By Joaquin Araneda, Movimiento Anticapitalista of Chile
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked profound debates in the left about the nature of the war, the role of imperialism and the place that revolutionaries should take, especially those who intervene directly in Eatern Europe like our sister organization, the Ukrainian Socialist League. This article aims to be a political contribution to the question of self-determination and national independence in the revolutionary struggle, a problem that is far from being a merely theoretical issue, since it takes on militant relevance due to the events of a time of inter-imperialist conflict, wars and revolutions. In turn, the text takes its lead from the writings published on www.lis-isl.org and is framed in the proposals of our international to nurture debate and revolutionary construction.
Putin, Stalin and the legacy of Imperial Russia
To approach the origins and causes, Vladimir Putin’s speech prior to the Russian army’s invasion of Ukraine can be reviewed,[1] in which he activated a story that formed a confusing amalgam to promote his policy of annexation, initially of the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk which were controlled by pro-Russian separatists, and later, to a military advance throughout the rest of the country. The alarms went off from that moment and gave a decisive step to the military mobilization that still continues and its outcome is uncertain due to the stagnation of the advance, the hesitation of the Western agents and the Ukrainian resistance to the invader.
Against this current backdrop, we can go back to the Prussian military strategist Clausewitz who developed: “war is not simply a political act, but a true political instrument, a continuation of political relations, their management by other means.”[2] And it indicates some coordinates on the analysis of warlike movements in a global way where direct confrontation is measured, which happens during the course of the war, its scope and its final objective. So, it is a priority to locate the objectives that led to the mobilization of troops and, in turn, how it has been developing and the elements in tension that are fighting in the various trenches. Understanding the current situation without confusion is essential and, simultaneously, knowing about near or distant possibilities, although trying to activate current events to connect with a policy of direct intervention on the reality of the here and now and not speculative about an undetermined future.
Therefore, and returning to Putin and the current Russian regime, a first fact is the return of the historical imperial tradition of Russia that ruled authoritatively until the beginning of the 20th century and advocated a unification on the basis of the subjection of various ethnic groups and peoples, taking that as a discursive engine in a context in which “imperialist capitalism as a world system came from a deep crisis in 2008 from which it never fully recovered, and that prior to the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 it was again incubating new episodes of deep social and economic crises… In this plane of deep economic crisis, the wars and the leaps in the threats and confrontational escalations, lead imperialisms to re-arm and advance in militarization plans. For example, prior to invading Ukraine, Putin’s Russia considerably increased to double its military budgets, advancing in the modernization of its machinery and in a leap in the international business of arms sales.”[3]
This is why Putin’s narrative acquires first of all a relationship of denial of “other” states and, simultaneously, strongly challenges those who did see self-determination as an engine of social liberation, Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Let’s see: “I will remind you that after the October Revolution of 1917 and the following Civil War, the Bolsheviks proposed to create a new State. They had some pretty serious disagreements with each other on this point. In 1922, Joseph Stalin held the positions of both General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party and People’s Commissar for Ethnic Affairs. He suggested building the country on the principles of autonomy, that is, giving the republics, the future administrative and territorial entities, broad powers when they join the unified state.”[4]
And he continued: “Why was it necessary to make such generous gifts, beyond the wildest dreams of the most zealous nationalists and, on top of all that, give the republics the right to secede from the unified state without any conditions?”[5]
Without going into a larger historical analysis, the initial justification and reactionary nationalist morale boost for the Russian troops prior to the start of the invasion is linked to the imperial tradition of Russia and in turn to the bureaucratic nostalgia for Stalinism: therefore, the denial of Bolshevism and, on that basis, the ideological consummation of a Putin leading an expanding Russia in a context of territorial disputes over markets in a declining economic framework.
In other words, between the ideological discourse and the armed confrontation, the continuity of politics by other means appears, and in order to approach the problem of the invasion and the just struggle against the imperialist military mobilization, it immediately leads us to questions: why should Putin harshly criticize Lenin and the Bolsheviks to justify the military advance? Where are we now and what is the revolutionary task in the trenches?
Before answering these questions, we situate the nature of the conflict: “Since its beginning, the war in Ukraine has combined two processes at the same time. On the one hand, Ukraine’s just defense of its sovereignty and, on the other, the sharpening of inter-imperialist friction between the NATO powers and the emerging imperialisms of Russia and China. A misunderstanding of this double character of the war, its rhythms and the most likely perspective is the basis of the confusion that reigns in a significant part of the left.”[6]
Therefore, its dual character will be central to understanding the ideological advance advocated by Putin and retaking Bolshevik teachings.
Bolsheviks, Lenin and the revolution in various languages
The amalgamation of Putin’s speech should have pointed to a milestone in reality to assume the race of confronted camps to add confusion to the working class, a social sector that suffers the horror of war with deaths, displacement and misery. But in fact it is true that only after the October Revolution were firm steps taken towards the principles of self-determination, although it is important to go back a little further. The victory of the Russian Revolution was preceded by the accumulation of experience of the revolutionaries in the heat of the events that they had to witness: the brutal First World War and the relentless response of peace; against feudal accumulation, land for the peasants; and against the famine caused by the tsarist regime, bread for the people. Although it was not the only thing, they simultaneously supported the claim for self-determination of the peoples subjected by tsarism (a claim related to the imperialist war), a political orientation that made the party of Lenin and Trotsky gain influence with a class and socialist perspective that ended up conquering the first workers’ government in history, although not without opposing views with sectarian and opportunist tendencies.
After the February revolution, the provisional (bourgeois) government took office, erasing with a stroke of a pen the promises of independence of nations like Ukrainian and Finland, postponing them for the writing of the Constituent Assembly, which they had promised to convene, although the liberals and moderate socialists already had a decision for the CA of a single and indivisible Russia, the same position as the Tsarists. The Bolsheviks, contrary to the policy of governing within the margins of a bourgeois state, understood the situation of the domination of the peoples not as a mere agitation to win ephemeral followers, but as an integral part of the tasks of the socialist revolution that should spread and consolidate. That is why, after the assault on power, they did not wait or postpone decisive measures and published after the October revolution the Declaration of the Rights of the People of Russia,[7] where without hesitation they stated that the peoples of Russia have suffered repression, pogroms, slavery and, against all this, the equality and sovereignty of nations, self-determination, the right -even- to form their own states must be decisive. These measures, along with others, achieved the support of various nationalities, the concrete prelude to the debates for the formation of the USSR, although the process was not without contradictions.
In a week of Soviet government, Finland’s recognition of independence was resolved, followed by Lithuania, Estonia, Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine, among other nationalities oppressed by the Russian Empire. These countries were led by bourgeois nationalist wings in many cases, a situation that was mainly due to the fact that in 1917 the revolution broke out in a country where feudal forms prevailed in large areas, where there were clans not consolidated as nations, a small working class and authoritarian concentration, product of Tsarism. Therefore, once the revolution broke out, the subjected peoples saw the opportunity to liberate themselves, even with all the contradictions that this entailed due to the condition of feudal backwardness (dominant economic elites, little education and poor infrastructure), especially in Central Asia.
The Tsarist empire broke into large territorial extensions occupying a part of Poland in the west, which had been divided between the Russian empire, the Austrian empire and Prussia. After the First World War the old dominions burst and, with the revolutionary force that crossed Europe, Poland had the possibility of becoming independent and unifying the country; the Bolsheviks recognized their rights and the Polish National Committee as a legitimate government.
The unified and independent Poland was led by Pilsudski, of the Polish Socialist Party, although his intentions were not to consolidate the bases for the expansion of socialism. Piłsudski promoted a coup policy against the revolution and thus advanced with the Polish army on Lithuania; he had also agreed with the Ukrainian nationalist Petlura to form a military intervention front in Ukraine, all this backed by Western powers in the midst of the civil war of the young Soviet nations.
At this point the revolutionary experience has lessons. On the one hand, the intervention of the Red Army was needed to drive the counter-revolution back to Warsaw, although, notwithstanding that decision, the Bolsheviks in the peace negotiation stated that “the policy of the Russian Socialist Federation with respect to Poland stands in contrast, not in temporary military or diplomatic advantages, but in the absolute and unshakable right to self-determination. The RSFSR unconditionally recognizes the independence and sovereignty of the Republic of Poland and defends it from the moment the Polish state was formed.”[8]
This determination of the Bolsheviks is part of the historical struggle that Lenin put up. As early as 1914 he stated: “We stand firm and without any doubt: Ukraine has the right to have such an [independent] state. We respect this right. We do not support any privilege of the Great Russians over the Ukrainians, we educate the masses in the spirit of recognizing this right and in the spirit of rejecting any state privilege by one over any other nation.”[9] So the relationship with the events in the civil war after the revolution are part of a revolutionary coherence, even with tension and difficulties. That is why, a century later Putin must aim the bullets of his speech at Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
The Ukrainian case had its own episodes. After February, the Central Soviet, the Tsentralnaya Rada, was formed, which proposed a “government of all Ukrainians” due to the preponderant influence of the moderate and liberal wings, while with that definition the right to self-determination was interpreted. The debate of the Bolsheviks in Kyiv, who were in the minority, was that the “national question” was a secondary task. Therefore, they did not give the dispute in the newly formed Tsentralnaya Rada (or against the body). In October, after the revolution, the Central was nominated as the legitimate government and that allowed them to develop institutions that postponed central problems such as land. In turn, the Bolshevik militants of Kyiv, considering the national as a “secondary issue,” did not advance in an implacable dispute over liberal conceptions, facilitating the counterrevolutionary penetration of the recently formed organization. This is how they allowed the reactionary wings to propose that Ukraine be a German military protectorate, a fact that intensified the civil war. The consequences of isolating mass disputes and separating politics at times.
Nationalism and Stalinism in Ukraine
These difficulties had an expression in the internal debates of the Bolshevik party. Stalin held that self-determination is subordinated to socialism, a language disguised as ultra-leftist that was consistent with the formulation of the draft that he proposed when he was in charge of the Commissariat for Nationalities, which addressed the problem among the Soviet republics by subordinating them to the central power in key functions and only granting them “autonomy” in secondary issues such as culture, health or justice. The newly formed republics opposed this view, as did Lenin and Trotsky.
Later, with the counterrevolution, Stalin assumed the bureaucratic power of the party, a fact that responds to objective and subjective conditions of the revolutionary process. Among the consequences of this situation, the richest peasants were encouraged to follow the process of accumulation on the rent of the land, thus constituting a social base for the bureaucracy based on the kulaks (provided that they maintain the objective reminiscences of the old regime). The Soviet bureaucracy, which had achieved legitimacy over this privileged social sector, felt the pressure of economically feeding the rich peasantry who demanded more and more. Therefore, as a typical dictatorial condition (bureaucratic irrationality), Stalin pointed in the opposite direction to promoted forced collectivization, a situation that caused between 6 and 7 million deaths due to famine in various peripheral countries such as the agrarian areas of Russia, Central Asia and Ukraine. This policy fed reactionary nationalists, who called this brutality Holodomor (“starve to death” in Ukrainian) to blame Bolshevism. These crimes of Stalin, in turn, were impregnated with a strong chauvinism that attacked the rights of the peoples and “Russification” was resumed, contrary to the first years of the revolution that granted a process of diversifying languages, opening schools and universities, even the Red Army under Trotsky’s leadership developed multilingual units, basic freedoms that were then swept away.
The left opposition was already taking its first steps in those years and it was Trotsky who warned that bureaucratic policies would end up giving a platform to the most reactionary spheres of nationalism, defending the tradition of the Bolshevik party led by Lenin of an “independent workers’ and peasants’ Ukraine.” He would later write: “The Thermidorean reaction, crowned by the Bonapartist bureaucracy, has left the working masses far behind in the national sphere as well. The great masses of the Ukrainian people are dissatisfied with their national destiny and want to drastically change it.”[10]
So, when Comrade Volkan from Turkey’s SEP states that “Ukrainian nationalism has historically been far-right and fiercely anti-communist. The fact that Stalinism was responsible for this in history does not change the reality today,”[11] denies the historical relationship of the struggle for national self-determination, which was severely cut by the bureaucracy, which allowed the reaction to gain influence. Trotsky, as quoted, strongly warned about this trend. Therefore, if the comrade sees the duality of the war as expressed in his text (a fact we agree on), we can know that reality exceeds the superstructural guidelines in tension, while the continuity of the war by other means, from a Leninist perspective, is to place ourselves on the objective conditions to be able to intervene according to the strategy. In it, tactical flexibility, even despite circumstantial situations such as war, in which the nationalist tribunes gain strength, or was it not so in every military confrontation? Comrade Volkan tells us about it: “The Ukrainian nationalist movement, which had fiercely opposed to the October Revolution, turned into far-right forms as early as the 1920s. Founded in 1929, the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) was an openly fascist organization that emphasized ethnic purity. The crimes of Stalinism against the Ukrainians (and all oppressed peoples) in the 1930s not only spread Ukrainian nationalism, but also ensured that its main trend was the far-right. Under these circumstances, both wings of the OUN collaborated with the Nazis. When the OUN split in two, the OUN-B led by Stepan Bandera was clearly pro-Nazi, while the wing led by Melnyk (OUN-M) was pro-Mussolini.” Although if we review even earlier history we can see that on the “socialist” side not everyone was in favor of advancing in the revolution, as in the case of Pilsudski in Poland, and in that sense, the relationship established by the Bolsheviks was not the temporary imposition of who is in power “but in the absolute and unbreakable right to self-determination,” even when “progressive nationalism” revives the most reactionary spheres of bourgeois institutions, therefore, adopting the demands of the struggle for national independence, despite the contradictions and tensions in the midst of civil war. This is why a century later Putin must praise Stalin to counteract the tradition of Lenin.
Unfortunately, comrade Volkan conditions the superstructural leaderships with the complexities of the working class, isolating himself and developing examples that start with statements such as “nationalism has historically been right or left,” selecting with tweezers where one can intervene or not. This situation is not new: as was expressed in the midst of the revolution, tendencies that posed the national problem as “secondary” existed within the Bolshevik party and led to mistakes, which Stalinism took to deepen bureaucratization under ultra-left language. This confusion, of putting an equal sign between the just struggle of the peoples and the leaderships that act in reality, is a justifying basis for moving away from the living processes of the class struggle, falling into sterile propaganda and, consequently, freeing up space for the right to take up the slogans of national liberation.
2022: Ukraine under siege, imperialisms in dispute and war as a continuation of politics
The brief review invites us to draw some conclusions: the first is that the history of Eastern Europe is impregnated with inconclusive imperial subjugation due to the struggle of the peoples, where the world wars were predatory on their own continent and, therefore, the working class had to pass conditions. A second conclusion is that the formation of modern states has a relatively short date where the events of recent history are pending in their resolution on self-determination and independence over imperialist submission. And a third conclusion is that capitalism in its imperialist phase must subject the peoples to activate the logic of profit without contemplating minimum freedoms and that today who commands the subjection of the nations is in dispute. We can add others: on the one hand, after the fall of the USSR, the bureaucracy took a leap in the consolidation of new capitalists, while the world succumbed to instability. After decades and deep economic crises, the war implies a consummation of trying to take possession of domination over global fringes, a characteristic of the times we are living. That is why war, beyond what is outlined in this text, takes up the debate on the role of imperialism.[12]
Taking this perspective and returning to Clausewitz’s coordinates, it is essential to put in tension the moment that the Ukraine war is in and, assuming the double character that the warlike confrontation contains, we must act in coherence with that. In the first place, to understand that there is a “just trench for national sovereignty”[13] against the invasion, while the inter-imperialist dispute is dynamic and can change, although, taking the Prussian strategist, it is essential to place ourselves on the current moment of the war and that certain or not certain possibilities remain as a condition of activating today in reality. Therefore, when the SEP comrade says that: “The revolutionary attitude in Russia is the position of ‘revolutionary defeatism.’ In a situation where the atmosphere of nationalism is affecting Russia and intense state repression continues, revolutionaries in Russia should intensify revolutionary propaganda against Putin and his oligarchs, and look for opportunities for anti-occupation protests.
While the revolutionaries in the West oppose the invasion of Russia, they should also expose the expansionism of the NATO bloc and point out the provocative policies that the NATO bloc has followed from the past to the present as the culprit of the war. The creation of an nationalistic anti-Russian atmosphere by the ruling classes and bourgeois media in the West under the leadership of NATO must be fought against.”[14]
The defeatism of the left, already countered by the ISL in other articles, may be part of a possible policy in a future of the war entering into a direct confrontation between imperialisms and putting the whole of humanity at risk, although today what is clear is that Russian imperialism is in Ukrainian territory and NATO cannot agree on the way to nurture its intervention, there is still no direct clash between the imperialisms, so defeatism as a slogan will only contribute to Putin, benefiting a camp, the invader’s camp. Likewise, the separation of tasks according to the place of political activity moves away from the internationalist global understanding, resulting in a stage-based policy that nurtures the idea of strengthening a political dispute in isolation, instead of unifying as the Bolsheviks did, where independence and self-determination were concrete in a program.
And lastly, that strengthening of isolated tasks that Comrade Volkan proposes is a misunderstanding of the transitional tasks on independence and self-determination, assuming an isolationist position and comparing the superstructure with the peoples as a justification for non-intervention. Therefore, the lack of understanding of the moment the war is in and, on that basis, the lack of understanding of the necessary independence in the battle for national sovereignty as a determining factor to attack imperialism. This confusion will only contribute to building a social base for the right-wing reaction, adding a mistake of historical determinism in Volkan’s analysis, similar to that advocated by Stalinism, where the “obvious” condition prevents deciphering the elements of change. Therefore, it denies the struggle of ideas and therefore the possibility of revolution.
The review of certain historical debates is to contribute to the need to activate from an independent and revolutionary position, which beyond the accumulation of our organization in Ukraine, has managed from free trade unionism to activate a position of solidarity and direct battle against the invader to open up political space together with the ISL, assuming the anchor debate for national sovereignty (determined moment that the war is in).
This task is on trial and the constant internationalist support will add qualitatively to nurturing true self-determination: a government of the workers and peoples, in unity with all the socialist republics of Eastern Europe. Something that will become real only by assuming the perspectives on the given reality and the consequent actions of the revolutionaries on the concrete facts, despite the contradictions, in a global analysis and with an outstanding internationalist participation as our ISL has been doing.
[1] Putin (2022) http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828
[2] Carl von Clausewitz (1832), On War.
[3] S. García (2022), Amid war and imperialist conflict, where is the world headed?
[4] Putin (2022), http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828
[5] Putin (2022), http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828
[6] Bodart (2022), Un aporte sobre la guerra y los debates en la izquierda. En https://lis-isl.org/2022/07/02/un-aporte-sobre-la-guerra-y-los-debates-en-la-izquierda/
[7] Can be seen at http://grupgerminal.org/?q=system/files/1917.11.14.derechospueblosrusia.stalin.lenin_.pdf
[8] Quote taken on the basis of the peace treaties between Soviet Russia and Poland in 1920, according to the source (Lenin) refers to the declaration of the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR, of January 28, 1920, addressed to the government of Poland and the Polish people. https://www.abertzalekomunista.net/images/Liburu_PDF/Internacionales/Lenin/Obras_Completas_LENIN_TOMO_40-K.pdf
[9] Lenin (1914), The Right of Nations to Self-determination
[10] The independence of Ukraine and sectarian confusionism. In Socialist Appeal, September 15-18, 1939. Socialist Appeal was the weekly newspaper of the SWP, which later changed its name to The Militant. Trotsky responds on this occasion to a criticism of an article that he had written in April 1939, which is reproduced in Writings 1938-1939 under the title of “The Ukrainian Question.” In https://www.marxists.org/espanol/trotsky/ceip/escritos/libro6/TXIV107.htm#_ftn1
[11] V. U. Arslan (2022) How to Position in the Ukrainian War? Some Mistakes… https://www.sosyalistgundem.com/ukrayna-savasinda-nerede-durulmali-bazi-hatalar-v-u-arslan/
[12] Gunes Gumus (2022) ¿What is Imperialism? ¿Are China and Russia Imperialist? https://lis-isl.org/2022/03/09/what-is-imperialism-are-china-and-russia-imperialist-gunes-gumus-sep%ef%bf%bc/
[13] Bodart (2022), A confribution on the war and the debates in the left. https://lis-isl.org/2022/07/02/un-aporte-sobre-la-guerra-y-los-debates-en-la-izquierda/
[14] V. Arslan (2022), op. cit.