“Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you”

Joseph Stalin’s  successor Khrushchev was quoted as saying to western diplomats in 1956, “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you”.  This determination to beat the other side was a constant during the cold war. Both sides were confident of victory but the Soviets even more so. Marxist doctrine teaches that history is driven by a process defined as historical materialism. The progression of technologies (means of production) and labors interaction with them are the only thing that really progress history. According to Marxist thought, capitalism will inevitably continually divide society into the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. This imperialist oppression is unsustainable and will crumble leading to a new form of society. Freely chosen labor and one’s return to their species-being will then drive production in a communal economy.

Soviet Movie Poster

Anti US Soviet movie poster discussing 1983 US Invasion of Granada

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev: Time Magazine Cover March 25, 1985

Gorbachev served as an influential member of the politburo during the early 1980s before asuming the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1984. He then instituted a number of reform campaigns that ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Emma Goldman as portrayed in E.L Doctrow’s Ragtime serves as a rallying cry, a figure for those in America who advocate Anarchism, Socialism, Marxism, pretty much anything that isnt capitalism.  She fights and pushes her agenda to help the poor working man and others who have been downtrodden by the current system. She decrys how people are disregared by the system and left without housing food or means to survive. Yet her ideas are difficult to put into practice. The founders of the Soviet Union, good intentioned, as they may have been still created a system of social hierarchy despite the flowery rhetoric preaching equality and no class distinction. Without a clear model or good ideas to base such a society the creation of one on the fly is very difficult.

“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

The feelings and mood of the average Soviet citizen is harder to gauge because of the mostly closed society Moscow governed. The average Soviet citizen grew up and lived in a society dominated by the party and state. Free mandatory education from the state along with omnipresent propoganda indoctranated the populace with the government’s line.