Library:The Russians Are Coming: The Politics of Anti-Sovietism/Chapter 4: The Democratic Criteria

PART II

Soviet Reality

Diversity

The reason for examining the reality of the Soviet Union is not simply to measure the extent to which the Western portrayal of it is a distortion but to try to understand why it is portrayed in such degrading terms. It is obviously not sufficient to establish that the Soviet Union is socially and culturally different from the Western nations. Differences between nations are commonplace. There are wide climatic, geographical, cultural and historical distinctions between Britain, Japan, the USA and West Germany yet they arouse no serious political interest nor do they currently form the basis for enmity between them. What then is so offensive about the Soviet Union?

There are two main difficulties in answering this question. The first is that the Soviet Union is so large and complex that it defies generalizations. Behind and in spite of the Western image, 265.5 million people interact with each other in kinship, neighbourhood and ethnic relations. They comprise 126 nationalities and ethnic groups and speak more than 100 different languages. Many of these people present greater contrasts than those which exist between the Western nations themselves. Neither Czarist Russia nor the Soviet Union has been a ‘melting pot’ for cultures, for national identities have always been jealously guarded throughout their histories. Russia was never a predator of the classic imperialist kind. Since the establishment of the Soviet Union the variety of languages and cultures has been preserved and developed so that in some ways there is greater diversity now than ever before. It combines the Ukranians, conscious of their heritage as the fountain of Russian culture; the Lithuanians proud of their role in European history and of the beauty of their language; the Inuits within the Arctic Circle who live semi- nomadic lives similar to the inhabitants of Greenland and Labrador, well inside the permafrost zone, and the inhabitants of Central Asia in the former colonies of Czarist Russia.

An indication of the complexity of the USSR can be gauged from the exceptional cultural and regional diversity of the 45.5 million Islamic peoples who live there. Soviet Muslims are found on the border of Poland, in Siberia, on the Chinese frontier, in Central Asia and in Transcaucasia. They have varied ethnic origins. There are the Turkic peoples such as the Tatars, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks and Uighurs; the Iranians such as the Tadzhik, Ossetians, Kurds and Baluchis; the Caucasians, such as the Avars, Lezghis and Tabasarans; and a number of other groups such as the Arabs, the Armenian Khemshils, the Chinese Dunans, the Central Asian Gypsies and the Mongol Sart Kalmyks. The linguistic heritage of the Soviet Muslims includes 15 Turkic, 10 Iranian and thirty Caucasian languages as well as Chinese and Mongol. Their histories are equally varied. The Tadzhiks belong to an ancient urban tradition while the Kazakhs were nomadic until relatively recently; the Tatars arrived at the Volga in the Thirteenth Century while the Dungans entered Russian territory as refugees only a century ago; the Caucasians on the other hand, are descendants of the original aboriginal population. At the time of the Revolution the Azerbaijanis in the region of Baku were industrialized, the Volga Tatars were involved in commerce, the Turkmen were still plundering their neighbours and the Karakalpaks were primitive herders and farmers. This multiplicity of interests has produced contemporary diversity. In all areas of the Soviet Union, much of the education of Slav and Muslim is through the medium of their national languages. They maintain their own traditions and extol their own distinctive histories as well as their respective contributions to the general welfare of Soviet society.

The Soviet people live in an area of almost incomprehensible dimensions. They are distributed between continents. 71 per cent of them live in Europe yet 75 per cent of Soviet territory lies in Asia. The country covers 11 time zones ranging from Nachodka on the Korean border, facing Japan, to Minsk, the capital of Byelorussia, the most westerly Soviet Republic. The Soviet Union comprises one-sixth of the world’s surface, an area fourteen times the combined size of Italy, France, Spain and Great Britain. Just one town in Western Siberia, Novosibirsk, with 1.3 million inhabitants, has an administrative area almost five times the size of Belgium. In many parts of the Soviet Union towns are like oases located in vast forests or steppes. Air travel in recent years has improved communications between the different parts of the country but for most of its history the railways were the only reliable means of transport involving long journeys between the regions. Most Soviet people have lived out their lives in relatively insulated communities in response to their own particular material conditions and histories but within a broad common political framework.

The diversity created by distance and relative isolation underscores that arising from geographical distinctions which range from animal trapping for furs in the north to cotton growing in the south. Many regions reflect the influences of different civilizations. Through invasions, in particular the Tatar one in the Thirteenth Century, and travellers the cultures of the Orient have mingled with those of Old Europe though in different degrees and intensities. The consequences can be seen in art, music, language, dress and dance.

None of this variety in Soviet life is present in the stereotype which in so far as it recognizes people presents them as drab Lowry-like figures, burdened by oppression and equality, waiting to be rescued from their communist jailors by the freedom-loving peoples of the West.

Distortion

The second difficulty encountered in answering what in Soviet reality is offensive to the West is that the Soviet Union has been subjected to such sustained and exaggerated distortion that all aspects of Soviet life are perceived in a derogatory manner. Objective qualities have no meaning except through perception. Whatever the Soviet Union is or does is seen through the images which have entered the consciousness of people in the West. This is the most difficult problem for anyone intent on challenging the veracity of the stereotype. An enemy cannot be believed. Whatever it does must be for a sinister ulterior motive. Whatever is positive in its achievements must have negative implications. All the evidence presented in favour of the Soviet Union can be transformed instantaneously through perception into a case against it.

It follows that the imagery created in the West cannot be disproved by empirical investigations. All empirical data is subjected to perception and has no meaning apart from it. There is no point then, in starting with evidence about the living standards of Soviet workers, listing wage levels, price levels, the availability of consumer goods, the social wage and trade union benefits. Nor does it help simply to describe the legal rights of workers or their involvement in the political decision-making process. Not all data, of course, can be equally misconstrued. There is some information, for example, relating to the position of women in society, which cannot be so readily distorted. Nonetheless the assessment of all'Soviet data has to commence with an analysis of the assumptions underlying Western perceptions. Only after that has been done can it be possible to question the meanings attributed to it.

Democracy

The Western view of Soviet society is based in the first instance on the premise that it is not democratic. Western political institutions, the multiparty system, contending candidates in elections, the periodic secret ballots and parliamentary or presidential government are seen as the essence of democracy. There is little in the Soviet system to resemble these elements. It does not govern itself according to the rules of the West. In the first place the Soviet Union condemns itself with its own words for it describes itself as a dictatorship of the proletariat. A dictatorship is regarded as the antithesis of democracy and historically has been associated with oppressive regimes in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, in Spain under Franco and Portugal under Salazar. Secondly, it has rejected multi-party politics and has enshrined the power and status of the Communist Party in the USSR Constitution. Thus the Soviet Union is governed by a party which cannot be voted out. This is presumed to have two consequences. Firstly, that a political party without competitors tends to become bureaucratic and authoritarian, succumbing to the ‘iron law of oligarchy’. This particular oligarchy, moreover is perceived as a self-confessed dictatorship led by a succession of First Secretaries which all in varying degrees have been attributed with dictatorial powers though not all satisfying the classic role of dictators. The second consequence is that the controlling functionaries in a party which cannot be removed from power are presumed to be protected from public exposures and accountability and are free, therefore, to abuse their power in a corrupt fashion. In order to maintain a power position which is not accorded them by the free will of the people they have to resort to the use of state force, secret police and the organs of propaganda. The Soviet people are said in this situation to be oppressed, cowed and muted, waiting for freedom. As this is assumed anyway everything falls into place, thus completing the self-fulfilling prophesies of Winston Churchill that communism “rots the soul of the nation” and of F A von Hayek, that under communism the worst gets to the top.3

The manner in which Soviet politics is conducted has aided the Western image-builders. In the Soviet Union there is a recognized mechanism for political decision-making which is not constantly in the public eye as in the Western parliamentary democracies. It is not a point-scoring system, featuring public debate, influencing and responding to public opinion polls, enticed by a media searching for political sensations which, in dull periods creates its own. Major political decisions in the Soviet Union are made away from the public glare. People in general learn about them through communiques from the Political Bureau of the CPSU or from reports of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Soviet politics are not sensationalized through public clashes of personalities appealing to wider audiences and hoping to improve their poll ratings. There is, of course, gossip about personalities but it is not institutionalized as the substance of politics as it is in the West. The media has no part in the spread of Soviet gossip which circulates in spite of it.

The Soviet political system, then, lends itself to accusations that it is secretive and manipulative, that it is run by oligarchies in their own interests. Such assertions are re-inforced by Western media representatives in Moscow who, trying to meet their own standards of what is newsworthy, look for information about personalities and are forced to resort to gossip and ‘informed’ guesswork, thus emphasizing the secretive character of the Soviet system. This situation has been altered somewhat since Mr Gorbachev became the First Secretary of the CPSU in that he has used the media, particularly television, as a means of countering Western perceptions of the Soviet Union and he has reduced the scope for distortion. But all news from the Soviet Union, even visual information on television no matter how well presented, is still sifted through a perception which defines that country as undemocratic. The assumption underlying this perception, namely that only Western political institutions can be described as democratic, can be questioned on a number of counts.

Dissent in the West

The values which are considered to be so essential in the West for a democratic process, namely the protection of the rights of individuals in relation to the state and of dissenting minorities have resulted from the particular historical experiences of Britain and the USA and are not equally commonly held values in all Western capitalist countries. The countries in the West have evolved their political decision-making processes broadly along two types of historical routes.

The English speaking route came via the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the English Revolution. Along it the characteristic of individualism was acquired from the way in which British capitalism developed through individual traders and producers disentangling themselves from state commercial regulations, thus contrasting the rights of the individual with those of the state. The protection of the economic rights of individuals to acquire and accumulate capital and to dispense with it without hindrance from the state, became the focus of English and Scottish philosophy in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. John Locke took up the question of individualism after the Civil War by posing the rights of individuals against the state and church but it was not articulated as economic doctrine until more than a century later when Adam Smith wrote about natural economic laws in the theory of laissez-faire. Smith was followed by David Ricardo4 and between them they laid the basis for a theory which postulated that each person was the best judge of his or her own interests and who by pursuing those interests helped to maximize the utility of everyone. The best way of making people happy was, therefore, to reduce the restrictions on individual effort and initiative. This involved reducing government legislation to the minimum consistent with preserving individual freedom. Thus economic individualism, which reflected the aspirations of a nascent bourgeoisie in the Eighteenth Century, became the core of the ideology of the dominant class in the Nineteenth Century. And although it had a political purpose it eschewed making political comments by implying that there was no relationship between economic and political rights. It effectively, and successfully, separated economics and politics as distinct, unrelated subjects. The economic power of an owner of property was presumed to have no bearing on that person’s political rights. This became the dominant feature of liberal political thought.

Along this English route political rights were achieved and extended through a series of confrontations ranging from revolution to political demonstrations between the state and dissenting groups seeking the right to dissent. The basic confrontation which gave character to the English political system was the Seventeenth Century Revolution. On that occasion the issue was religious dissent but because of the unity between church and state the results were profoundly political. The Revolution ended in a compromise between Anglicanism which was the state religion and the nonconformists but it endorsed the views of those who preached tolerance for religious dissent. After that time the right to dissent became established as nonconformist religious groups split and multiplied. At the same time groups of workers in the skilled trades struggled for the right to organize and to oppose both employers and the state. Throughout the Eighteenth Century trade unions were formed in a variety of trades in an uncoordinated ad hoc fashion with each group seeking its own right to dissent. The struggles became overtly political in the Nineteenth Century with the middle class in 1832 and the working class in 1867 obtaining the right to vote. It remained a patchwork, however, for coal miners, agricultural workers and women had to conduct their own struggles; women did not achieve limited political emancipation until 1918. It was in this peculiarly British way that the right to dissent from the state without institutional discrimination became synonymous with the democratic process. It enshrined compromise as the essence of political action.

The alternative route to contemporary Western democracy stemmed from the French revolution which, unlike the English one, did not diversify power but simply transferred it from one nominal ruler, ‘the crown’, to another, ‘the people’ without altering the autocratic character in which it was exercised. “The history of the revolution in France E H Carr commented, “promoted the trend towards totalitarian democracy . . . (it) . . . did not issue in a balance or compromise: it was a victory not for political tolerance, or for the rights of the individual as against the state, but for a particular view of the authority of the state.”5 The French democratic system has retained its authoritarian character and, in consequence, its lack of concern for dissenting minorities. This characteristic is displayed, for example, in trade unions where different ideological interests have been incapable of associating within a single organization. In France there are three national centres representing Communist, non-Communist Socialist and Christian views.

Authoritarian, as against liberal, democracy is present in the many European countries which were influenced by the French during the Nineteenth Century. There the concerns about minorities have been over-ridden by the need for a strong, cohesive state which, in the manner suggested by Rousseau in the Social Contract in 1762, expressed the ’general will’ of the society. Thus civil liberties have always been secondary to populist government thereby facilitating the transition from authoritarian to totalitarian government.

The USA had its own historical qualities which though visibly different from those in England had sufficient structural similarities to identify with the English democratic values. American society in the Nineteenth Century was forged from waves of immigrants escaping from various forms of authoritarianism. In the new society individualism was a precondition for economic survival whereas, due to the accumulation of immigrants from different cultures and religions, tolerance of dissent became a necessary condition for communal survival. By making virtue out of necessity, individualism and the right to dissent have emerged as essential but unrelated democratic values in the USA and are pursued with greater intent than in any other Western nation. Democracy clearly is a many-varied thing even amongst the Western capitalist countries.

Russia before 1917 had none of the societal qualities of England and the USA except that it was an emerging capitalist nation. Industrialization was nurtured by state intervention such as tariffs, subsidies and state orders rather than through market competition and took the form of large-scale, centralized production units. Thus economic growth in Czarist Russia had nothing to do with economic individualism. It was accompanied, moreover, by an oppressive, centralized state apparatus in which the secret police, arbitrary arrests and exile were common features. The notion of individual freedom had no part in Russian conditions. Liberal political thought, in consequence, had no relevance, right up to the Bolshevik Revolution. In so far as Russia developed democratic forms they were a version of French authoritarian democracy. No liberal traditions were on hand to influence the founders of the new Soviet state in 1917.

Tolerance and Intolerance of Dissent

The qualities which the Western democracies emphasize most when assessing the Soviet Union are tolerance of dissent and the freedom to escape from intolerable conditions by emigrating. No freedoms, however, are absolute in any country. Indeed there is a perpetual argument in most societies about the limits on dissent. Governments need to know the nature and extent of protest which is consistent with what they regard as the preservation of their societies. They continually scrutinize groups, movements, parties and individuals for their threats to the system. The definition of what constitutes a threat varies with circumstances. For example, when a country is under an external threat through war then restrictions on internal protests are intensified. This was the experience of Britain and the USA during both World Wars when those who were defined as potential sympathizers of the enemy because of their ethnicity or even because of the ethnic origins of their names were put under surveillance, socially harassed or interned. At the outbreak of the First World War for instance, The Daily Mail distributed posters urging the formation of Vigilance Committees “with the duty of examining the houses, gardens, outhouses etc, of all Germans and Austrians ... It is better that every German, naturalized or not, in this country shall be safely put under lock and key than that one British soldier should die through the treachery of the enemy in our midst.” In the Second World War German aliens in Britain were put into concentration camps irrespective of their loyalties.6 The Japanese Americans who lived West of the Mississippi also suffered for, after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, they were forcibly relocated to camps in barren areas of the West and prevented from practising Japanese culture or language.

War, however, is simply an extreme example of a general sensitivity about dissent. Whenever the ruling class in Western societies has felt threatened it has reacted by imposing restrictions on those opposed to it. The facility to dissent, therefore, is a sort of barometer of the confidence of the ruling class. Since 1917 international communism has been perceived as the main threat to the stabililty of capitalism and on occasions, as in the USA after the two World Wars, it has been the justification for widespread repression. Domestic communists, regarded as the agents of international communism, have been the victims. But whatever the circumstances they have always been under some sort of surveillance by the state. This pre-occupation with communists, however, is a symptom of a much more general, pervasive and underlying intolerance in Western democratic societies, namely an inability to recognize and accept unregulated collective dissent.

In Western democratic societies legitimate dissent is that which conforms to the value of individualism and is, therefore, confined to individual protest. This is institutionalized in the electoral system based on the secret individual ballot vote. From the point of view of the ruling class this is a sensible recognition of protest because the greater the fragmentation the less it can endanger their power base. It results in pitting individuals against the institutions of capitalism, Parliament, the courts, the agents of government, multi-national companies and the like. There is no threat in such a grossly unequal struggle.

Dangers to the system only arise when individuals recognize their weakness and combine into collectives to rectify the power imbalance. It is for this reason that collective protest has never been fully legitimized in Western democracies, as the history of trade unionism in Britain and the USA testifies. US governments have consistently engaged in hostilities with trade unions, except for a brief interlude during the New Deal period, legislating to control them, taking administrative action to weaken them, siding invariably with employers and whenever necessary using state violence to suppress them. Trade unions have had similar experiences in all other capitalist societies. The state vendetta against trade unions in Britain has in general been less oppressive than in the USA mainly because British employers have at times attempted to control unions more by assimilation than confrontation. The rights of collective action in Britain, however, have always been fragile, likely to be whittled away or even demolished whenever the opportunity to do so has arisen. This fact has been illustrated by recent history. British trade unions after almost two centuries of struggle for the right to take collective action, and during which time it could have been presumed that they had established certain basic rights, have become weaker and more constrained by the law than at any time since before 1875. The intensity of the state’s unease with collective protests was revealed firstly when unprecedented state force in both scale and intensity was used against the miners during their 1984-8 strike and then against the London printers in their dispute with News International in 1986-7.

The evidence about dissent clearly shows that its practice varies with circumstances within and between Western democratic societies irrespective of how strongly a belief in dissent is pronounced. There are of course marked differences between such societies for some, for historical and contemporary economic reasons, have wider margins of tolerance than others. In all situations, however, because of the imperative need of societies to sustain themselves, dissent is a phenomenon which can be afforded so long as it is not too dangerous.

The Question of Emigration

The ability of people to move freely within and between countries is similarly determined by material conditions rather than by an inherent belief in it as a right. The Western countries condemn the Soviet Union as a closed society because it restricts the right of its citizens to leave the country. For them emigration is described as an inalienable, incontrovertible right and campaigns are mounted to obtain exit visas for those Soviet citizens who are refused them. The elevation of emigration as a measure of democracy, however, is historically fortuitous in that it meets the needs of Western democracies at this moment.

States have always imposed restrictions on the movement of people between their borders in accordance with their assessment of the national interest.7 There have been occasions where immigration has been encouraged as in Nineteenth Century USA and other occasions when it has been discouraged, as in contemporary USA. It has rarely been the case that restrictions on both exit and entry have been treated equally for usually economic conditions have favoured one or the other. The determining factor has been whether a society had surplus labour it wished to shed or whether it was short of labour.

In the Nineteenth Century many European countries encouraged emigration to remove labour surpluses caused by the movement of peasants to the towns. Britain was one of these but it also encouraged emigration because it was a necessary condition for colonial expansion. British citizens were needed to run the outposts of the British Empire as well as to settle in congenial conquered areas in Africa. In the post Second World War years Western democracies generally allowed free emigration because it matched their economic needs. Nonetheless some political restrictions on outward movement were imposed. The McCarran Act of 1950 gave the State Department the power to deny exit rights to anyone whose activities abroad might be detrimental to the interests of the USA, as well as forbidding the issue of passports to members of the Communist Party. There was the celebrated case of Paul Robeson, the singer and political activist, who was denied a passport in the 1950s and on whose behalf an international campaign was mounted. The USA has also imposed a blanket prohibition on travel to some countries, such as Cuba, China, Vietnam and Korea at different times since 1945. This still exists for Cuba and Vietnam.

While the freedom to emigrate has been elevated to the status of a right this has not been the case with the freedom to immigrate. Both the USA and Britain exercise strict controls over the right of entry. All persons wishing to visit the USA for any purpose, even for a day, have to complete long application forms with details of their political and social lives. The granting of a visa, moreover, is not permission to enter which is controlled by the immigration authorities on the spot. There have been many instances of British applicants being refused entry or subjected to time and place restrictions. The 1965 US immigration law insists that priority should be given to people with skills which would benefit the society with the consequence that preferential treatment has been given to educated professionals, such as medical doctors and university teachers. It has always been easy for refugees from socialist countries to obtain immigration rights though similar rights have not been conferred on refugees from oppressive regimes with which the US government has had friendly relations such as South Korea, El Salvador or Guatemala. In Britain, immigration is regulated by the British Nationality Act of 1981 under which it has become virtually impossible for black people to enter Britain. This too has been a response to changing labour market conditions.8

Types of Democracy

The Western democracies project themselves as the only form of democracy because to do otherwise would expose their claim to be democratic to be challenged. If alternative democratic forms were recognized or degrees of democracy admitted then the citizens of the Western capitalist countries might begin asking whether they possessed the most suitable form or whether they might not be able to improve on what they had by altering some of its conditions. But as democracy is about power-sharing it is inexcusably dogmatic to assert that there can be only one form of distribution of power.

Two main qualities are present in Western democracies. First, they are based on the premise that political decision-making is not related in any sense to economic power and that, therefore, it is possible to equalize the distribution of political power without similarly distributing economic power. Campaigns for universal suffrage were waged in Britain during the Nineteenth Century on the assumption that somehow the extension of the suffrage, secret ballots and periodic elections would produce a more equitable society but so complete has been the distinction between political and economic power that none of the anticipated changes occurred. “One man, one vote” was not an economic leveller.

This separation of political and economic power was not fortuitous but was the main protection of the capitalist system during the long process of political emancipation for workers. Political freedom was never volunteered in Britain by the mixed bag of landowners and the new bourgeoisie but so long as it had no effect on the ownership of the means of production it could safely be conceded in stages. In the USA political equality was granted from the outset for white Americans through the Constitution but this had not the slightest effect upon the distribution of income, of wealth, of property at large and, therefore, of economic power. Nor indeed when it was allowed to black Americans did it remove the causes of discrimination against them. There is not an automatic downward casual relationship between political decision-making and economic power. So long, therefore, as equality is confined to politics, ignoring economic inequalities, then the system is relatively safe.

It would be misleading to see the present system of political decision-making in Western capitalist countries as the result of some kind of Machiavellian plot to protect the private ownership of the means of production. It has been built on the structure of capitalism, at one and the same time expressing its contradictions as workers struggled for greater freedom yet always doing so in a manner which protected the essential structure of capitalism. It is a reflection of the uncanny ways in which societies practise the art of survival. The belief has been created that there is genuine majority rule when every member of the electorate has one vote from the poorest to the richest and can cast it in secret without any formal constraints. This, however, in no way disturbs minority control. The system would be perfect for the bourgeoisie if it did not involve pretence, propaganda and deception to prevent the working class from learning the truth about the nature of power.

The second quality is that Western democracy is formal and institutional; it is about the means of selecting governments and the procedures which regulate their practice. Western democracy passes no opinion about the results of government. To qualify as a democracy a society has to grant universal suffrage, hold secret elections and permit multiple parties to participate. It does not have to govern in the interests of the majority except that periodic elections may compel it to take those interests into account in order to gain re-election. It is not an infringement of Western democracy if a fascist government is elected. The accession of Hitler to power in Germany in 1933 was done in a perfectly constitutional way according to the democratic provisions of the Weimar Republic. After the Second World War, a major demand of the Western allies when effecting peace treaties was that former enemy nations, Germany, Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria, should hold ‘free’ elections. It was of little concern that an authoritarian government might be returned, that the old land-owners might retain their power or that fascists might regain their influence. The Western allies actually used some of the Nazis and their collaborators, whom they had agreed at Yalta to remove from influence, in their endeavour to establish formal democratic forms. In Greece after 1945 the British government left former fascist collaborators in power and crushed the antifascist resistance in order to restore Western democratic procedures. It was a rather cruel paradox. In the British, American and French zones of defeated Germany the whole cloth of Western democracy was clearly exposed. German capitalists, including the industrial giants, Krupp and Thysson, which had financed the Nazi war and Jewish extermination machine, had their economic power restored through massive injections of American capital, thus ensuring the continued dominance of international capitalism; while a political edifice was constructed involving free elections and multiple parties with the participation of many who had exercised administrative and political power during the Nazi period. The qualitication to be democratic did not involve Germans renouncing their fascist beliefs but simply accepting the British and American way of making political choices. Fascism did not have to be eradicated. It was freshly packaged and given new labels to satisfy the conscience of the Western allies. The new German democrats learned quickly. In 1956 they outlawed the German Communist Party which on the eve of the Nazi takeover in 1933 had had nearly 400,000 members and both led the struggle against Nazism and suffered most from its impact.9 The price for rejecting the Western perception of democracy has always been high. It is being paid in the 1980s by Nicaraguans and El Salvadorians.

The most serious consequence of defining democracy in terms of procedures for making political choices has been that there is no belief in the West in the substance of democracy. What happens in between elections is of little concern to the Western democrats. Western democracy is an area of contending opinions with not only no distinction between good and evil opinions but with no feeling for good and evil. Anything and everything is acceptable so long as the procedures are abided by. Because authoritarian or fascist or physically oppressive political practice could legitimately exist within the framework of democratic procedures it has been relatively easy to undermine and destroy them. Most of the Central and Eastern European countries, including Germany, which were forced to establish Western democratic procedures after 1918 as a condition for admission to the Tree’ world as independent states had rejected them by the 1930s in favour of unadorned authoritarian governments. The Western conception of democracy was similarly forced on the newly independent states of tropical Africa but there it has had an even shorter existence. In other parts of the world, in Latin America and Asia, the Western inspired political institutions have crumbled through the firing of a few guns, the capture of a radio station or a proclamation from an army barracks. A system which is so frail that it cannot survive economic crises, which has to be suspended in times of war, which has no resistance to physical force, can surely claim no moral superiority over other forms.

FOOTNOTES

1. In this chapter I have drawn on two areas of my own work, namely the pamphlet "Images and Reality of the Soviet Union”, 1983, and a forthcoming book Trade Unionism in the Soviet Union.
2. Detail for this map is taken from: Islamic Peoples of the Soviet Union, by Shirim Akiner, London, 1983, pp. 14-15. It has been adapted by the Graphics Department of the University of Leeds. Akiner’s book contains a comprehensive and detailed description of the Soviet Muslim population.# The Road to Serfdom, by F A von Hayek, 1944, ch. X.
3. See The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and The Principles of Political Economy by David Ricardo.
4. The Soviet Impact on the Western World, op cit, p. 7.
5. See COLLAR the LOT. How Britain Interned and Expelled its Wartime Refugees, by Peter and Leni Gillman, 1980.
6. See Szymanski, op cit, pp. 13-26 for an historical survey of the international movement of labour.
7. See Immigration Control Procedures: Report of a Formal Investigation, Commission for Racial Equality, London, 1985, for an examination of the restrictions on black immigrants.
8. See Beating the Fascists? by Eve Rosenhaft, 1983, for a penetrating historical analysis of the confrontation between communists and Nazis from 1929 till 1933.