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| Source: Philadelphia Enquirer |
From Roger Silverman in London
What is the right socialist response to the war? My contribution to the discussion...
WAR IN UKRAINE
Thirty years ago, the world’s capitalists were rejoicing at the collapse of the USSR, celebrating “the end of history”. Since then, history has given its own riposte, in the shape of the deepest slump since the 1930s, the deadliest pandemic since 1918, the first European wars since 1945 and the closest threat of nuclear armageddon since 1962.
There is a direct connection. It was that very same blinkered triumphalism that
created the perfect conditions for the current war: first by inflicting on
Russia the most savage defeat since Versailles; then by helping hoist to power
over it a caste of crazed gangsters; and finally by provocatively pushing right
up to its very borders a hostile military alliance. The responsibility for this
and any subsequent wars rests squarely on the ruling class worldwide.
AGAINST THE RUSSIAN INVASION
We have no interest in pedantic quibbles over whether or not Russia fits the precise classification of a rival imperialist power. Russia is not an imperialist power, but it is behaving like one. The Russian ruling class are mostly former Soviet bureaucrats who following the collapse of Stalinism became predators and plunderers of the resources of the Soviet state. Russia is a kleptocracy, a criminal enterprise founded on wholesale plunder of the corpse of the Soviet state. It is parasitic and reactionary: the inspiration and patron of fascist and far-right forces worldwide. It is ravaged by gangster capitalists, a band of predators. Like the Tsarist state, the Putin regime is trying to reconstruct a prison house of nations.
Putin started by justifying the invasion on the grounds of “defence of the
right of the peoples of Donetsk and Lugansk to self-determination”. This
pretext was always utterly cynical; after all, tens of thousands of Chechens
had died fighting Putin’s forces for precisely that same right. That excuse was
soon abandoned. His declared war aims shifted overnight to regime change in
Kyiv and at the very least the permanent partition of Ukraine: the
incorporation of Ukraine’s most productive and economically developed area into
Russia, alongside the installation of an impotent and compliant puppet regime
in the west. Even the outright annexation of the whole of Ukraine is still not
ruled out.
It was not long before Putin was resorting to primitive Russian Orthodox
medievalism by rubbishing Ukraine’s very national identity, dismissing it as an
artificial construct “created by Bolshevik Communist Russia”. This was a
reference to the Bolsheviks’ policy after the revolution of liberating the
enslaved nations of Tsarist Russia and granting them statehood and autonomy, up
to and including the unconditional right of secession. They even created the
first alphabets for languages that had up to then been exclusively vernacular.
Behind Putin’s menacing message “we are ready to show you what genuine
de-communisation means for Ukraine” lies an underlying threat: the extinction
of Ukraine as a nation.
(If anything, it would be more historically correct to say
that it was Ukraine which created Russia, the origins of the Russian state
having been laid in “Kiev Rus” over a thousand years ago, centuries before the
foundations of Moscow were laid, and half a millennium before the creation of
St Petersburg.)
Equally, Putin has frantically hurled about all manner of
contradictory rationalisations, including the need to “fight fascism” – a
surprising claim from the spider at the centre of a vast worldwide web of
fascist and far-right conspirators, including his American stooge Trump. All
that really motivates Putin is a determination to enhance still further the
right of plunder for Russia’s degenerate gangster plutocrats, and his timing is
prompted by two factors.
First is the conspicuous decline of US imperialist power, as
demonstrated by its eventual defeat in Iraq (Iran being now the dominant power
there), its abstention from involvement in the Syrian civil war, and most
graphically by its rout in Afghanistan. Putin rightly calculated that the USA
and NATO would not confront Russia militarily in Ukraine, any more than they
had in Chechnya, Georgia or Crimea. They will not intervene directly, as is
shown by their refusal to impose a “no-fly zone”. Putin knows that in this war
the West will fight… to the last Ukrainian.
Secondly, Putin is desperate to assert his waning authority as it begins to
crumble at home. He is alarmed by the recent full-scale uprisings he has only
barely succeeded in suppressing in Belarus and Kazakhstan, Russia’s two closest
allies; and at the growing mood of discontent within Russia itself, which he
rules solely by thuggery and fear.
Putin’s grip on power is dependent more than ever on brute force and sheer
inertia. From the very start of the invasion there were widespread public
protests: from the families of dead, wounded or captured conscripts; from the
many Russians with family connections in Ukraine; even from within the state
television channel and above all from within the army itself, which has
encountered unexpected logistical delays and high initial casualties. These
signs of discontent, including cracks within the general staff itself, are
ominous warning signs; incipient splits at the top are always evidence of a coming
groundswell of discontent from below. Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese war
was followed by the 1905 revolution; its catastrophic losses in the first world
war by the 1917 revolution; and its humiliating retreat from Afghanistan by the
collapse of the USSR. Putin’s adventure in Ukraine could ultimately prove just
as catastrophic to his rule.
AGAINST NATO
There can be no excuses and no alibis for the Russian invasion of Ukraine; but it is not irrational. Following the collapse of the USSR, the USA and its allies had imposed on Russia the most draconic and humiliating defeat and constantly baited Russia with brazen provocations.
Emphatic warnings had been sounded against the expansion of NATO into the
former Soviet satellite states, and specifically into Ukraine, by the USA’s
entire diplomatic establishment: by Henry Kissinger, George Kennan, the current
CIA director Bill Burns, former defence secretaries, former US ambassadors,
etc.
In flagrant disregard of these warnings and of the undertakings previously made
to Gorbachev in 1991, negotiated as a quid pro quo for the reunification of
Germany, NATO had swallowed up former Warsaw Pact countries and even former
constituent parts of the USSR, fourteen in total, systematically bringing a
hostile military alliance right up to Russia’s borders, and refused to rule out
the incorporation of Ukraine itself. The USA and EU had promoted a series of
anti-Russian “colour revolutions” in a range of countries formerly within its
sphere of influence, including twice in Ukraine: in 2004 and 2014. They had
violated the terms of the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 guaranteeing
autonomy to the Russian-speaking peoples of Donbas, encouraged the
incorporation into the Ukrainian army of the Azov battalion and other openly fascist
paramilitary forces, and let them loose on the inhabitants of Donbas. It may be
that outright fascist parties don’t win many votes in Ukrainian elections, but
Ukraine is the only country to mobilise, arm and recruit violent Nazi street
gangs and deploy them as autonomous fighting units of their armed forces in a
civil war.
The USA had waged countless coups, invasions and wholesale wars to impose
regime change on countries throughout the world from Guatemala to Vietnam to
Iraq, and the EU had brazenly broken up Yugoslavia at the cost of massacres,
ethnic cleansing and civil wars. So too today, the meddling of the Western
powers in Ukraine has no other motive but the exploitation of its labour and
its economy. Still intent on swallowing up the rich agricultural, industrial
and energy resources of the region and consolidating their strategic advantage,
they are waiting for the Russian invasion to collapse, leaving them to pick up
the spoils. Meanwhile, London especially is still awash with spoils looted from
Russia’s wealth and infested with Russian billionaires, and the Tory Party
thrives on their patronage. To call on Biden and Johnson to intervene in
defence of democratic rights flies in the face of history.
These acts justify Russia's invasion no more than the Versailles treaty
justified Hitler's annexation of the countries of Europe, but they demonstrate
that the USA and NATO has pursued a policy of calculated provocation, not
intervening directly but engaging in a protracted covert proxy war, just as
they did during the 1980s in supporting the mujaheddin when Russia was at war
in Afghanistan (with deadly consequences that backfired catastrophically when
their surrogates proceeded to turn their weapons on them).
Of all the satellites and former constituent countries of the USSR, none has
been more unstable than Ukraine, which over three decades has suffered economic
collapse, coups and counter-coups, secession, annexation, civil war and now a
full-scale invasion. Twice in the last two decades pro-Western governments have
been installed in power by right-wing uprisings – first the “orange revolution”
of 2004, and then the Maidan protests in 2014.
What had begun as a genuinely popular occupation of Maidan square was soon
taken over by outright fascist parties like Svoboda and the Right Sector which
sported swastikas and swore allegiance to the wartime Nazi collaborator Stepan
Bandera. The protest was actively encouraged by the EU, NATO and the USA, and
was physically greeted by visiting US politicians such as the former Republican
presidential candidate John McCain. Over a hundred people were killed in the
subsequent street fighting, the police withdrew, and the by now twice-deposed
president Yanukovych fled the country, immediately precipitating the Russian
military intervention, the annexation of Crimea, the secession of Donetsk and
Luhansk, and the civil war which followed. 14,000 people were killed and 28,000
wounded at the hands of Nazi death squads officially recruited into the
Ukrainian army, including the Azov battalion, Aidar, Tornado and others. Among
the atrocities of that period was the torching of the trade union building in
Odessa in which 48 people were burned alive.
The political regimes established following both the 2004 and 2014 coups proved
spectacularly unpopular at the first test. In the presidential election of
2010, the incumbent Yushchenko managed to scrape together just 5.4% of the
vote. Then again, in the 2019 election Poroshenko – the president installed
following the coup of 2014 – scored a pitiful 24% against a massive 73% for the
new president Zelensky, running on an anti-corruption peace ticket.
Ukraine’s unlikely new president is a former comedian who had played the role
of a disgruntled citizen in a popular television programme. The show was
brilliant satire, but it conveyed a mood of nihilistic iconoclasm which could
easily be exploited to refashion him as a populist idol. As a symbol of honesty
and resistance to corruption, Zelensky won an unprecedented share of the
popular vote. However, he also enjoyed the covert patronage of the tainted
billionaire Kolomoisky, a shady operator who was simultaneously sponsoring the
Azov battalion. For all his undoubted courage, Zelensky immediately found
himself trapped within the militarised state machine, a helpless hostage caught
in a war between two irreconcilable enemies.
Meanwhile, neither Kyiv, nor Moscow, nor Berlin, nor Washington have any right
to determine the status of the disputed territories of Donbas and Crimea. Just
as for the people of the Western Ukraine, they too have a democratic right of
self-determination. The population of Crimea are mostly Russians who suddenly
found themselves Ukrainian citizens within a unified Soviet Union due solely to
the whim of a capricious Khrushchev, who personally gifted it to his Ukrainian
satraps in 1954. Donbas was the industrial powerhouse of the USSR, and its
inhabitants mostly Russian-speaking descendants of workers historically
transported there from elsewhere in Soviet times. It’s a matter solely for the
populations of those regions to decide their status for themselves.
INTERNATIONALISM
What is the right attitude for socialists to take to this war? In any sudden crisis, rather than risk falling prey to panic, it is helpful to look for historical precedents, though without expecting to find ready-made off-the-shelf slogans in the writings of past teachers.
Perhaps the closest historical analogy to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is
Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Then too, an operation that had
initially masqueraded as defence of the right of self-determination for an
ethnic minority soon turned into the annexation of an entire nation. At the
time of the Munich agreement, correctly predicting an outcome that Neville
Chamberlain was manifestly incapable of anticipating, Trotsky wrote: “It may be
argued that after separating the Sudeten Germans… Hitler will not stop before
the enslavement of the Czechs themselves.” He went on to renounce a policy in
that case of mere support for their “struggle for national independence”,
warning that “an imperialist war, no matter in what corner it begins, will be
waged not for ‘national independence’ but for a redivision of the world in the
interests of separate cliques of finance capital”. Marxists “do not link the
question of the fate of the Czechs, Belgians, French and Germans as nations
with episodic shifts of military fronts during a new brawl of the imperialists,
but with the uprising of the proletariat and its victory over all the
imperialists.”
Trotsky was addressing his advice to revolutionary cadres, emphasizing that for
socialists “the main enemy is at home”. This is an elementary principle.
Workers’ unity, socialist internationalism and the overthrow of the class enemy
offer the only conceivable way out of the nightmare facing all of us. Popular
outrage and protest are perfectly legitimate democratic responses to this
brutal invasion, but the task of socialists is to expose the truth: that this
war is just one expression of the crisis of world capitalism; that our allies
are the workers of Russia, Ukraine and the world, and the best help we can give
them is to overthrow our own capitalists.
Russia, hands off Ukraine. Immediate
withdrawal of occupation forces.
No trust in NATO, the EU, Biden or Johnson.
Self-determination for the peoples of Donbass and Crimea on the basis of a genuinely democratic referendum.
Mutual demilitarisation of the border territories on either side.
Solidarity with the people of Ukraine in defence of their democratic rights.
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