Click here to access article by Richard Rousseau from Foreign Policy Journal.
Although it was not the writer's intention, I believe the article illustrates a fundamental truth about class structured societies: although the composition of the class structure may change, many essential features remain the same.
The class structure of the former Soviet Union was that of a privileged bureaucracy and intelligentsia. Although it started with the highest ideals, it rapidly degenerated into a nightmare of totalitarian rule for anyone who might be seen as a dissident. There is little doubt that this happened in large part because of the terrible circumstances surrounding its birth. Who knows what might have happened if circumstances had been more favorable?
The Soviet Union was created out of the Russian Revolution toward the end of WWI, a war in which they suffered huge losses. This was followed by widespread famine, epidemic diseases, civil war, and foreign attacks and occupation by 14 Western capitalist countries. The latter happened for obvious reasons and has been repeated many times since then whenever any country tries to opt out of a capitalist system.
In any case, instead of the usual capitalist class of people who are privileged because of their rights under capitalism (appropriation of the wealth created by workers, the sanctity of contracts regardless of the devastating social consequences, and their control of banking and money), in the Soviet Union there arose another privileged class that used their control of the state to concentrate power and privilege to serve their own interests.
However, because the Soviets used rational planning to guide their economy, the country soon made very rapid strides in building an industrial society out of one that had been semi-feudal. The people of the Soviet Union also benefited because the economy was free of the instability generated by capitalist elites whose activities of over production, speculation, and control of the money supply in their mad pursuit of profits lead to periodic economic crashes. Moreover, the Soviets also enjoyed free medical care, low cost housing, and an excellent educational system.
Because of these successes and the frequent economic crises in the West, during the first two of decades after their revolution the Soviet model enjoyed considerable popular support among workers in capitalist countries in spite of reports of police state incidents that were leaked to Western media. This popularity posed a problem for Western capitalist ruling classes and they responded in two general ways.
First was with heavy handed police state methods against left worker organizations. Probably the worst abuses occurred in Germany where the unions were crushed after capitalists turned to the Nazis to do their dirty work. German leftists of all kinds were the first to occupy Germany's infamous concentration camps.
The second way was the option used in the US under F.D. Roosevelt and his New Deal policies. Under this policy option the ruling class used some marginal, but significant laws to institute positive labor reforms (Wagner Act) which gave unions legal rights and social benefits (Social Security, Worker's Compensation, welfare programs, etc.) The US ruling class also used option one methods, but mostly, and most intensively, in the immediate period following WWI.
After WWII and the defeat of Germany, due in major part to the heroic efforts of the Soviet people, the Soviet ruling class slowly became more and more corrupt and self-serving. This decay plus the ever present threats of military competition with the West, the Afghan invasion, the Chernobyl nuclear accident all resulted in lack of support from the Soviet people, and caused the elites to turn toward the much more lucrative capitalist model. They had no difficulty in the transition from an elite ruled bureaucratic economy to a privately owned capitalist economy. The old nomenklatura easily transformed themselves into the new owners of the Soviet economy, a new ruling class of capitalists.
In contemporary Russia, we now see the same economic instability, the growing gap between rich and poor, and public spending cutbacks as is happening in the West. And, we are also witnessing the same "absence of accountability and the rule of law and freedom of the press in Russia" as we are seeing in Western capitalist countries, and as we witnessed under the old Soviet class system.
