M.N.: Putinism as aggressive, geopolitically predatory, traditional and historical Russian Imperialism under the adaptive masks of crony capitalism and appropriated "Eurocommunism" | "Жизнь в империи не прошла для нас даром. За минувшие столетия имперское бытие сформировало наше сознание, вошло в культуру. Но адекватно ли наше имперское сознание сегодняшним реалиям? Хотим ли мы воссоздания империи из руин и способны ли к этому? А если не хотим, то, может, стоит задуматься, чего хотим?" - С.А. Никольский | Breedlove also said proposals put forward by Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine were "completely unacceptable" | “I can assure you that he will not stop until he has to pay a much higher price,” said Mr. McCain
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The head of the radical leftist Syriza party, Alexis Tsipras, speaks to supporters after winning elections in Athens, Jan. 25, 2015. REUTERS/Marko Djurica
"Breedlove also said proposals put forward by Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine were "completely unacceptable".
"The situation is worsening and we need to address the worsening situation," Breedlove said. "It is important that we use all the tools in the toolbox to address this.
"The Russian forces and the Russian-backed forces are changing the landscape in order to better position themselves in whatever solution that comes out of this and we need to keep the diplomatic pressure on," he said, adding that the ultimate goal was a diplomatic and political solution to the conflict."
NATO commander: West shouldn't rule out sending arms to Ukraine
"Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who has argued forcefully for weapons deliveries to Ukraine, summed up his reaction to Ms. Merkel’s speech with one word: “Foolishness.”
Mr. Putin, he predicted, would next seize the port of Mariupol in eastern Ukraine with a view to building a land bridge from Russia proper to Crimea, which the Kremlin annexed last March. “I can assure you that he will not stop until he has to pay a much higher price,” said Mr. McCain, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee."
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said she bluntly opposed providing lethal military support to Kiev during a security conference in Munich on Saturday.
In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote that “a specter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism.”
That image has been much adapted. The specters that have been held to haunt the Europe of today include Americanization, privatization, the far right, and the breakup of the euro, among others. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, said recently that today’s haunting specter is “economic stagnation,” daring to invoke Marx from the heart of the City of London.
That image has been much adapted. The specters that have been held to haunt the Europe of today include Americanization, privatization, the far right, and the breakup of the euro, among others. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, said recently that today’s haunting specter is “economic stagnation,” daring to invoke Marx from the heart of the City of London.
But now, the original specter in 1848, wandering unheeded for many decades, is back, hovering again over the old continent.
Communism is again haunting Europe.
Syriza, which won the Greek parliamentary elections last month and is the dominant party in the country’s coalition government, is a layered confection of mainly hard-left parties, survivors of — and combatants in — the splits, wars and betrayals of a Greek left whose members had been, over the years since the war, outlawed, imprisoned, tortured and, in the last three decades, marginalized.
The new prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, was a leader of the youth wing of one of the communist parties. Its finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, says he is a libertarian Marxist. The party has promised to raise wages, rehire sacked public-sector workers and nationalize sectors of the economy. In an interview with Britain’s Channel Four news, Varoufakis said that his government would confront the “oligarchic system” in Greece — the mix of political leaders, wealthy business people and their media — and “destroy” it.
Cut out of any kind of power, the new men and women of Syriza look on their country’s postwar past, with its periods of authoritarian military rule and its culture of vast corruption, as nothing to do with them — and thus they are not responsible for agreements entered into before they took power. Tsipras told crowds after his victory that “Greece has turned a page. Greece is leaving behind the destructive austerity, fear and authoritarianism. It is leaving behind five years of humiliation and pain.”
It seems a perfect standoff. No European state will agree to Syriza’s determination to cut back radically on its debt obligations. Syriza, having come in on a maximalist program, has softened some of its demands, but it can’t turn on a dime and accept mere cosmetic reshuffling of its promises. Yet, for now, before the real haggling starts, there’s not a honeymoon but a period in which commentators and some politicians have proffered suggestions of where compromises might be found.
Hugo Dixon of Breakingviews argued that delay in pressing the new government “would cut the risk of a financial and political backlash in the rest of the eurozone in the event that Athens does leave.” Martin Woolf, in the Financial Times, put it bluntly, “Creating the eurozone is the second-worst monetary idea its members are ever likely to have. Breaking it up is the worst. Yet that is where pushing Greece into exit might lead. The right course is to recognize the case for debt relief, conditional on achievement of verifiable reforms. Politicians will reject the idea. Statesmen will seize upon it.”
Those who the Greeks most scare are the “good” leftists: the social democrats who, like the German Social Democratic Party in coalition with Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union, the socialist government of France and, above all, the center-left Democratic Party in Italy — stay with the centrist consensus. They have grumbled, jibbed and pleaded for less austerity but stayed within the constraints that both the German-led European Union and a globalized world, where most labor is much cheaper and less protected than in Europe, have enforced. Now, a party far to their left denounces these constraints, and their moderation, and promises, in a bound, to be free of them.
Take — as an example of what this means to those in the tormenting seats of power — the figure of Giuliano Poletti, minister of labor in the Italian government led by Mateo Renzi. A 63-year-old greybeard in a cabinet of 30- and 40-somethings (Renzi turned 40 last month), Poletti spent much of his life as one of the leaders of the powerful cooperative movement, with strong links to the trade unions and the left.
In government, he found himself facing — it could not have been a surprise — as hidebound a labor market as any in Europe. Italy, he saw, had, since the war, made a choice, to which both its secular leftists and its Catholic-influenced centrists assented. That was, that jobs must be protected, and where workers were laid off, they must be compensated with high unemployment benefits, sometimes for many years.
It was meant to be humane but had become stultifying in a world where flexibility is all. Poletti saw that the protection of jobs, as they were, stopped the creation of jobs of the future and kept out young workers. In his first legislation, he introduced elements of flexibility in labor contracts, has tried to increase female employment (the lowest in Europe), and bring in work-experience courses in schools and universities. It’s modest, so far. But even that has the big union confederations mounting strikes and threatening more.
When he’s chided for doing the capitalists’ work, he thinks: What kind of left would we be if we didn’t face up to a labor market that is quite different from the one for which the laws of postwar Italy — including its constitution — were drafted? Yet in Greece, Varoufakis asks: What kind of left would webe if we didn’t, right now, give people who go to bed hungry their jobs, and thus their dignity back?
Tsipras and Varoufakis, who have been on a quick tour of European capitals to ensure that fellow leaders take them seriously and soften their hostility to debt forgiveness, must storm the citadel still — that is, must convince the Germans, who have given most and expect most.
The German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, granite-like in his opposition to further concessions, met Varoufakis earlier this week and told the news media that “we agreed to disagree.” Varoufakis, with sour wit, said “we didn’t even get to disagree.”
The European parties of the center left have cut budgets, liberalized labor laws and take on the unions – seeking a return to pre-crisis growth. The far left government in Greece has a mandate from a desperate nation, and proposes a leap into freedom, holding out a seductive vision to legions of unemployed youth of activism and defiance. The specter walks again.
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· · · · ·
By Pavel Polityuk
KIEV Sat Feb 7, 2015 7:44am EST
KIEV (Reuters) - Pro-Russian separatists have intensified shelling of government forces on all front lines and appear to be amassing forces for new offensives on the key railway town of Debaltseve and the coastal city of Mariupol, Ukraine's military said on Saturday.
Five Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and 26 wounded in fighting in the past 24 hours, spokesman Volodymyr Polyovy told a briefing.
Separatist gains against Kiev government forces in eastern Ukraine, particularly a rebel advance on Debaltseve to the northeast of the regional center of Donetsk, have given impetus to a Franco-German initiative to try and strike an 11th hour deal with Russia to end the Ukrainian crisis.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who along with French President Francois Hollande met Russia's Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin late on Friday, told an international security conference in Munich on Saturday that there was no guarantee that the peace initiative would work.
But she voiced opposition to the West supplying arms to the Ukrainian government to help them to defend themselves against separatists who Kiev says are supported by Russian arms and Russian troops. Moscow denies this is so.
More than 5,000 civilians, Ukrainian soldiers and pro-separatist fighters have been killed since a separatist rebellion erupted in Ukraine's eastern territories in April.
A peace deal was struck last September in Minsk, Belarus, but the agreed ceasefire was almost immediately violated and attempts to revive it have failed.
Artillery and mortar fire on populated areas of the east including the big city of Donetsk itself have taken a huge toll on civilian lives, while more than 1,500 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed.
The present focus on the battlefield is the town of Debaltseve, a vital rail and road junction which lies in a pocket between the two main separatist-controlled regions.
Ukrainian government forces express confidence they have enough firepower to hold the town even though the rebels have steadily encroached in surrounding towns and villages.
A Reuters correspondent who was in Debaltseve on Friday said Ukrainian forces kept up a steady barrage of mortar or howitzer fire from the town even as an operation to evacuate civilians was underway.
Another source of concern for the Ukrainians is Mariupol, a southeastern city on the coast of the Sea of Azov, which lies between rebel-controlled areas and the Crimean peninsula, which was annexed by Russia last March.
Mariupol's vulnerability was exposed last month when 30 civilians were killed there in intense rocket attacks from rebel-controlled areas.
"The situation remains tense. The adversary is carrying out attacks across all the separation lines," military spokesman Polyovy said on Saturday.
"The Russian terrorist forces are gathering strength for further offensives on Mariupol and Debaltseve. An increase in the number of tanks and armored vehicles in Debaltseve ... has been noticed," he said.
(Writing by Richard Balmforth; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
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· ·
By Adrian Croft
MUNICH Sat Feb 7, 2015 5:46am EST
MUNICH (Reuters) - The West should not rule out sending weapons and other military equipment to help the Ukrainian army in its war against pro-Russian separatists, NATO's top military commander said on Saturday.
The comments by U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove were his strongest public intervention yet in the debate going on in Washington over whether the United States should send defensive weapons to help the Ukrainian government forces.
"I don't think we should preclude out of hand the possibility of the military option," Breedlove, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, told a group of reporters at the annual Munich Security Conference.
He said he was referring to providing weapons or capabilities, not sending soldiers. "There is no conversation about boots on the ground," he said.
"The Ukrainians have been straightforward in their request to all the nations of NATO and other nations as well about the capabilities they need to address artillery problems, to address communications problems and jamming problems," he said.
"The Ukrainians have asked for help in all of those areas and those are the areas that nations are discussing."
Breedlove also said proposals put forward by Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine were "completely unacceptable".
"The situation is worsening and we need to address the worsening situation," Breedlove said. "It is important that we use all the tools in the toolbox to address this.
"The Russian forces and the Russian-backed forces are changing the landscape in order to better position themselves in whatever solution that comes out of this and we need to keep the diplomatic pressure on," he said, adding that the ultimate goal was a diplomatic and political solution to the conflict.
Breedlove said the Russians had supplied more than 1,000 combat vehicles to separatists in eastern Ukraine. Moscow denies such involvement in the conflict.
"We do see hundreds of Russian regulars in eastern Ukraine providing capabilities like air defense, electronic warfare support to artillery, command and control etc ... We have not seen large regular formations of fighting troops," he said.
Many people from other countries had also been brought into the area to fight alongside the separatists in the east, he said.
(Reporting by Adrian Croft; Editing by Stephen Brown/Mark Heinrich)
Read the whole story
· ·
MUNICH Sat Feb 7, 2015 8:52am EST
MUNICH (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday that there were reasons for optimism on a peace deal for Ukraine but he also warned against the arming of Kiev's military and blamed the United States and Europe for inflaming the crisis.
"We believe that there are good grounds for optimism, to issue recommendations for conflict resolution," Lavrov said after talks on Friday between the leaders of Russia, France and Germany. during a debate at a security conference in Munich.
But Lavrov, speaking during a debate at a security conference in Munich, also pointed to growing calls in the West to "pump Ukraine full of lethal weapons."
"This position will only exacerbate the tragedy of Ukraine," Lavrov said.
(Reporting by Noah Barkin)
MUNICH (Reuters) - Germany's Angela Merkel on Saturday ruled out sending weapons to the Ukrainian government to fight pro-Russian separatists but said there was no guarantee that her latest peace initiative with French President Francois Hollande would work either.
Russian Imperialism: Selected Articles
Vaclav Havel:
"...if the West does not stabilize the East, the East will destabilize the West.”
The Rise of Russia’s New Imperialism
"Sergey Nikolsky, a Russian philosopher of culture, says that perhaps the most important idea for Russians “from the fall of Byzantium until today is the idea of empire and the fact that they are an imperial nation. We have always known that we live in a country whose history is an unbroken chain of territorial expansion, conquest, annexation, of their defence, of temporary losses and new conquests. The idea of empire was one of the most precious in our ideological baggage and it is this that we proclaim to other nations. It is through it that we surprise, delight or drive mad the rest of the world.
Аннотация: Центральной темой данной статьи является проблема переосмысления имперского сознания россиян. Автор выделяет ряд черт имперского сознания и подробно рассматривает процесс имперского строительства, формирования и эволюции имперского сознания. Ключевые слова: имперский народ, имперское сознание, имперское строительство.
Может быть наиважнейшей мыслью, которая была воспринята и сохранена народами, населяющими Россию со времени падения Византии до наших дней есть мысль об империи и о том, что они — имперский народ. Мы всегда знали, что живём в стране, история которой представляет собой непрерывную цепь территориальных расширений, захватов, присоединений, их защиты, временных утрат и новых приобретений. Мысль об империи была одной из самых ценных в нашем идейном багаже и именно ее мы были готовы заявить и заявляли другим народам. Именно ею мы удивляли, восхищали или ужасали остальной мир. С крушением СССР империя исчезла. И ни власть, ни общество, похоже, не знают — чем жить дальше. Ответа нет, а число ошибок, неизбежных при отсутствии цели и смысла существования, множится день ото дня. Жизнь в империи не прошла для нас даром. За минувшие столетия имперское бытие сформировало наше сознание, вошло в культуру. Но адекватно ли наше имперское сознание сегодняшним реалиям? Хотим ли мы воссоздания империи из руин и способны ли к этому? А если не хотим, то, может, стоит задуматься, чего хотим?
See also:
"В заключение повторю: России пора перестать имитировать признаки империи. Эволюция российской государственности в форму национального (гражданского) государства в современных условиях возможна и необходима. Содержанием этой работы, наряду с прочим, видится и корректировка идентичности современных русских – вытеснение из нее имперской составляющей и наполнение смыслами и ценностями культуры и права. Исторического опыта такого рода работы у нас нет. Но и империю воссоздать нельзя. Остается заняться созданием самих себя. Попробуем?"
С.А. Никольский Институт философии РАН - GS
Sergey Nikolsky, a Russian philosopher of culture - GS
Сергей Анатольевич Никольский - GS | sergey nikolsky - GS | s.a. nikolsky - GS
Сергей Никольский - YT
The first and most important characteristic of the Russian empire, says Nikolski, has always been “the maximization of territorial expansion for the realization of economic and political interests, as one of the most important principles of state policy” [1]. This expansion was the result of the permanent and overwhelming predominance of the extensive development of Russia over its intensive development: the predominance of the absolute exploitation of the direct producers over their relative exploitation, that is to say over one based on the increase in labour productivity."
Russian imperialism - International Viewpoint
Аннотация: Центральной темой данной статьи является проблема переосмысления имперского сознания россиян. Автор выделяет ряд черт имперского сознания и подробно рассматривает процесс имперского строительства, формирования и эволюции имперского сознания. Ключевые слова: имперский народ, имперское сознание, имперское строительство.
Может быть наиважнейшей мыслью, которая была воспринята и сохранена народами, населяющими Россию со времени падения Византии до наших дней есть мысль об империи и о том, что они — имперский народ. Мы всегда знали, что живём в стране, история которой представляет собой непрерывную цепь территориальных расширений, захватов, присоединений, их защиты, временных утрат и новых приобретений. Мысль об империи была одной из самых ценных в нашем идейном багаже и именно ее мы были готовы заявить и заявляли другим народам. Именно ею мы удивляли, восхищали или ужасали остальной мир. С крушением СССР империя исчезла. И ни власть, ни общество, похоже, не знают — чем жить дальше. Ответа нет, а число ошибок, неизбежных при отсутствии цели и смысла существования, множится день ото дня. Жизнь в империи не прошла для нас даром. За минувшие столетия имперское бытие сформировало наше сознание, вошло в культуру. Но адекватно ли наше имперское сознание сегодняшним реалиям? Хотим ли мы воссоздания империи из руин и способны ли к этому? А если не хотим, то, может, стоит задуматься, чего хотим?
See also:
Никольский Сергей Анатольевич - biography |
После империи
Стратегической задачей становится переход России к гражданскому единству
Сергей Никольский
Об авторе: Сергей Анатольевич Никольский – доктор философских наук, заместитель директора по научной работе Института философии Российской академии наук.
С.А. Никольский Институт философии РАН - GS
Sergey Nikolsky, a Russian philosopher of culture - GS
Сергей Анатольевич Никольский - GS | sergey nikolsky - GS | s.a. nikolsky - GS
Сергей Никольский - YT
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Nov 27, 2014 - Sergey Nikolsky, a Russian philosopher of culture, says that perhaps the most important idea for Russians “from the fall of Byzantium until today ...
Putin’s Crimea intervention has won widespread support within Russia and sparked a debate over the Soviet past
Fighting Vladimir Putin has been part of the job for Dmitry Agranovsky. For years, as the Moscow lawyer defended civil rights activists in court, he found himself on one side of the divide and the Russian president on the other.
Until now. As Mr Putin stares down the west over Crimea, Mr Agranovsky stands by him, as does the vast majority of the Russian people. “Revanche for the fatherland!!!!” he tweeted last week. He posted pictures of Russian personnel carriers in Crimea accompanied by a prayer for protection of “our army”. “Rise up, great country! Rise to mortal combat with the fascist dark forces, with the cursed horde!” he wrote in another tweet.
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While Mr Putin has triggered a mixture of outrage and bewilderment in Europe and America by seizing control of Crimea two weeks ago, he has received resounding support at home.
Ahead of Sunday’s referendum in Crimea, Levada, the country’s most independent pollster, found this week that more than 70 per cent of Russians believe Russian speakers in Ukraine are either in real danger from bandits and nationalists, or at least that their rights are being infringed. According to the poll, 67 per cent see radical Ukrainian nationalists behind the aggravation of the situation in Crimea, while only 2 per cent blame the Russian government.
“A two-week campaign of propaganda and disinformation, unprecedented in post-Soviet times, has created a powerful effect and mass approval of Putin’s policy towards Ukraine,” Levada said. “This tactic to manipulate public opinion . . . has provided a negative mobilisation of a large part of the Russian population and revived its dormant imperial complexes.”
For many Russians, Crimea has come to encapsulate the feelings of insecurity, anger and loss that have simmered since the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991. One of the cornerstones of Mr Putin’s public support is broad consensus that Russia should never have lost Crimea in the first place. Although it was Nikita Khrushchev, then head of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, who signed Crimea over to Ukraine in 1954, the man most widely blamed today is the now deceased Boris Yeltsin. As president of the Russian Federation in 1991, he confirmed the inclusion of the territory in Ukraine in agreements with other republic chiefs that secured the end of the Soviet Union.
The anger over this stroke of a pen echoes a much broader demonisation of Yeltsin in Russia today. During the decade of his presidency, Russia was shaken by economic shocks, political infighting and corruption. Those traumatic memories of the 1990s, where bouts of hyperinflation and financial crisis robbed many of their lifetime savings while a handful of oligarchs became rich overnight, have long nurtured nostalgia for the Soviet Union.
Popularity boost: Vladimir Putin
“The west is accustomed to thinking the Soviet regime ended in 1991. But symbolically, it lives on,” says Andrey Zubov, a liberal historian who sparked a fierce debate two weeks ago when he compared Mr Putin’s move on Crimea with Hitler’s grab of the German-speaking Sudetenland regions of Czechoslovakia in 1938.
He says that while Ukraine’s moves over the past decade to open historical archives and publicly debate famine and deportations under Stalin allowed the country to shake off its Soviet past, Russia failed to take this step. The majority of Russians fear such upheaval, he argues. “Looking at revolution in Ukraine means looking at the spectre of revolution in Russia, too. In that sense, the fight for Crimea is not just the fight for a piece of land, it’s the fight between two world views.”
That debate is now reflected in everyday discussions in Russia. “It is hard to get people focused on work these days as everyone keeps discussing Ukraine,” says an expat at the Moscow office of a German engineering group. “We have to be careful what we say. Our Russian colleagues are unanimously in favour of what Putin is doing.”
This week over 100 prominent filmmakers, musicians and other artists including Valery Gergiev, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, signed an open letter of support for Mr Putin, stating: “As the fate of our compatriots and the Crimea is at stake, Russian cultural figures cannot be indifferent observers with a cold heart. Our common history and roots of our culture and its spiritual origins, our fundamental values and language unite us forever.”
Despite the threat of sanctions that would harm the economy, few business leaders openly oppose Mr Putin’s policy. “I am no particular fan of Putin but I think he is doing the right thing,” says a senior Russian banker.
Steven Dashevsky, a Ukraine-born US citizen living for 15 years in Moscow, says his fund, Dashevsky & Partners, went from 25 per cent exposure to Russia to 5 per cent in the past two weeks. Yet one of his rich Russian friends – someone he considers “a completely normal, sane guy” – told him recently he would “sacrifice his life for Crimea”, citing the memories he had holidaying there as a child.
For the already frail opposition movement, the fervent emotions are awkward. Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption blogger who has come closest to being a credible challenger to Mr Putin, laid out his position in a nuanced, long blog post on Wednesday after treading cautiously for weeks.
“Call me a Slavic chauvinist but I believe the most important strategic advantages for Russia in this world are not oil, nor gas, nor nuclear weapons, but friendly (even fraternal, which already exist) relations with Ukrainians and Belarusians,” he said, appealing to the view that Ukraine is not like a foreign country, given that the first Slavic state had its capital in Kiev.
Mr Navalny also said Mr Putin’s real motivation was to stop a revolution that could unseat his own corrupt regime, and argued that the rights of Russians were less under threat in Ukraine than in most other former Soviet republics.
. . .
One reason for these fervent emotions, which are so out of step with public opinion in western Europe and the US, is Moscow’s propaganda campaign. State media describe the crisis in Ukraineas a stand-off between Russian civilisation and law and order on one side, and radical “fascist” forces on the other.
The fight for Crimea is not just the fight for a piece of land, it’s the fight between two world views
In Russia, such language surprises no one because it has long been part of the official historical narrative. “The victory over Hitler’s Germany, which our history textbooks call fascist, is the single high point in our modern historic memory,” says Mr Zubov. “That contrasts with western Ukraine, where the dominant historical memory is the fight against Communism, led by people who in turn have consistently been called ‘fascist’ in our historiography.”
The country’s nationalists feel their hour has come. Alexander Dugin, a rightwing ideologue who has long called for Russia to rebuild a Eurasian empire, says triumphantly that while Mr Putin, as a realist, has not followed his ideological advice in the past, their lines have now crossed.
“[The referendum] is the seal of creation of a new era. Monday marks the end of the unipolar world,” he says. “If there is no attack from Nato before the vote, then that’s a geopolitical, strategic and moral victory for Russia – Obama said ‘yes, we can’, but Putin has shown him ‘no you can’t’.”
Mr Dugin envisions a “Russian spring”, under which Europe would drift away from the US and close ranks with Russia, while Moscow would use its new power to help other countries around the world to “break loose of American hegemony”.
While few even in Russia share such expectations, political observers agree that Mr Putin has moved to the right during his third term, including an increasing clampdown on the free media. The Russian public’s yearning for new strength and identity could compel him to stay there.
“In western Europe, our positive history starts with the beginning of our democratic history, and we don’t embrace past periods such as colonialism, slavery, national socialism. But in Russia, history did not start in 1991,” says Alexander Rahr from the German-Russian Forum.
He argues that Russia’s view of its own history, which stresses the role of heroes and strong leaders, puts the country on a different trajectory from that of the west. “It is about repelling enemies, preserving its own form of Christianity and protecting the fatherland – all concepts that in Europe sound very old-fashioned,” he says.
The question is how far Russia is prepared to go for such beliefs. Despite broad support for Mr Putin’s Crimea policy, there are deep-seated fears of war in the Russian public. Fewer than half of respondents of the Levada poll believe that Russian soldiers can help stabilise the situation in Crimea, and more than 80 per cent say they feel frightened of war.
Liberal Russians hope this will help rein in Mr Putin. Mr Zubov says he believes the young generation will have enough energy to boost turnout at an anti-war demonstration planned in Moscow on Saturday.
If they do, they are under a lot of pressure. At small-scale rallies over the past two weeks, some of those traditionally opposed to Mr Putin took part in demonstrations supporting his Crimea push. Mr Agranovsky, the defence lawyer, makes his own stance very clear. “Don’t attend the rally of the defeatists and traitors if you don’t want to be viewed as a defeatist or traitor!” he tweeted on Thursday.
Additional reporting by Courtney Weaver
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Russian Imperialism: Development and Crisis Paperback – August 27, 1998
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Ariel Cohen (Author)
Ariel Cohen (Author)
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What started out as a small-scale demonstration in Kiev’s Maidan—Independence—Square against the government of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in late 2013 has escalated into a crisis that in a worst-case scenario could develop into a full-scale shooting war between Russia and the U.S-EU-NATO world empire—“the Empire” for short. As more facts have came out, it has became clear that the demonstrations had a pro-imperialist, pro-Empire character from the beginning. In addition, it is now obvious that the U.S. government has been heavily involved since the beginning.
The one-sided U.S. media coverage of the “pro-Maidan movement,” as the pro-imperialist forces in Ukraine are called; the activities of U.S.-funded NGOs; and the U.S. role in the pro-imperialist “Orange Revolution” of 2004 all point in the same direction. In addition, as the crisis developed it was revealed on the Internet that U.S. diplomats favored right-wing neo-liberal banker Arseniy Yatsenyuk, or “Yats,” as the diplomats affectionately called him. Sure enough, right after the coup that overthrew Yanukovych, “Yats” was named prime minister of the new coup government in Kiev. But there is more.
According to Wikipedia, on April 18, 2014, Burisma Holdings, one of the leading oil and natural gas production companies in Ukraine, announced Hunter Biden’s appointment to its board of directors. “Burisma holds licenses covering the Dnieper-Donets Basin and the Carpathian and Azov-Kuban basins and has considerable reserves and production capability,” the on-line encyclopedia stated.
Hunter Biden, a lawyer, is the son of U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden. According to Wikipedia, Hunter Biden’s résumé includes multiple connections to the financial industry and government: “From 2001 to 2008, Biden was a founding partner of Oldaker, Biden, and Belair, LLP, a national law firm based in New York. He also served as a partner and board member of the mergers and acquisitions firm Eudora Global. Biden was chief executive officer, and later chairman, of the fund of hedge funds PARADIGM Global Advisors…. At MBNA, a major US bank, Biden was employed as a senior vice president.”
Wikipedia further reports: “In addition to holding directorships on the Boards of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, The Truman National Security Project and the Center for National Policy, he sits on the Chairman’s Advisory Board for the National Democratic Institute (NDI). The NDI is a project of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).” The NED is the organization that does what the CIA did covertly 25 years ago.
Viktor Yanukovych is a middle of the road Ukrainian capitalist politician who balanced between the Empire and Russia. Yanukovych had defeated the openly pro-imperialist politicians associated with the so-called Orange Revolution in the 2010 elections. Yanukovych is quite corrupt, but this is almost universally true of capitalist politicians operating in the former socialist countries of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—and not only there.
The anti-Yanukovych demonstrators attempted to revive the Orange Revolution. This was not a revolution at all but instead a U.S. empire-supported movement. Its aim was to reverse an election that had been won by Yanukovych against his pro-Empire Orange opponents on the pretext that election results had been falsified, a somewhat questionable assertion.
The Orange Revolution was part of a series of pro-Empire “color revolutions”—some successful and some not—that were organized by the Empire and its local representatives with the aim of replacing governments that resisted the Empire in one way or another. Other such “revolutions” include the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon; the unsuccessful Green Revolution in Iran, which also attempted unsuccessfully to overturn a presidential election; and the Rose Revolution in Georgia.
In Ukraine, the Orange Revolution was initially successful. Yanukovych’s clear victory in the 2010 election, however, indicated that the movement lacked broad popular support among the Ukrainian people. During its rule from 2004 through 2009, leaders of the Orange Revolution glorified Stephan Bandera and other Ukrainian “nationalists” who had collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II.
The initially small demonstrations centered on Maidan Square gradually but steadily increased in size. Many of the demonstrators were shipped in from Western Ukraine (1), where right-wing and even out-and-out fascist sentiments have been historically strong. The demonstrators complained that President Yanukovych had signed an agreement with the Russians rather than with the European Union. Russia, which is eager to prevent Ukraine from falling into the Empire’s orbit, offered the Ukrainians a better deal. In contrast, the European Union demanded stiff neo-liberal austerity measures in return for loans to bail out the virtually bankrupt Ukrainian government.
Side by side with the “moderate” right wingers who made up the bulk of the demonstrators, there appeared a growing number of outright fascist forces such as the Svoboda party, which had begun as a neo-Nazi party before moderating its image slightly, and the even more extreme Right Sector. The latter uses Nazi symbols and hardly hides its admiration not only for those Ukrainians who fought on the side of Nazi Germany during World War II but for Nazi Germany itself.
Nor were these the only reactionary symbols used. Side by side with the Nazi symbols, there appeared the flag of slavery itself, the stars and bars of the the slave-owning rebels of the U.S. Civil War of 1861-65. When a few Ukrainian leftists, influenced by the “far left” (2) in Western Europe, tried to join the right-wing demonstrators in Maidan to express their solidarity with the struggle against Yanukovych—a huge political error in my opinion—they were driven away by Right Sector thugs, who were emerging as the leaders of the movement on the street level if not in the halls of power. The right-wing mass of demonstrators made no attempt to stop them. Indeed, the Right Sector is apparently greatly admired by the “moderate” right-wing demonstrators.
In February, the Right Sector led a march on the parliament building, which forced President Yanukovych to flee for his life. The Right Sector also occupied the headquarters of the Communist Party of Ukraine in a move reminiscent of the infamous Nazi march on Karl Liebneckt House—headquarters of the German Communist Party—in Berlin in 1933. These events were ignored or barely mentioned in the U.S. media, which falsely presented the Euro-Maidan movement as a democratic uprising against the supposedly Russian-controlled and dictatorial government of Victor Yanukovych.
More on the reactionary nature of the Euro-Maidan movement
Since I am not an expert on Ukraine, I rely on observers like Volodymyr Ishchenko, a Ukraine sociologist who is opposed to capitalism and is a member of a small movement influenced by the West European “far left.” Like them, Ishchenko was quite sympathetic to the Euro-Maidan movement. Let’s see what he has to say about the character of that movement—and remember, he is sympathetic to it.
Ishchenko reports: “The Maidan protest started more as an ideological protest that was, to some extent, an attempt to break through to the European Dream, seeing it as a kind of utopia which would solve many Ukrainian problems. And for other people, it was a protest against Russia. It was generally believed that if Yanukovych would not sign the European Association Agreement, he will join the Customs Union with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. These countries were described in quite negative tones as authoritarian, poor countries that Ukraine doesn’t need to orient itself to.”
Even if there had been no fascists involved, this position in and of itself is a profoundly reactionary one. It reflects an attraction to exploiting countries of the U.S.-EU-NATO world empire, combined with hostility to poor exploited countries such as Kazakhstan. In my mind, this is sufficient reason to fight against such a movement. All proportions guarded, this is similar to the mentality of the “Tea Party” in the U.S. Are Tea Party protests progressive because they are opposed to the administration of Barack Obama, which they, quite falsely of course, claim is sympathetic to the non-white countries of the “Third World”? Hardly. But there is more.
Ischenko goes on: “But you have to understand that the political mainstream in the Ukraine is much further to the right than, for example, in Western Europe. Things which would receive very strong criticism in the West are more or less tolerable in the Ukraine. It’s more or less okay to talk about things like ‘the defense of white European people'; this kind of thing can even be said by mainstream politicians. It’s okay to be homophobic, not to recognize any need to defend LGBT people. In this more right-dominant ideology, the far right from the Right Sector or from the Svoboda party are not actually seen as something extreme.”
I don’t know what Ischenko means by the “political mainstream,” but it appears that he has in mind the milieu out of which Euro-Maidan emerged—the supporters of the Orange Revolution. This would explain not only the toleration for the Right Sector that openly flaunts Nazi symbols, including armbands that contain a symbol that “looks like” a swastika. It would also explain the appearance of the Confederate flag, the flag of slavery itself, though as far as I know there are very few African people that live in Ukraine.
Ischenko’s case for supporting Euro-Maidan
Ischenko continues: “But later during the Maidan uprising, there came the questions of police repression and violence, of the authoritarian laws which were passed in January—they were pulled to the forefront. They became more important than the European Association.”
Many leftists here in the West have made similar arguments. Even if the Euro-Maidan movement had certain reactionary aspects, it became transformed into a progressive movement against dictatorship when the Yanukovych government resorted to repressive actions and dictatorial legislation to put down what was becoming a full-scale insurrection aimed at overthrowing his elected government.
Here we can point to the example of Germany itself during the rise of Hitler. The quasi-dictatorial Chancellor Heinrich Bruening, who ruled by decree and was called “the hunger chancellor,” at times took dictatorial measures in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prevent the Nazis from coming to power. At one point, Bruening used his quasi-dictatorial power to prohibit the Nazi stormtroopers, or SA, from wearing their brown uniforms. This violated the democratic right of the Nazis to express themselves politically by wearing clothing of their choice.
Now, it is true that we should not be drawn into supporting anti-democratic laws by capitalist governments even when they are aimed at fascists. Such laws will sooner or later be used with redoubled force against the workers’ organizations. And, as the example of Bruening’s government itself shows, his dictatorial measures did not prevent the Nazis from coming to power shortly thereafter, resulting in the destruction of all remaining democratic rights.
But did the resistance of the Nazis to Bruening’s quasi-dictatorial government transform the Nazi movement into a democratic movement that leftists should have supported? Of course not! Similarly, whatever repressive laws and dictatorial measures that were taken by the bourgeois Yanukovych government against the Euro-Maidan insurrection—that is what it developed into, it was in no sense a peaceful mass demonstration of the kind that we are familiar with in the West—did not transform the reactionary Euro-Maidan uprising into a democratic movement.
The rise of the ‘anti-Maidan’ movement in eastern Ukraine
The anti-Maidan movement that has arisen in the Ukraine in opposition to the Euro-Maidan coup government in Kiev is represented by such entities as the People’s Republic of Donetsk, which enjoy considerable support in eastern Ukraine. Unlike the Euro-Maidans, they are tolerant of leftists and Soviet symbols, but not Nazi symbols and flags. For example, red Soviet flags and pictures of Lenin mix with the tri-color flag of the bourgeois Federated Russian Republic and the czarist double eagles of the Russian nationalists. While the Euro-Maidans destroyed statues of Lenin, the anti-Maidans defend these statues.
These symbols are decidedly mixed, of course—for example, the double eagle on one side and the red hammer-and-sickle flag of the Soviet Union plus Lenin on the other! They clearly reflect the conflicting political and class forces participating in the anti-Maidan movement. But the relationship of class forces among the anti-Maidans, who consist largely—not entirely of course—of industrial workers, is quite different than the relationship of class forces of the Euro-Maidans.
To be fair to Ishchenko and the Western leftists who share his views on Ukraine, the same leftists have shown sympathy to the anti-Maidan movement in eastern Ukraine as well, since it too is a mass movement against the “pro-Empire” government—that government being the one established by the middle-class Euro-Maidans with the help of their fascist shock troops.
The position of Ischenko and his like-minded supporters in the West would be much like a person living at the time of the U.S. Civil War sympathizing with the Confederate rebels and the Unionists at the same time because both sides enjoyed the passionate support of significant sections of the U.S. people! These facts didn’t prevent Marx and Engels then living in Britain from knowing from day one which side they were on.
May 25 election
As I reach my deadline to hand this post to my editors, the news of the results of the May 25 presidential elections staged by the Kiev coup government in a bid to establish some legal legitimacy has arrived. First, it seems all anti-Maidan candidates were effectively banned. Second, no vote was held in regions where anti-Maidan sentiment is strongest such as Donetsk. There was a very low vote in the Donbass as a whole. This was anything but a free election. But that doesn’t mean that the results are without interest.
As had been expected, the pro-imperialist billionaire “chocolate king” Pyotr Poroshenko won the election. He handily defeated his fellow billionaire Yulia Tymoshenko, one of the leading figures of the Orange Revolution, who was the candidate of the extreme right-wing Fatherland Front Party. She advocated a referendum on the question of Ukraine joining NATO hoping to make a decent showing and perhaps forcing Poroshenko into a runoff. This strategy failed completely. Tymoshenko is unpopular because of her corruption. She was actually serving a prison sentence when she was freed by the Euro-Maidan uprising.
An interesting feature of this election was the weak showing of the neo-Nazi parties. Both Svoboda and the Right Sector candidates got around 1 percent of the vote, even less than the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party regularly receives in today’s Germany.
Among the major candidates, the victorious Poroshenko appears to have been the most “moderate.” This indicates that the Euro-Maidan movement demonstrations were far to the right of the views of most of the people who live in western Ukraine. While the fascists of the Right Sector were able to emerge as the leading force on the Maidan, as shown by their successful exclusion of the left and their leadership of the march on the parliament that forced President Yanukovych to flee for his life, they enjoy very limited support among the people of even western Ukraine.
Another sign that Euro-Maidan enjoys limited support, at best, among the people of western Ukraine has been the refusal of Ukrainian troops to fight the anti-Maidan forces in the east. In many of the confrontations, the Ukrainian forces have either gone over to the anti-Maidan side or simply refused to fight. Only the Right Sector fascists have shown any real fighting spirit.
The Empire’s aims in Ukraine
The U.S-EU-NATO imperialist empire (3) is taking full advantage of the traditions of the Ukrainian “Whites” during the civil war that followed the 1917 revolution. These traditions were further developed by Stephen Bandera and his followers during World War II—called the Great Patriotic War in the former Soviet nations. The leaders of “the Empire”—that is, the leaders of the U.S. government—are taking advantage of these traditions of the reactionary segment of the Ukrainian population to gain control of this rich agricultural land, which has been dubbed “the bread basket of Europe.” Ukraine also has oil and natural gas and pipelines that supply Europe with Russian natural gas.
Within the Empire, there are growing signs of tension between present-day Germany, which now dominates Europe economically and would like to be less dependent on U.S. imperialism. Its access to Russian natural gas gives Germany and other European countries more room to maneuver within the Empire relative to the U.S. After all, the U.S. did not fight two wars against Germany in the last century so that Germany could be independent of the U.S! The U.S. wants very much to retain the basic relationship of forces between it and the West European countries—above all Germany—that emerged from World War II.
The so-called Euro-Maidan Ukrainian “nationalists” are being encouraged by the U.S. to talk about the greatness of the Ukrainian nation, just as the Southern whites after the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction era were encouraged to celebrate the great traditions of the white “Southern people” and their so-called nation.
In the name of defending the great traditions of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, poor whites were encouraged to attack the freed Afro-American slaves. But who is to play the role of African Americans in Ukraine? Since there are few if any African people living in Ukraine, that role falls to the Russians, or those Ukrainians who speak Russian as their native language rather than Ukrainian.
And who is to play the role of the Ku Klux Klan in Ukraine? Why, the Right Sector. It is no accident the “stars and bars” of the Confederacy and Ku Klux Klan appear side by side with Nazi symbols. (4) But just as the white working people of the South are more exploited and worse off than the white working people of any other part of the U.S., if the Empire gets its way, the Ukrainian workers in the western Ukraine who speak Ukrainian rather than Russian will be worse off than most other people in Europe—except, that is, Russian or Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
But what about ‘Russian imperialism’?
Well, that is how I see it as do some other parts of the left. But many on the left in the United States and Europe reject this analysis. They reply to that part of the left that I am in agreement with that we are ignoring “Russian imperialism.” Weren’t Marx, Engels and above all Lenin strong opponents of Russian imperialism and all forms of Russian nationalism?
According to this argument, U.S. imperialism tyrannizes and exploits Latin America and other parts of the world, while Russian imperialism similarly tyrannizes and seeks domination over the countries of Eastern Europe including the Ukraine. They point to the history of Russian czarism’s very real oppression of the Ukrainian nation going back to the days of Catherine the Great in the 18th century, as well as the excesses of Stalin’s collectivization campaign of the early 1930s, which hit Ukraine especially hard resulting in widespread famine. They accuse those of us on the left who see the U.S.-centered world imperialist empire as the real aggressors in Ukraine of being supporters of Russian imperialism and the capitalist government of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Now, even if our opponents on the left are right about the imperialist nature of present-day Russia, it would still be the duty of those of us who live in the West –especially the United States—to follow a policy of “revolutionary defeatism” toward our “own” imperialist rulers. No matter how powerful and dangerous Russian imperialism allegedly is, we still have to be guided by Lenin’s slogan of “revolutionary defeatism” and Karl Liebneckt’s slogan “the main enemy is at home!”
That said, is Russia really imperialist? From the 1990s on, almost all leftists agree that present-day Russia is a capitalist nation. But not all capitalist nations are imperialist nations. For example, Venezuela is still a capitalist nation, but is it imperialist? Virtually all leftists, including those who consider Russia a dangerous imperialist power, strongly support Venezuela and its Bolivarian Revolution in its struggle against imperialism.
Similarly, in the 1930s the Marxists of the time supported China in its struggle against Japan, despite the fact that China was then ruled by the reactionary butcher Chiang Kai-Shek, who had drowned the Chinese revolution of 1925-27 in the blood of the workers of Shanghai. Therefore, whether a given capitalist country is one of the imperialist countries or is one of the exploited countries is no mere academic question to Marxists but can have grave political consequences.
Russia’s ‘annexation’ of the Crimean Peninsula
Hasn’t the Putin government annexed the Crimean Peninsula? Isn’t this an act of naked aggression against Ukraine? In reality, the Crimean Peninsula has never been predominately inhabited by Ukrainian speakers at any point in its history—at least according to what I have been able to find on the Internet. Many peoples have lived on the Crimean Peninsula throughout its recorded history. But since the middle of the 1860s, the predominate population of Crimea has been Russian.
This situation was recognized by the Bolsheviks when Crimea was made part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Federated Republic, while the large minority of Crimean Tatars had their own special Tatar autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. If there had been any case for making Crimea a part of Ukraine, Lenin, who always bent over backwards to take the side of nations and peoples who had been oppressed by czarist Russia, would certainly have used all his influence to see that Crimea was integrated into the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic as opposed to the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic. But he didn’t.
Indeed, Putin as a Russian-nationalist has complained that the Bolsheviks supported the incorporation of the largely Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine—what the czarist regime called “new Russia”—into the Ukrainian Republic, not the Russian Republic.
In 1945, the Soviet government headed by Premier Joseph Stalin dissolved the autonomous Tatar republic for reasons that will be examined below. Only under Nikita Khrushchev—who as first secretary of the Central Committee of the then ruling Soviet Communist Party had emerged as the most influential Soviet leader after the death of Stalin the previous year—was the Crimean Peninsula made part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
This was done to mark the 300-year anniversary of the conquest of Ukraine by the Russian Empire under Empress Catherine the Great. Perhaps, this was done as a measure of respect and compensation for the Ukrainian nation, which indeed had been oppressed by the Russian Empire and then had disproportionately borne the brunt of the civil war that erupted as a result of the collectivization of agriculture in the early 1930s. However, Khrushchev’s son Sergei, now a U.S. citizen, claimed on Radio New Zealand that it was a purely administrative decision after the construction of a canal to supply water to Crimea from Ukraine.
The Putin government was more than willing to accept the status quo established by history—whether or not it was a just one—as long as Russia’s right to maintain its naval base at Sevastopol, its only warm water port, was recognized by Kiev, and as long as the Ukrainian government played a buffer role between the Russian Federation and the U.S.-NATO-EU world empire. But when the Ukrainian far right wing came to power this February and Kiev made clear its plan to turn the Russian-speaking people in Ukraine into a persecuted minority and scapegoat, the Putin government felt it had no alternative but to allow the predominately Russian-speaking Crimea to join the Russian Federation.
The alternative would have been to hand over sooner or later the Russian naval base at Sevastopol to NATO. This would be intolerable to the Russian people, especially in light of the NATO expansion since the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in direct violation of the assurances made to Mikhail Gorbachev by U.S. leaders when he agreed to the unification of Germany on U.S. terms.
Assuming the current Kiev government consolidates itself and succeeds in putting down the resistance in the Russian-speaking east, and even assuming Crimea stays part of Russia, the net result still will be a huge extension of the power of the U.S.-NATO world empire at the expense of Russia. This situation bears no resemblance to Germany’s annexation of German-speaking Austria in 1938, which represented an enormous strengthening of the position of Nazi Germany at the time. For example, Germany’s gold reserves were doubled by the transfer of the gold held by Austria’s central bank to the Reichsbank, as the central bank of German was then called.
The attitude of Marx, Engels and Lenin toward the Russian Empire
But weren’t Marx, Engels and Lenin fierce opponents of Russian nationalism? How can we support the anti-Maidan moment in the eastern Ukraine that is clearly strongly influenced by Russian nationalism when all the historic leaders of Marxism so strongly opposed all forms of Russian nationalism?
Of course, our historic leaders Marx, Engels and Lenin lived in a different time than we do. In the mid-19th century, the Russian Empire cast a dark shadow across Europe. Most peasants within the Russian Empire were serfs bound to the land just like was the case in Western Europe during the feudalism of the Middle Ages. Russian troops crushed the democratic Hungarian revolution of 1848 in blood thereby saving the reactionary Austrian Empire (after 1867 called the Austro-Hungarian Empire). Therefore, during the 1848 revolutions, Marx and Engels advocated war against Russia as well as Great Britain, the “despot of the world market.”
Industrial capitalist Britain in the West and autocratic-feudal Russia in the East were the twin pillars of European and global reaction. If the revolutions of 1848 had reached the level of the Great French Revolution of 1789-1794, not to speak of the Russian Revolution of 1917, there is little doubt that revolutionary Europe would have had to fight a world war against both Britain and Russia.
Misuse of Marx and Engels’ writings on Russia
Marx and Engels’ attitude toward Russia reflected the realities of the epoch in which they lived. This did not prevent renegade socialists from claiming the authority of the two founders of scientific socialism after conditions had fundamentally changed. For example, during World War I the German Social Democratic Party claimed that since Marx and Engels had advocated war against Russia in 1848 they were only applying Marx and Engels’ policy when they voted for war credits on August 4, 1914.
Later, during the Cold War, the reactionary ex-Marxist Sidney Hook tried to enlist Marx and Engels on the side of the newly established U.S.-centered world imperialist empire against the Soviet Union. Hook did this by pointing to Marx and Engels’ calls to war against czarist Russia. In reality, Marx and Engels were strong believers in an approaching Russian revolution destined to transform Russia from a pillar of reaction to a fortress of revolution.
Russia in 1914
By the eve of the “Great War,” though the Russian revolution was not yet victorious, Russia had already changed considerably from what it had been in 1848. Serfdom had been formally abolished in 1861, and by the end of the 19th century modern capitalist industry was developing in Russia. With modern capitalist industry came the development of the workers’ movement, which was far more radical in Russia than in any European or other country. The lingering remnants of serf relations were gradually giving way to capitalist relations in agriculture as well.
Much of the capital invested in large-scale industrial enterprises in Russia as well as in the government bonds of the czarist government was of foreign origin. This capital came from Britain and even more from France—less from Germany because German industry was growing much faster than industry in either Britain or France and therefore had less surplus money capital seeking investment abroad. The newly created industrial enterprises in Russia often took the form of extremely modern factories—by 1914 standards—that were far larger and employed far more workers than any factories in the West.
In the West, including the United States, there were many smaller-scale factories that employed smaller numbers of workers. This reflected the relatively small-scale industrial enterprises that had dominated capitalism during the previous epoch of free competition. In the epoch of free competition, Russia was not yet a capitalist nation.
The pockets of ultra-modern capitalism in the Russia of 1914 formed enclaves in what was still a society that bore many of the marks of its recent feudal past. Politically until the outbreak of the first Russian revolution of 1905, Russia was an absolute monarchy somewhat like Saudi Arabia is today. After the 1905 revolution, a parliament with little real power and limited suffrage called the Duma—the same name as the present-day Russian parliament—was set up, and a constitution, though a very reactionary one, was proclaimed.
The workers’ movement, which had enjoyed no democratic rights whatsoever before 1905, had a shaky and very limited legality and some representatives in parliament. In this sense, Russia in 1914 was actually more advanced politically than the United States is in 2014, where the workers as a class have no representatives at all in either house of the U.S. Congress. Despite these liberal reforms that emerged out of the 1905 revolution, the Russian constitution proclaimed the czar the autocratic ruler of Russia. Therefore, behind some parliamentary window dressing, the essentials of the absolute monarchy remained intact.
Czarist Empire ‘prison house of nations’
Like all empires, the Russian nation ruled and oppressed many other nations. The non-Russian nations of Finland, most of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Byelorussia, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and what was then called Turkestan (the present-day nations of Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan) were ruled by the Russian Empire. In addition, Russia on the eve of the war in 1914 was in the process of dividing up Iran with Britain. Russia was to get the north as a “sphere of influence” and Britain would dominate southern Iran.
Today, none of the countries listed above are part of today’s Russian state—the Russian Federation. All are independent of Russia, though not necessarily of the U.S. world empire, which is another question entirely. Indeed, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are members of NATO. As such, NATO members therefore have to be considered very dependent parts of the U.S.-centered world imperialist empire.
Russian finance capital in 1914
Though Russians owned some finance capital, defined as stocks, bonds and substantial bank deposits, the development of Russian finance capital lagged far behind the countries that were richest in finance capital, which in 1914 were Britain, the U.S., France and Germany. Indeed, Russia itself was exploited by foreign capital, especially French capital. The role of French finance capital was particularly important because French industry was stagnant at the time. Capital in France tended to be accumulated in the form of money capital that was seeking investment as money loan capital.
Therefore, in 1914 Russia combined elements of both a semi-colonial country and an imperialist nation in its own right. This raised the question whether the Russian Marxists should struggle against Russian imperialism or defend Russia against foreign imperialism like Marxists would defend China against Japanese imperialism in the 1930s.
But to take a similar stand toward Russia in 1914 would have been a grave political error. As we have seen, Russia ruled and oppressed many nations and nationalities. Its policies of “russification”–forcing other nations to use only Russian and forget their languages and culture—were notorious. So was the czarist regime’s vicious anti-Semitism and pogroms. And even greater numbers of Muslims were ruled and oppressed by the czarist empire, where Orthodox Christianity was the state religion.
These circumstances forced Russian Marxists to attach far more importance to the national question than Marxists of any other country. The Russian imperialism of 1914 was actually a combination of two regimes of different class origins, a modestly developed modern imperialism based on monopoly capitalism and finance capital, and a military-feudal imperialism rooted in feudal pre-capitalist relations presided over by the continuing czarist autocracy rooted in feudal relations.
As a result, it was necessary for the Russian Marxists to treat Russia as an imperialist nation and not an oppressed colonial or semi-colonial country. Russia’s war against Germany and Austria-Hungary that started in 1914 was in no way comparable to the war in defense of its independence that China waged against Japan between 1937 and 1945. Unlike the Chinese case, the situation mandated a policy of “revolutionary defeatism” by the Russian Marxists, as their leader V.I. Lenin put it.
The Russia of 1914 therefore presents a peculiar picture. It had many colonies, though unlike the “maritime” empires of Britain and France, Russia’s colonies formed a single continuous geographical area. Russia was a land power and not a maritime power like Great Britain. Since it lagged far behind Britain, not to speak of the United States and Germany in overall industrial development, Russia was much weaker militarily than it had been in the middle of the 19th century. In military competition—war—just like in economic competition, it is the relative, not the absolute, strength of the contending parties that is decisive.
This was shown by the Russian Empire’s defeat at the hands of the upstart Japanese Empire in 1904-05, which shocked European observers at the time. They couldn’t imagine that a white country like Russia could be defeated by a non-white nation that had barely avoided becoming a colony or semi-colony itself. And this point was to be driven home by Russia’s dismal performance during the “Great War” itself.
The end of Russian imperialism
This is not the place to write the history of the Russian Revolution or the Soviet Union. Here we will limit ourselves to the effect of this revolution on Russian imperialism as it existed in 1914. The February revolution, though it formally converted Russia from a monarchy to a republic, left intact both the military-feudal aspect of Russian imperialism as well as its modern monopoly capital-imperialist aspect.
While Czar Nicolas II had been forced to give up the throne, the class base of czarism—large-scale semi-feudal landownership and the military bureaucratic structure of the state—remained intact. Therefore, the republican Russia that emerged from the February revolution remained very much an imperialist power.
Reflecting this fact, the provisional government created by the February revolution, both under its first prime minister, Prince Georgi Lvov, and its second “socialist” prime minister, Alexander Kerensky, stubbornly pursued the czar’s war aims, including the demand that Russia be granted control of the Dardanelles, which connect the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. As a result, the Russian Marxists under Lenin’s leadership—not without internal party debate—stuck to a position of revolutionary defeatism under the republic just as they had under the czar.
October revolution destroys Russian imperialism
However, Russian imperialism in both its senses—a feudal-military machine and monopoly capital dominated by finance capital—was decisively destroyed by the October Revolution. The landlords, the backbone of the military-feudal aspects of Russian imperialism, were overthrown and lost their estates to the peasants in what was the greatest peasant uprising in all history before the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Russian monopoly capitalism soon vanished as well as a result of the victory of the first lasting proletarian revolution. Russian imperialism was now a thing of the past.
Was the Soviet Union imperialist?
Imperialist Western propaganda and its bought and paid for historians claim that the Soviet Union that emerged from the October Revolution was really just a continuation of the old Russian Empire in a new guise. The term “Soviet Empire” often appearing in the capitalist media was designed to drive home this point. The various “state capitalist” tendencies within today’s socialist movement echo the claims of these imperialist historians. For example, the now badly fractured international socialist tendency founded by the late Tony Cliff supports the view that the Soviet economy was a form of capitalism that they call “state capitalism.”
The “state capitalists” insist that the Soviet Union was state capitalist because Soviet industry was owned by the Soviet state and not by private capitalists, whether individual or corporate. However, Cliff’s followers argue that like capitalism the Soviet economy was based on expanded reproduction, or economic growth, and so they draw the conclusion that the Soviet economy was not only capitalist but imperialist as well.
During the “Cold War”, the slogan of the Cliffites was “neither Washington nor Moscow.” When the Soviet Union was completely destroyed under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the Cliffites hailed this development as a great advance for the working class since, according to their “state capitalist” logic, one of the two “imperialist superpowers” that had dominated the post-1945 world had fallen.
Since the Soviet Union had been “imperialist,” virtually all the tendencies in the present-day Cliffite movement see the present-day Russian Federation as simply the continuation of Soviet-era imperialism, which in turn is seen as essentially the continuation of the old czarist imperialism that Lenin had fought so hard against.
The other main “state capitalist” tendency in today’s socialist movement draws its inspiration from the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, which from 1968 onward often referred to the Soviet leadership of the day as the “new czars.” By using the term “new czars,” the Chinese leadership starting from 1968 drew a direct equation between imperialist czarist Russia and the Soviet Union after the “Krushchevite revisionists” took over at the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU in 1956.
No true Soviet imperialism
It is true that under the planned economy of the Soviet Union a tremendous amount of wealth was accumulated. But this wealth was not accumulated in the form of capital and therefore not in the form of finance capital. Since there was virtually no legal capital after the New Economic Policy was superseded by the first five-year plan starting in 1928—and since the “second economy” even under the indulgent regime of Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) certainly did not come anywhere near the level of monopoly capitalism generating its own finance capital—there was not a single kopeck of Soviet finance capital.
The Russian Federation a prison house of nations?
Lenin hated all forms of national oppression and racism, not least the Great Russian chauvinism that had proved such a prop of the czarist regime. On a personal level, Lenin never told “ethnic jokes.” After the revolution, no nation was forced to remain in the Soviet Federation that was to evolve into the Soviet Union. For example, Poland and Finland never became members of the Soviet Federation. Nations that were sufficiently developed to exist as independent countries but chose to be part of the Soviet Federation were organized as Soviet Republics, which specifically included the right of secession.
But the old Russian Empire in addition to including nations that were perfectly capable of existing as independent countries also included many smaller nationalities that themselves were simply not populous enough to function as viable independent countries. These peoples were organized into autonomous Soviet republics. They were educated in their own languages, and in some cases written alphabets had to be developed for these languages for the first time.
Under Lenin, every effort was made to develop leaderships both in the Soviet Republics and the Soviet autonomous republics from their own nationalities. This policy was the opposite of the czarist policy of “Russification.” In Ukraine, for example, a policy of “Ukrainization” was followed where not only the Ukraine language was used in all official functions but Ukraine leadership was developed in both the party and the state.
Lenin’s successors did not live up to his high standards. It is well known that near the end of his life Lenin denounced what he saw as heavy-handed policies reflecting great Russian chauvinism by Joseph Stalin, Felix Dzerzhinsky and Sergo Ordzhonikidze towards Stalin’s and Ordzhonikidze’s own native republic of Georgia. It should be pointed out that Stalin; Felix Dzerzhinsky, who was of Polish nationality; and Sergo Ordzhonikidze were all non-Russian. As non-Russians, men like Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, and Ordzhonikidze were under pressure from backward elements to be “more Russian than the Russians.” Lenin hated this kind of thing.
World War II was to bring greater problems on the national front. The widely varying degrees of economic development and class structure of different nationalities and certain special historical circumstances flowing from the nature of German fascism, combined with the Stalin leadership’s policy of not always voluntary collectivization of agriculture—when the peasants did not agree to join a collective farm, their joining was then made virtually compulsory, which runs counter to Marxist principles—created more Nazi collaborators among some nationalities than among others.
A special circumstance applied to the traditionally Yiddish-speaking Soviet Jewish nationality. The Jews had been a trading people in czarist Russia, which meant that many—not all, of course—Jews were strongly attached to private property. In spite of this, there were very few Nazi collaborators among them. This was because the Nazi policy toward the “Jewish question” was very simple. It was to kill every Jewish man, women and child, either through working them to death or killing them outright.
Therefore, within the Jewish Yiddish-speaking nationality all classes and strata—workers who supported the Soviet system because of their class position, the more or less illegal businesspeople who found many possibilities to make money in the shortage-plagued Soviet economy but who yearned for a return to capitalist rule so that they could exploit workers legally, and revolutionary and counterrevolutionary intellectuals alike—had no alternative but to side with Soviet power against the German Nazi imperialist invaders. During World War II, Soviet Jews were the most loyal nationality within the Soviet Union, despite the relatively large number of businesspeople operating more or less illegally that existed among this traditionally trading people.
Things were different among the Chechens, whose social structure resembled the Jews in some ways. Like the Jews, the Chechens had been a trading people in czarist Russia, and many Chechens, just like many Jews, were skillful in playing the Soviet “black market.” But the Nazis had no policy of exterminating Chechens, who traditionally practiced the Muslim religion. Indeed, during the war, Germany posed as the champion of the Muslim peoples much like the U.S. posed as the champion of the Chinese people against Japan, and Japan posed as the champion of the Indian people against Britain.
Germany “championed” the interests of the Muslims because Germany’s imperialist enemies, especially Britain, held much of the Muslim world in thrall. As part of its general oppression of the Arab nation, which forms part of the Muslim world, British imperialism introduced Jewish Zionist colonizers into Palestine beginning with the proclamation of the Balfour Declaration in 1917.
For the above reasons, the Muslim Chechens produced a relatively high number of Nazi collaborators. The Stalin government responded by deporting the Chechens to regions far away from the fighting.
In the wake of World War II, the Stalin government also decided that in light of what it saw as a large number of Nazi collaborators among the Crimean Tatars during the Nazi occupation of the Crimean Peninsula—who like the Chechens are traditionally Muslims—to remove the Tatars from Crimea and to dissolve their autonomous Soviet Republic. The Tartars were removed to Central Asia, which is the historical homeland of the Tatars of which the Crimean Tatars are only a subset. The Tatar people as a whole form the largest national minority in today’s Russian Federation and have their own autonomous republic within the Russian Federation. The Volga German nationality was also exiled because, in light of their shared nationality with the invaders, the Stalin government doubted their loyalty.
The removal of entire nationalities and the abolition of their autonomous republics—as opposed to punishing individual collaborators—were gross violations of the principles of Lenin and the Russian Revolution and are therefore heavily emphasized by Western historians who are paid to put the Russian Revolution and Soviet Union in the worst possible light.
However, the champions of U.S. imperialism have little moral authority to make an issue of this. The Roosevelt government imprisoned the entire Japanese American population—men, women and children—in concentration camps during World War II because it feared some of this population might prove loyal to their ancestral homeland rather than the U.S.
In addition, during the war government propaganda posters featured extremely racist caricatures of Japanese people. These posters were widely displayed in factories and other places, which had the effect of creating a racist hysteria against the Japanese and Americans of Japanese descent. These posters with their racist caricatures of Japanese people warned workers to shut up lest they be overheard by spies. Presumably these Japanese spies would be disguised as white people.
Though the U.S. was also at war with Germany and Italy, there were no similar racist caricatures of Germans or Italians on propaganda posters. After all, Germans and Italians were white, and Roosevelt’s Democratic Party even more than its conservative Republican opponent was in those days based on white racism, and not only in the Jim Crow South. The big-city Democratic machines were based on white ethnic groups, and the northern Democrats posed as defenders of the white workers against African Americans who competed with the white ethnics for the hardest and least desirable jobs on the capitalist labor market.
The imprisonment of the Japanese-American population was carried out despite the fact that at no point during the war was there ever any realistic chance of a Japanese invasion of the United States. Indeed, the Japanese air force was unable to launch a single bombing raid against the U.S. mainland during the entire war. The famous bombing of the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor, located in the colony of Hawaii thousands of kilometers west of the U.S. mainland, was never repeated. In contrast, the U.S. launched a vicious bombing campaign against the Japanese islands that reduced its cities to rubble. It culminated in the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In contrast to the inability of Japan to invade the U.S., the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Germans under Nazi leadership was very real. If German imperialism had not invaded the Soviet Union, the deportations of national minorities that did so much violence to the nationality policy of Lenin and the Russian Revolution would never have occurred. Also, unlike the Palestinian people, who were exiled from their homeland to make room for Zionist Israel after the war, the exiled Soviet nationalities were absorbed in their new homes by the rapidly expanding Soviet planned economy.
Due to the imperialist exploitation and oppression of the Arab nation, their economies have not been able to absorb many of the displaced Palestinian people. As a result, many Palestinians are still housed in refugee camps 65 years after they were driven out of their homeland. Two whole generations of Palestinians have grown up in these refugee camps, and now a third generation is growing up knowing only refugee camps as homes. Nothing like this occurred in the Soviet Union.
Despite violations of the national rights of some nations arising from the Nazi invasion and a less sensitive policy toward the non-Russian nations in general that prevailed under Lenin’s successors, the position of the non-Russian nationalities as a whole was a colossal improvement compared to what existed in czarist times.
The continued survival of the autonomous republics today—which is why today’s republican Russia is a federation as opposed to a unitary state—however damaged they might be by the restoration of capitalism—is a remaining democratic—not socialist—conquest of the October Revolution. This does not change the fact that the condition of all non-Russian people, like is the case with the Russian people of the Russian Federation, has deteriorated tremendously since the destruction of the Soviet Union and the return of capitalism.
Still, even today it would be worth comparing the conditions and national rights of the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Federation with the closest U.S. equivalent of the Russian autonomous republics, the conditions of the Native nations—commonly called “American Indians”–of the United States in the “Indian reservations” that are supposed to allow the native nations to exercise their national rights within the framework of the United States of America.
In December 1991, the president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, declared the independence of Russia from the Soviet Union—an act that brought the Soviet Union to a formal end. Reactionary Russian nationalists had complained for years that the Russian nation was being oppressed by the non-Russian nationalities of the Soviet Union. This complaint echoes the claim of white racists in the U.S. that white Americans are being oppressed under the “tyranny” of African American President Barack Obama, who is supposedly putting the interests of the “Third World” people ahead of “real”—that is, white—Americans.
Does the existence of minority nationalities that face actual or potential oppression by the majority Russian nationality mean we should define the present-day Russian Federation as imperialist? After all, one of the reasons Lenin described czarist Russia in 1914 as imperialist was that Russia was a prison house of nations. Isn’t today’s Russian Federation, though on a much reduced scale, still a prison house of nations?
If we use the presence of minority nationalities and the possibility of their oppression by the majority nation to distinguish between imperialist and oppressed nations, it would be difficult to find non-imperialist countries anywhere in the world.
For example, pre-1949 China would be “imperialist,” since it had minority nationalities that the “Great Han” nationality either oppressed or potentially oppressed. Syria, Iraq and Iran all have a “Kurdish problem.” India, even when it was a formal colony of Great Britain, would have to be considered “imperialist” in its own right, because it is made up of many nationalities that speak many languages and have different religions than the Hindu nation proper. The well-known conflict between Hindus and Muslims is only one aspect of the extremely complex national question in India.
With the victory of the Muslim-baiting BJP under ultra-rightist Narendra Modi in this May’s election, which was greeted with great joy by the imperialist press, the national question is taking on a new sharpness in India. However, this does not mean that India is now an imperialist nation. Even the countries of Africa, the most oppressed countries in the world, contain many different nations within their borders. So by this logic they too would have to considered imperialist.
In conclusion, the national question is not a thing of the past for the Russian Federation, but it is also true that today’s Russian Federated Republic is a far cry from the prison house of nations that czarist Russia was.
No restoration of czarist imperialism
Has the military-feudal imperialism of pre-1917 Russia been restored? Except for the double-eagle coat of arms that is popular among today’s Russian nationalists, the answer is no. Present-day Russian landed property is landed property of a purely capitalist type, not of the feudal type. And even if reaction in Russia were to deepen to the point that one of the Romanov pretenders were to be restored to the throne—which remains a theoretical if highly unlikely possibility—the feudal order would still be beyond revival.
The reaction against the October Revolution, which had been building for decades, seems to have reached its peak under the regime of Boris Yeltsin. But the essence of Yeltsin’s policy was the restoration not of the old military-feudal order—the double eagle that was restored as the coat of arms of the Russian Federation aside—but of capitalism. Though Putin has followed a more nationalist policy than Yeltsin, Putin is also powerless to restore military-feudal imperialism of the czarist past, even if he personally wanted to do so. Therefore, though you might not realize it if your opinions are governed by the media of the real empire and the real jailer of nations in the contemporary world, the feudal-military imperialism of the czarist past has not been restored in present-day Russia, nor can it be.
A new modern Russian imperialism?
But what about a modernized Russian imperialism based on the rule of monopoly capitalism and finance capital? The development of a modern Russian imperialism based on monopoly capital ruled by finance capital—the owners of great concentrations of stocks, bonds and large bank deposits—cannot be excluded in advance as long as Russia remains capitalist. The same is true of all non-imperialist capitalist countries. We cannot rule out a future Indian imperialism, or even a future imperialism centered in sub-Saharan Africa.
Who knows, if capitalism were to last for a few more centuries, if the Congo with its rich mineral wealth might become the center of a global imperialist empire much like the U.S.A.—also rich in mineral wealth—is now. But today in the year 2014, despite the strides that capitalism is making in Africa, we are very far from that. Indeed, in the U.S. of 2014, anybody fantasizing about a possiblefuture Congolese world imperialist empire would be guilty of fanning the flames of racist hysteria.
Crises, monopoly capitalism and the rise of finance capital
Our study of crises and the industrial cycle, the main topic of this blog, has demonstrated that a basic contradiction of capitalism is its ability to raise the level of industrial production faster than markets for the growing quantity of commodities it must produce can expand. Therefore, the competition among the many capitals capitalism must consist of is much like the children’s game of musical chairs. The more capitalism develops the fewer independent capitals remain. Capital is therefore doomed to become more centralized until its further existence becomes impossible.
We also saw that each successive crisis of overproduction, beginning with the first one in 1825, causes great amounts of money to fall out of circulation and accumulate as huge idle hoards in the banks. We certainly see this today in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Since the essence of capitalism is M—C—M’, the huge amount of idle money created by each successive crisis burns holes in the collective pocket of the capitalist class. Inevitably, the great amount of money—potential capital—released by successive crises of overproduction seeks investment. Much of the money driven out of the channels of circulation in each successive crisis is transformed into money loan capital M—M’.
In this way, modern finance capital develops. Within about 75 years—a human lifetime—after the crisis of 1825, the capitalism of free competition had been transformed into monopoly capitalism-imperialism, with the world almost completely divided up among a handful of imperialist powers. Monopoly capitalism has produced centralized “trusts”–which is the form proper to a centralized planned socialist production—side by side with continued free competition in other sectors of the economy. Over time, from crisis to crisis, the element of monopoly grows stronger while free competition, though it doesn’t disappear, recedes.
Historically speaking, the monopolist or imperialist phase of capitalism is the first stage in the transformation of capitalism based on private property and free competition into the planned communist economy of the associated producers.
Monopoly capitalism is therefore the final stage of capitalism, though like all social phenomena imperialism passes through a number of phases of its own. Under all stages of imperialism, however, a few countries emerge that are very rich in finance capital that exploit other countries that are relatively poor in it. To measure how rich a country is in finance capital, we must take into account not only the absolute quantity of finance capital—measured like all forms of wealth under the capitalist mode of production in money, or units of weights of gold bullion representing in turn quantities of abstract human labor measured by some unit of time—but also its magnitude relative to the population of the country.
The countries that are richest in finance capital—not necessarily richest in industrial capital—are the imperialist countries that economically exploit all other capitalist countries in the world.
Finance capital versus other forms of capital
Under the old capitalism of free competition that reached its highest level of development in Britain during the first three-quarters of the 19th century, businesses were owned by individuals or by small groups of partners. Individual owners of ongoing businesses often speak of “my employees” or “my workers” or “my hands,” as though they actually own their workers outright, though under capitalism they only own their purchased labor power.
What is today called investment banking was just developing in 19th-century Britain and was generally conducted by firms that were separate from those conducting commercial banking. The commercial banks were relatively small-scale enterprises—humble middlemen, as Lenin called them—a far cry from the gigantic universal banks that dominate capitalism today. A business owned by a single “boss” or a small group of partners was typical of the old industrial capitalism of the age of free competition. These relations can still be found in those sectors of the present-day capitalist economy where production is carried out on a relatively small scale.
The situation is quite different with those capitalists who own only finance capital—which I, following Marx and Engels, have called money capitalists in this blog. The bank commercials talk about making your money work for you. But whoever saw a gold bar, dollar bill or checkable bank deposit actually work? What the bank is really saying to the “moneyed public”–owners of usually small amounts of “moneyed” capital—is that by converting their money savings into capital the bank will arrange to have the surplus value-producing working class work a certain number of hours for its customers free of charge. It is only in this sense that money “works.”
Nowadays, stocks, bonds and money market instruments are often owned by mutual funds managed by professional money managers. The individual owners of the mutual fund shares often don’t directly own such assets. The reason that mutual funds are so popular is that intelligent “stock picking” is difficult for small “investors.” Small, and sometimes not so small, individual money capitalists lack the knowledge to distinguish which stocks are “overvalued” on the stock market from those that are “undervalued.” While the stock market is often wrong about the value of stocks, its participants collectively are more informed than most individual capitalists.
A mutual fund embodies the banking principle. Individuals who have surplus money or savings do not have the ability to individually lend their surplus money, so they deposit it in a bank that does the lending and shares the interest income with its depositors. A mutual fund applies this principle to stocks, bonds, money market funds and so on. Very often the mutual funds are actually owned by large universal banks.
The same is true of pension funds. A group of employees, themselves not capitalists, save for their retirement. A certain amount of their salaries or wages is set aside and invested. But the employees are in no position to know what to invest their retirement savings in. Therefore, their savings are pooled and put under the control of a professional money manager who is knowledgeable, or supposedly knowledgeable, and in a position to invest the savings more or less intelligently.
One of the changes in monopoly capitalism since Lenin’s day is that back then the great mass of corporate shares was still owned and managed by individuals. Today, in contrast, the great mass of stocks, bonds and other securities is managed by institutional investors such as bank-managed trust funds, pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, insurance companies and money market funds. These institutions, in turn, are increasingly owned or controlled by the few universal banks. In this way, “moneyed capital” is transformed into finance capital controlled by a few gigantic banking institutions.
In a country rich in finance capital, there is in addition to the extremely rich people found in all capitalist countries—for example, the Russian and Ukrainian “oligarchs”–there is a large “middle class” of “modest savers.” This middle class comes to include the more privileged upper levels of the working class, who may own some mutual funds or be beneficiaries of pension funds through various job-related retirement plans.
It is quite possible for a country to be poor in finance capital even if it is relatively rich in industrial capital. For example, a large number of factories, mines, and large-scale capitalist farms might be located in such a country, making it rich in industrial capital. Britain is the classic example of a country that in the age of free competition was rich in industrial capital—it was the workshop of the world—while today Britain is not so rich in industrial capital but very rich in finance capital.
The U.S. has evolved in the same direction. While a century ago the U.S. was very rich in industrial capital, today de-industrialization has vastly reduced the relative wealth of the U.S. in industrial capital. However, the U.S. remains very much number one in finance capital.
Not all forms of monetary savings represent finance capital. In India and to a certain extent China, savings often consist of gold jewelry—essentially money material, gold bullion—that is shaped into jewelry. Savings in this form do not represent finance capital or capital in any form. The mere ownership of gold bullion—money—does not entitle its owner to an atom of surplus value. Generally, oppressed countries, with their underdeveloped banking systems, are poor in finance capital. A relatively large amount of savings are held in the form of hoarded money that is not converted into capital. In the more developed countries, “savings” are held in banks, mutual funds, money market funds, and so on. This is one of the reasons why empirical-minded Keynes, who served in his youth as a colonial official in India, considered gold a “barbarous relic.”
Unlike hoarded gold, each unit of finance capital—a share in a mutual fund, hedge fund, or certificate of deposit issued by a bank—is a claim on a definite quantum of the total surplus value produced by the global working class. If you own a portion of finance capital in whatever form, you have a certain percentage of the world’s wage slaves working for you. The ownership of this “moneyed capital” is in its great mass centralized in the hands of financial institutions concentrated in certain countries. The countries that are rich in finance capital exploit the countries that are poor in finance capital.
Closely related to finance capital is wealth in real estate. Real estate is a combination of landed property and the buildings built on top of it. Though not identical to finance capital, real estate is closely bound up with finance capital. The richer a country is in terms of finance capital the more the price of landed property is inflated in the country and therefore the more “valuable”–in terms of the amount of money it exchanges for on the market. Ultimately, the rising value of real estate originates in the unpaid labor of the global working class.
Therefore, how rich a country is in finance capital—or what amounts to the same thing, the extent to which a country is an exploiter or exploited country—will have a profound effect on the class struggle and the politics of the country, since large sections of the upper levels of the working class can own small amounts of finance capital, or are beneficiaries of pension funds, own stocks and bonds through Individual Retirement Accounts, or hold shares in mutual funds.
These more privileged workers don’t control the tiny quantities of finance capital they own and don’t own enough capital to be capitalists proper, because they cannot live off their interest or dividend income. They all the same do appropriate a certain quantity, if only a very small quantity, of the surplus value produced by the workers of the oppressed countries, as well as by the productive (of surplus value) workers of their own country.
This is one of the methods by which imperialism bribes the upper layer of the working class and the white-collar “employees.” In the exploited countries, the working class is more radical, and national liberation movements against exploitation of the nation tend to become the ally of the working-class movement. In contrast, the richer a country is in finance capital, the more it is an exploiter country, the more powerful reactionary nationalism becomes and the more “national feelings” become the ally of the exploiters.
However, the more imperialism is weakened by the resistance of the oppressed nations, the weaker imperialism becomes and the more the way is opened to radicalization of the working class and even the middle class. For example, U.S. society was thrown into profound turmoil by the resistance of the Vietnamese nation in the 1960s and early 1970s.
The anti-war movements in the imperialist countries are therefore not a detour in the “real” class struggle—the trade union struggle for higher wages, shorter hours and better conditions—but are an inevitable form that class struggle must take in the imperialist countries due to the basic economic nature of imperialism itself.
Because of the long-term trend toward concentration and centralization of capital, the real social base of the monopoly capitalist rulers narrows over time. In order to defend its position as ruling class as well as its empire, monopoly capitalism-imperialism is obliged to support all reactionary trends and forces in the world—racism, misogyny, homophobia, neo-fascism, absolute monarchies, police states and systems of universal surveillance. This is why in Lenin’s words imperialism means “reaction all along the line.”
The other side is that every democratic trend or movement both in the imperialist countries themselves as well as the oppressed countries comes into conflict with monopoly capitalism-imperialism.
Is China about to become the world’s leading imperialist nation? It has been reported that by the end of the current year—2014—the GDP of China according to the purchasing power parity—taking into account the differing price levels in different countries—will exceed that of the United States. (5) Already, China’s GDP on this basis is reported to exceed the GDP of Japan. Does this mean that China in this very year is in the process of replacing the United States as the world’s leading imperialist nation? And isn’t India emerging as a leading imperialist nation—admittedly not quite on the scale of “imperialist” China—in its own right eclipsing Japan?
Before we jump to these conclusions, we have to take certain things into account. The population of present-day China is about three times that of the United States. China, therefore, remains relatively poor in industrial capital relative to the United States.
But imperialism, as we have seen above, is not based on the relative level of industrial capital but of finance capital. If I as a citizen of the United States own X amount of finance capital in stocks, bonds and interest-bearing bank deposits, this doesn’t mean that I am entitled to X amount of surplus value produced by the workers of the United States. No, I am entitled to X amount of surplus value produced by the workers of the entire world.
Russian banks
What is the relative position of Russian banks today? If Russia today is not only capitalist, which it indeed is, but also imperialist, we would expect Russian banks to be increasingly prominent in the world, since the “great” universal banks are the most important organizations of finance capital. The publication Global Finance lists the world’s 50 biggest banks as of 2012 in terms of assets. Despite the size and natural wealth of Russia, not a single Russian bank appears on the list.
According to the Jan. 31, 2014, Wall Street Journal, based on assets of the world’s 100 biggest banks, only two Russian banks, OAO Sherbank and OAO VTB, appear. They come in at number 54 and 94, respectively. Sherbank evolved from the old Soviet savings bank system—in Russian, Sherbank means savings bank. Even today 51 percent of its stock is owned by the Russian central bank, which itself is state owned. According to Wikipedia, the Russian Federation state owns 60.9 percent of OAO VTB. While both banks today are universal banks, they are still quasi—state enterprises.
In and of itself, the lack of a single Russian bank in the top 50 banks, and only two among the top 100, is suggestive but not decisive. In today’s world, banking is highly centralized, and in many of the smaller imperialist countries all banking is foreign owned—though Russia is hardly a small country.
In addition, Russia is not a member of NATO or the European Union and is generally seen as far more independent of the U.S. than imperialist countries of “the West” such as the countries of Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Since Russian capitalist “imperialism” would have developed only over the last 25 years from its very modest roots in the pre-perestroika Soviet “second economy,” it would be expected to be sharply counter-posed to the established imperialism of the U.S.-centered world empire.
Russia would therefore be expected to be evolving its own gigantic banking institutions. Indeed, China is developing some very large banks, which does indicate a certain development of finance capital in that country, though the operation of these banks remains so far largely confined to China. Moreover, China as a whole, as we will see below, is still far too poor in finance capital to be considered anything close to being an imperialist country in its own right.
Russia, in contrast, which has not seen anything approaching the growth of industrial capital that China has experienced over the last quarter of a century, has yet to develop a single bank, even a state-owned bank, that ranks in the world’s top 50 banks.
The other features that Lenin took into account in distinguishing between imperialist countries and the exploited countries are less significant than they were in 1914, because there has been a century of capitalist development that has greatly reduced the weight of pre-capitalist modes of production and political forms compared to 1914.
For example, when Lenin wrote “Imperialism” in 1916, two years after World War I had begun and while it was still raging without a decisive outcome, the czarist military-feudal imperialism, though in its death agony, was still very much in existence and there was no way of knowing how long it would be able to hang on. Rapidly industrializing but relative to Britain, the U.S. and Germany still under-industrialized, Japan was still poor in finance capital. But Japan was using its highly developed military machine to seize colonies. Japan had seized Taiwan in a war against China in 1895, and Korea in 1910. Therefore, Lenin ranked Japan among the imperialist powers despite its relative poverty in finance capital.
Imperialism in 2014 compared to imperialism in 1914
If you have to describe the difference between the imperialism of 1914 and the imperialism of 2014 in one word, it would be NATO. Unlike in 1914, there is one military machine, or “czar,” that dominates the imperialist world. And its roots are not in feudal but purely capitalist relations. This machine includes the armed forces not only of the United States but also of other countries in the NATO “alliance,” including Britain, Germany, France and, though formally part of a separate security treaty, Japan as well. It also includes the armed forces of many of the “lesser” imperialist countries such as Canada and the smaller countries of Western Europe as well as, now, Eastern Europe.
The armed forces of many, though not all, oppressed nations are thoroughly controlled by the global military machine headquartered in the Pentagon and commanded by the White House. The situation where the “czar” in the White House dominates the world militarily will not last forever. Indeed, the law of uneven development undermines it, but it is very much the situation in the world of 2014.
If imperialism is fated to last for decades more, it will inevitably change in the future just as it has changed over the century that followed the outbreak of the great war in August 1914. Our analysis of imperialism in 2014 centered on a “czar” in the White House will then be quite out of date, much as Lenin’s writings on Russian imperialism are out of today. But in order to orient ourselves correctly in 2014, our “homeland in time,” so to speak, we have to understand the world we are living in and not a purely speculative world that may or may not come into existence at some point in the future.
The real imperialist countries
The imperialism of 1914 was still intermixed with the imperialism of pre-capitalist origins. While this was most evident in czarist Russia, it also characterized the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire, itself a relic of the medieval Holy Roman Empire of the German people. Like czarist Russia, Austria-Hungary was a prison house of nations—though on a somewhat smaller scale than its czarist counterpart.
Today’s imperialism, by contrast, is pretty much purged of the still significant pre-capitalist elements that characterized the imperialism of 1914. A century of capitalist development, two world wars, successive crises of overproduction, including the super-crisis of 1929-33, and not least of all the revolutions of the 20th century, including the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Chinese Revolution of 1949, though they have not yet led to the downfall of imperialism have largely purged it of the pre-capitalist elements that were still significant in 1914.
Finance capital the decisive factor
This brings us to the question of finance capital. The Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2012 divides the countries of the world into four categories according to wealth—not income—per adult. This is a rough proxy for the average amount of finance capital that is owned by individuals in each country, since finance capital—stocks, bonds, money market funds and bank accounts—form the great bulk of wealth in today’s world.
This is true despite the fact that ownership of finance capital is anything but even within the imperialist countries themselves. The top group, with over U.S. $100,000 average wealth per adult, pretty much defines the imperialist countries, including the “white colony” of Israel. These countries are the United States—no surprise here—Canada, all the countries of Western Europe with the exception of Portugal but none of the East European countries. Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden are also among the countries in the top group. These countries in the economic sense are exploiting countries and are therefore imperialist countries.
Only a few countries in this $100,000 plus club don’t quite fit in the traditional list of imperialist countries. Leaving aside some Arab oil monarchies, which are hardly countries in any real sense, we find Taiwan. However, Taiwan is not really a country either but a part of China that is a neo-colony of the United States. There is also the case of Ireland, a country oppressed and exploited for centuries by Great Britain, which is listed by Credit Suisse in the $100,000 plus group. Significantly, however, South Korea does not belong to this top group.
With these few qualifications, Credit Suisse’s list of countries with average adult wealth exceeding $100,000 is a list of real imperialist countries. The other feature that all countries in this group have in common is that they are all allied with—really satellites of—a single country, the United States of America.
The second group of countries have an average wealth level of between $25,000 and $100,000 per adult. In this group, we find Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Uruguay, Saudi Arabia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Baltic states, Greece, Turkey, Portugal, and a few Arab oil monarchies that are not really countries in the usual sense. Most of these countries are semi- or neo-colonies. Perhaps only Portugal, which had a colonial empire in Africa until the 1970s, might be considered imperialist.
The third group of countries, very poor in finance capital, includes most of the Latin American countries, Brazil, Argentina and so on; South Africa; the countries of North Africa; most of the East European countries, including Poland and Russia; China; and Indonesia. These countries are most certainly not imperialist. And this is where we find China despite its remarkable industrial progress over the last quarter of a century, completely unmatched by Russia. Quite the contrary. None of the countries is this category can remotely be considered imperialist.
Finally, we have the countries that are poorest in finance capital. These include the countries of central Africa; India, despite its industrial progress; Vietnam; Bolivia and Guyana in South America; and Ukraine. Though Ukraine was among the richest areas of the Soviet Union, it now is among the countries that are poorest in finance capital.
No Russian imperialism
If we use the criterion of an independently powerful military machine, there is really only one imperialist power, or “czar,” in today’s world, the United States of America. If we use the criterion of countries that are rich in finance capital—that is, share in the exploitation of the countries of the world, despite their being military and political satellites of the U.S., we do not find Russia or for that matter China among them. Nor do we find Russia or China in the second category. In terms of finance capital, Russia belongs definitely to countries that are in the lower half of the countries that are definitely not imperialist. Today’s Russia is very far indeed from becoming an imperialist country, and if anything is in danger of falling into the fourth tier where Ukraine already is.
Some other arguments that Russia is imperialist
Supporters of the view that Russia is imperialist point to Russia’s status as a “great power.” Czarist Russia was considered a great power in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, and the Soviet Union was a “superpower” along with the U.S. during the Cold War. So, the argument goes, today’s Russian Federation must also be ranked as a great power, if not a superpower. And aren’t great powers imperialist?
This argument, as we have seen above, is based on unhistorical analogies where completely different epochs are lumped together. But what about Russia’s missiles and nuclear weapons that are inherited not from the czarist Russia of 1914 but from the Soviet Union of the late 20th century? Though Russia’s nuclear capacity has perhaps been degraded since the destruction of Soviet power, it still appears to be capable of turning the world, including the United States, into radioactive dust. Therefore, isn’t this proof that present-day Russia is imperialist?
During the Cold War, it gradually became evident that nuclear weapons are extremely dangerous to use in modern warfare. Even if a nuclear power launched a major nuclear attack against a non-nuclear country, the environmental consequences of using such a weapon would devastate the attacking country even in the absence of any counterattack. Mother nature herself would launch a devastating counterattack. Russia’s ability to destroy the United States with nuclear weapons at the price of destroying Russia itself, even if the U.S. did not counterattack, doesn’t make Russia an imperialist country.
The role of the semi-state-owned Gazprom oil and gas company is sometimes cited as evidence that Russia is an imperialist country. However, virtually all oil-rich countries that are not imperialist themselves such as Mexico, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia have similar oil companies. Indeed, Gazprom is evidence that Russia is not imperialist. It underlines that Russia is a supplier of raw materials, the historical role of oppressed, not imperialist, countries.
Gazprom itself is far from the world’s biggest state or quasi-state oil company. Its wealth is exceeded by among others the Iranian National Oil Company and the state oil companies of Venezuela and Nigeria. If Russia is imperialist because of Gazprom, so are Venezuela, Nigeria and Iran.
By the eve of perestroika 30 years ago, the Soviet Union led the world in the basic branches of industry—though not in consumer goods. Not surprisingly, today capitalist Russia has had some success in exporting steel, machine tools and military commodities. Russia was in 2013 number five when it comes to steel production, a far cry from the number one position the Soviet Union enjoyed just before perestroika.
The current number one country is the People’s Republic of China while Russia has fallen below India, which is number four. The United States, which prior to the Soviet Union was the world’s leading steel producer, is now number three. In 2013, Germany, a much smaller country than China, Russia or the U.S. was number seven.
In 1914, steel production, the “heart” of heavy industry, was concentrated in the imperialist countries. Today there is a growing trend for steel production to be “farmed out” to non-imperialist countries such China and India. Considering these factors, Russia’s relatively high rank as the number five steel producer in 2007 hardly makes it imperialist.
The verdict is in
During the last several decades of the Soviet Union, economists inspired by neo-classical marginalism, and especially the Austrian school, developed a critique of the Soviet economy from a marginalist perspective. The economists who were to become the architects of perestroika were greatly influenced by such figures as Ludwig von Mises, Frederich von Hayek and Milton Friedman.
All the problems faced by the Soviet economy, and of course there were many, were blamed by these economists on central planning. The solution proposed by these “radical-reformers,” as they were called, was a thoroughgoing decentralization of the economy, partial or complete de-collectivization of agriculture, the abolition of the state monopoly of foreign trade, and a convertible ruble (6).
Only in this way, these economists argued, could the law of value operate in the Soviet economy and full advantage be taken of the “levers” of personal material interest and commodity-money relations. Though these ideas were sometimes dubbed “market socialism,” in reality, taken in their general tendency, they were incompatible with building socialism. In the end, to fully carry out this program, it was necessary to restore private property in the means of production. While earlier Soviet governments had attempted to carry out bits and pieces of the “reform program,” the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev embraced the reform program wholeheartedly.
This “experiment” has been going on now for more than two decades—actually since 1989, when Gorbachev’s “radical” economic reforms began to be put into effect in earnest. If marginalist theory is correct, whether in its neoclassical or Austrian versions, the economies of the former Soviet nations freed from the “fetters” of centralized planning and state ownership should have thrived.
But if the Marxist critique of bourgeois political economy is correct, the transition from a higher to a lower mode of production would be expected to lead to a lowering of the productive forces and general social and political catastrophe. If neither theory is fully correct and the truth is somewhere in between, then we would expect to see a kind of intermediate result. The results of the experiment are now in. What are they?
The verdict of Konstantinovka, Ukraine
The British Guardian reported May 8, 2014: “Unlike many of the coal-mining towns, “Konstantinovka has always been known for its glass production. At their peak, during the Soviet period, the town’s three glass factories employed more than 15,000 people between them…. In the late 1980s [just before Gorbachev’s “radical” perestrokia reforms began to bite—SW] the factories produced over 150m glass bottles a year, to package sweet Crimean imitation champagne and send them far and wide to celebrate birthdays and weddings across the Soviet Union.”
That was then. But now?
“Now, the factories lie in ruins around the outskirts of town. Just a few workshops are still operational, employing a mere 600 people. Even the centre of town is decaying. The asphalt on the roads is cracked, and huge weeds sprout across the pavements. The stone models of a bright yellow camel and of Snow White and the seven dwarfs in the central park look somewhat sinister, surrounded by knee-high grass that has not been cut for months.”
The Guardian quotes a local politician as observing: “Nothing new has been built, nothing has been modernized. Many people are upset and angry with their fate.”
Remember, the supporters of perestroika a quarter of century ago claimed that their “radical economic reforms” were necessary to “reinvigorate” the Soviet economy and ensure its modernization, which was supposedly being blocked by the “fetters” of centralized planning. Now we can see what the effects of this “reinvigoration” have been for the town of Konstantinovka in Ukraine. And Konstantinovka’s results are not atypical but typical, not only for Ukraine but throughout the former Soviet Union.
A few “oligarchs”–the new capitalist class that stole the factories, mines and farms that used to belong to the workers and peasants–have indeed become very rich. For them and their hangers-on—the hangers-on are much fewer in Russia, Ukraine and the other ex-Soviet nations than in the real imperialist countries—perestroika and the even more “radical” post-perestroika policies have indeed been a great success. Their wealth has grown far beyond what would have been possible even in the final days of the regime of Leonid Brezhnev with its growing “second economy.” But for the great majority of the Ukrainian people and the peoples of all the former Soviet nations, the results have been an unbridled disaster.
These results, just like the Great Recession, show how false are the ideas of marginalism. Remember, the marginalists of both the neoclassical and Austrian schools claim that the value of commodities arises from their scarcity relative to the wants of consumers and not by the quantity of labor socially necessary to produce them. Marginalism holds, in contrast to both Marx and the classical economists, that “interest”–surplus value—arises from the value produced by scarce capital and not the unpaid labor of the workers.
Every crisis that has occurred in the history of capitalism, from the crisis of 1825 to the crisis of 2008, is a refutation in life of marginalism. The unprecedented economic, social and political disasters in the former Soviet Union, including the current crisis in Ukraine, is also a living refutation of marginalist theory and a confirmation of the work of Karl Marx. Unfortunately, the world socialist revolution needed the whip of this counterrevolution to demonstrate to great numbers of people in life, not just theory, just how false the claims of marginalism are compared to the economic science of Karl Marx.
And the solution
Paul Goble in the April 24, 2014, edition of Window on Eurasia reported: “As Aleksey Verkhoyantsev of ‘Svobodnaya pressa’ noted yesterday, ‘experts have long predicted that the political crisis in Ukraine would soon acquire a social dimension and that the mixing of these two elements ‘could lead to unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable consequences'”.
What consequences, for example? “Boris Shmelyov, an expert at the Moscow Institute of Economics and a professor at the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy,” Goble continues, “told Verkhoyantsev that one of the reasons for this is that ‘for the majority of citizens of Ukraine living in the South-East, the term “federalization” is not very well understood.’”
Verkhoyantsev asked Professor Shemlyov whether the growing anger of the miners and other workers would lead to demands to nationalize these enterprises—essentially return them to their rightful owners who built them—the workers. Shemlyov replied that there “is not only the increasing collapse of Ukrainian statehood and the sharpening of regional conflicts in Ukraine. We are seeing the destruction of that liberal-oligarchic [my emphasis—SW] model of social-economic development on which Ukraine had been developing in recent years.”
The “liberal-oligarchic model” is, of course, the restoration of capitalism, and the “recent years” are essentially the last 25 years from 1989 onward. And this “model of development” applies not only to Ukraine but to Russia itself, as well as the other former Soviet countries.
What many of the workers involved in the anti-Maidan movement want is not simply the reversal of the February coup in Kiev. What they really want is the restoration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This is shown by the Soviet flags that compete with the tri-color flags of the bourgeois Russian Republic and the double eagles of the Russian nationalists, the complaints of Western correspondents about widespread “Soviet nostalgia,” and the defense of the statues of Lenin by the people of eastern Ukraine. Lenin is above all the symbol of the October Revolution, the symbol of socialist revolution so hated by the Euro-Maidans but defended by the anti-Maidan movement.
And this is why the anti-Maidan movement is such a threat not only to imperialism but to Russian capitalists as well and their representative Vladimir Putin. This explains why Moscow is doing everything it can to cool down the movement. Putin surprised the Western imperialist journalists who had been painting him as a new Hitler and Russia as the Third Reich when he announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Ukrainian border, indicated support for the May 25 elections that the Kiev junta organized in order to claim some legitimacy, as well as his unsuccessful attempt to convince the People’s Republics to postpone their own May 11 referendum on autonomy from the Kiev coup government.
The only real solution to the Ukraine crisis is the restoration of workers’ power and workers’ ownership of the means of production through a revived Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which itself must inevitably be part of a still broader movement that will ultimately involve the workers of the entire world.
In this sense, both the struggles of the workers in Ukraine against the Kiev coup and the mid-May worldwide actions by fast food workers point in the same direction. Therein lies the solution not only to the crisis in Ukraine but to the many other crises ranging from chronic mass unemployment to global warming that confront us today.
________
1 Extreme right-wing sentiment in Ukraine is largely centered in the province of Galicia. Before World War I, Galicia, an agricultural region with little industry, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire rather than the Czarist Empire. After World War I and the Russian Revolution, it was captured by Polish Marshal Josef Pilsudski and became part of what was in effect a Polish empire—the part of pre-World War II Poland that expanded beyond ethnic Poland. This empire included in addition to Galicia, parts of Byelorussia as well as parts of defeated Germany.
In Galicia, the landlords were Polish but the peasantry was of Ukrainian nationality. The Polish landlords often employed Jews to act as their agents in their dealings with the peasantry. The result of these feudal-like relations, which persisted until 1939, was that both anti-Polish and anti-Jewish sentiments were strong in Galicia among the Ukrainian peasant masses. For these historical reasons, the region is today the primary base for the far right in Ukrainian politics. (back)
2 The “far left” refers to those political currents that grew out of the radical student movement in Western Europe of the late 1960s that consider themselves to the left of the traditional Communist Parties. This “far left” has been historically divided between various anarchist, Trotskyist and Maoist currents. (back)
3 In this blog, I have developed the concept of satellite imperialist states. These states are subordinate to the “international institutions”–NATO, the World Trade Organization, and the U.S. dollar-centered international monetary system—that are in every case dominated by the United States of America. But like the United States, and unlike the oppressed countries, they share in the super-profits generated by imperialism and are in a position to bribe their more privileged workers and support a large middle class of “white collar” employees who own a certain amount of “moneyed capital” and the land under their own homes. However, their income from capital and land is not enough to live on. So they have to sell their labor power to make up the difference. Unlike the traditional petty bourgeoisie, these people do not own their own businesses. In imperialist countries, these middle strata are quite sizable and form the social base for the pro-imperialist politics that dominate these countries.
In 1914, however, the system of “satellite imperialisms” was not nearly as developed as it is today—two world wars later. However, in his “Imperialism,” Lenin refers to the relationship between Britain and Portugal, which in some ways formed a prototype of today’s satellite imperialist countries.
Lenin wrote: “A somewhat different form of financial and diplomatic dependence, accompanied by political independence, is presented by Portugal. Portugal is an independent sovereign state, but actually, for more than two hundred years, since the war of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), it has been a British protectorate. Great Britain has protected Portugal and her colonies in order to fortify her own positions in the fight against her rivals, Spain and France. In return Great Britain has received commercial privileges, preferential conditions for importing goods and especially capital into Portugal and the Portuguese colonies, the right to use the ports and islands of Portugal, her telegraph cables, etc., etc. Relations of this kind have always existed between big and little states, but in the epoch of capitalist imperialism they become a general system, they form part of the sum total of ‘divide the world’ relations and become links in the chain of operations of world finance capital.”
The difference in 2014 compared to 1914 or 1916 when Lenin was writing is that relative to the United States of America all the other imperialist nations are “little states.” (back)
4 The various “National Socialist” or neo-Nazi organizations that are active in the United States often display the “stars and bars” side by side with the swastika and other Nazi symbols. (back)
5 In the non-imperialist countries with largely capitalist economies such as China and India, prices when measured in terms of a given currency like the U.S. dollar—and ultimately weights of gold bullion—the scientific definition of price, including the price of the commodity labor power, are lower than in the imperialist countries. For example, assuming that the the GDP of China exceeds the GDP of the United States later this year or shortly thereafter in terms of purchasing power parity, the U.S. GDP in absolute, not per-capita, terms will still be considerably smaller in terms of money.
Money and money alone is the measure of social wealth under the capitalist mode of production. As regular readers of this blog should know, gold as the money commodity is the independent form of exchange value. And exchange value, not use value, dominates in the world capitalist economy. Therefore, notwithstanding its remarkable industrial progress of the last quarter of a century, China is still very far from being an imperialist power in its own right. And what is true of China is all the more true of Russia, which has not made the industrial progress that China has made over the last 25 years since “radical perestroika” was launched. Quite the contrary! (back)
6 A convertible ruble in the sense that the ruble could be freely bought and sold by private individuals in exchange for other currencies such as the U.S. dollar. It does not mean convertibility into gold at a fixed rate. In this true sense of convertibility, no currency is convertible today nor has been since since August 1971 when what was left of the dollar’s convertibility into gold was suspended by a decree of U.S. President Richard Nixon. (back)
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The first and most important characteristic of the Russian empire, says Nikolski, has always been “the maximization of territorial expansion for the realization of economic and political interests, as one of the most important principles of state policy” [1]. This expansion was the result of the permanent and overwhelming predominance of the extensive development of Russia over its intensive development: the predominance of the absolute exploitation of the direct producers over their relative exploitation, that is to say over one based on the increase in labour productivity.
“The Russian Empire was called “the prison of peoples”. We know today that it was not only the state of the Romanovs which deserved this description”, wrote Mikhail Pokrovsky, the greatest Bolshevik historian. He demonstrated that the Grand Duchy of Moscow (1263-1547) and the Tsardom of Russia (1547-1721) were already “prisons of peoples” and that these states were built on the corpses of the inorodtsy, the non-Russian indigenous peoples. “It is doubtful whether the fact that in the veins of the Great Russians there runs 80 per cent of their blood is a consolation for those who survived. Only the complete destruction of Great Russian oppression by this force which fought and is still fighting against all oppression, could be a form of compensation for all their sufferings” [2]. These words of Pokrovsky were published in 1933, just after his death and shortly before, at the request of Stalin, in the historic Bolshevik formula “Russia - prison of peoples”, the first word was replaced by another one: Tsarism. Subsequently the Stalinist regime stigmatized the scientific work of Pokrovsky as “an anti-Marxist conception” of the history of Russia [3].
Military-feudal imperialism
Over the centuries, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the peoples who were conquered and annexed by Russia suffered three successive forms of Russian imperialist domination. “Military-feudal imperialism”, thus named by Lenin, was the first. It is not uninteresting to discuss what mode of exploitation predominated in it: feudal or tributary, or again, as Yuri Semenov prefers, “politary” [4]. This debate is brought up to the present by the most recent research of Alexander Etkind. It flows from this that it was colonial modes of exploitation that were then dominant: “the Russian Empire was a great colonial system both at its distant frontiers and its dark heartlands”, “a colonial empire alongside those of Britain or Austria, and a colonized territory like Congo or the West Indies”. The key point is that “expanding into huge spaces, Russia colonized its own people. This was the process of internal colonization, the secondary colonization of one’s own territory.”
It is for this reason, says Etkind, that we need “an understanding of Russian imperialism as an internal, and not only external, affair” [5]. Serfdom - generalized by law in 1649 – had there a character that was just as colonial as black slavery in North America, but it concerned Great-Russian peasants as well as others, considered by Tsarism as “Russian”: the “Little Russian” (Ukrainian) and Belarussian peasants. Etkind draws attention to the fact that even in Great Russia, peasant insurrections had an anti-colonial character, and that the wars by which the empire crushed these revolts were colonial. Paradoxically, the imperial centre of Russia was at the same time an internal colonial periphery, within which the exploitation and oppression of the popular masses were more severe than in many conquered and annexed peripheries.
When “capitalist imperialism of the latest type” appeared, Lenin wrote that in the Tsarist empire it was “enmeshed, so to speak, in a particularly close network of pre-capitalist relations” - so close that “in general, military-feudal imperialism is predominant in Russia”. Therefore, he wrote, “in Russia the monopoly of military power, immense territory, or special facilities for pillaging non-Russian indigenous peoples, China, etc., partly complements, partly substitutes the monopoly of modern, up-to-date finance capital” [6]. At the same time, as the least developed imperialism among the six major powers, it was only a sub-imperialism. As Trotsky noted, “Russia paid in this way for her right to be an ally of advanced countries, to import capital and pay interest on it – that is, essentially, for her right to be a privileged colony of her allies – but at the same time for her right to oppress and rob Turkey, Persia, Galicia, and in general the countries weaker and more backward than herself. The twofold imperialism of the Russian bourgeoisie had basically the character of an agency for other mightier world powers” [7].
No decolonization without separation
It was precisely the powerful extra-economic monopolies mentioned by Lenin that guaranteed the continuity of Russian imperialism after the overthrow of capitalism in Russia by the October Revolution. Contrary to previous statements by Lenin, that the norm of the socialist revolution would be the independence of the colonies, only the colonies that the expansion of the Russian Revolution had not reached, or which rejected it, separated from Russia. In many peripheral regions, its expansion had the character of a “colonial revolution” led by Russian settlers and soldiers without the participation of the oppressed peoples, indeed even with the maintenance of the existing colonial relationships. Georgi Safarov described such an unfolding of the revolution in Turkestan [8]. Elsewhere, it had the character of military conquest, and some Bolsheviks (Mikhail Tukhachevsky) quickly concocted a militarist theory of the “revolution from without” [9].
The history of Soviet Russia has negated the opinion of the Bolsheviks, according to which with the overthrow of capitalism the relations of colonial domination of some peoples over others would disappear and that consequently these peoples could, or even should, remain within the framework of a single state. The “imperialist economism”, denying the right of peoples to self-determination, which (criticized by Lenin) was spreading among the Russian Bolsheviks, was in an extreme manifestation of this. In reality, it is exactly the opposite: the state separation of an oppressed people is the precondition for the destruction of colonial relations, although it does not guarantee it. Vasyl Shakhrai, Bolshevik activist of the Ukrainian revolution, had already understood this in 1918 and he publicly polemicised with Lenin on this question [10]. Many other non-Russian Communists understood it then, especially the leader of the Tatar revolution, Mirsaid Sultan Galiev. He was the first communist to be removed from public political life at the demand of Stalin, in 1923.
In reality, the imperialism based on extra-economic monopolies mentioned by Lenin reproduced itself in many ways, spontaneously and unnoticed, even when it lost its specifically capitalist base. It was for this reason, as Trotsky demonstrated, that in the 1920s Stalin “became the vector of the Great-Russian bureaucratic oppression” and quickly “secured advantages for Great-Russian bureaucratic imperialism” [11]. With the establishment of the Stalinist regime, there was the restoration of the imperialist domination of Russia over all these peoples, previously conquered and colonized, who remained within the borders of the Soviet Union, where they made up half the population, as well as over the new protectorates: Mongolia and Tuva.
Rise of bureaucratic imperialism
This restoration was accompanied by murderous police violence and even genocide - the extermination by famine known in Ukraine as the Holodomor and in Kazakhstan as the Zhasandy Asharshylyk (1932-1933). The national Bolshevik cadres and the national intelligentsia were exterminated and intensive Russification was begun. Entire small peoples and national minorities were deported (the first big deportation in 1937 concerned Koreans living in the Soviet Far East). Internal colonialism spread once more and “the most terrible of these practices was the exploitation of prisoners of the Gulag, which can be described as an extreme form of internal colonization” [12]. In the same way as under Tsarism, the immigration of the Russian and Russian-speaking population towards the peripheries calmed the tensions and socio-economic crises in Russia, while ensuring Russification of the peripheral republics. Overpopulated, impoverished and starving after the forced collectivization, the Russian countryside massively exported the labour force to the new industrial centres on the periphery of the Soviet Union. At the same time, the authorities hindered the migration towards the towns of the local – non-Russian – population of the countryside.
The colonial division of labour distorted, indeed slowed down development, and sometimes even transformed the republics and peripheral regions into sources of raw materials and zones of monoculture. This was accompanied by a colonial division between the city and the countryside, manual and intellectual, skilled and unskilled, well or badly paid labour, as well as an equally colonial stratification of the state bureaucracy, the working class and entire societies. These divisions and stratifications guaranteed to the ethnically Russian and Russified elements privileged social positions regarding access to income, skills, prestige and power in the peripheral republics. The recognition of ethnic or linguistic “Russianness” in the form of the “public and psychological wage” - a concept that David Roediger has taken from W.E.B. Du Bois and applied in his studies of the white American working class [13] - became an important means of Russian imperialist domination, and of the construction of an imperialist “Russianness” also inside the Soviet working class.
During World War II, the participation of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the struggle for a new division of the world was an extension of domestic imperialist policy. During the war and after its end, the Soviet Union recovered much of what Russia had lost after the revolution, and also conquered new territories. Its surface grew to over 1.2 million km2, reaching 22.4 million km2. After the war, the area of the USSR exceeded by 700,000 km2 that of the Tsarist empire at the end of its existence, and was smaller by 1.3 million km2 compared to the surface of this empire at the height of its expansion - in 1866, just after the conquest of Turkestan and shortly before the sale of Alaska.
Fighting for a new division of the world
In Europe, the Soviet Union incorporated the western regions of Belarus and Ukraine, Carpatho-Ukraine, Bessarabia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, parts of East Prussia and Finland, and in Asia Tuva and the southern Kuril islands. Its control was extended over the whole of Eastern Europe. The USSR postulated that Libya be placed under its tutelage. It tried to impose a protectorate over the big Chinese border provinces - Xinjiang and Manchuria. In addition, it wanted to annex northern Iran and eastern Turkey, exploiting for that the desire for liberation and unification of many local peoples. According to the Azerbaijani historian Jamil Hasanli, it was in Asia and not in Europe that the “Cold War” began, yet in 1945 [14].
“The parasitic character of the bureaucracy manifests itself, as soon as political conditions permit it, through imperialist plundering”, wrote at that time Jean van Heijenoort, former secretary of Trotsky and future historian of mathematical logic. “Does the appearance of elements of imperialism imply the revision of the theory that the USSR is a degenerated workers’ state? Not necessarily. The Soviet bureaucracy feeds in general on an appropriation of the work of others, and we have already, long ago, recognized this fact as part and parcel of the degeneration of the workers’ state. Bureaucratic imperialism is only a special form of this appropriation” [15].
The Yugoslav Communists became rather quickly convinced that Moscow “wanted to completely subordinate the economy of Yugoslavia and make of it a simple complement providing raw materials to the economy of the Soviet Union, which would hamper industrialization and disrupt the socialist development of the country” [16]. The Soviet-Yugoslav “joint-stock companies” were to monopolize the exploitation of the natural resources of Yugoslavia that Soviet industry needed. Unequal trade between the two countries would guarantee the Soviet economy super-profits at the expense of the Yugoslav economy.
After the break of Yugoslavia with Stalin, Josip Broz Tito said that from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939) and especially after the conference of the “Big Three” in Tehran (1943), the USSR took part in the imperialist division of the world and “is consciously pursuing the old Tsarist road of imperialist expansionism”. He also said that the “theory of the leading people within a multinational state” proclaimed by Stalin “is nothing but the expression of the fact of the subjugation, the national oppression and the economic plunder of the other peoples and countries by the leading people” [17]. In 1958, Mao Zedong ironically remarked in a discussion with Khrushchev: “There was a man by the name of Stalin, who took Port Arthur and turned Xinjiang and Manchuria into semi-colonies, and he also created four joint companies. These were all his good deeds” [18].
The Soviet Union on the brink of collapse
Russian bureaucratic imperialism was underpinned by powerful extra-economic monopolies, further strengthened by totalitarian power. But their character was only extra-economic. Because of this it proved too weak or completely incapable of carrying through the Stalinist plans of exploitation of the satellite countries in Eastern Europe and the border regions of People’s China. In the face of the increasing resistance in these countries, the Kremlin bureaucracy had to abandon the “joint-stock companies”, unequal trade and the colonial division of labour that it wanted to impose. After the loss of Yugoslavia, from 1948 on, it gradually lost political control over China and some other countries, and had also to weaken its control over others.
Even within the USSR the extra-economic monopolies proved incapable of securing the long-term imperialist domination of Russia over the principal peripheral republics. Industrialization, urbanization, the development of education and more generally the modernization of the peripheries of the Soviet Union, as well as the growing “nationalization” of their working class, of the intelligentsia and of the bureaucracy itself began to change gradually the balance of power between Russia and the peripheral republics in favour of the latter. Moscow’s domination over them weakened. The growing crisis of the system accelerated this process, which began to tear the Soviet Union apart. The counter-measures of the central power - such as the overthrow of the regime of Petro Shelest in Ukraine (1972), considered as “nationalist” by the Kremlin - could not reverse this process, nor effectively stop it.
During the second half of the 1970s, the young Soviet sociologist Frants Sheregi tried to observe Soviet reality based on “Marx’s theory of classes, combined with the theory of colonial systems”. He concluded that “the gradual extension of the national intelligentsia and the bureaucracy (civil servants) of the non-Russian republics, the growth of the working class - in a word, the formation of a more progressive social structure - will lead the national republics to secede from the USSR”. A few years later, at the request of the highest authorities of the Soviet Communist Party, he studied the social situation of the teams of young people mobilized by the Komsomol throughout the country to build the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway. This was the famous “construction of the century”.
“I became interested”, says Sheregi, “in the contradiction that I discovered between the information about the international composition of the builders of the railway, forcefully diffused by official propaganda, and the high level of national uniformity of the construction brigades that arrived.” They were almost entirely composed of ethnically and linguistically Russian elements. “I then came to the unexpected conclusion that the Russians (and the “Russophones”) were being driven out of the national republics” – driven out by the so-called titular nationalities, for example by the Kazakhs in Kazakhstan.
This was confirmed by research that he conducted into two other major projects in Russia. “The central government knew it and participated in the resettlement of Russians by funding the “shock engineering projects”. From this I concluded that since the social funds of the national republics had been depleted, there was a shortage of jobs, including for the representatives of the titular nationalities where social guarantees (crèches, holiday homes, sanatoriums, opportunities for housing) existed; such a situation can cause inter-ethnic antagonisms, so the authorities gradually “repatriated” Russian youth from the national republics. Then I realized that the Soviet Union was on the verge of breaking up” [19].
Military-colonial empire
The crisis of the Soviet bureaucratic regime and of Russian imperialism was so great that to everyone’s surprise the USSR collapsed in 1991, not only without a world war, but even without a civil war. Russia lost its outer peripheries, because fourteen non-Russian republics of the Union left it and proclaimed independence - all those who, according to the Soviet Constitution, had this right. This meant a loss of territory, unprecedented in the history of Russia, of an area of 5.3 million km2. But, as noted by Boris Rodoman, an eminent scientist who created the Russian school of theoretical geography, today too “Russia is a military-colonial empire, living at the price of an unbridled waste of biological and human resources, a country of extensive development, in which the extremely wasteful and costly use of land and nature is a common phenomenon”. In this domain, as well as in regard to “the migration of populations, the mutual relations between ethnic groups, between the local population and migrants in various regions, between state authorities and the public, the “classic” characteristics of colonialism remain vivid, as in the past”.
Russia has remained a plurinational state. It includes twenty one republics of non-Russian peoples, covering almost 30 per cent of its territory. Rodoman writes: “In our country we have an ethnic group bearing its name and providing the official language, as well as many other ethnic groups; some of them have national-territorial autonomy, but do not have the right to leave this pseudo-federation, in other words, they are forced to stay there. More and more often the necessity of the existence of distinct administrative units according to ethnic criteria is put in question; the process of their liquidation has already begun with the autonomous districts. Yet almost no non-Russian people has begun living in Russia as a result of migration; they were not resettled in an existing Russian state - on the contrary, they are peoples conquered by this state, pushed back, partly exterminated, assimilated or deprived of their state. In such a historical context national autonomies, even regardless of to what extent they are real and to what extent only nominal, should be seen as a moral compensation for ethnic groups who have suffered the “trauma of subjugation”. In our country the small peoples which do not have national autonomy, or which are deprived of it, disappear quickly (e.g. the Vepsians and the Shors). The indigenous ethnic groups, at the beginning of the Soviet period, constituted a majority in their autonomous units. They are now a minority because of colonization, linked to the appropriation of natural resources, public works, industrialization and militarization. The development of “waste lands”, the construction of certain ports and nuclear power plants in the Baltic republics, etc., not only had economic reasons, but also were aimed at the Russification of the border regions of the Soviet Union. After its collapse, the military conflicts in the Caucasus, whose peoples are being held hostage to the imperial policy of “divide and rule”, are typical wars to conserve the colonies in an empire that is disintegrating. The extension of its sphere of influence, including the integration of parts of the former Soviet Union, is now a priority of Russian foreign policy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Tsarist Russia, nomadic tribes swore allegiance and their land automatically became Russian; post-Soviet Russia distributes Russian passports to people in countries on its borders...” [20].
Restoration of capitalist imperialism
The restoration of capitalism in Russia has partially complemented and partially substituted the extra-economic monopolies, weakened and truncated after the break-up of the Soviet Union, by a powerful monopoly of finance capital welded to the state apparatus. Russian imperialism, reconstructed on this basis, remains an inextricably internal and external phenomenon, operating on both sides of the borders of Russia, which once more are beginning to be movable. The Russian authorities have built a state mega-corporation which has the monopoly of the internal colonization of Eastern Siberia and the Far East. These regions have oilfields and other great riches. They have privileged access to the new global markets in China and in the Western Hemisphere.
The two regions mentioned may share the fate of Western Siberia. “The federal centre keeps for itself almost all West Siberian oil revenues, not even giving Western Siberia money for the construction of normal roads”, wrote the Russian journalist Artem Yefimov a few years ago. “The trouble, as usual, is not colonization, but colonialism”, because “it is economic exploitation and not the improvement and development of the territory that is the aim of the corporation mentioned.” “Basically it comes down to admitting that in the country, at the highest level of the state, colonialism reigns. The resemblance of this corporation to the East India Company and other European colonial companies of the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries is so obvious that it could be funny” [21].
A year ago, the massive uprising of Ukrainians on the Maidan in Kiev, crowned by the overthrow of the Yanukovych regime, was an attempt by Ukraine to finally break the colonial relationship historically binding it to Russia. We cannot understand the present crisis in Ukraine - the annexation of the Crimea, the separatist rebellion in the Donbass and the Russian aggression against Ukraine - if we do not understand that Russia is still and always an imperialist power.
Kowalewsk is author of several works on the history of the Ukrainian national question, published among others by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. We recommend his article "For the independence of Soviet Ukraine”, International Marxist Review, Vol. 4, N° 2, Autumn 1989. The present article is taken from Le Monde Diplomatique - Edycja polska, N° 11 (105), November 2014.
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Putin’s Wars: The Rise of Russia’s New Imperialism
By: Marcel H. Van Herpen
Lanham, USA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014
By: Marcel H. Van Herpen
Lanham, USA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014
Although it may seem backwards to point to the conclusion before talking about the hundreds of pages preceding it, in the case of Marcel H. Van Herpen’s recent work, Putin’s Wars: The Rise of Russia’s New Imperialism, starting at the end explains why the rest of the book is so important to understanding the on-going events in Ukraine.
The book, which Van Herpen finished writing late last year, ends with a quotation from former Czech President Vaclav Havel, who stated, “I have said it so often: if the West does not stabilize the East, the East will destabilize the West”, and is followed by Van Herpen’s commentary that “this is a warning that should be taken seriously” (p. 248). This comes during a section discussing Ukraine in 2013 and a prediction from Van Herpen that “if Ukraine were to opt for deeper integration into the European Union, a Georgia scenario could not be excluded, in which the Kremlin could provoke riots in Eastern Ukraine or the Crimea, where many Russian passport holders live”, and could provide the Kremlin with the excuse it needs to intervene and “dismember the country” since they would be acting in defence of the “Russians” living there (p. 247). What has been seen in the months since the writing of the book is as both Havel and Van Herpen predicted. A new conflict has emerged in the European neighbourhood, and the Russian support for separatist movements in Ukraine has resulted in the annexation of Crimea by Russia and fighting between Ukrainian governmental forces and Kremlin-supported militants in Eastern Ukraine.
In the case of this book, it is perhaps the subtitle and not the main title that is of greater significance. The consideration of Russia’s imperialism that the book sets forth provides the background to understanding what has happened in recent months and establishes the basis for the book itself. The focus of the second section of the book, “The ‘Internal War'”, provides those unfamiliar with the domestic forces that influence Russian foreign policy-making with a consideration of the country’s political party system and nationalist forces within Russia. The book’s third section, entitled “The Wheels of War”, is dedicated to the two twenty-first century wars that Russia has fought, one in Chechnya and the other in Georgia. This affords the reader an opportunity to understand the lessons that the Russian leadership has acquired during the fighting and the ability to connect them with what has occurred in recent months in Ukraine.
The first section of the book, “Russia and the Curse of Empire”, will be the focus of this review, but that does not detract from the importance of the second and third sections of the book. What the first section does so successfully is explain the complicated legacy that empire has on the modern Russian state and how Russia has sought to maintain (as well as increase) its influence over its neighbours. As these themes can be seen as key to understanding current events, this section should be highlighted.
Van Herpen is clear in the introduction to his book that he will argue that Russia “is both a post-imperial state and a pre-imperial state” (p. 5) and states that his position stands in contrast to that of Russian scholar and Director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, Dmitri Trenin, who wrotePost-Imperium: A Eurasian Story (2011). In his book, Trenin argues that the post-Soviet leaders of Russia have not sought, and do not seek, to reinstate the Russian Empire and, therefore, to read these two books together provides a good debate on the nature of Russia’s geopolitical aspirations and allows the reader to acquaint themselves with two very different arguments. In support of his own argument, Van Herpen points to decisions made by Russian leaders regarding the so-called “near abroad” as examples of Russia’s attempts at building influence, including: Putin’s 2003 suggestion for Belarus to join Russia as six new provinces; the claims from Russia (dating to 1993) on the Ukrainian city of Sevastopol; the choice to give Russian passports to Ukrainians living in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in violation of the Ukrainian Constitution; and suggestions from Russian leaders after the Orange Revolution to turn Ukraine into a federal state in a proposal, like the one made regarding Moldova in 2003 (p. 4). When looking at what has happened in Ukraine since the book’s publication this past spring – the annexation of Crimea by Russia, discussions of federalizing the Ukrainian state, and the fighting between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian forces (aided by Russia and consisting of some Russians) – events that Van Herpen points to from years earlier appear all the more significant.
While the first section of the book, “Russia and the Curse of Empire”, provides valuable background on Russian expansionism and imperialism since the tsarist period, thus establishing precedent, it is the later chapters in this section that focus on Putin and begin to establish the perspectives and goals of the Russian leadership regarding the country’s neighbours. For Van Herpen, the efforts by Russia to exert influence over its neighbours, through projects such as Putin’s Eurasian Union, can be seen as an example of the new imperialism to which the title of the book alludes and as a way “to reintegrate the post-Soviet space” (p. 243). It is the fact that the Russian leadership “is very secretive about its long-term foreign policy goals and keeps its cards close to its chest” while “playing a dangerous ‘Great Game’ in Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus, destabilizing its neighbourhood and trying to re-establish itself as the dominant power” (p. 55) that can be seen in evidence in Ukraine as fighting continues in the eastern portion of the country.
Russian attempts to maintain influence in this region and to prevent expanding Western influence can be seen in the establishment of organizations like the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), considered by Van Herpen to be a “mini-Warsaw Pact” (p. 68), and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Putin’s Eurasian Union, therefore, represents another stage in Russia’s on-going efforts to institutionalise its influence over its neighbours and allows Russia to establish “a new instrument to bring Ukraine back into its orbit” (p. 84). Van Herpen sees Ukraine as the key to building the Eurasian Union and the membership of Ukraine as one of Russia’s two goals in establishing the Union, the other being the creation of a military side that allows only member-states of the Eurasian Union to intervene in post-Soviet countries with Russia leading the way (p. 83-4). For Putin, pressuring Yanukovych and offering reduced gas prices and billions of dollars in loans in exchange for not signing the Association Agreement with the European Union was a way of drawing the Ukrainian leadership closer to Moscow while hoping to gain Yanukovych’s support for the Eurasian Union. The Maidan protests, the fleeing of Yanukovych to Moscow, the annexation of Crimea, and the support for fighters in Ukraine’s east have ended the prospects of Ukrainian membership in the Eurasian Union, but the importance of the project to Putin can still be considered a motivating factor for the Russian president.
What Putin’s Wars does so successfully is establish that Russian imperialism is not something left in the past, but a prospect for the future, an argument that is strengthened by the events of the last half year. The post-imperial state that Russia entered after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the loss of influence in the former Republics, has given way to a pre-imperial state that is building its influence over its neighbours. While in the past Russia has built its empire through territorial expansion, the new imperialism is seeking to institutionalise Russian influence over the neighbourhood.
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KIEV, Ukraine — AT this very moment, in plain view of the entire world, the final demise of the Soviet empire is unfolding. The plan for its resurrection, long in the works at the Kremlin, has failed: Ukrainehas proved that it has matured into an independent state that will determine its own domestic and foreign policy.
It was when Viktor F. Yanukovych, then president, refused to listen to the pro-European yearnings of Ukrainians that the mass protests erupted in Kiev in the fall of 2013. It was when Mr. Yanukovych decided, with the active support of Russia, to resort to force that he lost control of the situation. And it was when Mr. Yanukovych crossed the line and unleashed gunfire against his own people that he lost his legitimacy as the president.
The Kremlin had a strategy designed to weaken Ukraine and its government by prying some regions away from Kiev’s control and establishing enclaves in the south and east similar to Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia. Russia needs these frozen conflicts in order to prevent the normal development of the post-Soviet republics and to impede their integration into European and NATO structures.
Moscow’s plan has been foiled. The people of Ukraine proved stronger than a dictator who had been groomed for the role of a puppet ruler. The opposition quickly gained control of the situation, consolidating the authority of Parliament and legitimately appointing a new government. This prompt action calmed the protests within the country, yet it also prompted foreign aggression.
The chronology of events is telling: On Feb. 21, the Ukrainian Constitution of 2004 was reinstated; on Feb. 27, we formed a national unity government; and on Feb. 28, Russian troops moved outside their bases to occupy the Crimean Peninsula. At the same time, Russian forces have massed along the Ukrainian border.
This brazen and unjustified aggression, thinly veiled as “protecting Russian speakers,” pursues an obvious goal: to weaken and dismember Ukraine, to create another zone of instability in Europe and to arrest the process of European integration. Moscow’s purpose, in other words, is to prevent the final demise of the Soviet empire.
In Crimea, Russian troops have blockaded our government buildings, taken over our communications infrastructure and seized our military bases and weapons depots — all the while provoking Ukraine to respond with force and provide a pretext for a full-scale military invasion by Russia. These tactics bear a close resemblance to those deployed in South Ossetia and Abkhazia during the 2008 Russia-Georgia war.
The Ukrainian military and government have done everything possible to avoid this trap and keep the peace. No one should doubt that Ukrainians are prepared to defend their country. But the memory of our people’s terrible losses during the protests in Kiev is still fresh; we cannot permit more bloodshed.
We are fully aware that, should force be used, containing the situation would be impossible. The resolve of Ukrainians to die defending their country, the large stockpiles of weapons, the country’s nuclear power stations and the strategic gas pipelines all point to the potential magnitude of a disaster.
In 1994, Ukraine surrendered its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees from the United States, Russia and Britain, and for their pledge to respect its sovereignty and territorial integrity. If this agreement is violated, it may lead to nuclear proliferation around the world. The rule of law and the credibility of international institutions would also be severely undermined as deterrents to military aggression.
An escalation of conflict would be catastrophic for the whole of Western Europe. It would put an end to the global security system, breaching its very foundation. These are very real risks. Yet Russia’s reckless actions would be unbecoming of Somali pirates.
Today, the people of Ukraine are united as never before in the idea of collective security and European values. We choose Western standards and reject this neo-Soviet imperialism. We will no longer play the game of “older and younger brothers.”
Moscow must understand what we discovered at the Maidan in Kiev: The use of force will backfire and, more often than not, yield the opposite of what was intended. Ukraine and Russia are two sovereign states, and the Ukrainian people will determine their path independently. The refusal to accept this fact will lead, at the very least, to a new Cold War.
Ukraine is open to any constructive dialogue with the Russian Federation that is rooted in partnership. We wish to develop fair and mutually beneficial relations. Russia must choose how it will respond.
The Soviet Union is no more. We must all come to terms with that fact and begin a new era of cooperation based on equality and the right of the Ukrainian people to choose their own government and their own destiny.
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The Russia as "Imperialist" Thesis Is Wrong and a Barrier to ...
Ukraine's President Rebuffs Russian 'Imperialism' - The ...
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Putin's unchallenged imperialism moves to Ukraine
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Divisions on Display Over Western Response to Ukraine at Security Conferenceby By MICHAEL R. GORDON, ALISON SMALE and STEVEN ERLANGER
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said she bluntly opposed providing lethal military support to Kiev during a security conference in Munich on Saturday.
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