By Roger Silverman
[Note: The editors of Left Horizons do not agree with all aspects of this article, but we believe it makes an excellent contribution to the discussion in the labour movement around Ukraine and will help to educate readers on the background to the conflict]
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.)
Web of fascist and far-right conspirators
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.
Consolidating strategic advantage
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.
Political regimes proved spectacularly unpopular
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.
