How the Abandonment of Democracy and Socialism has Decimated the Socialist Movement

Abstract

This paper looks not at workers’ struggles, which had their ups and downs over the last two hundred years, but specifically at the revolutionary socialist movement, which aims to eliminate capitalism. While there have been contributions to the vision of a classless, stateless society by utopian socialists and anarchists, the paper concentrates on Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and their legacy. It identifies three bifurcation points in this particular revolutionary socialist tradition where a substantial part of the movement abandoned democracy, internationalism, or both, and argues that this has had a disastrous effect on the movement and needs to be reversed.

A useful roadmap with a few misleading directions

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels stated that:

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.[1]

It is evident, therefore, that when they talk of the “conquest of political power by the proletariat,” they mean the whole proletariat, not any particular party. Their commitment to democracy is affirmed when they say “the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy”; as Engels confirmed, “The Communist Manifesto had already proclaimed the winning of universal suffrage, of democracy, as one of the first and most important tasks of the militant proletariat.”[2] Their commitment to internationalism (“the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality”) is also evident. What was meant by these two values can be gleaned from accounts of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA, also called the First International), established in 1864, in which Marx and Engels were active participants. Its 1867 rules reiterated that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.” As an association of workers’ unions and proto-unions, it stood for freedom of association, expression and peaceful assembly, all of which are necessary for successful workers’ struggles. It also worked for manhood suffrage and called for the abolition of war, in which workers of different countries killed each other in the interests of their bourgeoisies, and support for the Irish struggle for independence from England, the Polish struggle for independence from Russia, and the 1865 Black uprising in Jamaica.[3]

Clear principles to guide the movement, although the implementation of some of them (like women’s equality, an element of democracy) was less than perfect. But this roadmap also included a couple of misleading directions. What were they thinking when they wrote “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution”[4] at a time when the proletariat was a small minority in Europe and an even more minuscule minority worldwide? In 1850, Marx proposed that when the petty bourgeoisie in alliance with the peasantry (the majority) attempted to end the revolution by installing “a democratic form of government,” it was the task of the armed workers “to make the revolution permanent” until the propertied classes in all the leading countries of the world were “driven from their ruling positions.”[5] In 1859, he suggested that when “From forms of development of the productive forces the relations [of production] turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution”[6]: somewhat more realistic, but still without any hint of how the revolution would take place in the colonies or, indeed, whether they would be part of it at all.

The impression that the revolution is imminent is strengthened by Marx’s references to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Even if we concede that “dictatorship” at that time didn’t have the authoritarian connotations it has now and simply meant “rule,” Sartre has dismissed as “absurd” the idea that a whole class, with all its internal divisions between active groups and passive serialities, can wield state power,[7] although working people are certainly capable of self-government, to use the helpful distinction suggested by Engels.[8] Both Marx and Engels suggested that the Paris Commune was an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As a government, the Paris Commune was a wonderful experiment, which we can even see as prefiguring the administration of a classless socialist society. But as a state, it was a failure: the “armed people,” as Marx called them, were no match for the standing army of their enemies. The Commune was crushed, the Communards slaughtered.

In any case, what did it even mean? In his “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, Marx says that “Between capitalist and communist society lies a period of revolutionary transformation from one to the other. There is a corresponding period of transition in the political sphere and in this period the state can only take the form of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat;” but a few sentences on he says that “vulgar democrats, who see the millennium in the democratic republic… have no inkling that it is precisely in this final state form of bourgeois society that the class struggle has to be fought out to a conclusion.”[9] So on the one hand the transition to socialism takes place under the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, while on the other the class struggle is fought out to a conclusion (socialism) in the (bourgeois) democratic republic. Trying to make sense of this fifteen years later, Engels comes to the logical conclusion that “The working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is… the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat”;[10] in which case, it makes sense to see the democratic republic as the ground on which the battle to abolish the bourgeois state as well as capitalist production relations must be fought.

Marx cannot be blamed for the fact that so many of his followers have treated every tentative remark he made as the last word on the subject. But it would have saved innumerable grievous setbacks to revolutionary socialism if it had been made clear that the transition to a worldwide socialist society would take centuries, and that establishing and defending democratic republics was a necessary condition for such a transition. Even today, those lessons need to be reiterated.

Internationalism betrayed: the first bifurcation

The Communist Manifesto states, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains”,[11] but thanks to successful organizing and struggle by trade unions and Social-Democratic parties of the Second International, workers in Europe had a great deal more to lose than their chains by the early 20^th century. The fact that these gains were rooted in the nation-state resulted in the growth of nationalism, especially among the leaders of these parties, leading to identification with and support for the imperialist aims of their own bourgeoisies in World War I. This catastrophic abandonment of internationalism led to a definitive split between the nationalist-imperialist parties and revolutionary socialists who continued to uphold the value of internationalism.

It is worth inquiring how this could have happened, because it entailed a shift far more serious than a simple craving for the high standard of living which the “labour aristocracy” could expect in an imperialist state. Reinhart Kössler observes that in the early 20^th century, the German state made no attempt to conceal its genocidal policies in German South West Africa (now Namibia) but in fact advertised them with pride, and Social-Democratic leader August Bebel, who died in August 1913, strongly condemned the slaughter of the indigenous people as barbaric and bestial.[12] How is it possible that anyone who identified themselves as “socialist” could support a state that was guilty of such horrific racist oppression? Other European imperialist states committed similar atrocities in their colonies. 

V.I. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg were among those who split away from the Second International, seeing its support for the bourgeoisies of the imperialist countries as a betrayal. Lenin goes beyond Marx and Engels in arguing that socialists in imperialist countries must support struggles for national liberation in their own colonies, seeing this as part of the struggle for democracy:

The socialist revolution is not one single act, not one single battle on a single front; but a whole epoch of intensified class conflicts, a long series of battles on all fronts, i.e., battles around all the problems of economics and politics, which can culminate only in the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It would be a fundamental mistake to suppose that the struggle for democracy can divert the proletariat from the socialist revolution, or obscure, or overshadow it, etc. On the contrary, just as socialism cannot be victorious unless it introduces complete democracy, so the proletariat will be unable to prepare for victory over the bourgeoisie unless it wages a many-sided, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy.

It would be no less mistaken to delete any of the points of the democratic programme, for example, the point of self-determination of nations, on the ground that it is “infeasible,” or that it is “illusory” under imperialism…

The domination of finance capital, as of capital in general, cannot be abolished by any kind of reforms in the realm of political democracy, and self-determination belongs wholly and exclusively to this realm. The domination of finance capital, however, does not in the least destroy the significance of political democracy as the freer, wider and more distinct form of class oppression and class struggle…

Russian Socialists who fail to demand freedom of secession for Finland, Poland, the Ukraine, etc., etc. – are behaving like chauvinists, like lackeys of the blood-and-mud-stained imperialist monarchies and the imperialist bourgeoisie.[13]

The second bifurcation: democracy undermined

Lenin’s uncompromising championship of internationalism helped to preserve the revolutionary tradition, but his assaults on democracy, assisted by Leon Trotsky, completely abandoned the principles he had proclaimed in 1916. There are plenty of examples, but I will cite just three. One is the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly when it became clear that although it was overwhelmingly socialist, the Bolsheviks were a minority of about 25 percent. Many Bolsheviks opposed the hostility of their party leaders to the Assembly. Prior to the election, five members of the Bolshevik Central Committee resigned in protest against plans to cancel it, saying in a statement that “We cannot assume responsibility for this ruinous policy of the Central Committee, carried out against the will of a large part of the proletariat and soldiers.” Five Bolsheviks resigned their commissariats, stating, “There is only one path: the preservation of a purely Bolshevik government by means of political terror. We cannot and will not accept this.”[14] Thanks to these protests, the election was allowed to go through, but before the Constituent Assembly opened on 18 January 1918, a peaceful demonstration in support of it was dispersed by firing, and the following day, Lenin announced that the Constituent Assembly had been dissolved. Socialist writer Maxim Gorky was appalled:

For a hundred years the best people of Russia lived with the hope of a Constituent Assembly. In the struggle for this idea thousands of the intelligentsia perished and tens of thousands of workers and peasants.

On 5th [18^th] January, the unarmed revolutionary democracy of Petersburg – workers, officials – were peacefully demonstrating in favour of the Constituent Assembly. Pravda lies when it writes that the demonstration was organized by the bourgeoisie and by the bankers. Pravda lies; it knows that the bourgeoisie has nothing to rejoice in the opening of the Constituent Assembly, for they are of no consequence among the 246 socialists and 140 Bolsheviks. Pravda knows that the workers of the Obukhavo, Patronnyi and other factories were taking part in the demonstrations. And these workers were fired upon. And Pravda may lie as much as it wants, but it cannot hide the shameful facts.[15]

The second example is the crushing of the Kronstadt uprising. The demands of the Kronstadt rebels were clearly democratic, including new elections to the soviets by secret ballot with freedom to campaign among workers and peasants; freedom of speech and press for workers, peasants, anarchists, and left socialists; and freedom of assembly for labour unions and peasant organizations. Yet their rebellion was crushed by the Red Army in a bloody battle, after which thousands of prisoners were shot or sent to forced labour camps. The slaughter of comrades who were guilty only of adhering to the original aims of the revolution disgusted Emma Goldman so much that she decided she would have nothing to do with the Bolsheviks in future.[16]

The third example is Lenin’s and Trotsky’s merciless disparagement of trade union leaders Mikhail Tomsky and Alexander Shlyapnikov for their attempts to prevent unions from being subordinated to the one-party state. Shlyapnikov wanted unions to take charge of economic planning and production, while Tomsky had the less ambitious aim of ensuring a degree of workers’ control over management that would ensure health, safety, and decent working conditions. Trotsky, especially, was egregiously insulting to them, insisting that trade unions should abandon fighting for better conditions for workers and focus exclusively on raising productivity.[17]

This is clearly a second bifurcation point, where things could have been different if the Bolshevik leaders had safeguarded democracy instead of forcibly suppressing dissidents. But it is not a simple bifurcation. Luxemburg was very critical of these actions, and consistently spoke up for democracy. Yet on the issue of what was to happen to the Tsarist colonies, she vociferously opposed granting them the right to national liberation (a democratic right), whereas Lenin, having started out with a position very similar to hers, was persuaded by Marxists from those colonies that they should have a right to independence from Russia if that is what they wanted.[18] Shlyapnikov participated in shutting down the Constituent Assembly[19], and Tomsky, packed off to Tashkent as a disciplinary measure, was more sympathetic to ethnic Russian settler-colonists than to indigenous Muslims evicted from their land.[20] All of them, in their different ways, fell short of a whole-hearted defence of democracy.

The third bifurcation: Stalin’s counter-revolution

The undermining of democracy under Lenin and Trotsky created the conditions for Stalin’s counter-revolution, but it would be a mistake to see this as simple continuity rather than a qualitative break. While Lenin was alive, the situation was still fluid, it was possible to fight against authoritarianism and sometimes even to win. Tomsky and Shlyapnikov might have been derided and subjected to disciplinary procedures, yet they could also be reinstated in positions from which they could continue to fight for workers’ rights. Among the anti-colonial influences on Lenin was Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, the pioneering Bolshevik theorist of imperialism, national liberation and socialism, who saw national liberation and the modernization and democratization of Western and Tsarist colonies as necessary steps in the socialist revolution.[21] Above all, Lenin himself began to understand that far from accelerating the transition to socialism, his insistence on a minority Bolshevik government bolstered by the persecution of dissidents and use of the police against them had allowed the most authoritarian, backward elements in the party to take control of it as well as the state apparatus; but he died before he could fully analyze what had happened and reverse this trend.[22] In his book From Lenin to Stalin, Victor Serge – who was by no means an uncritical acolyte of Lenin or Trotsky – writes, ‘Everything has changed, everything is changing.’[23]

From the February Revolution in 1917 to the aftermath of Lenin’s death in 1924, the struggle for democracy was never coherent, nor seen as a priority by the majority of Russian socialists. People who opposed one authoritarian measure would often support another. And hovering in the background was submissiveness to “the party” as well as the idea that defending what were seen as “bourgeois” democratic rights, freedoms and institutions was unnecessary – even reactionary – at a time when what they believed was a socialist revolution was in progress. It is possible to envisage a different outcome if there had been a united force mounting a principled defence of democracy.

The lack of such a force helped Stalin to consolidate his own repressive state apparatus and use it to devastating effect as the opposition floundered. In December 1928, the Politbureau appointed five Stalin supporters to the trade union presidium, and when trade union delegates objected, threatened them with arrest. Realising he had lost control, Tomsky resigned from his post. A campaign of vilification against him intensified while hard-liner Kaganovich oversaw a massive purge of trade union bodies from top to bottom. Wages dropped by half, and working conditions plummeted. In August 1936, learning that he was going to be arrested, Tomsky committed suicide to avoid being coerced into implicating himself and others in fictitious crimes at a show trial.[24] Shlyapnikov was purged from the party in 1933 and executed in September 1937.[25] Not just in Russia but throughout the Soviet Union, workers lost the right to form or join a union of their choice and elect their own trade union leaders.

In May 1923, while Lenin was incapacitated by a stroke, Stalin arrested and expelled Tatar Bolshevik Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, and from 9 to 12 June subjected him to a show-trial – the first show-trial of a Bolshevik – based on fabricated evidence. Other Muslim delegates were too afraid of being arrested or shot to defend him. But Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky were still in a position to speak up for him, yet failed to do so; Sultan-Galiev was forced to recant in order to stay alive, creating a precedent for other socialists to be treated the same way in the Great Purges.[26] He was rearrested in 1928 and sentenced to ten years of hard labour, sentenced to death in 1939, and shot in 1940. Equally important in this case was Stalin’s drive to reverse Lenin’s progressive policies in the former colonies of Tsarist Russia, stripping them of equality and autonomy and Russifying them ruthlessly.[27] Raphael Lemkin, the Holocaust survivor who coined the term “genocide,” argued that in some cases, including Ukraine and Muslim-majority republics like Crimea, this treatment amounted to genocide.[28]

The final blow was Stalin’s doctrine of “socialism in one country,” first put forward in December 1924.[29] Defining an increasingly brutal totalitarian, imperialist state as “socialist” and “communist” made these terms appear to be the opposite of democracy, something that had not happened under Lenin. The corollary of this argument – that henceforth the primary task of communists around the world was to defend Russia and carry out the commands of its “communist” state – redefined internationalism as Russian nationalism. In a perceptive essay, George Orwell says that among other things, “nationalism” in the rather unorthodox sense in which he uses the term means “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” He continues that in Britain, “Among the intelligentsia, it hardly needs saying that the dominant form of nationalism is Communism ­– using this word in a very loose sense, to include not merely Communist Party members but ‘fellow-travellers’ and russophiles generally. A Communist, for my purpose here, is one who looks upon the U.S.S.R. as his Fatherland and feels it his duty to justify Russian policy and advance Russian interests at all costs.”[30]

In other words, “Communism” here means Russian nationalism. While “Communists” who advanced Russian interests at all costs declined in number and the Sino-Soviet split complicated allegiances, sympathy for Russia still infects an astonishing range of people around the world. That a substantial portion of the self-professed left can echo the propaganda of Putin, who openly expresses nostalgia for Tsarism and a desire to reverse the Russian revolution, shows how pervasive this hangover from Stalinism remains today.

What made “socialism in one country” so persuasive was the prevailing confusion about the character of the Russian revolution, shared by most of those who opposed Stalin. In his panoramic survey of Western Marxism and the Soviet Union, Marcel van der Linden presents a plethora of theories and observations. Most participants in the debate agree that pre-revolutionary Russia had a nascent or backward capitalist economy and absolute monarchist state, but disagree about what came after Stalin rose to power. Of the three possibilities discussed – state capitalism, a degenerated workers’ state and bureaucratic collectivism or some other hitherto-unknown mode of production – arguments for the first are strongest.

In 1917, capitalists were dispossessed and workers’ councils formed, but the workers couldn’t run production as a whole. A minority in society, further decimated by the war, and without much experience of democratic discussion and debate due to the repressive tsarist state, how could they? The state had to step in and take over, with a degree of centralisation that varied over time. In 1932, Friedrich Adler suggested a form of state capitalism had developed to carry out primitive accumulation, and this accounted for the subordination of workers and imposition of sacrifices on them.[31] Indeed, the dispossession of the peasantry and their conversion into wage-labourers – achieved in the Soviet Union by collectivisation – was also a characteristic of primitive accumulation. None of the Western Marxists mentioned the imperialist character of Soviet Russia prior to World War II, but this was emphasised by Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, whose writings in many ways recalled Marx’s descriptions of Western capitalism’s depredations in Asia, Africa and the Americas during its period of primitive accumulation.[32]

In the 1940s, Raya Dunayevskaya and C.L.R. James characterised Russia as state capitalist on the grounds that production relations were essentially capitalist, since workers were exploited by having surplus value extracted from them and accumulated through the expansion of production without improving their standard of living.[33] They quoted Marx –  who had stated that if the capital of a whole country was centralised in the hands of a single capitalist or corporation it would not cease to be capital[34] – to argue that capital was still capital if centralised in the hands of the state. In 1948 Tony Cliff, a Palestinian Trotskyist originally called Ygael Gluckstein, began arguing that Stalinist Russia was state capitalist, and dealt with the objection that there was no competition either within Russia or on the world market with the argument that international competition took place in the production of armaments.[35]

However, the most powerful argument that what existed in Russia was state capitalism comes from Lenin. In 1918 he argued for progress to state capitalism in his polemic against the Left Communists:

 Yesterday, the main task of the moment was, as determinedly as possible, to nationalise, confiscate, beat down and crush the bourgeoisie, and put down sabotage. Today, only a blind man could fail to see that we have nationalised, confiscated, beaten down and put down more than we have had time to count. The difference between socialisation and simple confiscation is that confiscation can be carried out by “determination” alone, without the ability to calculate and distribute properly, whereas socialisation cannot be brought about without this ability…

 

[S]tate capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months’ time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in our country…

 

No one, I think, in studying the question of the economic system of Russia, has denied its transitional character. Nor, I think, has any Communist denied that the term Socialist Soviet Republic implies the determination of Soviet power to achieve the transition to socialism, and not that the new economic system is recognised as a socialist order…

 

At present, petty-bourgeois capitalism prevails in Russia, and it is one and the same road that leads from it to both large-scale state capitalism and to socialism, through one and the same intermediary station called “national accounting and control of production and distribution”.[36]

 

Lenin clearly detaches the capitalist economy from “Soviet power,” which is attempting to bring about a transition to socialism, stating that the economy never ceased to be capitalist, and the only guarantee that it would move towards socialism lies in the character of the state, which at this point he seems confident is working-class. However, by December 1922 he admits that “the [state] apparatus we call ours is, in fact, still quite alien to us; it is a bourgeois and tsarist hotch-potch and there has been no possibility of getting rid of it in the course of the past five years without the help of other countries and because we have been ‘busy’ most of the time with military engagements and the fight against famine.”[37]

The elephant in the room throughout most of this debate is the issue of substitutionism. If a dictatorship is exercised by a party substituting itself for the proletariat, what is there to prevent it from becoming a dictatorship over the proletariat? The Bolsheviks were certainly supported by a section of the working class in 1917, but only a minority, which constituted an even smaller minority of working people in the country. In 1919, the Menshevik internationalist Julius Martov described the paradoxical way in which the Bolsheviks, instead of seeking the atrophy of the repressive functions of the bourgeois state, now sought the hypertrophy and resurrection of state institutions typical of the bourgeois era:

The shrewd people continue to repudiate democratic parliamentarism. But they no longer repudiate, at the same time, those instruments of State power to which parliamentarism is a counterweight within bourgeois society: bureaucracy, police, a permanent army with commanding cadres that are independent of the soldiers, courts that are above control by the community, etc. In contrast to the bourgeois State, the State of the transitional revolutionary period ought to be an apparatus for the “repression of the minority by the majority.” Theoretically, it should be a governmental apparatus resting in the hands of the majority. In reality, the Soviet State continues to be, as the State of the past, a government apparatus resting in the hands of a minority.[38]

 This model of revolution diverges sharply from the model envisaged in Engels’ interpretation of Marx: “The working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic.”[39] Lenin never lost his affection for Martov and admiration for his clarity and integrity; one of his last wishes (never fulfilled) was that Stalin, the party secretary, should forward funds to Martov, who was dying of tuberculosis in Berlin, so that he could get better medical care.[40] His own last writings indicate a growing recognition that Martov might have been right in his criticisms of repressive Bolshevik rule.

Implications for the twenty-first century

Revolutions claiming to abolish capitalism are almost unheard-of in recent decades, but if we shift our attention to struggles for democracy, then the 21^st century has seen many. Contrary to dire predictions about declining unionism and the end of strikes, there have been numerous unionization drives as well as strikes. There have been democracy uprisings against authoritarian states in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Sudan, Algeria and Sri Lanka, multiple uprisings against the militarised theocracy in Iran including the amazing one led by women and girls, the farmers’ uprising in India, and resistance by Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians to Putin’s genocidal war on Ukraine. Working people exploited by capital – a broader category than the “proletariat” as defined by Marx and Engels – participated in all of them, and they can be seen as “the first step in the revolution by the working class.” Of course, these uprisings have encountered murderous violence from the state and far right, but that also highlights my other point: the urgent need for socialist internationalist solidarity with all struggles for democracy, everywhere in the world.

Is the notion of “bifurcations” theoretically justified?

The assumption underlying the notion of “bifurcations” is that events in a particular conjuncture could have taken a different direction. This opens it up to the charge of being a counterfactual account of history: “This is how it happened, but this is how it could have happened.” How do we know? Obviously, we can’t. On the other hand, to say “This is how it happened and this is how it had to happen” is a deterministic view, depriving the human beings involved in the situation of the agency to act in any other way.

Marx tackled this problem in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” when he said that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”[41] In 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks could do nothing about the fact that Russia had a backward capitalist economy, an absolutist state, and a working class which had never enjoyed democratic rights; these were “circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” However, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and firing on unarmed “workers and employees” who came out with “red banners” to support it was not a circumstance inherited from the past but an instance of a violent and repressive history being made.[42] The Bolshevik Party was not a monolithic machine – as we have seen, there were plenty of disagreements within it – and it would have been possible for it to participate in the Constituent Assembly. We cannot know exactly what would have happened if they did, only that a violent and repressive incident would have been avoided and democracy would have been upheld.

We cannot change what happened in the past, but unless we learn from it, our capacity to move towards a socialist society in the present and future is severely constrained. I believe we are at another bifurcation point today. People who could shut their eyes to Russia’s history of racist, genocidal imperialism during the Tsarist and Stalinist periods[43] as well as its imperialist exploitation and oppression of various African countries in the 21^st century[44] found it somewhat harder to justify its naked aggression against Ukraine in 2022. It therefore becomes easier to convince revolutionary socialists that principled opposition to the heinous crimes committed by Western imperialists and their barbaric, authoritarian allies is compatible with – indeed demands – equal opposition to the heinous crimes committed by anti-Western imperialists and their barbaric, authoritarian allies. Self-professed socialists who fail to do so undermine their own moral authority and credibility when they condemn Western imperialism.[45]

If a thorough critique of neo-Stalinism is made, it would be possible to reverse the current decline of the left. This would include going all the way back to the Communist Manifesto and making it clear that a socialist society was nowhere on the horizon at that point and will even now remain elusive unless there is a concerted effort to fight for democracy and human rights in all countries. Failing that, a section of the left will continue to converge with the far right, the largest part of it will take inconsistent positions, and only a small section will consistently support struggles for democracy around the world, knowing that their success is a necessary condition for a socialist transition.

(This paper was published in the International Labor and Working-Class History journal, Volume 106, October 2024, pp.365–377, and is available at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547924000279 )

 

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Notes

[1] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” [1848], The Revolutions of 1848, tr. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973) 67–98: 79–80.  

[2] Frederick Engels, “Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France” (1895).  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/intro.htm

[3] Wilhelm Eichoff, “The International Working Men’s Association: Its Establishment, Organisation, Political and Social Activity, and Growth” (1869). http://marxengels.public-archive.net/en/ME9000en.html

[4] Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, 98.

[5] Karl Marx, “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League” (1850). https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm

[6] Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859).  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

[7] Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, tr. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso/NLB, 1982), 662.

[8] Frederick Engels, Anti- Düring. Herr Eugen Düring’s Revolution in Science [1877–1878] (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1947), Chapter 24.  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm

[9] Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme” [1875], The First International and After, tr. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974) 339–359: 355, 356.

[10] Frederick Engels, “A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891” (1891). https://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm

[11] Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, 98.

[12] Reinhart Kössler, “Entangled history and politics: Negotiating the past between Namibia and Germany,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 26(3), July 2008, 313–339.

[13] V.I. Lenin, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1916). https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jan/x01.htm#bkV22P151F01 

[14] John Simkin, “1917 Constituent Assembly in Russia,” Spartacus Educational (1997, updated 2020). https://spartacus-educational.com/RUSassembly.htm

[15] John Simkin, “1917 Constituent Assembly in Russia”.

[16] Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1923), chapter 27.  https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1920s/disillusionment/ch27.htm    

[17] Charters Wynn, The Moderate Bolshevik: Mikhail Tomsky from the Factory to the Kremlin, 1880–1936 (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 81–101; Barbara C. Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov 1885–1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 182–190.

[18] Rohini Hensman, “Socialist internationalism and the Ukraine war,” Historical Materialism blog, 2022. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/socialist-internationalism-and-ukraine-war

[19] Barbara C. Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov, 106–107.

[20] Charters Wynn, The Moderate Bolshevik, 136–144.

[21] Rohini Hensman, “Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, the Pioneering Bolshevik Theorist of Imperialism, National Liberation and Socialism,” Logos Journal 22, no.3 (2023). https://logosjournal.com/article/mirsaid-sultan-galiev-the-pioneering-bolshevik-theorist-of-imperialism-national-liberation-and-socialism/

[22] Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Random House, 1968).

[23] Victor Serge, From Lenin to Stalin (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1937), 55. https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1937/FromLeninToStalin-BW-T144.pdf

[24] Charters Wynn, The Moderate Bolshevik, 297, 302–11, 361–65, 388.

[25] Barbara C. Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov, 320–29, 363.

[26] Stephen Blank, “Stalin’s first victim: The trial of Sultangaliev,” Russian History/Histoire Russe, 17(2), 1990, 155–178: 162–63, 168, 170–172, 175.

[27] Sergei Lebedev, “Sandarmokh. When the Graves Speak” (2023). https://swiatsybiru.pl/en/sandarmokh-when-graves-speak/

[28] Rohini Hensman, Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), 35–38, 55.

[29] E.H. Carr, Socialism in One Country 1924–1926, Volume 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), 45–61.

[30] George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism,” Polemic, 1945. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/notes-on-nationalism/

[31] Marcel van der Linden, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 53–54.

[32] Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, “Two articles by Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, 1919” posted by Joshua Alexander on 08/08/2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20200629112952/https://anti-imperialism.org/2016/08/08/two-articles-by-mirsaid-sultan-galiev-1919/

[33] Raya Dunayevskaya, “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a Capitalist Society” (written 20 February 1941 and published in the Internal Discussion Bulletin of the Workers’ Party). https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1941/ussr-capitalist.htm ; C.L.R. James, State Capitalism and World Revolution, written in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee, 1950 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986). https://files.libcom.org/files/State%20capitalism%20and%20world%20revolution%20-%20CLR%20James.pdf

[34] Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 779.

[35] Marcel van der Linden, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union, 119–124.

[36] V.I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Childishness,” 1918.  https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm

[37] V.I. Lenin, “The Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation’,” 1922.  https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm

[38] J. Martov, The State and the Socialist Revolution, tr. Integer (New York: International Review, 1938), 19. https://archive.org/details/TheStateAndTheSocialistRevolution/page/n9/mode/2up 

[39] Frederick Engels, “A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891”.

[40] Harold Meyerson, “My Man Martov,” The American Prospect, 7 November 2017. https://prospect.org/world/man-martov/

[41] Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 1852.  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

[42] Maxim Gorky, cited by Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism and Commodity Production: Essay in Marx Revival (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), 12–13.

[43] See Sergei Lebedev, “Sandarmokh. When the Graves Speak.”

[44] Greg Mills, Ray Hartley and John Gowing, “It’s time to remove the Wagner killers from Africa,” Daily Maverick, 2023. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2023-06-29-its-time-to-remove-the-wagner-killers-from-africa/

[45] Rohini Hensman, Indefensible, 283–284.

Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, The Pioneering Bolshevik Theorist of Imperialism, National Liberation and Socialism

The first show trial of a Bolshevik

Given his prominence as a high-ranking Bolshevik, Mirsad Sultan-Galiev is very little known. This is partly because he was cut off early in his career by persecution and ultimate execution in Stalin’s purges and his writings suppressed for decades, but also due to distortion and lack of comprehension of his arguments even by many anti-Stalinists. This is a pity, because there is much we can learn from his writings as well as his practice even today.

Socialist Internationalism and the Ukraine War

How do the working people of the world transform themselves from a plethora of groups waging a multitude of scattered struggles for survival and dignity to a revolutionary force capable of ending capitalism, governing the earth, and taking over production? They have innumerable tasks before them, but one of the most important is to overcome divisions among themselves resulting from ethnic supremacism and nationalism. Marxists have been debating this issue from the beginning, but it still plagues us today. The war in Ukraine offers a good opportunity to examine it more closely.

Ukraine's Protracted Struggle for Self-Determination

Many on the left seem to think that they can comment on the crisis in Ukraine while being totally ignorant of that country’s history. I wish to argue, on the contrary, that it is impossible to understand what is happening in Ukraine today without some knowledge of its past.[1]

The Historical Background to Putin's Invasion of Ukraine

 

If someone suggested that we could understand the Black Lives Matter struggle without some knowledge of the historical background of slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow and so on, we would find it unconvincing, to put it mildly. But many on the left seem to think that they can comment on the crisis in Ukraine while being totally ignorant of that country’s history. I wish to argue, on the contrary, that it is impossible to understand what is happening in Ukraine today without some knowledge of its past, and to fill in some essential features of that past.[1]

The Ukrainian nation

While human habitation in Ukraine dates back tens of thousands of years, the first stable state was Kievan Rus, established by the Scandinavian Varangians who settled in Kiev in the late ninth century AD. The height of its prosperity occurred under Volodymyr the Great (980–1015 AD), who converted to Byzantine Christianity, and his son Iaroslav the Wise; but Kievan Rus was destroyed by the invasion of Genghis Khan’s Golden Hordes in the thirteenth century, and was subsequently fought over, divided and dominated by Lithuania, Poland, Austria and Russia, until most of it was colonised by Russia (then called Muscovy) in 1654. Nonetheless there was a revival of Ukrainian culture in the nineteenth century, in the latter part of which both nationalist and socialist parties grew as Ukraine was integrated more closely into the Tsarist empire as a provider of wheat and raw materials such as coal and iron, and as a market for Russian manufactured goods.[2] 

This was a typical colonial relationship; as Lenin observed in 1914 at a talk in Zurich: ‘What Ireland was for England, Ukraine has become for Russia: exploited in the extreme, and getting nothing in return. Thus the interests of the world proletariat in general and the Russian proletariat in particular require that the Ukraine regains its state independence, since only this will permit the development of the cultural level that the proletariat needs’.[3] Crimean Tatars were the most numerous indigenous ethnic group in Crimea when it was annexed by the Russian empire in 1783 during the reign of Catherine the Great, who proceeded to settle it with Russian colonisers and, according to Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term ‘genocide’, to drown 10,000 Crimean Tatars.[4]

Thus, Ukraine’s origins as a state predates the founding of the Grand Principality of Moscow (predecessor of the Tsarist Empire) in 1263. It is therefore entirely understandable that it would have a national liberation movement, which succeeded briefly in establishing Ukraine as an independent Soviet Socialist republic from 1920 to 1922. The Crimean Tatars were also granted special status under Lenin.

All that changed when Ukraine was recolonised by Stalin in a process described as ‘the classic example of Soviet genocide’ by Lemkin, who outlined the process in chilling detail. First the intelligentsia was destroyed by deporting, jailing or killing teachers, writers, artists, thinkers and political leaders; at the same time, the Ukrainian churches were destroyed with hundreds of priests and lay-people killed and thousands sent off to forced labour camps, deliberately separating families and sending children to Russian homes to be ‘educated’. Finally, in 1932–1933, as Stalin escalated his repression in Russia itself, around 5,000,000 Ukrainian peasants – men, women and children – were starved to death. Lemkin shows that this was not the result of forced collectivisation, which had left ample crops to feed the people and livestock, but the outcome of a deliberate policy to engineer a famine. The dead and deported Ukrainians were replaced by non-Ukrainians, altering the ethnic composition of the country and comprising the fourth step in the systematic destruction of the Ukrainian nation. In 1944 the Crimean Tatars, who were also described by Lemkin as being subjected to genocide, were deported en masse by Stalin, a crime against humanity in which almost half of the population perished.[5] 

Russia was not the only country to occupy Ukraine in the 20^th century; the Nazis, with their own genocidal agenda, also occupied it. Timothy Snyder argues that Nazi policies, which referred to Ukrainians as Afrikaner or as Neger – including the Hunger Plan to starve millions of people in the winter of 1941, the Generalplan Ost to forcibly transport or kill millions more thereafter, and the ‘final solution’ to exterminate the Jews – were centred on Ukraine; consequently some 3.5 million civilian inhabitants of Ukraine – of which an estimated 1.5 million were Jews – were killed by the Nazis in addition to roughly another 3 million inhabitants of Ukraine who died as soldiers fighting against the Nazis or indirectly as a consequence of the war. Russian historians have calculated that more inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died in WWII than inhabitants of Soviet Russia; more Ukrainians died fighting against the Nazis than French, British and Americans put together.[6] At the end of the war, Ukrainians were subjected once more to Stalin’s rule.    

Almost miraculously, the Ukrainian sense of national identity survived this horrendous history, and in the referendum of 1991, 84% of the population participated and more than 92% voted for independence from the Soviet Union. When the votes are disaggregated by region, it is notable that every region had a majority in favour; the lowest majority (54%) was in Crimea, but in each of the majority-Russian-speaking Oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, over 83% voted in favour.[7] This was partly because citizenship was defined not ethnically but inclusively, and although the constitution adopted in 1996 proclaimed that the state language would be Ukrainian, it also promised that ‘the free development, use and protection of Russian, and other languages of national minorities of Ukraine, is guaranteed’; again, that ‘The State promotes the consolidation and development of the Ukrainian nation, its historical consciousness, traditions and culture, and also the development of the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identity of all indigenous peoples and national minorities of Ukraine.’[8] The positive outcome of the referendum cannot be attributed to interference by the US, because President George H.W. Bush was strongly opposed to independence for Ukraine (see below).

This history puts Soviet-controlled Ukraine firmly in the category of colonies, and in fact one which has suffered more than many others. Most of us refer to colonies and former colonies of Western imperial powers in Asia, Africa and Latin America as the ‘Third World’ or ‘Global South’, sharply distinguished from the imperial powers that exploited and oppressed them, yet we are guilty of lumping together the imperial power with its colonies and former colonies in the Soviet Union. From this perspective, the disintegration of the Soviet Union can be seen as an ongoing process of decolonisation, and Ukraine’s struggle for independence as being necessary, as Lenin said, to permit the development of the cultural level that the proletariat needs.

The Russian Empire

The Grand Principality of Moscow gradually absorbed other principalities, including the Kievan one, until in 1503 Ivan III took on the title of tsar and declared himself ‘Ruler of all Rus.’ The Tsarist Empire was an absolute monarchy, which was overthrown in 1917 by the Russian Revolution. Among the enormous challenges facing the revolution was the question of what to do with the colonies of Tsarist Russia. There was a debate on this issue between V.I. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, with Lenin upholding the right of all colonial peoples to self-determination but conceding Luxemburg’s point that this should not result in handing over power to regressive, authoritarian regimes. Lenin did not come to this position alone, but by listening to comrades from the colonies. During 1920 and 1921, Ukraine, Georgia, Byelorussia, Azerbaijan and Armenia were treated as independent republics.

In one of the articles that came to be called ‘Lenin’s Last Testament,’ Lenin expressed anguish that one of Stalin’s close associates had hit a Georgian Communist who disagreed with his plans to terminate Georgia’s independent status, and continued,

It is quite natural that in such circumstances the ‘freedom to secede from the union’ by which we justify ourselves [against Western imperialist powers] will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant.

 

[…] I think that Stalin’s haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious ‘nationalist-socialism’, played a fatal role here. In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles…

 

Here we have an important question of principle: how is internationalism

to be understood?

 

In my writings on the national question I have already said that an abstract presentation of the question of nationalism in general is of no use at all. A distinction must necessarily be made between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and that of an oppressed nation, the nationalism of a big nation and that of a small nation. In respect of the second kind of nationalism we, nationals of a big nation, have nearly always been guilty, in historic practice, of an infinite number of cases of violence; furthermore, we commit violence and insult an infinite number of times without noticing it. [He goes on to quote the racist epithets by which Ukrainians, Georgians and non-Russians in general are insulted.] …

 

I think that in the present instance, as far as the Georgian nation is concerned, we have a typical case in which a genuinely proletarian attitude makes profound caution, thoughtfulness and a readiness to compromise a matter of necessity for us. The Georgian [Stalin] who is neglectful of this aspect of the question, or who carelessly flings about accusations of ‘nationalist-socialism’ (whereas he himself is a real and true ‘nationalist-socialist’, and even a vulgar Great-Russian bully), violates, in substance, the interests of proletarian class solidarity, for nothing holds up the development and strengthening of proletarian class solidarity so much as national injustice… [9]

Lenin made mistakes in theory and practice that we can debate, but his anti-racism, anti-imperialism and identification of Great-Russian chauvinism as the Russian version of White supremacism set an example for all socialist internationalists to follow. However, he died soon after making these remarks, and Stalin went ahead with reducing the Tsarist ex-colonies back to the status of colonies. In Russia itself, his counter-revolution erased all the gains of the revolution except for the transition to state capitalism. Stalin exterminated communists as ruthlessly as Hitler, and converted the Communist International into an arm of the Russian state capitalist empire. His totalitarian state ruling Russia and its colonies was distinguished not only by its extreme brutality but also by a systematic war on the truth, analogous to the Nazi use of the big lie repeated over and over again. His propaganda machine was responsible for literally rewriting history to propagate falsehoods, and for cropping and airbrushing photographs to eliminate his victims from them as they themselves were liquidated. These fabricated stories and images were then internationalised by means of the vast propaganda apparatus of the Comintern. Vicious censorship made it impossible to find alternative accounts or challenge the falsification without risking death. Stalin’s collaboration with Hitler from August 23, 1939 to June 22, 1941 (the archetypal red-brown alliance) was possible only because the politics of the two men were so similar.[10]

When Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, a movement of disgust against the prevailing culture of corruption, lies and assaults on the dignity of the individual was already underway, and he plugged into this:

‘A new moral atmosphere is taking shape in the country,’ Gorbachev told the Central Committee at the January 1987 meeting where he declared glasnost – openness – and democratization to be the foundation of his perestroika, or restructuring, of Soviet society. … Later, recalling his feeling that ‘we couldn’t go on like that any longer, and we had to change life radically, break away from the past malpractices,’ he called it his ‘moral position.’ […]

 

Democratization, Gorbachev declared, was ‘not a slogan but the essence of perestroika.’ […] That reforms gave rise to a revolution by 1989 [the fall of the Berlin wall] was due largely to another ‘idealistic’ cause: Gorbachev’s deep and personal aversion to violence and, hence, his stubborn refusal to resort to mass coercion when the scale and depth of change began to outstrip his original intent. To deploy Stalinist repression even to ‘preserve the system’ would have been a betrayal of his deepest convictions.[11]

Gorbachev’s plans for a new treaty that would create a truly voluntary federation – a vision close to what Lenin was working towards – were thwarted by a coup against him by Stalinist hardliners in August 1991; the coup was met with public outrage and defeated, but Gorbachev was sidelined and Ukraine, among other Soviet Republics, voted for independence, leading to the disintegration of the USSR. While the economic plunder and corruption which followed were disastrous, it should not be forgotten that in his own way, Gorbachev initiated a democratic anti-imperialist revolution.

This is what Vladimir Putin, from the time he first came to power in 2000, has been trying to reverse ever since. His agenda has two main goals: (1) to crush all expressions of democracy in Russia and inaugurate or support authoritarian regimes in the rest of the world; and (2) to rebuild the Russian empire. Investigators of the Moscow apartment bombings of September 1999 (which unleashed an Islamophobic ‘war on terror’ against Chechnya and swept Putin to power), journalists, human rights defenders and whistle-blowers against corruption were murdered. In 2011-2013, huge protests against rigged elections that brought Putin and his United Russia party to power, and demanding free and fair elections and freedom for political prisoners, were met not only with arrests and police violence but also with mobilisation of far-right counter-protests. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny (who more recently narrowly survived being poisoned and was subsequently imprisoned) was jailed. Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot dead yards from the Kremlin after writing an op-ed about the Russian incursion into Ukraine, published in September 2014 in Russian and Ukrainian, in which he said, among other things,

This is not our war, this is not your war, this is not the war of 20-year-old paratroopers sent out there. This is Vladimir Putin’s war… Through his bloody actions, though he is fomenting a fratricidal war, one can see his main goal – preservation of personal power and money at any cost…

Despite censorship, little by little the society started to understand that those in power are greedy and amoral people whose main goal is personal enrichment.

Ukraine became an example of an anti-criminal revolution, which overthrew a thieving president. Oh, so you dared to get out onto the street and throw off a president? Ukraine needs to be punished for it to make sure that no Russian would get these thoughts.

Moreover, Ukraine chose the European way, which implies the rule of law, democracy and change of power. Ukraine’s success on this way is a direct threat to Putin’s power because he chose the opposite course – a lifetime in power, filled with arbitrariness and corruption.[12]

Historian and opposition politician Vladimir Ryzhkov outlines the anti-Muslim racism that accompanied Russian annexation of Crimea, an issue that has been widely ignored:

The Crimean Tatars are the ancient, native inhabitants of Crimea… In 1944, Stalin ordered that all 191,000 of them, all 47,000 families, be exiled to Central Asia. In 1954, Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, but in March of this year Putin returned Crimea to Russia…

Along with Crimea came the Tatars, who were surprised to find that they were part of Russia (once more). They had begun to return to their homeland in droves under Gorbachev in the late 1980s, and by 2001 the Ukrainian census recorded 245,000 Crimean Tatars living on the peninsula. They now number some 300,000 and make up around 13% of Crimea’s population…

The hostility of most Crimean Tatars towards the idea of union with Russia caused a serious conflict with the pro-Moscow authorities. The Tatars’ leaders, Mustafa Dzhemilev and Refat Chubarov, current head of the Mejlis, have been barred from entering their homeland for five years and are now living in Kiev against their will… On 18 May, the 70th anniversary of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, a day when many thousands of people usually assemble in the centre of Simferopol to remember and mourn, the Crimean authorities banned the gathering… The ban was an insult to the Tatar people, for whom the deportation remains the most terrible tragedy in their history.

Mosques, schools (madrasas), community centres, firms and private homes belonging to Tatars have been searched and raided by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (“anti-extremism” special branch), prosecutors and the Special Purpose Police, as well as so-called “self-defence forces”. The Crimean Tatars’ only independent television station, ATR, has come under heavy pressure and many activists, journalists and bloggers have been forced to leave Crimea.

All these violations are set out in a report written by Nils Muižnieks, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, who himself visited Crimea. He pays particular attention to the killing, abduction and disappearance of people in Crimea.[13]

The important point being made by Nemtsov and Ryzhkov is that the 2014 annexation of Crimea and war on Eastern Ukraine was an assault on democracy. And Putin has extended this assault well beyond Russia by sponsoring extreme right-wing authoritarian groups and parties around the world, and is in turn admired by them. Such parties from Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Serbia and Spain have a symbiotic relationship with his regime, and neo-Nazis from Germany, Greece, Britain and Norway have praised him. White supremacists from the US have close ties with their counterparts in Russia, and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke has travelled to Russia several times to promote his antisemitic book, Jewish Supremacism.[14] 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 Hiftar in Libya, both guilty of crimes against humanity, and has been associated with mass murder and military coups in the Central African Republic, Mali and Burkina Faso.[15]

With this assault on democracy has come an assault on the truth, magnified since Stalin’s time by new technology and social media. This was on full display in Putin’s speech on February 21, 2022, in which he claimed that the Ukrainian state had been created by Lenin and the Bolsheviks ‘by separating, severing, what is historically Russian land.’ He fully supported Stalin’s counter-revolution, deploring only his failure to delete the reference to ‘self-determination’ from the constitution. According to him, there was a coup by radical nationalists supported by the U.S. in 2014; there was a policy to root out the Russian language and culture; Donbas communities daily come under military attack as Ukraine continues ‘its transition towards the Neanderthal and aggressive nationalism and neo-Nazism which have been elevated in Ukraine to the rank of national policy’; the eastward expansion of NATO is a threat to Russia’s security; and NATO should undertake not to induct any more countries in the east and in fact roll back its borders to where they were in 1997, failing which Russia would act to ensure its security.[16]

It is true that Ukraine has a history of antisemitism and collaboration with the Nazis, as have most countries in Europe, including Russia. It is also true that during the Euromaidan movement the neo-Nazi Azov brigade played a disproportionately large role in responding to the violent crackdown by the Yanukovych regime. Undoubtedly these facts are a cause for concern. But they have to be considered along with other facts: that far-right parties in Ukraine have consistently polled pathetically small numbers of votes, that Volodymyr Zelensky, a Russian-speaking Jew, won the last presidential elections with a landslide majority, and that the neo-Nazi and antisemitic forces on the Russian and separatist side, which engage in antisemitic smears against Zelensky, are incomparably stronger.[17] Zelensky himself, in an address to Russian citizens, tried to combat the disinformation, asking ‘how can a people support Nazis [when they] gave more than 8 million lives for the victory over Nazism? How can I be a Nazi? Tell my grandpa, who went through the whole war in the infantry of the Soviet Army… You’ve been told I’m going to bomb Donbass. Bomb what? The Donetsk stadium where the locals and I cheered for our team at Euro 2012? The bar where we drank when they lost? Luhansk, where my best friend’s mom lives?’[18]   

In fact, Putin himself has made it very clear that NATO’s eastward expansion and Russian security are simply red herrings to distract from his real goal. At a press conference, ‘he quoted Soviet-era punk-rock lyrics about rape and necrophilia to demonstrate what Russia wants from Ukraine… “Whether you like it or don’t like it, bear with it, my beauty,” Putin said. Russia experts noted that Putin appeared to be quoting from “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin" by the Soviet-era punk rock group Red Mold. “Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I crept up and fucked her. Like it, or dislike it, sleep my beauty,” the English translation of the Russian lyrics reads.’[19] By invading and heading straight for Kyiv, he has confirmed that raping a dead Ukraine is his objective.

Jason Stanley explains that Putin’s grotesque claim to be ‘de-Nazifying’ Ukraine by toppling a Jewish President whose family fought against the Nazis rests on the Holocaust-denying neo-fascist myth that the ‘real’ victims of the Nazis were not the Jews but Russian Christians.[20] Putin is a living embodiment of the Stalin-Hitler Pact: the ex-KGB agent who has absorbed the fascist nostalgia for absolute power, imperial glory, and blood-and-soil nationalism. Lenin’s words from a century ago about the ‘vulgar Great-Russian bully’ who ‘carelessly flings about accusations of “nationalist-socialism” [today’s neo-Nazism] whereas he himself is a real and true “nationalist-socialist” sound weirdly apposite today.

The culpability of Western imperialist powers

In general, Western imperialist attacks on democracy in the name of democracy have helped to spread scepticism about democratic values. Most recently, the 2001 war on Afghanistan and 2003 war on Iraq violated and undermined international law. Perhaps as damagingly, given that the Taliban had virtually nothing to do with 9/11 and Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, they destroyed the credibility of Western media, creating an environment in which even well-researched and reliable reports could be dismissed as ‘fake’.

Coming to the more specific failures connected to this war, I mentioned earlier that George H.W. Bush had opposed Ukrainian independence in 1991.[21] One anxiety, among others, was that the new nation became the world’s third-largest nuclear power after the US and Russia. Negotiations to persuade Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, while also giving it security assurances that it would not suffer attacks if it did so, resulted in Ukraine signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear power while on 5 December 1994 the USA, the Russian Federation and the UK signed the Memorandum on Security Assurances in connection with Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons aka the Budapest Memorandum. Among other things, the signatories undertook to ‘respect the Independence and Sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine’ and to ‘refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine’. This agreement was torn up by Putin when he annexed Crimea and made incursions into the Donbas in 2014, but have the other signatories made real efforts to hold him to it?

Instead of holding Putin to the Budapest Memorandum, there were the two Minsk Agreements signed by Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany. Hastily drafted in order to establish a ceasefire while Russian forces were ranged against a much weaker Ukrainian military, the Minsk Agreements of September 2014 and February 2015, which sought to end Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine, rest on two irreconcilable interpretations of Ukraine’s sovereignty:

· Ukraine sees the agreements as instruments with which to re-establish its sovereignty in line with the following sequence: a ceasefire; a Russian withdrawal from eastern Ukraine; return of the Russia/Ukraine border to Ukrainian control; free and fair elections in the Donbas region; and a limited devolution of power to Russia’s proxy regimes, which would be reintegrated and resubordinated to the authorities in Kyiv. Ukraine would be able to make its own domestic and foreign policy choices.

· Russia sees the Minsk agreements as tools with which to break Ukraine’s sovereignty. Its interpretation reverses key elements in the sequence of actions: elections in occupied Donbas would take place before Ukraine had reclaimed control of the border; this would be followed by comprehensive autonomy for Russia’s proxy regimes, crippling the central authorities in Kyiv. Ukraine would be unable to govern itself effectively or orient itself towards the West.

· These contradictory provisions are testimony to a stunning failure of Russian foreign policy. In 2014 Russia launched a campaign of violent subversion to compel Ukraine to ‘federalize’ its political system. Belying Russian expectations, Ukrainians fought back en masse, forcing Russia to resort to increasingly open military intervention. Russia inflicted crushing defeats on Ukrainian forces, yet was unwilling to pay the price that further high-intensity war would have exacted.[22]

The pretext given by Putin for the 2014 invasion of Ukraine was exactly the same as the pretext given by Hitler for the annexation of Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia – protecting speakers of Russian and German respectively and uniting them with their homeland – and it is interesting that some of the same arguments, like the ‘right to self-determination’ of these enclaves, were used in both cases. Instead of opposing this blatant aggression, British Premier Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Édouard Daladier negotiated with Hitler, and on September 30, 1938 signed the Munich Agreement, drafted by the Nazis and presented by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, in the hope of avoiding war.[23] As we know, the outcome was World War II. Since then, the Munich Agreement has become a byword for the futility of appeasing expansionist totalitarian regimes. The Minsk Agreements were not quite so bad, because at least the victims of aggression were allowed to participate in the negotiations and there were weak sanctions against the aggressor, which probably prevented Putin from launching an all-out war until he had sanction-proofed Russia; and then, even as the Western powers were talking about the Minsk Agreement, he tore it up by recognising Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states. But while Putin prepared for war, it was business as usual for the Western imperialist powers.

Just a few examples illustrate this criminal negligence. On September 30, 2015 Putin started bombing Syria in support of his genocidal protégé Bashar al-Assad, targeting hospitals, schools, markets, residential neighbourhoods and mosques, with massive civilian casualties including small children. Yet the Obama administration negotiated with Putin and on September 10, 2016 signed a ceasefire deal that was unanimously condemned by secular, democratic Syrian activists, treating the perpetrator of crimes against humanity as a partner in the ‘war on terror’.[24] It is not surprising that the Syrian Civil Defence or White Helmets – who had experience of the Russians using helpless Syrian children, women and men to test their fearsome new weapons – were among the earliest to offer solidarity with the beleaguered Ukrainians.[25] Then, it is almost beyond belief that instead of diversifying their sources of energy, the EU allowed construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to go ahead despite it being so clear that its purpose was to starve the Ukrainians into submission. Thirdly, investigations have established that Russia provided at least social media support and probably also money to the Brexit campaign in the belief that it would weaken the EU, demonstrating the cosy relationship between Putin and this section of UK politics.[26]  

Had the measures now being belatedly implemented been discussed when Ukraine was first invaded in 2014, had they been implemented when Putin started bombing civilians in Syria in 2015, there is a good chance that this war could have been prevented.

What can be done now?

It is too late to prevent the war, but how can it be ended as soon as possible?

There is no harm in talks, but it should be understood that negotiations with Putin are about as useful as negotiations with Hitler turned out to be. They will not stop the war. The only people who can really end it are the people of Ukraine and Russia, and they should be given all the assistance they need. The Ukrainians need humanitarian and military aid to defend themselves as well as help to repel cyberattacks and convey what is happening to the rest of the world. The measures being taken now should certainly continue and in some cases be stepped up until Putin vacates the whole of Ukraine, including Crimea: appeasement has been shown not to work. Refugees need to be cared for, and solidarity demonstrations with Ukraine should continue.

Some way of communicating with the Russian public, bypassing the censorship, should also be found. Solidarity with the incredibly courageous anti-imperialist, anti-war activists risking arrest and jail to speak out and demonstrate against the Russian invasion in locations throughout Russia should be conveyed to them. There are probably many more opponents of the war who are too afraid to come out openly. It appears from some reports that the Russian soldiers invading Ukraine have been told, as American soldiers were told when they invaded Iraq, that the locals would welcome them as liberators, and are shocked to find out the real situation. Ukrainians have two big advantages over the Iraqis: (1) a democratically elected government and (2) the ability to speak the same language as the invaders, and some of them have been appealing to Russian soldiers. But these young soldiers, and their parents, should know that they are being sent to kill and die for Putin’s imperial delusions before they leave Russia; they should get accurate information about what is happening in Ukraine, and this is something that people outside Ukraine can help with – a kind of modern samizdat. As Nemtsov said before being murdered, this is not their war, this is Putin’s war, and the more Russians who see that, the sooner the war will end.

What about NATO and security guarantees for Russia? Shortly before the invasion, Putin recognised the regime of Lukashenka, who couldn’t even win a rigged election in Belarus, and sent in troops to crush a popular uprising against the fiercely repressive regime in Kazakhstan. These are the kind of neighbours he wants – dictators whom he can dominate – and in his mind, NATO is the main obstacle to realising this dream. The dreadful irony of the present situation is that NATO membership is probably the only thing that stands between, say, the Baltic states and a similar invasion, and it is very likely that if Ukraine had been a NATO member, it would not have been suffering in this way. Look at the countries that have been chopped up by Putin: Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova – all non-NATO countries. There is also evidence that he is helping genocidal Bosnian Serb nationalists, so generously given almost half the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Dayton Accords after the genocide of Bosnian Muslims (another betrayal by the Western imperialist powers), to split up their non-NATO country.[27] So, winding up NATO is a worthy goal, but it will have to wait until Putin stops acting as its recruiting agent. In the meantime, progress towards global nuclear disarmament and moving weapons delivery systems back from both sides of Russia’s borders with its neighbours will help to guarantee Russia’s security as well as theirs. The UN too needs to be reformed to be able to achieve its goal of eliminating the scourge of war, and the first requirement is removing the veto powers of the permanent members of its Security Council. Socialist internationalism in this crisis means supporting the right of the Ukrainian people to self-determination as a multi-ethnic democracy.

(This article was posted in New Politics on 2 March 2022 and is available here: https://newpol.org/the-historical-background-to-putins-invasion-of-ukraine/ )

 

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Notes

[1] I have drawn on parts of my book Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism (New York: Haymarket Books, 2018, temporarily selling at a highly subsidised price), in order to write this article more quickly, given that the current situation is so dire. The book has much more on Russia, Ukraine, Syria and Bosnia as well as Iran and Iraq, and I think the events of February 2022 fully confirm the arguments I put forward in it.

[2] Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) pp. 25; 32–41; 75–77; 134–35; 227–35; 268–69.

[3] Subtelny, p.269; Zbigniew Kowaleski, ‘For the independence of Soviet Ukraine,’ International Marxist Review, Autumn 1989; reproduced by Louis Proyect, 2014 https://louisproyect.org/2014/04/20/lenins-party-great-russian-chauvinism-and-the-betrayal-of-ukrainian-national-aspirations/

[4] Raphael Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine,’ 1953 https://43f70ce0-6f30-48c5-af8a-b85f37910e81.filesusr.com/ugd/24deff_09cae19509e44ebf82004129a25213d2.pdf

[5] Raphael Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in the Ukraine,’ 1953 https://43f70ce0-6f30-48c5-af8a-b85f37910e81.filesusr.com/ugd/24deff_09cae19509e44ebf82004129a25213d2.pdf

[6] Timothy Snyder, ‘Germans must remember the truth about Ukraine – for their own sake,’ Eurozine, July 7, 2017 https://www.eurozine.com/germans-must-remember-the-truth-about-ukraine-for-their-own-sake/

[7] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Ukrainian_independence_referendum.

[8] Constitution of Ukraine https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/44a280124.pdf

[9] V.I. Lenin, 1922, ‘The question of nationalities or “autonomisation”’, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm

[10] See Hensman, Indefensible, p.63

[11] Leon Aron, ‘Everything you think you know about the collapse of the Soviet Union is wrong,’ Foreign Policy, June 20, 2011 https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/06/20/everything-you-think-you-know-about-the-collapse-of-the-soviet-union-is-wrong/

[12] Boris Nemtsov, 2016. ‘Boris Nemtsov: This is Vladimir Putin’s war,’ Kyiv Post, 27 February. https://www.kyivpost.com/article/opinion/op-ed/why-does-putin-wage-war-on-ukraine-362884.html

[13] Vladimir Ryzhkov, ‘Russia’s treatment of Crimean Tatars echoes mistakes made by Soviets,’ The Guardian, November 25, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/25/-sp-russia-crimean-tatars-soviet-ukraine

[14] Natasha Bertrand, ‘“A model for civilization”: Putin’s Russia has emerged as “a beacon for nationalists” and the American alt-right,’ Business Insider, December 10, 2016. https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/a-model-for-civilization-putins-russia-has-emerged-as-a-beacon-for-nationalists-and-the-american-alt-right/articleshow/55913352.cms

[15] Candace Rondeau, Jonathan Deer and Ben Dalton, ‘Neo-Nazi Russian attack unit hints it’s going back into Ukraine undercover,’ The Daily Beast, January 26, 2022 https://www.thedailybeast.com/wagners-rusich-neo-nazi-attack-unit-hints-its-going-back-into-ukraine-undercover ; Al-Monitor Staff, ‘Intel: EU sanctions suspected head of Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group,’ Al-Monitor, October 15, 2020 https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2020/10/eu-sanction-russia-wagner-yevgeniy-prigozhin.html ; Philip Obaji Jr, ‘Survivors say Russian mercenaries slaughtered 70 civilians in gold mine massacre,’ The Daily Beast, January 31, 2022 https://www.thedailybeast.com/wagner-group-accused-of-killing-70-at-mine-in-aigbado-central-african-republic ; Philip Obaji Jr, ‘African president was ousted just weeks after refusing to pay Russian paramilitaries,’ The Daily Beast, January 25, 2022 https://www.thedailybeast.com/burkina-faso-president-ousted-after-refusing-to-pay-wagner-mercenaries

[16] Vladimir Putin, ‘Address by the President of the Russian Federation,’ February 21, 2022 http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828

[17] Cathy Young, ‘Smear and Loathing: A close look at accusations of Ukrainian anti-semitism,’ Cato Institute, February 18, 2022 https://www.cato.org/commentary/smear-loathing-close-look-accusations-ukrainian-anti-semitism#

[18] Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s “heartbreaking” appeal for peace goes viral,’ News18, February 24, 2022 https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/ukraine-president-volodymyr-zelenskys-heartbreaking-appeal-for-peace-goes-viral-4804235.html

[19] Bill Bostock, ‘Putin quoted song lyrics about rape and necrophilia to explain Russia’s demands from Ukraine,’ Business Insider, February 8, 2022 https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/world/news/putin-quoted-song-lyrics-about-rape-and-necrophilia-to-explain-russias-demands-from-ukraine/articleshow/89430396.cms (Commentators keep saying they can’t look inside Putin’s mind, but this is a Freudian slip that reveals how deeply misogynist it is.)

[20] Jason Stanley, ‘The antisemitism animating Putin’s claim to “denazify” Ukraine,’ The Guardian, February 26, 2022 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/25/vladimir-putin-ukraine-attack-antisemitism-denazify

[21] John-Thor Dahlburg, ‘NEWS ANALYSIS: Bush’s “Chicken Kiev” talk – an ill-fated US policy: Ukraine: Efforts to keep the Soviet Union intact are recalled with bitterness by some in new nation,’ Los Angeles Times, December 19, 1991 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-12-19-mn-1010-story.html  

[22] Duncan Allen, ‘The Minsk Conundrum: Western Policy and Russia’s War in Eastern Ukraine,’ Chatham House, May 22, 2020 https://www.chathamhouse.org/2020/05/minsk-conundrum-western-policy-and-russias-war-eastern-ukraine-0/summary

[23] Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Munich Agreement’ https://www.britannica.com/event/Munich-Agreement

[24] Hensman, Indefensible, pp.232–248.

[25] The New Arab, ‘Syria’s White Helmets “stand in solidarity” with Ukraine people,’ February 23, 2022. https://english.alaraby.co.uk/news/syrias-white-helmets-stand-solidarity-ukraine

[26] Peter Jukes, ‘Explosive report exposes the molten core of the Brexit, Trump, Russia scandal,’ Byline Times, February 18, 2019 https://bylinetimes.com/2019/02/18/explosive-uk-parliamentary-report-exposes-the-molten-core-of-the-trump-brexit-russia-scandal/

[27] Vera Mironova and Bogdan Zawadewicz, ‘Putin is building a Bosnian paramilitary force,’ Foreign Policy, August 8, 2018 https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/08/putin-is-building-a-bosnian-paramilitary-force/