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

January 15, 1992

The main and essential feature of "glasnost" (openness) was the crescendo of anticommunist propaganda. The field of propaganda was monopolized by anticommunism. This was expressed in a variety of ways, modern revisionist, social-democratic, bourgeois-liberal, populist, nationalist, fascist, religious, racist and purely cynical terms. The pluralism of anticommunist ideas, including the most antidemocratic ones, was described as democracy.

But the key idea in the welter of anticommunist propaganda was the advocacy of capitalism and bourgeois liberalism. Gorbachov attacked Stalin to be able by implication to attack Lenin, Marxist-Leninist theory and the entire course of Soviet history. But his subalterns explicitly attacked all these in the entire course of the Gorbachov period.

After eliminating the Brezhnevite holdovers in the Politburo in the most undemocratic manner, replacing them when they were on foreign trips or knocking them down at lower levels of the Party and state bureaucracy, Gorbachov played the middle between the "conservative" Ligachev who accepted "perestroika" but not "glasnost" and the "radical progressive" Yeltsin who went gung ho for both "glasnost" and "perestroika". Then, he used Ligachev in 1987 to push out Yeltsin from the Politburo only to let the latter continue as his cooperator in attacking the CPSU from the outside.

In the years leading up to 1989, the anticommunist followers of Gorbachov invented all kinds of lies against the socialist course of Soviet history and its great proletarian leaders and clamored for the rehabilitation of counterrevolutionaries and the freedom of all kinds of monsters. The people were fed with all kinds of illusions about a better life under capitalism.

In 1989, he had a new Soviet Congress of People's Deputies dominated by an anticommunist intelligentsia most of whom were at first formally communists but would eventually declare themselves as excommunists and even anticommunists. The congress included from the very start prominent anticommunists of longstanding.

In early 1990, Gorbachov used the congress to disempower the CPSU and to give him autocratic presidential powers. In the autumn of 1990 he took the posture of siding with the "conservatives" in the CPSU and the state against the "radical progressives" Yakovlev and Schevernadze. But at the same time he agreed to putting the sovereignty of the Soviet Union under question through a referendum in early 1991.

The popular voting in the referendum was for the retention of the Soviet Union. But again he agreed with the nationalist forces in the various republics to make a new "union treaty" whose terms (like having separate armies and currencies, etc.) meant the break up of the Soviet Union. In this period before the alleged coup to save the Soviet Union, Gorbachov announced that it was wrong to stress the role of the proletariat and that he was going to dissolve the CPSU and establish a social-democratic party.

Although the alleged coup of Gorbachov appointees from August 19 to 22, 1991 involved only a few plotters by its very nature, Gorbachov and Yeltsin collaborated in using it as a pretext for dissolving the entire CPSU and the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies. Although the Soviet Constitution and the Soviet Union were still existing and Gorbachov himself had a presidential term extending to 1995, he decreed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and resigned in favor of a commonwealth of independent states (CIS) still on the planning board. Thus, mouthing the slogan of democracy, the anticommunist duo of Gorbachov and Yeltsin autocratically issued decrees, committed the most antidemocratic acts and carried out their own coup against the Soviet state.

In the first place and in the final analysis, "glasnost" was devised by the monopoly bureaucrat bourgeoisie to pave the way for openly installing the bourgeois class dictatorship. The din of the petty-bourgeoisie about "democracy" is waning. After all, the drumbeating has been for the restoration of capitalism and the bourgeois class dictatorship. The monopoly bureaucrat bourgeoisie remains in control of the levers of political power and the economy while the petty bourgeoisie is being relegated to a worse life of massive unemployment, frustration and misery.

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