AUGUST 1991 was the month when the democratic revolution, having swept through eastern Europe in 1989-90, finally came home to the Soviet Union, birthplace graveyard - of the stalinist system. The collapse of the Soviet state amid the mobilisation of millions on the streets is a welcome development. The key question now is: what will emerge to replace it?
It is too early to draw definitive conclusions about the possible consequences of the August events. But one thing is clear: they were the beginning rather than the end of the democratic revolution, which remains in many respects unfinished.
The future now depends on the emergence of independent working class politics and organisation - the development of a mass workers' movement able to complete the anti-stalinist democratic revolution.
Meanwhile the immediate political victors are the neo liberals around Russian president Boris Yeltsin whose project is the more or less rapid restoration of capitalism. Notwithstanding their strident 'anti-communism', these forces (most, like Yeltsin, with their origins in the CPSU) represent a wing of Sept. 14, 1991 No. 7 the bureaucracy, anxious to hang on to political power and ensure its own future as part of a new capitalist class.
Their stand against the attempted rightwing coup was important, but in the light of the coup's defeat their successful move to capture the political initiative (the counter-coup) is a negative development. They now represent a barrier to the successful completion of the democratic revolution.
Pro-capitalist
Paradoxically the existence of a much more enthusiastically pro-capitalist political leadership may not bring the restoration of capitalism any closer. As the Financial Times notes, ..the revolution that has made an economically successful reform fi.e. the restoration of capitalism| politically conceivable has also made it technically still more difficult!
One reason for this is that the democratic revolution has been bound up with the struggle of the oppressed nations of the USSR for independence, and the collapse of the Soviet state has made independence a possibility. But the restoration of capitalism requires close economic coordination between at least the major republics. Without a old regime is not the best basis on whick o inflict the kind of battering on the working class which would be required for the restoration of capitalism. Leaving aside all the hypocritical gutt about people power on the streets', the capitalist class are well aware of this Insofar as Yeltsin and other republican leaders are serious in their attempts at all-out marketisation, they will be forced into confrontation with the working class at an economic, but also at a political level. The democratic gains of the glasnost years are not safe in Yeltsin's hands, nor are the gains in national-democratic rights in the republics safe in the hands of the likes of Ukraine's