216. The 1988 Perspectives Resolution prepared the International Committee for the political crisis of Stalinism that erupted in 1989 with mass protests in China, followed shortly thereafter by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, that culminated in December 1991 in the formal liquidation of the Soviet Union. The destruction of the Soviet Union was a political blow against the international working class that produced considerable disorientation and confusion. Against the triumphalism of the bourgeoisie, the International Committee was alone in insisting that the end of the Soviet Union did not signify the victory of the capitalist market and the end of socialism. The events confirmed Trotsky’s warnings. In 1938, he had written:

Either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.^[1]

The end of the USSR did not represent the failure of socialism, but of Stalinism and its reactionary nationalist perspective of “Socialism in One Country,” under the impact of globalised production. Having long ago abandoned the struggle for the world socialist revolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy responded to the crisis of the Soviet economy, and growing working class unrest, by integrating it within global capitalism and anchoring thereby its own privileges in capitalist private property. The collapse of the USSR was a product of the unravelling of the post-war order and the intensification of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism between world economy and the bankrupt nation-state system. Far from opening up a bright new future for capitalism, the end of the Soviet Union and its autarkic national economy foreshadowed the transformation or collapse of all parties and institutions based on national economic regulation. The ICFI explained that the intensification of the basic contradictions of capitalism would inevitably lead to a new period of profound economic crisis, wars and revolution.

217. The ICFI had consistently warned that the policies of glasnost and perestroika, initiated after Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the CPSU in 1985, were the preparation for the Stalinist bureaucracy’s ultimate betrayal of the October Revolution, i.e., capitalist restoration. While the ICFI declared that the only way forward was for the Soviet working class, as part of the international socialist revolution, to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy in a political revolution and take power, the Pabloites took the opposite course, supporting the policies of the Gorbachev regime. While Ernest Mandel, leader of the United Secretariat, wrote four possible scenarios that did not include the possibility of the dissolution of the USSR, Tariq Ali, leader of the Pabloite organization in Britain, dedicated his 1988 book, Revolution From Above: Where Is the Soviet Union Going?, to Boris Yeltsin.

218. The WRP leaders and their various opportunist supporters who broke with Trotskyism also went so far as to suggest that Gorbachev was leading a political revolution in the USSR. Savas Michael-Matsas in Greece, who broke with the ICFI in 1985 by supporting Healy and his opportunist policies, disagreed with Healy in 1989 on tactical issues related to their national opportunist agenda. However, in a document dated May-June 1989 published in the magazine Revolutionary Marxist Theory, Michael-Matsas made clear that their pro-Gorbachev line was prepared in full collaboration with Healy, writing:

In the summer of 1986, … at the same time G. Healy and S. Michael—who then and until 1987 collaborated closely and fruitfully, being in nearly daily telephone communication—reached the same conclusion that the turn to perestroika meant a leap in the political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.^[2]