In praise of Yuri Gagarin

When, on this day 50 years ago, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth, it seemed to many observers that the Soviet Union was destined to triumph over – or at least equal – capitalist countries like the United States.

Gagarin’s good looks and film-star charisma helped make him perhaps the world’s first global hero. Crowds gathered in the streets of London and other cities to catch a glimpse of Gagarin after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sent him on a world tour.

Khrushchev himself had initiated a partial de-Stalinisation of the Soviet Union with his 1956 secret speech. Shocked delegates at a closed session of the country’s Communist Party heard Khrushchev denounce Stalin and his crimes against the people.

It had been a spectacular conversion. Khrushchev was an enthusiastic supporter of Stalin and the pre-war show trials which had destroyed the party’s Bolshevik old guard, the Red Army’s leadership and millions of others. He had backed the disastrous Nazi-Soviet pact which made World War Two a certainty.

But within three years of Gagarin’s pioneering flight in Vostok, Khrushchev had been ousted and replaced by the arch-conservative Leonid Brezhnev. Gagarin himself died in a plane crash aged 34 in 1968. The Soviet Union went back to being a tightly-controlled Stalinist regime.

Instead of Khrushchev’s boast that the Soviet Union would out-perform the United States in economic terms, the new leadership reverted to a classic Stalinist mentality. This assumed that the only way to defeat imperialism was to arm yourself to the teeth.

Revolutionary change in the West was definitely off the agenda (it had been since Stalin’s rise to power) in favour of working for peaceful co-existence if possible and war if not. The nuclear arms race took off in a spectacular fashion as the USSR and the USA built enough inter-continental ballistic missiles to blow up the world many times over.

Moscow’s essentially isolationist policy, the dedication of huge resources to military hardware, was ultimately a significant factor in the eventual demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Cut off from the advanced technology of the global economy and encircled by capitalist states, the USSR stagnated on many indicators. Suffocated by a parallel world of state and party bureaucracies, economic productivity failed to increase. A distorted accounting system based on reporting to Moscow what it wanted to read only deepened the problems.

A little over 20 years after Khrushchev’s fall from power, a further attempt was made to resuscitate the country through deeper de-Stalinisation. Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost opened up the political process for the first time since the early 1920s. But the entrenched Stalinists in the party struck back in an abortive coup, facilitating Boris Yeltsin’s rise to power and an eventual capitalist overthrow.

Nevertheless, Gagarin’s heroic flight reminds us of some essential lessons of 20th century history. The 1917 Russian Revolution, whatever the country’s later horrific twists and turns, did demonstrate that it is possible to develop a country without capitalist ownership and the profit motive. What is not possible is the creation of a socialist economy, one based on common ownership and control, rather than bureaucratic state entities, in isolation from the rest of the world.

Today, Stalinism is gone and the “triumph” of the West has proved illusory. The “end of history” famously forecast by philosopher Francis Fukuyama after the demise of the Soviet Union turned out to be more than premature. Global capitalism is in its deepest-ever crisis and its political system discredited in the eyes of many. Gagarin’s one orbit of the planet broke free of physical laws. It’s up to us to liberate ourselves from oppressive social constraints.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

A meeting of minds in Tehran and Moscow

During the continuing street protests in Iran, in the wake of the disputed re-election of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, protesters have been heard shouting “Down with Russia”. This is not as strange as it seems. In fact, as the show trials get under way in Tehran, the slogan carries more historical significance than the marchers may know.

The Russian government was the first to congratulate Ahmadinejad on his “victory” in the 12 June elections. So denouncing Moscow makes sense. And the marchers also wanted to distinguish themselves from the usual “Down with America” slogans of state-orchestrated demonstrations in support of the regime.

Many of those on trial in Tehran have apparently “confessed” to "acting against national security" and "conspiring with foreign powers to stage a velvet revolution". Opposition leaders have denounced the torturing of those arrested and the staging of a mass trial where the defendants have few if any legal rights.

The historical connection with Russia, of course, is the most infamous show trials of modern times, which were held in Moscow between 1936-8. The principal leaders of the 1917 Revolution similarly “confessed” to working with and for “foreign powers” and were executed. Senior generals in the Red Army were tried in secret and also shot.

Only a half a century later, in 1988, during the perestroika and glasnost period inaugurated by Mikhail Gorbachev, were the Old Bolsheviks officially rehabilitated. However, Russian is once more rewriting its history to present the Stalinist period, including the notorious trials, in a more “favourable light”.

On 19 June, Russia’s largest online history resource at www.hrono.info was shut down by the home affairs ministry in St Petersburg. Founder Vyacheslav Rumyantsev said the closure followed after an article criticised the city’s governor for cutting an allowance given to survivors of the Nazi siege of Leningrad.

In December, police in St Petersburg raided the human rights organisation Memorial, removing much of the material used by Orland Figes in The Whisperers, his book on family life under Stalin. It included interviews with gulag victims, photos and personal testimonies.

The attack on the website comes in the wake of the publication of school textbooks that now portray Stalin not as a mass murderer but as a great national leader and an "efficient manager" who defeated the Nazis and industrialised a backward Soviet Union. In May, president Dmitry Medvedev announced he was setting up a new body to counter the "falsification of history", which, naturally, actually means the opposite.

The commission will be dominated by members of Russia's FSB intelligence service rather than professional historians. Its first job is to counter interprations of the 70th anniversary of the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, under which Hitler and Stalin agreed to carve up Europe, with Moscow annexing the Baltics and two-thirds of Poland.

As a taster of the “new history” to come, this month Russia's defence ministry posted a lengthy article on its website claiming that Poland provoked the Second World War! The article said Poland refused to yield to Germany's "modest" ultimatum demands in 1939 for a land corridor to East Prussia and Gdansk. The ministry withdrew it after Poland protested to Russia's ambassador in Warsaw.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, a former vice-president arrested for protesting against Ahmadinejad, reportedly testified in Tehran that now he understood that the vote was "clean" and that allegations of fraud in the election were "a lie". No doubt there is quiet approval for all this in the Kremlin, where the rehabilitation of Stalin is proceeding apace, in a country where anti-government demonstrations are usually banned and where investigative journalists are gunned down.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor