|
Source
From:
Peter Rushton (peter@glaucon.demon.co.uk)
Subject:
Re: Russian elections
View:
Complete Thread (6 articles)
Original
Format
Newsgroups:
soc.politics.marxism
Date:
1996/07/08
jmc@Steam.stanford.edu
(John McCarthy) wrote:
>It
surprises me that no-one posting to this newsgroup had anything to
>say
about the Russian elections. Is
what goes on in Russian politics
>entirely
irrelevant to Marxism? As
a non-Marxist, I don't want to
>start
the discussion of this question, but I am curious.
Your
surprise may result from a _non-Marxist_ misunderstanding of the
Russian
Communist Party and its presidential candidate, Gennady
Zyuganov.
Zyuganov
and his party have very little to do with marxism as it would be
understood by most readers of this newsgroup.
They have enjoyed considerable electoral success as an
understandable reaction to the horrific effects of economic
liberalisation, but what passes for their ideology is right-wing
social democratic, enlivened by a strong dose of Russian chauvinism
(viz. Zyuganov's overtures to Lebed - Gen. Pinochet's No. 1 fan).
Any
assessment of Zyuganov should also take account of the following,
taken from a lengthy analysis of the Russian ultra-right, written in
1994:
...More
extreme was the Russian National Council [Russkoe Narodnoe Sobranie,
RNS] founded in February 1992 and led by former KGB General Sterligov.
It was a serious political organisation with a structure based
on that of the former KPSS [Communist Party of the
Soviet Union
]. Among its leaders were
the nationalist writer Valentin Rasputin and Gennady Zyuganov who
later joined the Communist Party of the
Russian Federation
[KP-RF]. RNS was founded
as a mass national-patriotic movement designed to revive Russian
national statehood. It
claims to have wide support in military and state security circles,
and rejected both the revolutionary democrats and the Communists...
from
Stephen K. Carter, 'The CIS and After: The Impact of Russian
Nationalism', in Cheles, Ferguson & Vaughan (eds), 'The Far Right
in Western & Eastern
Europe
' (London: Longman, 1995)
Zyuganov
broke with Sterligov and the hard right by joining the National
Salvation Front, but even this included many right wingers and others
who were in no sense Marxists.
That
said, the people who should be really embarassed by developments in
Russian politics are Western observers like
Fukuyama
, who proclaimed the "end of history" and the final triumph
of liberal capitalism. Their
hero Yeltsin is now a moribund puppet, with a fight for control of the
strings developing between a
clique of corrupt presidential advisers and the new fascist power
broker Lebed.
I
look forward to the gloss that the Western media will put on
Yeltsin-Lebed authoritarianism: measures
to restore law and order, restore confidence in the Russian economy,
etc., etc.
>John
McCarthy, Computer Science Department,
Stanford
,
CA
94305
--
Peter
Rushton
peter@glaucon.demon.co.uk |
