BY CONTRAST with Gorbachev. who still vaguely supports socialism, Yeltsin openly supports the restoration of capitalism' -Ernest Mandel, SO 15.
This would certainly have come as news, ! think, to Mikhail and indood every Soviet bureaucrat back to Stalin Inal such poopie part ip-service to an ossilied ideology of so-called communism' in the guise of Marxism-Leninism is of course true, but it hardly amounts to support for socialism, however vague.
The whole problem with the klea of is the perception by large numbers o he working class that what they had was socialism, and more importantly that it did not work.
Mandel's gilb phrase only gives succour to this mistaken notion and credit (alber I assume unintentional) to the man who sent tanks into Azorbaijan, who presided over the murder of demonstrators in Georgia, and soks out countless struggles Perestroia may have started as a way of guaranteeing a section of the cutesuciacy 1 socialist aim), but by the time Gorbachev dropped out of the limelight he stood for the reintroduction of capitalism. This should come as no surprise to workyis - a na been predicted in The Revoltion Betrayed over 50 years earlier.
There is not a qualitative difference betaeen Gorbachev and Yelsin - they both stood for the reintroduction of the market at the time of the former's fall. Their disagreement was over how to move to the market.
Trotskyists have a history of opposing both stalinism and capitalism -at best a mistake that when one has Largely fallen and the other is in deep crisis such a misleading statement can Plan McLarty London E10.