- Against the background of the highest technical achievements of the productive forces of the USSR and the people's democracy countries there occurred an ideological decomposition of the society. The class of managers, of all ranks and levels, were striving for their liberation from the tyranny of the Central Committee of the CPSU (together with the KGB – the guard of the ideology). The working class, in a Communist manner despising their chiefs and managers, were disappointed with the ideological directions of "building up communism", which was allegedly being built but could not for the life of them have been achieved.

The USSR suffered a defeat in the Cold War, in its competition with the more powerful economic grouping of imperialism. The democratic ideology of personal liberties and the higher personal and living standard achievements of the imperialist encirclement were beyond compare after the lifting of the "Iron Curtain". The destruction of the "Concrete Wall" only accelerated the process of degradation of the countries of socialism (i. e. of the state monopolism, the history does not know any other genuine socialism - the Swedish "socialism" and the Italian and German national-socialisms - do not count as being imperialist ones)*.

------------------

* NB. Any socialism is bourgeois, but not communist, since socialism – the public – envisages a universal mass meeting of individuals and, subsequently, leaders of a non-organised people and of peoples. (It envisages) the exploitation of man by man. That's just what occurred in the USSR.

As to communism, it, on the contrary, envisages a production self-management – the self-activity – in the concrete collective process of production, the freedom of the organised and directly interacting working people. (It envisages) a system of communes.

The difference is essential.

------------------

After the destruction of the "socialist camp" (having lost the support of the USSR there suffered all the socialist countries except China) there came the turn of moral as well as technical degradation of the rest of the countries – of the victorious imperialist ones.

- Historically, according to the level of concentration of material means of production in money terms (i. e. in capital), three phases of capitalism can be distinguished:

(1) The capitalism of landlords and merchants - the "feudal", small-scale commodity one. Free labour, wage slaves, proletarians do not yet exist in it. Only isolated enterprises have been capitalised. The free competition of entrepreneurs is still bounded by the power of landlords, the manpower of society being concentrated in their property.

(2) The labour force has been liberated from its serfdom and abruptly fills up the labour market. Small enterprises are dramatically absorbed by their stronger competitors. There arise magnates of industrial sectors, monopolies of industrial sectors and "empires" of industrial sectors. This capitalist phase of the sectoral monopolism was called "imperialism" by Lenin.

(3) Following the victory of Soviet Russia in the Civil War the same Lenin practically organised, and Stalin subsequently totalised, under the name of "socialism", the third, state-capitalist phase. This is the third and last phase of capitalism - the highest and last capitalist mode of production, the highest level of concentration of material means of production. However, the state monopolism (as well as any controversial-in-itself capitalism) is not able to claim for the world supremacy.

The population of the country was universally proletarianised in a unitary system of payment for works.

Only the people of the agricultural branch of production "dropped out" of this system. With their ‘personal subsidiary holdings’, the farmers seemed to remain in the small-scale capitalism. However, the same Lenin had wrongly identified the "peasants" as a separate social class, "friendly" to the working class.

But then again a class-like "layer" of intelligentsia took its clear shape. Officially, people were divided into "workers" and "employees", the latter included military men and managers.

The third class - the upper one - (the CC of the CPSU) was also attributed to the notorious "layer".

The USSR ideologists in a "Marxist-Leninist" manner, i. e. dogmatically, always contrasted (and this opinion still remains) two classes - workers and peasants (although only workers belonged to the state-monopoly mode of production). And the managerial class, "the layer of intelligentsia", was shamefully passed over in silence. As for the masters of life - the CC of the CPSU – the universal capitalists, even thinking about them was not encouraged.

The USSR collapsed, with the mode of production directly falling through two phases (from the highest to the lowest one) – down to the small-scale commodity capitalism. That’s why the aristocratic regalia for the new bourgeoisie as well as religious cults for the "people" corresponding to the feudal and small-scale capitalism were urgently called for. The predatory people quickly went on looting, selling out and squandering the material wealth accumulated over the whole period of the heroic efforts of Soviet toilers.

At present, Russia is struggling up to the "civilised" sectoral monopolism (imperialism). However, this "rise" is again due to squandering the mineral wealth and in no case due to the production of means of production. So Russia's oligarchs, the richest billionaires are not a patch, as the saying goes, on their Western competitors as regards the productivity level.

Only the remains of the productive forces of the country have preserved their Soviet continuity in terms of their longing for the state monopolism and for planning their own lives.

- The defeat of the USSR is not yet the defeat of communism. And the triumph of imperialism is like a feast after a pyrrhic victory and during a plague as well.

Due to efforts of the USSR leaders who implanted the idea of building up communism, we have got the Marxist communist teaching in its primary sources.

We have got a negative experience of forming a socialist society with universal proletarianisation of population (with universal wage labour).

We have got a positive experience of non-commodity exchange in the sphere of production of means of production.

Among other things, the history has shown that it is easier to make the qualitative revolutionary leap from the previous phase of development, and not from the final one. Or from the "weak link", having timed, as it was in 1917, the general crisis of imperialism. To skip the "dead-end", highest stage of capitalist development, even though it has much more basic accumulations for the future social order (not to ignore the now half-ruined Russia).

So the matter depends on the dialectical Marxist communist social science which is qualitatively different from the bourgeois formalist, chaotic compilations.

- Such formalist opinions about the backwardness of the USSR were and are a good few. With their opinions of this kind many left-wing Marxist ideologists close up with right-wing bourgeois apologists. Exactly such "various readings" of Marxism engendered, in general, a discord in the working-class communist movement.

The sectoral monopolism of the Western type (imperialism, in Lenin's definition) is the capitalism in the phase of its particularity (i. e. the capitalism proper). Therefore, it is most consistently defined constitutionally and is conservatively stable (although being subject to systematic crises) economically than the small-scale commodity (feudalised) and the state-monopoly (totalitarianist "statecap") "transitional", developing modes of production of the capitalist formation.

- I myself and my father were dissidents communist. But we were sure of the solidity of the USSR socialism, and appealed only to the CC of the CPSU and to the institutes of social sciences over the deviations from Marxism in the social development.

I've heard about Sablin who was the commander of a destroyer. I read, after the 1990, some works by Fetisov. I know nothing else about the tradition of Marxists who envisioned a more radical transformation of society. Gorbachev's "glasnost" [openness] did not generate any united front of dissident Marxists.

The philosophical seminars, "universities of Marxism-Leninism" and institutes of social sciences, where we tried to act alone in a production-commune manner, more and more inclined to the pro-Western private-consumer opportunism.

- Just how Russia "has been reviving" and "asserting itself" - you can see it from my reply to your 2nd question. Here the views of the Left are mostly common.

As for the right-wing blood-suckers, they are not worth mentioning: this world is theirs.

- Russia is a country of the sectoral monopolism (see my reply to your 2nd question). It is, of course, an imperialist country, but on the lowest level of this capitalist phase, on the level of private seizing and squandering of the public natural resources. That is why the Western imperialist countries, and first of all the USA, view Russia as an object of absorption.

This absorption, is, of course, being realised by the way of liquidating the remains of the highly-developed in the past productive forces with their community-communist traditions. And this should be in no way allowed, since the first communist revolution is to be most easily realised in the weak link of imperialism.

The Left movement in the West already knows the communitarian movement: the LIP in France, there’s probably something of the sort in England; encouraging information systematically comes from the United States. So, I believe, the Left communitarians of the West must in no case support Russia's pro-Western trade unionism. On the contrary, they should detect and scientifically "spud" the shoots of production self-management.

- The working class of Russia, being subject to trade-unionism, is disoriented in their protest actions.

However, there are facts of take-overs of enterprises by their work collectives into self-management. And some collective bodies of dockers, car-assembly workers, railway workers even tried to control the financial and sales activities of their enterprises. If only the activists of liberation of the working class from exploitation are provided with the technique of self-management, the positive prospects won't make wait for them.

- The legacy of official "communism" manifests itself in the propaganda of returning to the socialist system of the USSR. This is the common sin of all the present "Communist" parties headed by the openly pro-bourgeois CPRF.

I, personally, treat the USSR as an advanced statecap. After all, despite the adverse natural conditions, it ponderably competed with the sectoral monopolies of the West, having been able to totally get its own branches of industry under the state. Even Hitler had never dreamt of that in the racist Germany. And with us it was solved relatively easy in the course of Stalinisation due to the mere hope of people for the communism to come. The sectoral monopolism does not suppose to generate such expectations

- Post-Stalinism now exists in the minds of humanistic part of Russia's people. However, it has no future and cannot have it at all, because you cannot disregard the resulting historical experience of deception with Stalin's apologetic "communist" idea: "communism" without having communised the society, with no collective power, with no self-motivation, without self-management in the production process. That is the "communism" with hired labour. Moreover, the new "dear God in the flesh", Stalin, is not expected in the foreseeable future.

Hitlerism, in its national-racist manifestation, is all the more not intrinsic in the Russian working class who form the majority of population in Russia.

Therefore, the genuine Communists must, first of all, set themselves the aim of achieving the genuine communism (see my reply to your 12-th question), as well as organise themselves in a Communist manner, i. e. not in a bourgeois democratic-centralist manner, but in a communitarian one – by self-management and interchangeability. Thereafter, [they must] gather in a fist the progressive Marxist scholars who are proficient in dialectical logic (for calculating the relation between the value and the use-value of labour product) and the labour movement forces prone to self-management (for taking-over enterprises by their production collectives).

- The biggest influence on left thought is now exerted by the dispersional and dogmatic Marxism in its opportunist and trade-unionist character. Further the subjects of influence are: Trotskyism, anarchism, a pure-bourgeois trade unionism.

A very weak influence in the "left thought" has got the dialectical Marxism. It is in use, but again in a dogmatic form, in the circles of the old com[munist]-professors.

Spontaneous protests by workers against the bourgeois robbery and mockery are taken by the Left exclusively from the standpoint of statistics and information. Being unorganised themselves, the Left do not even prepare any methods for taking and holding power by workers in their enterprises.

- Today the concept of "real communism" is interpreted by many as the Stalinist socialism, but in a philistinist manner - "with a human face". I. e. state monopolism without totalitarian repressions is meant, i. e. utopia. Moreover, the versions of such utopian constructions are as numerous as their authors: you cannot count them.

Whereas the real (true) concept of the real (true) communism, even according to the most simple and primitive logic, should be determined as the highest scientific achievement of mankind in its social structure. Moreover, even in the slightest Marxist manner communism is characterised "in the liberty and happiness of the ancient gentes" (Morgan, Engels and Marx). I. e., real communism represents a primitive communism, but at the highest level of social development, using all the best in the achievements of mankind.

The modern, social notion of "gens" is objectively, economically represented by the work collective of an enterprise – the collective body, which is responsible for the output of labour product suitable for public exchange. Today these operative "gentes" with their work force and their technological organisation are owned by the merchant-capitalist, the owner of building and tools. But if the ownership of work force and production technologies is transferred into the hands of this production collective body (numbering about 100 persons), then we get a self-reproducing, and self-governing collectivity – a gens – of a new, civilised generation, i. e., using the modern language, a commune, a production and reproduction social cell.