The AWL argues that Stalinism was responsible for an epochal defeat of the global working class. In the Stalinist states of USSR after 1928, Eastern Europe after 1945, as well as China since 1949, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba, the working class was atomised and repressed – prevented from even forming its own parties and unions and from publishing literature except underground. These regimes, ruling in the name of “socialism”, were in fact the very opposite of working class power. The Stalinist model – including its dreadful ecological record - remains a substantial reason why many people who want to fight against capitalism do not embrace socialism.
In the capitalist world the Communist Parties operated as agents of the Stalinist ruling classes, corrupting labour movements and tying activists to the dictates of Soviet (or Chinese, or Cuban) foreign policy. These monolithic parties poisoned the left, stamped out dissent – sometimes physically – and bowdlerised Marxism. For years Communists Parties failed to take up ecological questions and when they touched on the issues, served to mangle discussion, misrepresent the arguments and sever the link between workers and ecology. Although some individual militants and dissident communists did attempt to overcome these deficiencies, the weight of the Stalinist tradition made such reconciliation impossible.
The terrible role of the Stalinist ruling class towards climate and nature began with the forced industrialisation and collectivisation of agriculture in the late 1920s. The break-neck Five Years Plan combined the exploitation of workers and peasants with ecological devastation. In 1948, Stalin announced his “Great plan for the transformation of nature,” a futile attempt to expand the Soviet economy by harnessing nature and controlling the weather and climate. During cold war era, authors from at least nineteen research institutions in the Soviet Union published books, articles and reports on weather and climate modification, according to climate historian James Fleming. Several popularizations of this literature were notable for their geoengineering fantasies. In Soviet electric power (1956), Arkadiaei Markin forecast to the year 2000 when, he estimated, electrical power output would be one hundred times greater. Markin gave special emphasis to the future role of nuclear power: “Gigantic atom explosions in the depths of the earth will give rise to volcanic activity. New islands and colossal dams will be built and new mountain chains will appear. Atom explosions will cut new canyons through mountain ranges and will speedily create canals, reservoirs, and seas, carry[ing] out huge excavation jobs. At the same time we are convinced that science will find a method of protection against the radiation of radioactive substances.”
In Man versus climate (1960), Nicolai Rusin and Lila Abramovna Flit argued that “we are merely on the threshold of the conquest of nature,” and went on to describe “those mysteries of nature already penetrated by science, the daring projects put forward for transforming our planet, and the fantastic dreams to be realized in the future.” The bookʼs cover shows the Earth surrounded by a Saturn-like ring of dust particles intended to illuminate the Arctic Circle, increase solar energy absorption, and melt the polar ice caps. The book described mega-engineering projects such as damming the Congo River to irrigate the Sahara with a “Second Nile,” diverting the Gulf Stream with a dam between Florida and Cuba, and P.M. Borisovʼs proposal to dam the Bering Straits to divert Atlantic waters into the Pacific and melt the Arctic sea ice. The authorsʼ ultimate goal was to convince the reader, that “man can really be the master of this planet and that the future is in his hands.” Igor Adabashev discussed many of the same projects in his book Global engineering (1966). Referring to the proposal to melt the polar ice by building a dam across the Bering Strait, Adabashev declares that “What mankind needs is war against cold, rather than a ʻcold warʼ.” He foresaw a new global hydrologic era “of gigantic dams and dykes, pumping stations capable of handling entire seas, and other facilities which [would] ʻtriggerʼ various meteorological processes. We shall work out a better ʻheating systemʼ for our planet, better able to serve all five continents.”
Spencer Weart’s book, The Discovery of Global Warming (2008) also contains a similar indictment of the Russian Stalinist attitude, although he points out that some of these fantasies were opposed by some leading Russian scientists. Weart also states that the USSR like the USA After 1945 engaged in weather modification – for example, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy remarked that the idea of warming Siberia was worth exploring as a joint project with the Soviets. Russian leaders entertained “a more feasible scheme... to spread particles in the atmosphere, or perhaps directly on the ground. Beginning around 1961, Budyko and other scientists speculated about how humanity might alter the global climate by strewing dark dust or soot across the Arctic snow and ice. The soot would lower the albedo (reflection of sunlight), and the air would get warmer. Spreading so much dust year after year would be prohibitively expensive. But according to a well-known theory, warmer air should melt some snow and sea-ice and thus expose the dark underlying soil and ocean water, which would absorb sunlight and bring on more warming. So once dust destroyed the reflective cover, it might not re-form.”
These dystopic plans never came to fruition. However an examination of the carbon footprints of the late Stalinist states indicates how far these systems were from ecological sustainability. World Resources Institute CO2 emissions per capita figures for 1988, the year prior to its collapse in Eastern Europe (and the year when global warming became an international public issue) were: Bulgaria 9.77 metric tons; Czechoslovakia 16.28; Hungary 7.28; Poland 12.15; Russia 16.26; and Romania 8.79. These figures are similar if not worse than the major capitalist powers at the time: USA 19.87; UK 10.29; Germany 13.27; and France 6.41. Similar figures for total and per capita greenhouse gas emissions for 1990 (the first year of these figures) from the UNFCCC indicate a similar picture.
