DESPITE the best efforts of politicians to patch together a broken Thatcherite consensus, the days of capitalist triumphalism are gone.

Polls show big majorities for a return to public ownership of large sectors of the economy and the soaring inflation of the last two years has brought back demands for price controls.

The “unipolar moment” of US world supremacy ushered in by the collapse of the Soviet Union is past too, with China’s rise met with a new cold war against another Communist Party-led counterpart.

It’s a timely moment for former Morning Star Moscow correspondent Kate Clark’s new memoir, Twilight of the Soviet Union.

If the world is crying out for alternatives to capitalism on a burning planet, a sober assessment of the positives and negatives of the country which claimed to be that alternative for most of the 20th century can inform our approach to socialist programmes today.

And Clark’s memoir is exactly that.

Simplistic Western narratives about a democracy movement bringing down an authoritarian regime are belied by the March 1991 referendum in which 78 per cent of voters on an 80 per cent turnout voted to preserve the Soviet Union, or by the fact that 1989’s election to the Congress of People’s Deputies, sometimes trumpeted as the USSR’s first democratic election, returned a far lower proportion of both women and workers than the old Supreme Soviet, both points flagged by Clark.

And for a new generation of precarious workers, there are definitely aspects of Soviet life which will appeal. Job security, housing security and fixed, cheap energy and food prices are things many people in Britain today would give an arm and a leg for.

“Soviet citizens took this for granted,” Clark reflects when I meet her and husband Ricardo at her Chesterfield home to find out more. “They enjoyed the good points — free education, free healthcare, free holidays. Security of work, of tenure in the flat they lived in, things that are very important for working people everywhere.”

She arrived as Moscow correspondent in 1985, as the system was about to start unravelling. 

“But I didn’t sense huge dissatisfaction. It was clear though that compared to when I’d lived there before, in 1967-68, there was less of an atmosphere of optimism.”

That may have been because expectations themselves had risen: toward the end of her book Clark recalls an old woman in Yekaterinberg saying confidently “there is milk, there is butter, everything will be fine,” but what seemed like an age of plenty for those who remembered the hardship of World War II could seem pretty underwhelming for a younger generation. 

Still, the pendulum can swing both ways, and in post-bankers’ crash Britain, the availability and affordability of basic foodstuffs is again a priority for millions. Britain may be one of the richest countries in the world, but it still has dire poverty, hungry children and a huge rise in homelessness in recent years.

“Wherever you were in the Soviet Union you didn’t have that — whether the capital city or central Asia, you never saw homeless people, you never saw poverty.

“The children wherever you went were beautifully dressed, healthy looking.”

Clark travelled widely, covering the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, rising ethnic tensions in the Caucasus and Baltic states, interviewing miners mooting strike action in the Donbass. The book doesn’t pull punches on the grievances raised in all these regions as the Soviet Union edged toward the precipice. At the same time, she remembers a vibrant multicultural Soviet scene.

“There were lots of mixed families, which I think is testament to some success in the multicultural sphere. And there was a great fostering of literature and theatre and ballet and opera, in the different languages of the Soviet Union.

“One of the things I reproduce in the book is the programme of a ballet, Gayaneh, I saw in Armenia, and you can see it’s in Armenian script, with Russian only on the back. That was the same everywhere.”

Clark holds an “extreme glasnost” (openness, one of Gorbachev’s two signature policies alongside “perestroika” or restructuring) partly responsible for the explosion of ethnic tensions that brought down this multinational society. 

More broadly, an obsessive negativity on the part of Soviet publications which came to deride every single aspect of Soviet history, from the revolution to the second world war, in the late 1980s prevented a balanced assessment of the system’s pros and cons, paving the way for complete breakdown. 

In the field of nationality and ethnic relations in particular, she thinks the amplification of every difficulty between nationalities and eagerness to promote every historical grievance was akin to “opening a box of fireworks.”

The Soviet Union had worked to try to create multinational harmony from the ruins of what had been a specifically Russian empire in which non-Russians were subordinate in tsarist days, but it was “easy to destroy, you see it with nationalism in general, in Spain now, in Scotland. It’s easy to destroy harmony between peoples, it’s difficult to construct and maintain it.”

Even so, the book is as open on what didn’t work in the Soviet Union as on what did.

“There were good things about a planned economy, but it needed to be a planned economy that responded to the needs of the population more than it did.”

The shortages of particular foods and clothing, the long shopping queues that have become identified with the late Soviet Union were real problems by the time she arrived in 1985.

“In the Soviet Union an enterprise could just go on doing the same thing whether it was wanted or not … Let’s take tractors. A factory could just keep producing a particular model of tractor that had been produced ever since the 1920s.

“Maybe the tractor was inefficient, used huge amounts of diesel. Maybe there was no demand for this tractor from farms because they had enough … But if the plan said to produce this number of tractors and the factory fulfilled the plan it would keep getting its grant from the state planning committee, year after year 50,000 more tractors.

“It didn’t matter to anyone, seemingly, whether they were needed, whether they were good tractors, whether they were expensive to run. That sort of thing applied across the economy.

“So there was a groundswell of opinion that economic changes were needed, that it was necessary to reform.”

Another criticism Clark makes clear in her memoir is of the status of women in Soviet society. An appendix contrasts it to the leading role women played in the early years of the Russian Revolution.

“It had definitely got worse... in the early years women played an extremely valuable role and were seen as equal to men among the Bolsheviks.”

Why that changed she isn’t sure, but she hazards that the monolithic character of the ruling Communist Party meant there were no available mechanisms for women to campaign for their rights specifically if doing so meant criticism of the leadership.

“All the stuff you would read in the Soviet papers was about lightening the load for women so they could play their dual role — to work in a factory or whatever and then do their other role as mothers, general factotum in the kitchen and the house.

“Nobody questioned whether that was unfair, the women’s organisations didn’t question it.”

Was it better or worse than Britain at the time?

“I didn’t experience as much male chauvinism, though I’m sure it existed, but you didn’t feel it at work or in the way men related to you, that was always respectful.”

She also thinks capitalist consumer culture has been disastrous for women’s rights, and women and girls in the Soviet Union were better off without it.

“Not having all these magazines and TV programmes where women have to be dolled up to the nines, with make-up and the so-called perfect body.

“Our society is sickening in that sense, we are creating girls, children, who think unless they look like one of these ‘personalities,’ they’re not going to be beautiful.

“It ends up with young women having Botox injections in their faces, bust enhancements … it’s disgusting, it’s distorting relations between men and women and boys and girls to such an extent that I really fear for the future.

“In the Soviet Union there was nothing like that.”

She is also a strong believer that the Soviet Union was not a threatening country — it was threatened by the United States, and pressed into an arms race which placed crippling pressure on its economy, something which, combined with the country’s staggering losses in the second world war, with almost a whole generation of men wiped out, she thinks played a role in its failure to outcompete the West.

“Peace was extremely important to so many people I met, it came up in conversations when you didn’t expect it to.

“There were cruise missile pointing at the Soviet Union, literally pointing east, and it was frightening for Soviet people that there was a whole group of states that wanted to destroy their system.” In the book Clark tours an underground nuclear weapon testing site, and she remembers to this day how it brought home to her the terrifying reality of what nuclear war would mean.

Thoughtful and undogmatic, Twilight of the Soviet Union is an important book. It helps counter the anti-communist propaganda of our own ruling class, while cautioning a post-Soviet generation against idolising a system which was gravely, ultimately fatally, flawed.

Capitalism is again in trouble, and if we are to build a movement capable of moving us beyond a world order rooted in exploitation and violence, these are lessons we need to learn.

You can buy it from the Morning Star shop. Do so for Christmas!