The Communists of South Dagestan
In the middle of 1995 the A-UCP(B) split. A part of the Party that did not agree with the line of the Central Committee that was elected in 1991, held an Extraordinary Congress of the party and elected a new Central Committee led by its Secretary, A. Lapin.
What do the main differences consist of?
The work of the Central Committee was defined by an indeterminate and diffuse stand. For instance in the foundation congress which took place on the 8th November, 1991 it was decided that the party be officially registered in order to secure the basis for legal work. But by the beginning of 1992 the Central Committee stated that 'we do not want to be legally registered by this bourgeois regime.' Does this imply that in N. Andreyeva's opinion the regime before 1992 was proletarian? There is no other interpretation because a third kind of regime simply does not exist. The Andreyevites consider that the process for the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union began by the end of the 1950's and that this process is still ongoing in our days. But we know very well that the Khrushchevite restorers of capitalism dismissed all proletarian party cadre right after the death of Stalin in 1953 and replaced them by bourgeois elements and the Trotskyite-Bukharinist clique that was liquidated in the 1930's. It is these very elements that possess power in the present time on the territory of the USSR. The Khrushchevite clique accomplished a coup d'etat and violently overthrew the socialism that existed and pushed the country back to capitalism. Therefore it is incorrect to state that the restoration of capitalism took place in the 1990's: it took place some four decades ago. Ever since then capitalism existed in the USSR initially in the form of state capitalism and afterwards in the traditional mixed form.
The Andreyevite Central Committee with its theoretical fog made possible the organisational collapse of the party.
Even before the formation of the party many comrades had proposed that a central unified Bolshevik organ be established in place of a number of small ones. This would have permitted the editorial board to collect the best elements, to free many party activists in the regions and, moreover, to solve the main financial question of the viability of a regular publication. N. Andreyeva refused this proposal based on the lack of resources. The publication of a number of small organs requires far more resources than a unified party organ. Nowadays the A-UCP(B) has around ten organs with a total edition of less than 100,000 per month. This is too little for an All-Union party. Now the perspective for these publications is pitiful: one has already been closed and another one is likely to collapse. The publication of a large central organ makes self-financing possible.
The 'work' of the Andreyevite Central Committee has resulted in a pogrom of a large number of regional party organizations. Another side of this 'organizational work' is the indifference towards the problems in the regions. The Central Committee has responded to the internal problems with the silence of the tomb. Its secretaries were more concerned about travelling abroad than about the internal problems of the party. Moreover, this travelling abroad fostered relations with opportunist parties rather than with real communist ones.
In March, 1994 the Andreyevites proclaimed the general line of the 'Bolshevisation of the Communist Movement'. In the Report to the 1995 Plenum Andreyeva underlined that the 'Bolshevisation, or the passage to the positions of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism is applied to the parties of the communist opposition and not to the working class, trade unions, the unions of army officers, as some comrades think.' This means that in place of the Bolshevisation of the working class, of the live work among the masses and social organisations, the Central Committee is tied down to fruitless and endless indoctrination of false communists.
The Andreyevites proclaim the boycott of the Duma elections. They have tried to substantiate this stand theoretically by reference to the stand of the Bolsheviks in the beginning of the century. The Bolsheviks did boycott the elections to the Duma in 1905 and 1906. The 1905 boycott successfully ruined the plans of the Tsar. However, the boycott of the 1906 was afterwards regarded as wrong by the Bolsheviks. The error basically consisted in the fact that boycott took place by the time of the decline of the first Russian revolution after the defeat of the December armed revolt. The Bolsheviks showed that the policy of the boycott is valid just in the times of the rising revolutionary movement when only extra-parliamentary methods of struggle are required. The Bolsheviks did not go to the Duma to carry out organical 'legislative' work hand in hand with the Cadets as did the Mensheviks but in order to use it as a tribune for agitation for the revolution. The Andreyevites now proclaim the unconditional boycott of the elections despite conditions where there is the absence of a revolutionary upsurge.
Lenin exposed this kind of tactics in his 'Childish Leftism in the Communist Movement': 'You think you are the most revolutionary, dear boycottists and anti-parliamentarists, but in reality you are afraid of the relatively small difficulties of the fight against the bourgeois influence on the worker's movement.
'Krasnaya Molodyozh', No. 1, 1996.
Translated from the Russian by Inter.
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