Not my special field, but you might be interested in this one:
Socialism Betrayed by
Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenney
Go here for an interview with the authors:
http://mltoday.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=469&Itemid=57
Just read through two thirds of the book, and... it's bad. I mean, if the authors had meant it as a way to bolster faith on the viability of soviet communism, their work really backfires, badly!
The main points, that Gorbachev intended all along to weaken and split the party, to change the political system of the USSR towards some form of "social-democracy", are good. I can believe that he wished that but was simply too stupid to arrange the separation between the state and the party before setting about to destroy the party - then, when the party collapse because of Gorbachev deliberate campaigning against its ideological basis, he found himself a president without a state. And too stupid to recognize the can of worms he was opening as the party was replaced by the state: the party could oppose nationalism (and that was part of the whole ideology), the state could not -
states depend on nationalism.
The problem is, Gorbatchev was stupid, but so was the rest of the leadership of the PCUS, who let him dismantle the party, their own power base. And the rest of the members were either also stupid, or apathetic, or perhaps powerless. Only a bankrupt (ideologically and morally) party could have allowed its own dismantlement. Democratic centralism my ass, there was no democracy within the CPUS, else a leader would not be able to destroy the whole organization - he would have been toppled. Unless (if we take the opposite view and insist that the party was, internally, democratic) the people who made up the organization really wanted to dismantle it - and in that view the party as organization also failed.
The argument that the CPSU had a "left-wing" and a "right-wing" in the 1920s and then again starting with Khrushchev, is interesting. And so is the emphasis on the role of the "second (private) economy" as a support base of Gorbachev. But it begs the question: why did that second economy came exist? And here the authors feebly try (and fail) to demonstrate both that it was unnecessary, a deviation to be eliminated (allegedly, something which Andropov could have achieved, had he lived a few more years), and yet powerful and necessary enough to serve as a lever to topple the whole system! Increasingly important in supplying consumer goods. They decry the rise of the second economy within that role, yet present no explanation about how central planning could have supplied those same goods - which it constantly failed to do, else black markets and corruption would not have grown!
Worse,
I saw in the book the same argument I had seen elsewhere to defend the bosses of developing capitalist nations: that workers should sacrifice consumer goods (i.e., their own living standards) in the name of "economic progress", so that more capital goods could be produced in order to grow the economy. The implicit logic being that because central planning could not provide for the demand for those consumer goods, people should just postpone the fullness of their material rewards until some future unspecified time when the enemies of socialism were defeated and real socialism could be achieved.
So I must ask:
for the exploited worker what difference does it make to be exploited in the process of production of capital goods to be owned by capitalists, or in the process of production of capital goods to be owned by the state? The second is better because the worker is theoretically co-owner of those goods...
but when will he have the benefit of those goods? In some
unspecified future? Promises... no wonder that the population was not willing to defend socialism in the USSR when it collapsed, that it fell barely without a fight - people are only willing to wait so long!
So far the impression which I got from the book is that soviet socialism failed not because Gorbachev and a small cadre withing the CPSU betrayed it, but because the whole CPSU
and its policies failed.
