Stable story (1984)

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

As we all know (or should know by now) there are certain things which are good for us, like Clean Living and Saying Our Prayers and Looking Up To The Royal Family. Another one is Stable Government, which is supposed to ensure all sorts of benefits which we would miss under unstable government.

In England, where there is usually Stable Government, we are encouraged to regard with pity anyone who has to live under an unstable government, as happens in Central and South America and parts of Africa. Unstable government is clearly a nasty foreign habit, to be avoided in any sane country with ambitions to being great.

So what about one of the most stable governments in the world? How do the people there get on? Over the past 60-odd years, since the revolution in 1917, there have been only six leaders in charge in Russia (five if we do not count Georgi Malenkov, who lasted only one week in March 1953, following the death of Stalin, before he lost out to Nikita Kruschcv) starting with Lenin and ending with Andropov.

The most durable of these leaders was of course Josef Stalin, who ruled for 29 years and who asserted his stability — and protected it — with ruthless purges of any opposition. Under his iron grip millions of Russians were murdered and when his cynical carve up of Eastern Europe with Nazi Germany fell apart he led the country into a war which was won at a staggering cost to the Russian people.

Stalin's term of power was marked by its brutal dictatorship and by the extremes of privation suffered by the Russian people, while the ruling class there lived privileged lives. While the ordinary people of Russia suffered and died, they provided the human foundation on which Stalin could rest the stability of his power. He was that thing beloved of the apologists of capitalism — a strong leader — and the people under him suffered for it.

Workers’ interests do not lie in stable government, or indeed in a weak version of it. Any self-deception on this score obscures the fact that no style of government has anything of benefit to offer the workers; they must struggle for a new society in which government will give way to the management of things.