[PRWC Party Documents] Stand For Socialism Against Modern Revisionism, January 15, 1992

Stand For Socialism Against Modern Revisionism

III. The Process of Capitalist Restoration

Second Stage: The Brezhnev Regime, 1964-82

Basahin sa Pilipino Basahon sa Hiligaynon

Armando Liwanag, Chairman, Central Committee, Communist Party of the Philippines

January 15, 1992

While Khrushchov was stridently anti-Stalin, Brezhnev made a limited and partial "rehabilitation" of Stalin. If we link this to the recentralization of the bureaucracy and the state enterprises previously decentralized and the repressive measures taken against the pro-imperialist and anticommunist opposition previously encouraged by Khrushchov, it would appear that Brezhnev was reviving Stalin's policies.

In fact, the Brezhnev regime was on the whole anti-Stalin, with respect to the continuing line of promoting the Khrushchovite capitalist-oriented reforms in the economy and the line of developing an offensive capability "to defend the Soviet Union outside of its borders". It is therefore false to say that the 18-year Brezhnev regime was an interruption of the anti-Stalin line started by Khrushchov.

There is, however, an ideological error that puts both Khrushchov and Brezhnev on board with Stalin. This is the premature declaration of the end of the exploiting classes and class struggle, except that between the enemy and the people. This line served to obfuscate and deny the existence of an already considerable and growing bourgeoisie in Soviet society and to justify repressive measures against those considered as enemy of the Soviet people for being opposed to the ruling clique.

Under the Brezhnev leadership, the Khrushchovite capitalist-oriented reforms were pushed hard by the Brezhnev-Kosygin tandem. Socialism was converted fully into state monopoly capitalism, with the prevalent corrupt bureaucrats not only increasing their official incomes and perks but taking their loot by colluding with private entrepreneurs and even criminal syndicates in milking the state enterprises. On an ever widening scale, tradeable goods produced by the state enterprises were either underpriced, pilfered or declared defective only to be channeled to the private entrepreneurs for the free market.

Sales and purchase contracts with capitalist firms abroad became a big source of kickbacks for state officials who deposited these in secret bank accounts abroad. There was also a thriving blackmarket in foreign exchange and goods smuggled from the West through Eastern Europe, the Baltic and southern republics.

The corruption of the bureaucrat and private capitalists discredited the revisionist ruling party and regime at various levels. At the end of the Brezhnev regime, there was already an estimated 30 million people engaged in private enterprise. Among them were members of the families of state and party officials. Members of the Brezhnev family themselves were closely collaborating with private firms and criminal syndicates in scandalous shady deals.

The state enterprises necessary for assuring funds for the ever expanding central Soviet bureaucracy and for the arms race were recentralized. A military-industrial complex grew rapidly and ate up yearly far more than the conservatively estimated 20 percent of the Soviet budget. The Brezhnev regime was obsessed with attaining military parity with its superpower rival, the United States.

The huge Soviet state that could have generated the surplus income for reinvestment in more efficient and expanded civil production of basic and nonbasic consumer goods, wasted the funds on the importation of the high grade consumer goods for the upper five per cent of the population (the new bourgeoisie), on increasing amounts of imported grain, on the military-industrial complex and the arms race, on the maintenance and equipment of half a million troops in Eastern Europe and on other foreign commitments in the third world.

Among the commitments that arose due to superpower rivalry was the assistance to the Vietnamese people in the Vietnam war, Cuba, Angola and Nicaragua. Among the commitments that arose due to the sheer adventurism of Soviet social-imperialism was the dispatch of a huge number of Soviet troops and equipment to Afghanistan at the time that the Soviet Union was already clearly in dire economic and financial straits.

The hard currency for the importation of grain and high-grade consumer goods came from the sale of some 10 percent of Soviet oil production to Western countries and the income from military sales to the oil-producing countries in the Middle East.

The Brezhnev regime used "Marxist-Leninist" phrasemongering to disguise and legitimize the growth of capitalism within the Soviet Union. Repressive measures were used against opponents of the regime, including the pretext of psychiatric confinement. These measures served the growth of bureaucrat monopoly capitalism and constituted social fascism.

The Brezhnev regime introduced to the world a perverse reinterpretation of proletarian dictatorship and proletarian internationalism, with the proclamation of the Brezhnev doctrine of "limited sovereignty" and Soviet-centered "international proletarian dictatorship" on the occasion of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It was also on this occasion that the Soviet Union came to be called social-imperialist, socialism in words and imperialism in deed. With the same arrogance, Brezhnev deployed hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops along the Sino-Soviet border.

The Soviet Union under Brezhnev tried to keep a tight rein on its satellites in Eastern Europe within the Warsaw Pact. Thus, it had to expend a lot of resources of its own and those of its satellites in maintaining and equipping half a million Soviet troops in Eastern Europe. Clearly, the revisionist ruling parties and regimes were not developing the lively participation and loyalty of the proletariat and people through socialist progress but were keeping them in bondage through bureaucratic and military means in the name of socialism.

The Soviet Union under Brezhnev promoted the principle of "international division of labor" within the CMEA. This meant the enforcement of neocolonial specialization in certain lines of production by particular member-countries other than the Soviet Union. The relationship between the Soviet Union and the other CMEA member-countries was no different from that between imperialism and the semicolonies. This stunted the comprehensive development of national economies of most of the member countries although some basic industries had been built and continued to be built.

Eventually, the Soviet Union started to feel aggrieved that it had to deliver oil at prices lower than those of the world market and receive off-quality goods in exchange. So, it continuously made upward adjustments on the price of oil supplies to the CMEA client states. At the same time, among the East European countries, there had been the long-running resentment over the shoddy equipment and other goods that they were actually getting from the Soviet Union at a real overprice.

Before the 1970s, the Soviet Union encouraged capitalist-oriented reforms in its East European satellites but definitely discouraged any attempt by these satellites to leave the Warsaw Pact. In the early 1970s, the Soviet Union itself wanted to have a detente with the United States, clinch the "most favored nation" (MFN) treatment, gain access to new technology and foreign loans from the United States and the other capitalist countries. However, in 1972, the Brezhnev regime was rebuffed by the Jackson-Vannik amendment, which withheld MFN status from the Soviet Union for preventing Jewish emigration. The regime then further encouraged its East European satellites to enter into economic, financial and trade agreements with the capitalist countries.

During most of the 1970s, these revisionist-ruled countries got hooked to Western investments, loans and consumer goods. In the early 1980s, most of them fell into serious economic troubles as a result of the aggravation of domestic economic problems and the difficulties in handling their debt burden, which per capita in most cases was even worse than that of the Philippines. Being responsible for the economic policies and for their bureaucratic corruption, the revisionist ruling parties and regimes became discredited in the eyes of the broad masses of the people and the increasingly anti-Soviet and anticommunist intelligentsia.

The pro-Soviet ruling parties in Eastern Europe had always been vulnerable to charges of political puppetry, especially from the direction of the anticommunist advocates of nationalism and religion. In the 1970s and 1980s these parties conspicuously degenerated from the inside in an all-round way through bourgeoisification and became increasingly the object of public contempt.

The United States kept on dangling the prospect of MFN status and other economic concessions to the Soviet Union. Each time the United States did so, it was able to get something from the Soviet Union, like its commitment to the Helsinki Accord (intended to provide legal protection to dissenters in the Soviet Union) and a draft strategic arms limitation treaty but it never gave the concessions that the Soviet Union wanted. The United States simply wanted the Cold War to go on in order to induce or compel the Soviet Union to waste its resources on the arms race. The only significant concession that the Soviet Union continued to get was the purchase of grain and the commercial credit related to it.

When the CPP leadership decided to explore and seek relations with the Soviet and East European ruling parties in the middle of the 1980s, there was the erroneous presumption that the successors of Brezhnev would follow his anti-imperialist line in the Cold War of the two superpowers. Thus, the policy paper on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe praised the Brezhnev line in hyperbolic terms.

Although the Gorbachov regime would pursue worse revisionist policies than those of its predecessor, it would become a good source of information regarding the principal and essential character of the Brezhnev regime on a comprehensive range of issues. By using this information from a critical Marxist-Leninist point of view, we can easily sum up the Brezhnev regime and at the same time know the antisocialist and anticommunist direction of the Gorbachov regime in 1985-88.