On October 3, 1993, in Moscow, thousands of Russians took to the streets to demand the return of the USSR and to oppose the coup d’état led by Yeltsin, the U.S. puppet who sold the country off at a bargain price.
These images of the Russian people waving red flags and calling for the return of socialism—after suffering the misery of capitalism—are not something the “free press” will show you.
It all began on September 21, 1993, when the puppet Boris Yeltsin decreed the dissolution of the Congress of Deputies and the Supreme Soviet of Russia—obstacles to his consolidation of power and his plan to sell the country to the highest bidder.
The Russian State Duma rejected Yeltsin’s coup; the deputies agreed to remove Yeltsin from office, and in the face of the dissolution of political bodies and Yeltsin’s refusal to step down… they barricaded themselves inside the Supreme Soviet building and called on workers to overthrow Yeltsin; armed popular militias were formed to defend the Supreme Soviet and topple Yeltsin’s government, seizing control of areas near the Kremlin.
The dictator Yeltsin, with U.S. support, ordered the mobilization of the Russian army to suppress all popular protests in the streets and consolidate his hold on power.
A veritable massacre then unfolded in the streets against Russian workers who were defending the deputies holding out in the Supreme Soviet; the military shot and killed more than 124 protesters and wounded another 348—a bloodbath orchestrated by the U.S., which relished the spectacle.
That’s how capitalism took hold in Russia—by force of arms—and then they have the nerve to say that communists are the violent ones for arguing that it’s not possible to peacefully seize power from the oligarchy.
Source -> https://shitter.thepixora.com/DaniMayakovski/status/2106332594484764673#m
Our movements only ever fail not because of a lack of popular support, but because of lack of organization. It’s very clear that the people wanted the USSR to continue.
The real tankies were the capitalists all along.
I know too little about Russian history. I’m now wondering what happened to the communist movement in Russia after the coup. Were communists repressed in a similar way as in Europe? And what is the potential for a revolution nowadays?
not from russia myself, but from a post-soviet country nonetheless, so i don’t know if anything i say will be of any value. also, sorry if it’s going to get very rambly; it’s somewhat hard for me to organise my thoughts on the matter properly.
the collapse was an incredibly deep blow, not only economically but psychologically as well. besides the hunger and general economic hardship (which led to the single largest peace-time loss of life in recent human history), the social fabric almost totally unraveled: you had mass crime, banditry, dishonesty, and murders being committed out in the open, before dozens of witnesses, and the killer simply openly paying off the judge during court and walking out a free man.
during the worst period of the '90s, society essentially ceased to exist; instead, you had pure darwinism: to many people, the only salvation from utter misery was either emigration (a lot of people got forged papers and went to either germany or israel) or simply throwing your moral compass to the wind, seeking to exploit and get one over others, lest you end up at the bottom of the food chain yourself. many of today’s fascist and fascist-adjacent groups like azov or wagner have their ideological roots in that latter misanthropic attitude.
other ways in which some people reacted to their situation (besides all the cults, which i’m not even going to touch on) was either this kind of pro-western liberal self-hatred, pessimism, and belief in one’s inherent inferiority observable in many colonised nations, or the exact opposite: a kind of ultranationalism that proclaimed everyone else to be beneath you. (ironically, in ukraine, those two groups now form a united front…)
yes, the vast, vast majority of the population did continue to support communism; the results of the 1991 referendum prove this, and many still do, but most were and still are paralysed into inaction.
of course, repression against communists was and is very much a thing, but before putin cleaned house and re-established the state’s monopoly on violence, most of it was less the government and more fascist and criminal groups (the distinction here purely theoretical) doing extrajudicial killings.
this is also why so many people in russia do in fact support putin wholeheartedly and are critical of any opposition to him, since at least he returned russia to being an actual independent state, an actual civilisation, an actual culture, and not the utter humiliation of the decade before him. if all the other alternatives are zhang zongchang and cao kun, you will happily settle for a jiang jieshi.
Thank you for sharing, from my understanding in Western Europe the repression of communists also happened partly through fascist groups who were materially supported by nato, but I understand that in the former soviet nations the conditions allowed for fascists to operate much more openly and aggressively.
It’s sad that the remaining communists weren’t able to organize successfully to create support networks during this horrible time. In general it makes me really sad to think about the communist movement in Europe as it became so small and irrelevant.
There wasn’t any widespread opportunities for leftist support networks because society went through a near complete collapse in trust.
Communists were getting harassed and murdered by individuals who had only a few years earlier been themselves card-carrying members of the CPSU or Komsomol. The entire superstructure underlying “democratic centralism” was decapitated when the General Secretary of the CPSU became the counter revolutionary-in-chief.
Or as a Kremlin official stated years after
I would find flyers on the ground with the addresses of leading Central Committee workers—last names, house and apartment numbers; see pictures of them posted in every possible location. In case you run into one of them, so that you’ll recognize him. The Party nomenklatura would run from their offices with plastic bags, string bags full of their things. Many of them were afraid to sleep at home; they hid at their relatives’ houses. We knew the score… We knew how things had gone down in Romania. They’d shot Ceaușescu and his wife,* rounded up Chekists and Party elites and executed them all. Buried them in ditches… […]
[…] Stalin created a state that was impossible to puncture from below; it was impenetrable. But from above, it was vulnerable and defenseless. No one thought that they would start destroying it from the top, that the top leaders would be the ones to betray it first. Pererozhdentsy!
The general secretary turned out to be the chief revolutionary, installed in the Kremlin. Our state proved easy to destroy from the top. Harsh discipline and Party hierarchy worked against it.
Svetlana Alexievich, “Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets”
