IN line with certain glaring trends of' global socio-ethical degeneration which basically, apart from many other concomitant factors, have facilitated the emergence and also the impact of what might be termed the Gorbachev phenomenon in the erstwhile USSR, in August 1991, when a somewhat phoney attempt at a coup d'e'tat was overcome with suspicious case, Gorbachev, yielding reluctantly to a more blatant, if also slippery accomplice, Yeltsin, said: "My mission is fulfilled". Pretending to "re-structure" and develop "Socialism", the dismantling of the Soviet system plan fully and perfidiously had been achieved. Even Pope John Paul II, who himself pledged to extirpate Communism in his native Poland as well as elsewhere, went on record that though predominantly evil, Communism had a certain relevance to the basic postulates of civilisation and there should not be too much 'rejoicing' over its apparent demise.

This was reported in the London 'Times', even as that hoary mouthpiece of the British bourgeoisie gloated over the break-up of' the Soviet Union. "The Party is Over", it wrote editorially, capping its journalistic performance with such jubilant advice as that the Russians should now give "poor old Lenin" "a decent Christian burial". Such ejaculation seems surprising even from "the bloody old Times", (as William Hazlitt once exploded long ago) but it is typical of the present times. No wonder that we see the debacle of "real, existing socialism", the degeneration (which must have been the result of unforgivable spiritual sloth and the poisonous percolation of corruption and greed whose roots the Great October revolution had sought to extirpate).

There can be little wonder that the world ruled by Big Money, which is now on top after the collapse of socialism in many countries, thinks little of dismal degeneration of public life to be seen almost everywhere. Except for a former attorney-general in the United States raising the accusation of 'war crimes' against his own government, hardly a squeak of sorrow and shock was heard when in the US assault (early 1991) on Iraq (whatever the blackguardism of Saddam Hussain against Kuwait) involved not only the cruelest yet of technological warfare but a horrid tank battle in the desert when, in unequal combat with American tanks (with enormous ploughs attached) two thousand Iraqis surrendered while as many as six thousand were buried alive. This act, totally out of keeping with international law was followed by the US commander being decorated but no condemnation by world public opinion through, for example, the United Nations. The UN itself virtually hijacked by the US now the globe's sole super power, condoned this cruel crime against man and god, the former Soviets sheepishly following suit, and even countries like ours, once proud of Non-Alignment excellences, were like dumb driven cattle. This was one of the lowest points reached in the annals of international morality but contemporary records of the crime were so feeble as to be hardly there. Perhaps it was on account of the contrived collapse of the socialism in Europe that even the lights of morality and of concern for the agonies of man were so disastrously dimmed.

It will need careful, perceptive research in many countries to be able to understand how even a kind of intellectual and spiritual coma had come to overtake the countries of "real existing socialism" and of national liberation when, almost with impunity, during 1985-87 Mikhail Gorbachev began his elegantly masked crusade against socialism in the name of socialism itself.

His effort doubtless long prepared, had the spectacular (and often melodramatic) applause from 'Western' hide-outs of power. For a time no name was more popular in the US than that of 'Gorbie', decorated by the Big Money media as the 'Man of the Decade', and crowned even with the Nobel Peace Prize (remember Anwar Sadat once sharing it with Henry Kissinger, for reneging from Nasser's policies for the Arab world). The 'Gorbie' fever has died down; the man had been (though ever so seemingly sophisticated) a pawn in the grip of enemies of socialism; he was found to be rich material for neo-colonialist exploitation and so he was sucked dry till he had to be thrown into the garbage heap. This kind of thing had bamboozled even a large part of the Communist movement in a manner that suggests a chronic inner ailment which remains to be eradicated from the system.

Need for rethinking entire period after October Revolution

That is one good reason why there has to be re-thinking of the entire period from the Great October onwards implying necessarily genuine contemplation of the Stalin era which after all saw the application (with all its defects) or Marxist-Leninist principles and the setting-up through indescribable difficulties of the world's first formation heading heroically towards socialism. One should spurn such things as that the much-advertised perestroika' inspired malignment of Soviet history '(Stalin, and Lenin also, being targets of attack), the launching of an idea, absurd from the start but made to look impressive, that the epic of Soviet achievement, in war and in peace and in view of the most hideous hostility, was no more than a fake, that the tremendous tangible feats of 'Soviet Communism were an example of History's strangest 'confidence tricks', (in spite of Rabindranath Tagore, Romain Rolland, Bernard Shaw, Einstein, Charlie Chaplin and oh, so many other masterminds' testimony). This aspect cannot be adequately treated here, but the point is that the world of socialism and of national liberation had been (and still largely continues to be) 'hijacked', as it were, 'by the Gorbachevite programme. It is with sadness and not at all with superior pride that one notes so many of us allover the world having been stunned and paralyzed by the clever but pernicious injection of what someone once called "the dreary 'drip of democratic drivel". It was as if we forgot that there was no such 'thing as "pure democracy", bourgeois democracy being different basically from the proletarian 'variety (with merits and deficiencies in either case'). We perhaps forgot also that historically advanced countries, with long experience of democracy, had once been thought of by the founders of Marxism to be likely first to move towards revolution. This did not happen, for reasons that would need volumes to expound. For historic reasons, again, Revolution could and did 'come first in Russia, over an enormous area encompassing Asia and Europe, where democracy was nearly non-existent. 'Marx had at one time the expectation that revolution would come to countries like England or Holland in which case the progress towards real democracy could take place easier and quicker. The march, through democracy towards socialism, could then, it was thought, be facilitated, even without very heavy price. It was known also that while it was easier for determined revolutionaries like Lenin to start from a country situated like Russia was the price of transition towards democracy (always an essential com­ponent of socialism) would be heavy. The world Communist movement took that risk and 'Great October', whatever its cost then and through later decades, emerged to illumine new vistas of history. Any number of western ideologues claims even now that it is 'for the 'West', with its allegedly inherent superiority, could have shown the better "human" face of socialism, while Soviet (and allied) experience has exposed such ugliness as their delicate 'democratic' personalities cannot stomach. That, however, never happened. Only the lion-hearted Marxism of Lenin and his Bolsheviks could "storm the heavens" and achieve in October 19I7 the most far-reaching revolution in human history. Only that revolution, inspired and nurtured at first by Lenin, whose inheritors, among whom Stalin proved the staunchest though by no means glittering (like Trotsky was from time to time) and led Lenin's party for three tempestuous decades that hope changed the world. Here is a phenomenon to be comprehended and lessons drawn for suitable Communist action. Even a real urge for that effort appears, however, to have been almost scotched so far. It is good that Communist China, with her occasionally tantalizing parochialisms and paradoxicalities, remain defiant of Gorbachevian danglements and dauntless in her Marxist-Leninist faith which she rightfully adjusts with her national (and global) requirements. One does not need to name countries that proudly keep the Red Flag flying ­except for gallant little Cuba which, brutishly beleaguered by the bourgeoisie's pet 'democratic' power, the United States, challenges all comers and proclaims: "Socialism or Death! We will win!" Here in our India, in spite of our feebleness, we have not truckled down to hypocritical theses about 'consensus' ruling out 'confrontation', even as the 'West' (like the 'G-7' Powers, including that honorary 'western' Japan, which had once been honorary ‘Aryan' in Hitler's Axis!) rushes to annex our kind of country into its orbit in subordinate, subsidiary alliance.

It is a pity that even Alvares Cunhal, Portuguese Communist leader, could be inveigled in 1987 (when. of course, the Gorbachev lineaments were not very clear) that perestroika was 'not a retreat but a new step forward to socialism". In South Africa, there might well be special constraints, but it is odd that its Communist leader Joe Slovo could persuade himself to be an apologist of a kind of "adaptation" of Marxism, on the plank of 'pure' democracy which Lenin had flayed so cogently long ago. One understands but cannot appreciate the then West German Communist. H Mies, plumping in Moscow (1987) for "a universal coalition of reason larger than classes and systems"- what a parody is this of Karl Marx's envisagement in 1860 when he wrote on 23 February to the poet Freiligrath a bout "the Party in the grand historical sense of the term!"

It is a relief to recall Mao Tze Dong's memorable maxim - "Never forget the class struggle". Perhaps also present-day world happenings highlight the basic relevance of Stalin's concept of class struggle accentuating along with the advance of socialism. The current crisis when socialism has to fight back and re-think, re-structure, re-deploy ideas, organisations and movements to recover positions thoughtlessly thrown away in the erstwhile socialist countries and when countries like ours have to confront and confound the new unipolar might of Big Money powers, deep thought needs to be given to this problem. Soviet leader Khrushchev, at the 20th Congress (1956) of the Soviet Communist Party committed unimaginable damage done to the world Communist movement and placarding "de-Stalinization" in the alleged interest of genuine socialism, the spirit was blown out of socialism itself, causing fissures in the global movement, alienating (and almost antagonizing) People's China with latently the mightiest force in the process of world change. Almost inevitably, there followed what is called, in the time of Leonid Brezhnev, "the phase of stagnation", the potentially revolutionary idea of "peaceful co-existence" turning tame, with its salt losing, as it were, its savour. This was the period when, to take only one instance, the mighty Peace Movement, in Joliot Curie's (and others) hands, a resplendent weapon for the advance of all peoples, slowly but surely turned to he sadly sterile. Of the Soviet leaders in recent times, perhaps Andropov alone tried to stem the rot but did not even live to see the fruits of his effort. The craftiest customer of all, the redoubtable Mikhail Gorbachev, helped by diverse types of people and also diverse trends at home and abroad worked away from 1985 to 1987 to lay the foundations of the break-up of Soviet socialism, while unwittingly and unforgivably the Communist world seemed to be in complacent slumber. Malenkov, successor to Stalin, in his report in CPSU Congress raised many organizational questions but those were ignored both in the Soviet Union and other parties.

There is no analogy really, but somewhat like Palmerston in 19th century England who "found the whigs bathing and walked away with their clothes". Gorbachev, Yakovlev & Co., performed an almost unnoticed coup in the rather unusually elegant cacophony of Marxist sounding words. It was not that Gorbachev"s Kremlin speech of November 1987 was made the conditions that could not be prevented from moving in the direction of treason to socialism itself. By October 1989, if not quite so blatantly earlier, it was evident that a wily and wicked counter-revolution had taken over, pushing history backward for the devil knows how many decades. Unhappily, a peculiar world ambience bad grown in which few, even in the leadership of Communist movements in different countries, could see the peril and seek to counteract it. We are not to give a clean chit to Stalin straightaway - he must have his share or historic guilt for much that has happened during the seven Soviet decades, but for the sake of the battle for socialism, for the emancipation or man in the true sense of the term, there can he no truckling down to the world dominating Big Money forces that props up and perpetuates man's Greed while his Needs, physical and spiritual arc denied the millions of men and women everywhere. It is for Communists and their friends to review the predicament and set out on tasks, more difficult than hitherto, in order to win back for socialism its natural habitat in the hearts of the people.

The U.S. weekly "Time" (December 7, 1992), in a "special report on Russia" finds itself constrained to give a heading "Are Crime and Chaos a fair price to pay for democracy?" and to include a frighteningly foreboding section on "Germany's Furies", the xenophobia and hectic rise of neo-Nazism there, reminding people of "the see-no-evil attitude that led to [Hitler's death camps like] Auschwitz”. This erosion of morality, of all normal socio­political idealism, of humanity's innate yearning for social justice and real, not just formal freedom, this erosion almost everywhere (pace today's fundamentalist-communal inhumanities in India) of the hope of the masses for a better life has to be and must be fought and overcome. To prepare ourselves for the task, we have to turn, whatever 'democratic' purists might say, to Soviet history and to the role, specially, or Stalin in it.

Requires re-generation of Communist Movement

The aftermath of Soviet liquidation is horrendous. First Khrushchev’s Secret Report and total denigration of Stalin laid the space for de-ideologisation of the world Communist and progressive forces and thus Communist movement being rendered weak, very weak and some where painfully dissolved in the world arena. This debacle of the Communists offered further ground and all sorts of degenerative and dark forces from religious fundamentalism, secessionism to neo-fascism to affect the world. Imperialism got a very congenial ground for their cruel offensive at this juncture.

Now, it is time when worldwide moral degeneration in the wake of the attack of neo-liberal capitalism has vitiated the world situation, for the Communist and the progressive forces to recover ground for regeneration and counter resistance. A proper study of Soviet history with objective roles of Stalin and other leaders would prove more helpful for gathering courage and bold optimism by the progressive forces and the masses they want to lead.

Hence added significance of November Socialist Revolution of 1917 at the passing time.