Ukraine is the new Ireland

First published at International Socialist League.

The full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war has been going on for more than three years now, and all this time it has been the subject of intense debates both on the left and on the right.

The main sticking point is usually the social meaning of this war: what role it plays on the world stage of political struggle, that is, in the context of humanity’s class struggle.

First of all, it is necessary to understand the social nature of the Putin regime in Russia.

Putin’s Russia is the result of a socio-political reaction that has been going on for a century.

Russia, as Marx described it well in his work “Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the eighteenth century”, has always been an extremely reactionary state. At the head of Russian society has always been a profoundly reactionary conglomerate of feudal-monarchical forces, not only hostile to any kind of social development, however minimal, but also firmly convinced of the need for unlimited domination over neighboring countries. ”The history of Russia is the history of endless colonization,” wrote one of the main references of Russian historiography, Sergei Platonov.

And if the majority of Western European countries experienced, in one way or another, periods of bourgeois and democratic revolutions, in the Russian Empire all attempts at anti-feudal and anti-monarchical insurrection were brutally suppressed.

The revolution against tsarism triumphed in Russia only at the beginning of the twentieth century, but due to numerous local and international conflicts, the Russian working class and peasantry almost immediately switched from a bourgeois-democratic agenda to more radical and socialist transformations, in the hope of thus accelerating the social revolution in more developed countries.

However, this colossal task was immediately faced with great difficulties: in Western countries, the working class either did not reach the level necessary for a revolutionary movement (France, Great Britain), or its attempts to establish a proletarian order were drowned in blood (Germany, the former Austro-Hungarian Empire).

In Russia, in the course of the terrible civil war and the subsequent period of hard political struggle, a bureaucratic apparatus was developed and seized power, which Leon Trotsky called the “regime of bureaucratic absolutism.”

In her book On the Revolution, the thinker Hannah Arendt pointed out that in Europe, after all revolutions, counter-revolutions always triumphed. The same thing happened in Russia, only on a much more advanced technological level and on a gigantic scale.

The Soviet working class was beheaded: during the purges of the thirties, the Bolshevik party was physically destroyed, the trade unions lost their autonomy and became an appendage of the bureaucratic system, and an atmosphere of total surveillance and fear was established in the country. At the same time, the old Russian imperial chauvinism was restored, when the so-called ”Holy Russia“ (literal expression of the anthem adopted in 1944) was proclaimed as the core of the state, and the so-called ”national republics“ had to settle for the role of subordinate ”younger brothers”.

The Stalinist Soviet Union became a renewed version of the Russian Empire, where the degradation of social relations went hand in hand with the restoration of the ideology of Russian superiority. The Stalinist bureaucracy dreamed of restoring capitalism, asserting its privileged position by all possible means, although it could not do it immediately. His longings only began to materialize towards the end of the eighties.

Everything happened as Trotsky had predicted in The Revolution Betrayed: in the absence of an anti-bureaucratic insurrection of the proletariat, the Soviet nomenklatura converted its privileges into property over the means of production. But this did not happen in a mechanical or linear way, but in a context of contradictory political struggle: on the one hand, between different factions of the ruling bureaucracy; on the other, with the mass movements of various social classes and nations that took advantage of the collapse of the system to assert their demands; and, moreover, in the field of international struggle.

The symbols of this confrontation between bureaucratic factions were the general secretary of the CPSU Mikhail Gorbachev and the member of the Supreme Council of the USSR Boris Yeltsin, who became the leader of the opposition to the Gorbachev regime, whose results in social policy had generated widespread discontent in the Soviet population.

Yeltsin sought to rely on the patriotic movements of the national republics to remove Gorbachev from power and ensure total control of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR).

In December 1991, through the so-called Belavezha Accords, the dissolution of the USSR was proclaimed, Gorbachev lost his functions and the Soviet republics gained independence, in full accordance with the Marxist idea of the right of nations to self-determination, which had occupied an important place in Soviet law until its end.

This is something that Trotsky did not foresee, nor could he foresee. The destruction of the Soviet planned economy was an event of a reactionary character, but this reaction, due to the specific circumstances, contained revolutionary elements.

Yeltsin needed, on the one hand, to “surpass” Gorbachev and, on the other, to win the support of global capital. Today it is almost not remembered, but the Yeltsin era was the era of ”friendship with America“ and with ”the West as a whole”: the new Russian elite had to convince the Western establishment that it did not pose a threat to them.

However, from the very beginning of the existence of the ”renewed Russia” the anti-democratic and colonialist character of the new Russian power became apparent. After the beginning of an accelerated capitalist restoration in 1992, Yeltsin dissolved and bombed the independent Russian parliament with the help of the army: the events of the so-called Black October in Moscow in 1993. A year later, he drowned the Chechen national movement demanding self-determination in blood, which led to a prolonged war in the North Caucasus, during which appalling acts of destruction and genocide were committed. American and European officials were, at best, looking the other way, if they heard anything at all.

The Yeltsin ruling class was deeply imperial. One of the central elements of the Kremlin’s new ideology was the denial not only of the October Revolution and Bolshevism, but of the revolutionary turn of 1917 as a whole: the Russian media began to declare any radical political struggle criminal; the glorification of symbolic figures of the monarchical period prevailed, the Orthodox Church became a key ideological and political actor, and nostalgia for imperial times and all kinds of chauvinism flooded universities and literature.

Here it is important to point out the role of the neighboring countries — and in particular Ukraine — in the discourse of the Russian big bourgeoisie.

Ukraine is a country that emerged from the medieval state of Kievan Rus’, whose heirs were considered the Russian tsars of the Romanov dynasty. The official title of the Russian monarchs began with the words “Autocrat of Moscow and Kiev”, and only after that the other parts of the empire were listed. In other words, power over Ukraine – the center of which has been and still is Kiev — was one of the ideological pillars of Russian tsarism, the basis of its so-called “antiquity” and “eternity.”

On the other hand, it was precisely in Ukraine where one of the most dramatic episodes of the civil war of 1917-1922 took place, where the forces of imperial reaction suffered their most decisive defeats, simultaneously at the hands of various revolutionary groups.

Ukrainian nationalism, in its various forms, was a constant problem for Russian imperialism for almost the entire twentieth century. And the Ukrainian state that emerged in 1991, despite being united to the Russian one by thousands of social and economic ties, unequivocally opposed both imperialism and Russian culture.

However, the Russian ruling class could not openly show its colonial and imperialist ambitions regarding neighboring countries while relying on political and economic ties with the West. Everything changed at the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s, when, thanks to an unprecedented growth in oil prices, the Russian bourgeoisie was flooded by a real cascade of money.

At the same time, Boris Yeltsin, weakened by chronic alcoholism and health problems, carried out a typical ”transfer of power to the successor” in the style of authoritarian regimes: to the former secret service agent Vladimir Putin. Putin initiated a gradual reconfiguration of the Kremlin’s political system, removing people he found uncomfortable and promoting those who owed him their wealth and position. The so-called “hardening of the regime” began: political freedoms were progressively curtailed, police terror intensified, critical media were isolated or were directly attacked.

If Yeltsin destroyed the parliamentary opposition, Putin in the 2000s began to eliminate all forms of opposition.

The Russian capitalists got rich quickly. If in Yeltsin’s time there was only one billionaire in dollars in Russia — and it barely exceeded 3 billion – by 2011 there were already more than a hundred. Although inflation had decreased compared to the 1990s and mass urban poverty had shrunk, the gap between rich and poor continued to grow. The basis of the economy became the export of hydrocarbons and mineral resources. The social structure began to resemble that of Angola, Nigeria or Venezuela: on the one hand, an ultra-rich and bureaucratized bourgeoisie; on the other hand, an impoverished and precarious population, mostly employed in the service sector.

In the mid-2000s, the Kremlin began to openly show its undemocratic intentions, directly clashing with the West. First, the so-called “Rose Revolution” in Georgia in 2003 overthrew the pro-Russian President Eduard Shevardnadze and brought to power a more liberal and pro-European administration, which was harshly criticized by the official Russian media. Then, in the autumn of 2004, in Ukraine there was a confrontation between the pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych and the more pro-European Viktor Yushchenko, which led to massive protests in Kiev known as the Orange Revolution: Yushchenko finally triumphed.

This was the beginning of the ”Ukrainian turn” in the Kremlin’s international policy — and in the history of Eastern Europe and the continent as a whole.

For the first time in post-Soviet Russia, the official media was flooded with hatred towards Ukraine and Ukrainians. News anchors and talkers talked daily about the supposed chaos reigning in the neighboring country, the horrors that Yushchenko’s government would bring and the threat of ethnocide and genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.

It is necessary to emphasize that all this had not the slightest foundation in reality. Although the Russian language was — and still is – very popular in Ukraine, in 2004 the discussion revolved exclusively around the international political orientation of state leaders, not about linguistic or citizen rights.

The goal of Russian imperialism was to establish a subordinate regime in Ukraine — with additional benefits for big Russian capital — and with the prospect of a full integration of the country into a new version of the monarchical empire.

The turn towards an openly aggressive imperialist policy became irreversible in 2014. That year, the Yanukovych regime – which had returned to power thanks to democratic elections and discontent with Yushchenko’s liberalism – was overthrown by a new wave of mass protests. As in 2004, the protests began as a democratic demand against corruption and authoritarianism, but were soon taken advantage of by Ukrainian nationalists, and the situation ended with the flight of the president and the transfer of power to his opponents.

Then the Kremlin decided to take a step that transformed itself and the world: the annexation of Crimea. From that moment, the accelerated construction of a new Russian imperialism began. Russian television began to propagate the idea that ”Russians and Ukrainians are one people“, that ”Ukraine is not a real country“ and that the West wants to ”use Ukraine as a spearhead against Russia”. The cult of Stalin was resumed. The tsars reappeared in school textbooks. Statues of Ivan the Terrible and Alexander III were erected in the cities. The Duma passed increasingly repressive laws. The judiciary was subordinated to the executive. The political police (FSB) was given practically unlimited powers. The repression against LGBT people and feminists became systematic. The left Communists were persecuted. All this while the Russian oligarchs were accumulating colossal fortunes, and spending on the army was skyrocketing year after year.

And so, in February 2022, after eight years of tension and militaristic propaganda, the Kremlin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

It was a classic reprise of the darkest imperial adventures in history. A great capitalist power, equipped with nuclear weapons, decides to restore its empire by crushing a weaker neighbor, which it considers “its by right”, “part of its history”. He justifies this aggression with cynical excuses and open lies. It tries to occupy large territories and subdue an entire nation, without stopping at war crimes or the extermination of civilians. All this accompanied by an unprecedented propaganda avalanche in the aggressor country.

What does all this have to do with Ireland?

Ukraine and Russia today find themselves in a relationship very similar to that which existed between Ireland and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A great imperial power considers a weaker neighboring nation “its own“, exploits its resources, tries to suppress its language and culture, denies its independence, slanders its leaders as ”traitors“ and ”agents of foreign powers”, while using its population as cannon fodder in its wars.

Ireland was for centuries a colony of the British Empire. Its population was the victim of genocides, famines, mass expulsions. Any attempt at national insurrection was drowned in blood. For a long time, British ideologues claimed that the Irish did not constitute a distinct nation, that their language was a rural dialect of English, that the island had always been part of “Great Britain”.

In the nineteenth century, after the so-called Great Famine, millions of Irish were forced to emigrate. Many became proletarians in England, and were despised and oppressed as an inferior caste, despite speaking the same language as their oppressors. Only at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the Irish nation managed to organize a mass labor and socialist movement, which combined the struggle for independence with the social revolution. It was then that a new generation of revolutionaries emerged who understood that no significant social change was possible without breaking with British imperialism.

That is exactly the situation facing Ukraine today

The Ukrainian people are resisting not only a military invasion, but also an attempt at cultural and national annihilation by Russian imperialism. This war is a war for national liberation. And like any authentic national struggle, it has a progressive character. But it also presents the danger that the liberation movement will become subordinated to foreign capital: in the Ukrainian case, to American and European imperialism.

That is why the task of revolutionary socialists all over the world — and especially in Eastern Europe — is to unconditionally support the Ukrainian resistance, while continuing to criticize the Zelensky government and its neoliberal policy. To defend Ukraine’s right to arms, to its self-determination and to integrate as it wishes with other countries, without being treated as a pawn in the geopolitical games of the great powers.

Supporting Ukraine does not mean supporting NATO. It means being on the side of the oppressed people against the oppressor. On the side of the colonized peoples, not of the empires. Ireland’s side, not England’s. On the side of Ukraine, not Putin.