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The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 6 February 15, 2016
(front page)
Putin invokes czars, Stalin to justify
Moscow’s intervention in ‘near abroad’
BY NAOMI CRAINE
In recent remarks, Russian President Vladimir Putin staked his claim to
the legacy of both the czarist empire — the most reactionary in Europe
until it was overthrown in 1917 — and the counterrevolutionary regime of
Joseph Stalin. He denounced the revolutionary course led by communist
leader V.I. Lenin of supporting the rights of oppressed nations to
self-determination. Putin’s statements are not a historical question.
They aim to promote national chauvinism and justify Moscow’s territorial
and political claims to its “near abroad” today.
Lenin “planted an atomic bomb under the building that is called Russia,
which later exploded,” Putin declared at a Jan. 21 meeting of the
Presidential Council for Science and Education. He expanded on this
point at a Jan. 25 conference in southern Russia, saying he was
referring to the debate “between Stalin and Lenin regarding the creation
of the new state, the Soviet Union.”
Putin blamed Lenin’s insistence on a voluntary federation formed “on the
basis of full equality with the possibility of seceding” for the 1991
coming apart of the USSR. He said the borders of the Soviet republics
were “established arbitrarily, without much reason,” leading to
“nonsense” such as including the industrial, proletarian Donbass region
in Ukraine, not Russia. This is the region where Moscow’s forces have
backed a separatist war against the government in Kiev for nearly two
years now.
These remarks were given to a Russian Popular Front forum of pro-regime
“civil society activists” in Stavropol. According to a transcript
released by the Kremlin, Putin complimented the “efficient work” of
officials in nearby Chechnya putting down nationalist struggles by the
majority Muslim population there.
Ukrainian officials complained to the United Nations Security Council
Jan. 27, saying that Putin’s statements “publicly questioning the
territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence of
Ukraine” were “unacceptable.”
When the workers and farmers came to power in Russia in the October 1917
Bolshevik revolution, the old czarist empire was what Lenin aptly called
a “prison house of nations.” In September 1922, Stalin proposed
absorbing the independent republics of Ukraine, Belorussia, Azerbaijan,
Georgia and Armenia into the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.
Lenin’s final fight
“We consider ourselves, the Ukrainian SSR, and others equal,” Lenin
argued, and must “enter with them on an equal basis into a new union, a
new federation, the Union of the Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia.”
The record of this debate, in which Stalin derided the “national
liberalism of Comrade Lenin,” can be found in Lenin’s Final Fight,
published by Pathfinder Press. The Socialist Workers Party traces its
political continuity to Lenin and the early years of the Russian
Revolution and stands on Lenin’s legacy in this fight. It is the only
road to unite working people in struggle.
Writing a couple months later about the necessity of combating Great
Russian chauvinism inherited from the czars, Lenin said,
“Internationalism on the part of oppressors or ‘great’ nations, as they
are called (though they are great only in their violence …), must
consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but
even in an inequality, through which the oppressor nation, the great
nation, would compensate for the inequality which obtains in real life.”
The political course led by Lenin was crushed as part of the
counterrevolution against the working class carried out in 1920s and
’30s by the bureaucratic caste that consolidated under Stalin. The USSR
became not a voluntary union, but an oppressive “Soviet” superstate in
which patriotism was used to justify the resurgence of Great Russian
chauvinism. Whole peoples — like the Crimean Tatars in 1944 — were
deported from their homelands at gunpoint. It was this course that made
it inevitable the re-imposed prison house of nations would break apart.
Speaking in Stavropol, Putin also sought to smear Lenin and the
revolution as brutal, unpatriotic and a disaster for “Mother Russia.”
Bemoaning the fall of the czarist empire, he complains that the
Bolsheviks “lost” World War I “to a losing nation,” saying it caused
“colossal losses” for Moscow in territories surrendered. This refers to
the Bolsheviks’ decision to sign the onerous 1918 Brest-Litovsk peace
treaty with Berlin to defend the revolution from being overthrown.
Among other contributions to the working class worldwide, the Bolshevik
leadership exposed the secret treaties that had been drawn up between
the imperialist rulers in London and Paris — and the czarist regime in
Moscow — to carve up the world among themselves, the real aim of the war.
“Everyone accused the tsarist regime of repressions,” Putin added.
“However what did Soviet power begin with? With mass repressions.” As
evidence he cited the killing in 1918 of the former czar and his family.
He accused the Bolsheviks of murdering Russian Orthodox priests, as he
seeks today to bolster the church’s hierarchy as a cornerstone of his
regime’s rule.
Putin praised the “concentration of national resources” under Stalin, a
euphemism for the forced collectivization, murder of political opponents
and consolidation of a massive police apparatus in the 1930s. Without
this, he said, Moscow would have risked “catastrophic consequences for
our statehood” in World War II.
Putin’s goal is to justify his course today as he seeks to stabilize
Russian capitalism, win working-class subservience and sacrifice in the
name of greater Russia, and extend its grip over the “near abroad.”
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