From the previous presentations, it should be obvious that the USSR was not a union of equal republics. It was an empire in which Russia dominated the former Tsarist colonies, sometimes in extremely cruel ways.
Lenin envisaged a different set-up from the centralised and Russified Tsarist empire, and he did try to bring about equality as the civil war was winding down. A series of treaties in 1920–1921 recognised Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland and Poland as independent states. Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent Soviet Socialist Republics. In smaller minority ethnic enclaves, local and regional self-government and linguistic and cultural development were encouraged. On December 30, 1922, the First Congress of Soviets of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics approved the Treaty on the formation of the USSR. Lenin insisted on a clause proclaiming the right to self-determination, including secession from the USSR. Lenin made some serious mistakes; for example, he prevented the Constituent Assembly from taking place and stifled opposition, laying the basis for Stalin to come to power. But his insistence on the right to secede was absolutely correct. If the USSR was to be a voluntary union of equal republics, every republic had to be free to secede from it.
After Lenin died in January 1924, the struggle for succession was eventually won by Stalin, who proceeded to reverse most of Lenin’s policies. The Soviet republics were once again brought under the rule of Moscow and once again Russified. The secret protocols of the Hitler-Stalin Pact signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov on 23 August 1939 effectively made Stalin a Nazi collaborator supplying the Nazis with food and raw materials in return for the go-ahead to recolonise Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and part of Poland. Only when Hitler abrogated the pact by invading the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 did Stalin stop collaborating with him. The post-war Yalta Agreement allowed him to set up Moscow-dominated regimes in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and later East Germany, further extending the Russian empire. But in order to portray himself as Lenin’s closest comrade, he retained the clause in the constitution granting the republics freedom to secede, although in practice it remained a dead letter.
Stalin’s successors mostly continued with his policies until Gorbachev came to power. Unlike his predecessors, Gorbachev had a genuine commitment to democracy and aversion to violence. When the Berlin wall came down in 1989, he didn’t send in Russian tanks. He was in the process of trying to sign a more equal treaty with the non-Russian republics of the USSR when Stalinist hard-liners staged a coup and put him under house arrest. The coup collapsed and Gorbachev was freed, but he was side-lined by Yeltsin. In December 1991, Yeltsin presided over the disintegration of the Soviet Union into fifteen independent republics, including the Russian Federation and Ukraine. The process was chaotic and destructive, but we can see it as a process of decolonisation.
Yeltsin handed over power to Putin, an agent of the secret police or KGB, which later became the FSB. Putin was harshly critical of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. In 2016, he accused Lenin of putting a time bomb under the Russian state by insisting on the right to self-determination. In a series of articles and speeches in the run-up to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he accused Lenin and the Bolsheviks of creating Ukraine by chopping off part of Russia. He approved of Stalin’s ‘totalitarian regime’, but criticised him for not ‘cleansing’ the constitution of what he called ‘the odious and utopian fantasies inspired by the revolution’. He wanted to go one step further than Stalin, not just reversing the revolution but also wiping out its ideals and going back to the ideals of the Tsarist empire. In the Russian Federation itself this has meant increasing concentration of absolute power in his hands and successive blows against democratic institutions like the independence of the judiciary, free and fair elections, and freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly, as well as attacks on women’s rights and LGBT+ rights.
Russian Marxist Ilya Budraitskis calls
this fascism from above, and feels that the so-called ‘special military
operation’ has dealt the final blow to democracy, with the state intruding even
into private life. In foreign policy, the annexation of parts of Georgia,
Moldova and Ukraine, and now the assault on the whole of Ukraine, signals
Putin’s imperial ambitions. He sponsors extreme right-wing groups and parties
in Europe and has close ties with white supremacists in the US. The Russian
paramilitary Wagner Group, whose brutal neo-Nazi Rusich unit was active in
Donbas, has fought for Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Khalifa Haftar in Libya,
both guilty of crimes against humanity. It has backed authoritarian dictators
and military coups in Mali, Central African Republic and Burkina Faso in return
for gold and diamond mining concessions. Such practices, when carried out by
the West, have rightly been characterised as imperialism.
Given all this, it’s not surprising that authoritarian regimes around the world have supported Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, either voting with Russia in the UN or claiming to be ‘neutral’ and abstaining. So far as I’m concerned, neutrality in this situation is like watching a man rape a woman and saying, ‘I’m not going to take sides, I’m neutral.’ And that’s not my metaphor – it’s Putin’s. At a press conference shortly before he invaded in February 2022, he quoted from a Russian punk rock song which goes, ‘Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I crept up and raped her. Whether you like it or don’t like it, bear with it, my beauty,’ implying that he intended to rape a dead Ukraine. Third World governments who take this self-professed ‘neutral’ position forget that whereas the Non-Aligned Movement refused to take sides between the two super-powers, they were in full support of national self-determination against all forms of imperialism and colonialism. In the context of the Ukraine war that would mean supporting Ukrainian self-determination against Russian imperialism, not taking a neutral position.
More surprisingly, a number of people who
call themselves anti-imperialists and anti-war activists also support
Putin either openly or by repeating his propaganda. I started looking into this
phenomenon after Putin intervened in Syria in September 2015, and was horrified
to find that some of the people who had been on the same side as me when I was
demonstrating against the US wars on Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq and Israel’s
occupation of Palestine were now on the other side, never criticising Putin for
bombing hospitals, schools, mosques, markets and apartment blocks in Syria. Further
research showed that Syria was not an isolated case. This section of
self-professed anti-imperialists also backed or prevaricated about the genocide
of Bosnian Muslims by Serb nationalists, Iran’s brutal theocracy and its
murderous intervention in Syria, and Putin’s annexation of Crimea and invasion
of Donbas.
In my book Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism I tried to explain and classify these pseudo-anti-imperialists. One section are neo-Stalinists. Unlike the original Stalinists, who supported Lenin and the Russian revolution, these people back Putin, who curses Lenin and wants to reverse the Russian revolution. There are many such people here in India and in the Indian diaspora, like Vijay Prashad, for example. Then there was the section that was so focused on opposing anything and everything the Western powers did that they automatically took the opposite side regardless of how despotic or imperialist it was, seemingly unable to understand that defenders of democracy and human rights could have more than one enemy. Some of these people, like Medea Benjamin and Code Pink, never criticise Putin or the Iranian theocracy. The others criticise Putin, sometimes quite harshly, yet at the same time repeat his propaganda – for example, that the Euromaidan protest movement was a coup masterminded by Washington, and the Russian annexation of Crimea was legitimate. Sadly, this section includes people who have done good work in the past, like John Pilger and even Noam Chomsky.
In the wake of Putin’s 2022 invasion of
Ukraine, they either kept quiet or condemned the invasion in one sentence, but
went on to make excuses for Putin and to undermine the Ukrainian resistance at
much greater length. They have two main lines of argument. One, the real
culprits are NATO and the West. Two, the Ukrainians are also to blame for the
war. Let’s examine some of their arguments.
One. NATO is to blame because it expanded into Eastern Europe, thereby posing a threat to Russia, and therefore Putin was forced to respond. This argument ignores the fact that it was the countries in Eastern Europe which took the initiative to join NATO, precisely because they wanted to avoid the fate that has befallen Ukraine. A presupposition of this argument, which goes along with the claim that Ukrainians are simply tools of NATO and the West, is that East Europeans are fools manipulated by the West. To see this as a proxy war between NATO and Russia because NATO countries are supplying weapons to Ukraine would be like seeing the Vietnam war as a proxy war between the US and Russia/China, because the latter were supplying weapons to the Vietnamese. This is a racist view of colonised peoples because the agency of Ukrainians in one case, Vietnamese in the other, is denied.
Another assumption is that imperial
superpowers have a right to ‘spheres of influence’ in which they can dominate
smaller, weaker countries. If we went along with this assumption, we would have
to agree that just as Russia has the right to dominate the countries of Eastern
Europe and Central Asia, the US has a right to dominate countries of the
Caribbean and Latin America. I disagree with both propositions. The argument
that Russia has legitimate ‘security concerns’ about NATO being on its doorstep
completely ignores the fact that former Russian colonies have much greater
cause to have security concerns, given their past experience of Russian
colonisation and the threat of it being repeated. NATO has never attacked
Russia – indeed, has bent over backwards to avoid doing so. Therefore
the ‘security concerns’ argument is a disguised version of the complaint that
NATO is interfering in Russia’s ‘sphere of influence’. It seems bizarre that these
people have so much sympathy for the security of the rapist but none for the
security of the rape victims.
They claim that the US and NATO are preventing the Ukrainians from negotiating with Russia and coming to an agreement. This is not true. There have been negotiations, and some are still ongoing over prisoner exchanges, for example. But after the cruelty inflicted on the Ukrainian people, they would throw out any government that wanted to compromise with Putin’s demands. It’s the Ukrainian people, not the Western powers, who are blocking a compromise. And they have every right to do so, because it is their country which has been invaded. NATO hasn’t fired a single shot or lost a single soldier.
The arguments that blame Ukraine remind me
of the victim-blaming that so often takes place in rape cases. They use the
example of the Azov Brigade to imply that Ukraine is dominated by racists and
fascists, although the Ukrainian government has taken steps to disempower Azov.
It’s true there are racists and fascists in Ukraine and that is a cause for
concern, but fascists are much weaker in Ukraine than in many other countries.
The far-right parties didn’t win a single seat in the 2019 parliamentary
elections, and Russian-speaking Jewish Zelensky won a landslide victory in the
presidential election. UN reports on racism have only mild criticisms of
Ukraine. At a time when anti-Muslim racism is rampant in non-Muslim-majority
countries, Ukraine is better than most, and has a much better record
than Russia, which has resumed Stalin’s ethnic cleansing of indigenous Crimean
Tatars after taking over Crimea. Criticising the flawed democracy of the victim
without denouncing the brutal aggression of the perpetrator only makes it
easier for Putin’s fascist regime to seize more territory in Ukraine.
The same is true of countless proposals by self-professed anti-war activists that the West stop supplying weapons to Ukrainians and put pressure on them to negotiate a deal with the Kremlin, which would inevitably entail giving up part of the territory that Russia has occupied. This is strongly reminiscent of the Munich agreement between Chamberlain and Daladier on one side, Hitler and Mussolini on the other, forcing Czechoslovakia to give up part of its territory to the Nazis. In a way, it’s even worse. We know the horrific crimes against humanity that have been committed in Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian forces: the rape, torture, mass graves and deportation of millions of Ukrainian civilians to the Russian Federation. We know with hindsight that the Munich appeasement of fascists precipitated World War II. So why would anyone want to repeat that mistake, extending the war and increasing the bloodshed?
Instead, it is incumbent on all defenders of human rights and democracy to support the Ukrainian struggle in any way we can, because a victory of these values anywhere in the world is a victory for all of us, while a defeat of them anywhere in the world is a defeat for all of us. There are also bread-and-butter issues involved: the bombing of wheatfields and sunflower fields by Russian forces affects food supplies around the world. It has become obvious by now that Putin will not stop until he is defeated. That is the only way to end the war, and it should be ended as soon as possible for the sake of Ukrainians suffering a genocidal assault, Russians being sent to die for Putin’s imperial dreams, and the rest of the world suffering from shortages of food and fuel.
(This is a somewhat expanded version of a presentation at the Round Table Discussion ‘Dialogue With Ukraine’ held on 25 January 2023, including parts left out due to time pressure and responses during the discussion. The link to the discussion is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS1Iyc_Bpho )