Mayur Chetia
I became a communist long after the USSR had collapsed. The
red flags had been lowered, the hammer and sickle replaced by new symbols, and
the Cold War had ended in triumph for capitalism. And yet, even as someone who
now identifies more with market socialism—grounded in feasibility, and
committed to democratic institutions—I still feel the pinch. The loss of the
USSR is something I carry. And I’m sure I’m not alone.
Why does the fall of a state I never lived under, one I
never truly idealised, feel so personal? Because the USSR was more than just a
state. It was a symbol—a flawed, battered, often tragic symbol, but a symbol
nonetheless—of a world that dared to be different. A world not governed by
capital.
A First Attempt at
the Impossible
The Soviet Union was the first serious attempt to build
socialism in history. That matters. The Bolsheviks had no playbook, no
template. They improvised under siege—civil war, famine, international
isolation. They made grave mistakes, sometimes monstrous ones. But they tried.
The sheer ambition of creating a new mode of production—industrialising a
peasant country, eliminating private ownership of the means of production,
creating universal healthcare and education—cannot be dismissed as merely
authoritarian folly.
Even if we now argue, rightly, for decentralisation, worker
cooperatives, democratic planning, or hybrid models with markets—everything we
debate is built on a terrain first opened up by the USSR.
A Different Moral
Battlefield
The USSR shaped the entire 20th century. Without it, there
would have been no postwar welfare state in the West—social democracy was
capitalism’s answer to the Soviet threat. Anti-colonial movements across the
global South drew inspiration, funding, and diplomatic support from Moscow.
Even when we reject Stalinism or bureaucratism, we have to acknowledge the
fact: the USSR made the idea of socialism real, not just theoretical.
That’s why today’s so-called socialist states—China,
Vietnam—don’t feel the same. They are successful in their own way, but within
the framework of global capitalism. They compete in markets, attract foreign
capital, rely on wage labour and inequality. Their communist parties preside
over capitalist development. The USSR, by contrast, never accepted capitalism’s
rules, even when it failed to replace them.
The Death of an Idea
When the USSR collapsed in 1991, it wasn’t just a
geopolitical shift. It was a historical defeat. Not just for one model, but for
the belief that the world could be fundamentally reorganised. That human
relations could be governed not by profit, but by planning, solidarity, and
need.
As a market socialist, I do not want to resurrect the USSR.
But I mourn it nonetheless. I mourn the audacity, the seriousness, the scale of
its ambition. I mourn what its death made more difficult: the legitimacy of the
socialist project itself. The space to imagine alternatives shrank overnight.
Our ideas became tentative, marginal, riddled with disclaimers.
Still Thinking, Still
Trying
But here we are. We read Alec Nove and Erik Olin Wright. We
learn from Kornai and Kantorovich. We study failures not to mock them but to
avoid repeating them. We build models not for utopia, but for real, achievable
transitions. And we do this even when the world laughs, forgets, or demonises.
That pinch we feel? It’s the price of holding on to hope,
without illusion. Of remaining a socialist—when there are no clear blueprints,
no global momentum, no triumphal certainty. Only the long road ahead, and the
refusal to give up.
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