In 2018 we wrote:

“We should have rejected political support to both the Yanayev coup and the Boris Yeltsin counter-coup because both were capitalist restoration and if a political bloc was to be made with anyone it was with Gorbachev in defence of the degenerate workers’ state. However, this possibility never arose. Moreover, it was impossible to expect the working class to support their own repression, like we would not support the crushing of the Tiananmen Square uprising on 4 June 1989; Deng also declared that was in defence of communism. A military bloc was possible with Yeltsin for the brief 3 days of the coup when the outcome might well have been a civil war.”

We now believe this is wrong and despite his counter-revolutionary intentions he was nonetheless defending the degenerate workers’ state and Yeltsin was seeking to overthrow it, which he did in August 1991. Moreover, we were therefore also wrong in saying that “The USSR remained a degenerated workers’ state until October 1993”. We should have supported that attempt to oust Yeltsin, whose policies already had such dreadful effects on the living standards and life expectancy of the Soviet working class.