desire to return to 'socialist' policies. Traditional social democracy and communism were one and the same thing in their eyes and no philosophical, historical or political explanation surrounding the subtle differences between them would be entertained. In other words anything left-wing = totalitarianism and everything right wing = freedom.

The international political climate changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Cold War divisions that had festered between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed to melt away. That night 20 years ago in Berlin touched off the final wave of counter-revolutions which removed that threat of nuclear war, at least between these two antagonists.

The wall also removed a critical stain that had tarnished any reasonable discussion about the left and its role in the West. Many people equated socialism (wrongly) with the suppression of freedom and liberty. The erection of the Berlin Wall had symbolised this denial of human freedom and was successfully used as a powerful propaganda tool with which to beat up the Soviet Union and its East Germany ally. By implication, the existence of the wall and of authoritarian regimes throughout Eastern Europe also gave the political right in the West a huge battering ram with which to hit their various democratic socialist and social demcratic opponents with, amongst other things. But what most right-wing critics overlooked were the critical differences between Marxist-Leninist ideology and the social democratic and democratic socialist philosophies of mainstream Western left-wing parties.

In the Soviet Union, one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had served to corrupt the ideal of universal human freedom that had been the hallmark of socialist thinking during the nineteenth century. In Russia itself, it was not Lenin's Bolsheviks who were the most popular party but the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) who were, in the heady days that followed Czar Nicholas's overthrow in March 1917. In fact, during the November 1917 Russian elections, the Socialist Revolutionaries gained the majority of votes cast (57%) against Lenin's Bolsheviks (25%) who came second in the race for the Duma (Russian Parliament). But the Bolsheviks already had the upper hand due to their seizure of power in that same month when armed workers and some returning soldiers under their direction took control of the old imperial capital, Petrograd (now St Petersburg). It was nothing more than a coup which culminated in the violent January dissolution of the Duma by the Bolsheviks in order to remove their main left-wing rivals from the scene.

This violent coup and the concomitant desire of the Bolshevik leaders to make a seperate peace with Germany caused the Allied nations (led by Britain, France and the US) to intervene in the Russian Civil War. This war, where the imperialist, pro-monarchist forces attempted to topple the new Bolshevik regime created a sense of paranoia amongst the Soviet leadership. Given that the traditional political culture of Russia had always lent itself towards authoritarianism, Lenin decided to use the war emergency as a convenient excuse to terminate the radical experiments in worker and peasant democracy (in the form of the 'soviets' or worker's and peasant's councils) that had followed the overthrow of the monarchy. This he preceded to do and with it, he snuffed out any hope of a democratic socialist future for Russia. The new Bolshevik state, instead, pursued the use of terror against both perceived and real enemies alike.

This was the case as in Lenin's view, Marxism could only be interpreted through the prism of the Soviet Communist Party. This came to be headed by an elite whom operated under the precepts of 'democratic centralism' whereby only the Politburo (headed by the General Secretary) eventually came to make the decisions that influenced life, first in Russia, and then in the wider Soviet Union. Free speech and debate were only tolerated within the confines of the Politburo (and at first within the Central Committee and at party congresses too) and its decisions were then hierarchically transmitted via a highly bureaucratised party and state machinery to the wider populace. After Lenin's death, Josef Stalin made good use of this machinery to first win power and second to hold onto it through ending any debate within the party itself. Post World War II, Stalin oversaw the gradual imposition of Marxist-Leninist regimes throughout Eastern Europe (including in East Germany - the German Democratic Republic) as a means of both gaining a cordon sanitaire around the Soviet Union to prevent a resurgence of Germany and to provide (in the best tradition of any imperialist power) access to resources with which to rebuild his war shattered country.

Throughout Eastern Europe and even in places as remote as North Korea, the Soviet dictator made sure that all new worker's party structures closely imitated those of the Soviet Communist Party. Ordinary civil liberties, as in the Soviet Union, only existed on paper as in practice the terror that had swept the USSR during the 1930s was now replicated in these nations. After Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet-style political systems remained in place, even after the uprisings in East Germany (1953) and Hungary (1956). On both these occassions, the Soviets used brute force to suppress the uprisings and in the case of Hungary, these actions even caused some Western Communists to quit their local Communist parties in disgust.

But what must not be forgotten either is that the populace were afforded, by the new regimes, access to free health and education as well as a chance to obtain affordable housing. While these new socialist states kept some of the features of old-style capitalism (e.g. production targets and industrial management), they still tried to improve the life of most of their people to a degree that the old regimes had not. As Leninism gave way to Stalinism and then to post-Stalinism (after Khrushchev), regimes from the Soviet Union through to Bulgaria similarly relaxed some of their previous restrictions on personal and collective liberties but not to the extent that they would endanger the survival of these regimes.

In part two of this series, I will examine the background to the erection of the Berlin Wall, the crises that afflicted the USSR and Eastern Europe after that time and as to how the Western left at that time (and today) differs from Soviet-style socialism.

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