Оригинал Манифеста на русском языке
We, the organization Rabochaya Vlast’, present the Manifesto against Political Pessimism. Wars and crises have become a familiar news background. But to state the crisis of capitalism is not enough to find a solution. Almost two centuries ago, Karl Marx wrote the first Manifesto of the Communist Party, which ended with the words “Proletarians of all countries, unite”. We still rely on the basic ideas that resulted from the theoretical and practical work of our Marxist predecessors, but we need to understand contemporary economic and political relations in the world in order to offer our own analysis and to test these theses against them. In the Manifesto, we examine Russia's contemporary economy and political regime in the context of its history since the Soviet period and its position in the world system.
The conclusion we come to is that communism is possible in our lifetime. Why we believe so and what is the role of the subjective factor — the Party — in this process is revealed in this Manifesto.
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Today, as we proclaim this Manifesto, millions of people around the world stand in anxious anticipation. Plague, war — what lies ahead? General pessimism is a clear indicator that humanity is in crisis. The task before us is to show that this is not a crisis of humanity, but a crisis of capitalism.
Just over 100 years ago, Lenin characterized the imperialism of his day as dying, decaying and parasitic. Unfortunately, it still exists today and is also spreading the miasmas of its decay. As for its parasitic nature, this trait has developed to an incredible degree over the last century. For many decades, the export of capital was its main feature and calling card. Until the world turned upside down in the late 1980s and the world’s largest economy and by far the most powerful imperialist power, the United States of America, became an importer of capital. By the end of 2024, the US international investment position has reached an incredible $22.52 trillion dollars. This is due to a gigantic amount of both direct investment ($5.4 trillion) and government securities ($8.4 trillion). And if the first amount can still be explained by the rapid growth of the stock market, albeit not supported by actual dividends or profit figures, the second seems to be an inexplicable mystery. The 3-4% yield on 10-year US Treasury securities does not seem attractive against the background of inflation in the same United States. What attracts capital there?
The economic and political power of the United States since World War II has been based on the growth of world trade. Its origins lie in the international division of labor, where constant capital, such as machinery and technology, is produced in rich capitalist countries, and variable capital is used in poorer ones, where the cost of reproducing labor, and thus wages, is much lower. There is an internal contradiction hidden in this scheme. The development of industry creates demand for skilled labor, the education system develops, and sooner or later the developing country itself begins to produce machine tools and other machines, becoming a competitor on the world market. Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea have traveled this path in the postwar years. The fact that all these countries either have American military bases or are politically inextricably linked to the United States is not a coincidence. Up to a certain point, the “Communist threat” from the USSR and its allies also played an important role.
Paradoxically, it was Cold War politics that forced the US to turn toward China. A country that was not only militarily and politically independent of the United States, but also possessed nuclear weapons. A literate and disciplined labor force — the result of the hard work of the Chinese Communist Party — became a tasty lure for Western capital. China’s capitalist transformation on the basis of US investment was bound to transform it into a global imperialist capable of challenging the world hegemony of the United States.
Today, China’s dependence on the United States is no longer a dependence on American financial capital; on the contrary, China, along with Germany, is one of the largest exporters of capital. It is, first, dependence on American and Western European technology, and second, on the largest market for Chinese-made goods. The technological power of the United States goes back to the mass immigration of the 1930s, the military-industrial race of World War II and the Cold War, the increased availability of technical education in the US at the height of the Space Race. All of that is in the past. Today, US colleges graduate fewer than 300,000 engineers each year. About as many as Russia or Iran, and four times fewer than China. In recent decades, US labor shortages have been filled by immigration of professionals from China, India, Russia, Mexico and Canada. The situation is changing: rapid increase in salaries of technical specialists in China has turned migration flows around. Together with the repatriates, China receives many key technologies almost free of charge. The technological gap between the United States and China is rapidly shrinking. This means that the moment is approaching, when the US can rely only on protectionism.
All attempts by the Washington administration to bring mass high-tech manufacturing back to the United States are failing because of a lack of qualified personnel. American universities, more than anywhere else in the world, are money-grubbing enterprises for students and their parents. Increasing the “affordability” of education by partially subsidizing educational loans only leads to skyrocketing education costs, trapping young people in debt slavery for decades. In addition, the embargo on key technologies to China is being undermined by various corporate lobbies. On the surface, this looks like a collection of random, unrelated factors. But all of this is just a consequence of the fact that the high organic structure of capital leads to lower surplus value. In order to maintain the average rate of profit, capitalists, sometimes unconsciously, are forced to develop industries with a high share of variable capital at a faster pace.
The services market has an obvious flaw — it is not export-oriented. In order for Americans to pay for services and rising rents, they need money. Hence the policy of quantitative easing — that is, stimulating domestic demand, which weighs heavily on the US budget. This “medicine” has been actively used in the US economy since the 2008 crisis, in “horse” doses during the pandemic. The fact that it allowed to keep the economy “afloat” is a fact. As well as the fact that a side effect of this policy was the overheating of the stock market: the capitalization of such companies as Nvidia and Tesla exceeds their net profit 100 times or more! An overheated stock market will inevitably result in a stock market crash that, like Black Thursday in October 1929, will affect the broadest segments of American society.
But even without that perspective, right now the need to finance the budget deficit ($1.833 trillion — more than the GNP of Australia or Pakistan) is largely driving US policy. There are two obvious ways to finance the budget deficit: print money or borrow it.
The reason the Fed can print dollars without the risk of collapsing into rampant inflation is the dominant role of the dollar in world trade. Spring 2022 was a turning point — the euro’s share of world trade fell from 36% in 2020-2022 to 21.6% in August 2024. World trade “soaked up” most of the dollars issued.
The worse the economic and political situation in the world, the more willingly governments, insurance and pension funds buy US Treasuries. Everyone realizes: the US economy will be the last to collapse. The bigger the debt, the higher the discount rate, the harder it is to refinance. The economy is no longer enough — you need a policy. This policy is destabilizing everything the State Department can reach. The more blood and suffering in various countries around the world, the less interest the US government can borrow money at. This technique worked perfectly in both 2011 and 2022.
The above-mentioned need for the use of variable capital was the reason for the Shale revolution at the in the early tenths. Extraction of shale gas and oil requires many times more investments and labor. Having saturated the domestic American market, liquefied shale gas was exported. From the largest importer of petroleum products and natural gas, the US is becoming a net exporter by 2021. But shale oil production can only be profitable if oil prices are relatively high. Whereas the Middle East used to be an area of “vital US interest” to keep oil from being too expensive, now the U.S. army and its satellites are destabilizing Iraq and Syria to keep oil from being too cheap.
The next stage of the “gas war” is the US-Russian scramble for European gas market. Cheap Russian and, in the prospect of a trans-Arabian pipeline that would pass through Syria, Qatari pipeline gas are the main competitors in this war. Liquefied natural gas has won. There is an endless civil war in Syria. The wreckage of Nord Stream rests at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Instead of cheap pipeline natural gas, Russia supplies Europe with expensive liquefied natural gas.
The bourgeois media presented the US election campaign as almost the “last battle” between good and evil, which should determine the fate of mankind. In reality, it is a struggle of “yesterday” and “the day before yesterday”. The Biden-Harris program is to change nothing. More quantitative easing, more chaos in foreign policy — the dollar will pull through. If it doesn’t, it will be pulled by American aircraft carriers. This is the world imperialist proxy war program.
Trump’s “Make America Great Again” program pays lip service to a return to the “golden” 60’s, but in reality it is a program to return to the 30’s. Protectionism and trade wars will plunge the US into a great depression. Rising prices, stagflation, collapse of a number of industries, falling living standards. The only thing that can make Americans happy is that Europe and Asia, especially China, will be worse off. This is the path to World War or World Revolution. The fact that the lobby of transnational corporations in Congress will simply prevent this madness from materializing immediately is little consolation.
Trump’s victory is first and foremost a victory for Ilon Musk, who has become the White House’s chief lobbyist. His fortune instantly exceeded $400 billion (close to the GNP of South Africa). In the United States, a country where the myth of “people who make themselves”, flourishes, the opinion of one ultra-successful businessman was more important to voters than all the media in corporate America. The resulting aberrations will impact Trump’s entire presidential term. The newly invented “Department of Government Efficiency” is nothing more than every bourgeois’s dream of a “cheap government”. Given Musk’s cannibalistic way of doing business, whose success is largely attributed to headhunting specialists with knowledge of competitors’ key technologies, his clash with corporate America is almost inevitable. Even sooner, the onslaught on union rights and social programs will begin. In the course of its election Trump said in a campaign: “I look at what you do. You just walk in and you just say, ‘You wanna quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone… Every one of you is gone.’”
Under pressure from the rank and file, the unions, especially the United Auto Workers, will be forced to resist these policies. American youth, the first truly leftist generation in the US in decades, will be forced by the very course of events to recognize themselves first and foremost as proletarians, not as part of a particular racial or gender community.
On the rise of capitalism, protectionism and protection of national markets was a mandatory stage that a country lagging behind in its economic development had to go through. Bismarck’s Germany, the USA before and after the Civil War, Japan after the Meiji Revolution, Russia under Witte are classic examples. In the initial period of the imperialist era, the importation of capital into these countries only accelerated this process. But in the middle of the 20th century there came a moment when the development of productive forces reached a scale that far exceeded the scale of nation-states. Even the United States, which spends almost a trillion dollars on research and development, cannot compete successfully in all branches of industry and biotechnology. An industry limited to the domestic market is doomed to stagnation and backwardness.
But if protectionism as a tool of modernization has worked at least in the past, it has never worked as a way of preserving the status quo. Behind the scandalous victory of the libertarian Millay in the Argentine presidential election is the decades-long stagnation and degradation of the Argentine economy. It was the richest and most industrialized country in mid-twentieth century Latin America. “Promised Land” for millions of emigrants who sought to come here from crisis- and war-torn Europe, pursuing a strict protectionist policy, first lost its industrial potential and now its agricultural potential. A succession of moderate left-wing and equally moderate right-wing governments could do nothing about the hyperinflation, high cost of living and depreciation of the national currency, pushing the youth into the hands of a crazed adventurer.
Protectionism cannot solve the problems facing the US or EU economies, but this “theory” is of little concern to corporate lobbyists. The “Inflation Reduction Act” passed in 2022 clearly showed the whole world that “priority” sectors of the American economy will be protected from competition. Right now, imports of Chinese electric cars are subject to a 100% duty in the US, and semiconductors are subject to a 50% duty. Trump directly declares the introduction of new duties. The European Union is also inclined to this policy, despite the fact that China has something to answer to: exports of machine tools to this country are an important export item for Germany.
At some point, Trump-Musk’s insane economic policies will inevitably result into protectionist policies. Stagflation and falling real incomes of workers will accelerate the processes of radicalization of the working class. At the same time, the US, EU and China will be forced to start fighting over Latin America and Africa. Paradoxically, we arrive at the same scenario of a World Proxy War.
The US government restricts not only imports, but also exports. This seems like a paradox — but they are two sides of the same coin. As long as the U.S. and its satellites have a monopoly on key technologies and therefore control over the production of the means of production, they can put a spoke in the wheel of their competitors. This is not a new story. As early as 1949 (the very beginning of the Cold War), the US created the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom), whose purpose was to prevent the USSR’s industrial development by restricting access to advanced technology.
Today, the decisive point of contention between the US and China is lithography, a key process in semiconductor chip manufacturing. In October 2023, the White House tightened restrictions agreed with the Netherlands and Japan on the supply of advanced lithography machines to China. This primarily affects ASML, which before the sanctions, 49% of its revenue came from the Chinese market. Although the sanctions hurt the Chinese microelectronics industry, they resulted in strong government investment in the development of its own deep-ultraviolet photolithographers (steppers). As early as 2023, 65nm resolution has been achieved. Can China win back the 12-year lag behind ASML in the near term?
For decades, Western universities, research and engineering centers have eagerly hired hard-working Chinese engineers and scientists, often at the lowest wages. Today, tens of thousands of new Qian Sanqiang and Qian Xuesen1 are returning to China. In addition, PRC corporations are massively “re-buying” engineers from Taiwan, offering them higher salaries.
The globalization of science in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has not only led to a mass migration of scientific personnel, who are becoming less and less national, but also to the informational globalization of science. Corporations are constantly in a dilemma: patent their developments, revealing the direction of their research, or keep their know-how completely secret, restricting specialists to “non-disclosure signatures”. In reality (and Ilon Musk can attest to this), both approaches work very poorly.
Techno-embargo is the last line of defense of American imperialism before prohibitive duties on all consumer goods. And steppers are the main fortification of this line. If it falls, all restrictions on high-performance computing accelerators for artificial intelligence will become meaningless, and corporate America’s hopes for AI as a driver of a new round of economic growth will collapse. This will inevitably lead to a stock market crash (if it doesn’t happen sooner) and the “pupation” of the US economy.
The introduction of the euro and the expansion of the European Union to the East gave a powerful boost to the German economy. However, as the 2008 crisis showed, the price for this was the degradation of the industry of the “weak links” of the eurozone, first of all Greece and Portugal, then Italy. Strict monetary requirements imposed on the new EU members located in the east of the continent destroyed much of their industry. While the availability of capital had helped create jobs during the economic expansion on the eve of 2008, the crisis showed how fragile these gains had been. A new wave of migrant workers, now legal, moved westward. Ready to work for less money, they undermined the labor market in “old Europe”. The working class had gotten nothing from the economic growth of the previous period, now they were being asked to “tighten their belts”.
The economic success of Germany, the last classic industrialized country in Europe, was due to exceptionally rapid growth in exports of machinery and equipment to China, from $13.7 billion in 2003 to $99.2 billion in 2014. This growth was based on a combination of three factors: rapid growth of the Chinese economy, cheap Russian natural gas, and migrant labor from Eastern Europe. The growth rate of the Chinese economy is slowly declining, moreover, China has mastered many types of machine tools that it used to buy from Germany and even exports them to Russia, for example. Cheap Russian natural gas is no longer available.
There is also a powerful movement trying to turn Germany away from an industrialized path of development. The international tensions of the final phase of the Cold War, the deployment of US nuclear-armed missiles in Germany, combined with two major man-made disasters in 1986 — Chernobyl and a fire at the Sandoz chemical plant in Basel that polluted the Rhine - caused fear and frustration among many Germans, which Ulrich Beck described well in his book Risk Society. In the years that followed, the Greens evolved from a marginal political movement into a party that garnered 14.7% of the vote in parliamentary elections and was part of the government coalition.
Fukuyama’s “end of history” found its political expression in the concept of “sustainable development” — without contradictions, without struggle, catastrophes and revolutions. But is such development even possible? According to Marx, human development is the steady development of productive forces and the overcoming of the contradictions caused by it. The postmodernists succeeded in drawing millions of young Germans into the world of “green ponies”, but history came back to them in the form of energy bills to deal a devastating blow to the German economy.
Europe is aging. This obvious demographic fact pushes the bourgeoisie, on the one hand, to raise the retirement age and prolong the exploitation of workers to the extreme limit, on the other hand, to attract foreign labor. This has long been not only a way of making super-profits, but a necessary condition for the preservation of a number of sectors of the economy. Construction, trade, services, food industry… If all foreign workers were to disappear from Britain, France, Germany or Russia at the wave of a magic wand in the hands of an anti-migration populist, we would witness the collapse of the economy: stopped transport, frozen tower cranes at construction sites, garbage-filled streets, paralyzed industry. This thought experiment shows conclusively how false the xenophobic demagogy of the national-populists is.
While telling voters about their successes in the fight against migration, bourgeois politicians are secretly conducting a real struggle for labor resources. First of all, for qualified specialists from other countries. If in the 90s the spread of the EU to the East gave German capital the monopoly right to apply itself directly in the new EU member states, the subsequent stages of European integration were more aimed at the creation of a single labor market and the migration of workers to Germany.
At first glance, the situation is paradoxical: on the one hand, the ruling class makes every possible effort to lure foreign workers into the country, and on the other hand, it turns the local population against them. But there is no paradox here — it is advantageous for capitalists that workers do not bring their families to the countries where they work. In this case, the cost of reproducing their labor force is lower than that of the local proletariat, and it becomes possible to pay migrant workers less. The pressure on the labor market then makes it possible to lower the wages of local workers. In the modern economy, managed migration plays the same role for the bourgeoisie as unemployment.
Of course, such a scheme only works if the standard of living (and therefore prices) in the country where migrant families live is lower than in the rich countries where they work. This also answers the question, which is very “worrying” for bourgeois economists, why at some point the gap between the “new” and “old” EU members stops shrinking.
All these arguments are also applicable to Russia’s relations with former CIS countries. Numerous obstacles in the way of naturalization of migrants wishing to settle in Russia. The reluctance of Russian capital to invest in the industry of countries where the main flow of migrants comes from in order to preserve poverty there.
But the most dramatic development of events can be found where the economic interests of the EU and Russia intersect most directly — in Moldova and Ukraine. There was a real struggle for workers from these countries. Throughout the 90s and 00s, Moldovan and Ukrainian proletarians made up the bulk of the labor force in the construction sites of Moscow or the natural gas fields of Samotlor. Russian finance capital then faced competitors from Western Europe, who could usually offer better labor conditions. Economic competition quickly turned into a political struggle. Russian, Romanian and Polish passports were handed out, followed by manipulation of migration laws.
In the demographic realities of today’s Russia, millions of skilled workers are much more important than the semi-mythical shale gas of Northern Donbass or even Crimea with its naval base and population of two million. The same is true of Germany and Poland, where the other half of Ukrainians who fled the horrors of the war have settled.
During the twentieth century, social democrats and conservatives came to power alternately in most Western European countries. The descendants of noble aristocratic families and “ordinary guys from the next street” succeeded each other, and the monarchs who survived all the vicissitudes of this turbulent century gave honorary titles to the latter. This order seemed immutable. Even the crisis of the 1970s could not shake it. But then something went wrong. The “left” and “right” parties of the establishment became so close to each other politically that the habit of voting for one party or another became determined more by cultural tradition than by a conscious political choice. The petty bourgeoisie, the non-unionized part of the working class, the farmers, the youth who have not yet acquired stable political habits. This whole army of constantly wavering voters, who previously voted “contrary”, i.e. simply for opposition to “his majesty”, now either simply don’t go to the polls, or look for what seems to them to be a real alternative.
The European debt crisis of 2008 brought left-wing populists such as Greece’s Syriza and Spain’s Podemos into the stage of history only to demonstrate their political impotence and ideological emptiness. Syriza, with the support of much of Greek society behind it, capitulated, afraid to challenge the EU bureaucracy. Its collapse crippled Podemos.
A chemically pure example of left-wing populism was Iceland. The financial crisis led to the collapse of the country’s three main banks, most of whose depositors were British citizens. The country was on the verge of bankruptcy. The Icelandic krone depreciated by 85%. Mass protests continued for several months until the right-wing government resigned. Power was literally lying in the street. As often happens, the Social Democratic Alliance and former communists from the Left-Green Movement volunteered to save Icelandic capitalism. And then there’s comedian Jon Gnarr with his “Best Party”. As a memento of the mass movement and the enthusiasm of the masses, Iceland has a constitution that was adopted in as democratic a way as one can imagine.
We have already mentioned above the victory of the populist libertarian Miley in the presidential election in Argentina. The story of the protests in Bangladesh in August 2024 is much more dramatic. They were caused by the nepotism of ruling party functionaries, the government’s inability to cope with a protracted economic downturn, corruption and lack of democracy. Student youths clashed with police, army special anti-terrorism units and armed gangs of the ruling party’s youth organization, the Chantra Leagues. The Bangladesh Workers’ and Communist Party played an important role in the protests. The heroism of the youth, which cost the lives of at least 700 protesters, led them to victory. The police and army retreated and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled the country. But what happened next? Leaders of the Students Against Discrimination movement have agreed that the interim government of the country will be headed by Muhammad Yunus, a banker and Nobel Prize-winning economist who created a network of microfinance organizations in the country.
The Arab revolutions and the subsequent rise of radical Islamism led to a migration crisis, with hundreds of thousands of migrants from Iraq, Syria and North Africa moved towards Europe by all means. The labor migration has been replaced by political migration. Seventeen years ago, before the 2008 crisis, this would hardly have been such a big problem. But now, exhausted by several years of budget-cutting policies, the countries of southern Europe have found themselves unprepared to provide sufficient humanitarian aid to the refugees. Moreover, in an attempt to relieve social tensions, local authorities began to blame migrants for all the problems that could not be solved after the economic crisis.
We will return to the phenomenon of Islamic radicalism below. For now, we will limit ourselves to noting that refugees are nothing more than a cross-section of Iraqi, Libyan or Syrian society. There are people deeply imbued with the ideas of radical Islam. Even worse. Politically, any division of the working class, particularly between “native” citizens and migrants, is advantageous to the bourgeoisie. This prevents workers from fighting together for their rights. This is why, while the bourgeoisie pays lip service to cultural integration, it does not seek to overcome the cultural and religious differences that divide the working class. This is why medieval norms of family and social life, totally inadequate to the modern era, have been passed off by bourgeois politicians and their “leftist” advocates as cultural traditions and a certain “identity”.
In this situation, the rise of right-wing parties, which traditionally play on the theme of migrantophobia, was inevitable. Representatives of the establishment parties, who failed in the first rounds of elections, were everywhere calling on voters to “rally” around them in order to save democracy from the “brown plague”. But… as soon as the right-wing came to power, it immediately became clear that, with the exception of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, they were just as impotent as their left-wing opponents. This is not surprising. Europe is in the position of not only not having the money to fulfill election promises, no matter who makes them, but even the ability to print them. This applies to social programs and support for the self-employed, small and medium-sized businesses. National governments have become entangled by the bureaucracy of Brussels. The party in power is forced to pursue the same policies as its predecessors.
At some point, the crisis was replaced by panic. In Romania, for example, the results of the first round of the presidential election, in which right-wing populists Georgescu and Lasconi beat candidates from parties that had been sitting in parliament and forming governments for decades, were simply overturned by a Constitutional Court ruling on the absurd charge of “Russian interference”, even though Lasconi had an openly pro-Ukrainian stance. An additional contingent of NATO troops was sent to Romania just in case.
The capitalist system is destabilized everywhere and will break down in its weakest links time after time. Hundreds of thousands of workers and students will take to the streets. But as long as there is no subjective factor — a mass Marxist party of the proletarian vanguard — it will be picked up by random adventurers and unprincipled populists with their empty promises.
In the nineteenth century, the nation-state gave a mighty impetus to capitalist development. But even then the question of ethnoses worthy and unworthy of their state arose. Covered by Wilson’s voluptuous speeches about the right of nations to self-determination, US imperialism, which had enriched itself enormously during World War I, together with Britain, was cutting up the map of Europe. Its aim was not the freedom of nations, but the maximum weakening of Germany and Soviet Russia, which were on the threshold of revolution, and the creation of sanitary zones separating them from each other.
Already at the moment of their creation, the borders of these limitrophic states were too narrow for the development of productive forces. They could only become (and became) the arena of the struggle of external forces. At first it was the struggle of the World Revolution and reaction, and after the final establishment of the Stalinist clique in the USSR, increasingly — of German, French and British imperialism. It was not only Hitler, Chamberlain and then Stalin who divided Eastern Europe among themselves. Each of the limitrophs sought to tear a piece off its neighbor. Thus the Second World War involved almost all the states of Europe.
The result was a Europe of two camps and the Cold War. In each of these camps there were processes of economic integration. It was the very politics that became an extension of economics. The European Coal and Steel Association was little more than a cartel. The European Economic Community that emerged from it set itself the goal of merging national corporations into transnational corporations. Neither the nationalism deeply embedded in the flesh and blood of European politics nor the deep scars of historical enmity could prevent the pressure of lobbies that vitally needed a common market for European capitalists.
The same processes were underway in Eastern Europe, where the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance had been established even earlier. However, it soon became clear that it was paradoxically even more difficult to integrate planned national economies with their complex monetary and commodity balance and deficit of consumer goods than market economies. Insufficient integration of the Soviet camp countries, internal political competition, and the break with China — a giant source of labor resources — became one of the reasons for problems with economic growth both in the USSR and in other CMEA countries.
The wave of bourgeois counter-revolutions that swept across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to the appearance of more than a dozen new states on the political map. But even their founders, both post-Soviet bureaucrats and former dissidents, did not believe in the possibility of their independent capitalist development. Western European imperialism, which had lost its colonies in Asia and Africa, pulled the lucky ticket. The European Union, hastily created on the basis of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, began its rapid expansion to the East.
But as we have already seen above, economic expansion requires political expansion, and that requires military expansion. Ahead of the European Union was the military bloc NATO, membership in which for the countries of Eastern Europe became a prerequisite for admission to the “Garden of Eden” named after Borrell. Investments always need to be protected by force of arms, don’t they? An additional, but not unimportant, as it turned out later, factor linking EU and NATO membership was the possibility for the US to maintain its influence in Europe through its military presence.
Unlike in Russia, where the bureaucracy and party officials largely controlled the privatization process, the bourgeois counter-revolution in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia was so rapid that transnational corporations were able to quickly establish control over most of the national economies of these countries. However, the condition for large-scale investment was anti-labor legislation and economic restructuring, which led to a dramatic rise in unemployment, which reached the 15% mark in Poland, Hungary and Slovakia. This led to a collapse of confidence in the “ex-dissident” parties of the bourgeois counter-revolution. In Poland, the government of the “Solidarity” collapsed.
In these conditions, the Western bourgeoisie wanted to have more weighty guarantees of its domination. These were to be obtained in the course of a program of rapprochement with NATO and further membership. The decision on the Fourth enlargement was taken at the January 1994 NATO summit. Although Yeltsin’s regime, which at that moment was concerned only with its own survival and the preparation of large-scale privatization, did not care, the State Department and Clinton personally clearly understood how NATO enlargement would affect relations with Russia. It was then that they said that this decision could become a “self-fulfilling prophecy” and would lead to the “alienation” of Russia. That is why they decided to “cover up” the preparations for NATO’s eastward advance with a program with the typically hypocritical name “Partnership for Peace”.
The North Atlantic Treaty itself does not contain any special requirements for its possible participants, except for the provision that candidates for accession have no existing agreements with third countries that contradict the treaty. But in 1995, already after the decision to expand NATO to the East had been made, the alliance published a rather detailed document “Study on NATO Enlargement”. Apart from a certain amount of demagoguery, it contains the notorious paragraph 6, which states that: “States which have ethnic disputes or external territorial disputes, including irredentist [i.e., aimed at uniting an ethnic group] claims, or internal jurisdictional disputes must settle those disputes by peaceful means in accordance with OSCE principles. Resolution of such disputes would be a factor in determining whether to invite a state to join the Alliance”. The study was not a normative document, and in the very next paragraph it was explicitly written that NATO would decide for itself whom to admit and whom not to admit. The document was written in a certain historical context.
In 1993, the United States considered possible scenarios for Russia, Ukraine and Belarus and Kazakhstan to join NATO. However, they were never elaborated to a detailed level. The reasons were very simple. At that moment, Western imperialism’s investments in these countries were negligible, the majority of the economy was still in the public sector, and the prospect of further developments was completely uncertain. The contradictions between the level of development of the productive forces in these countries and their assigned place in the world system of capitalist labor had already become a factor in their political and social destabilization. Although unevenly, this process would continue in the following decades. This is why the US saw these countries primarily as an element of instability on the fringes of Europe. This is why Bush achieved the signing of the Lisbon Protocol to the START-1 Treaty, under which nuclear warheads were withdrawn to Russia from the former Soviet Union.
The collapse of the colonial system after World War II was inevitable. The old imperialist states — Britain and France — were exhausted by the war. The United States, on the other hand, had grown stronger than ever and needed a global market free of any restrictions. All that the colonialists could do when they left Asia and Africa was to sow ethnic and religious discord by drawing borders in the most sophisticated ways. The nation-states that emerged from colonial revolutions inherited many feudal vestiges from their former masters, which they carefully cultivated in their divide-and-rule policies.
Once established, these states faced a deep ideological crisis. Only the largest of them had a chance to form a full-fledged nation within themselves. A nation, usually speaking several different languages, and united almost exclusively territorially and economically, not culturally. In the 1960s, the growth of world trade, investments by US capital, politically motivated aid from the USSR, and the introduction of elements of a planned economy stabilized these states. The “green revolution” — the introduction of highly productive crop varieties — also played an important role.
But by the 1990s, all development reserves had been exhausted. National industrial production was going bankrupt, unable to compete with the production of consumer goods in East Asia. The rapid growth of the agrarian population in countries that never made the demographic transition led to exodus from the countryside. There was no way for the hugely troubled industry to absorb these people. This process also affected the urban middle class: tertiary-educated young people could not find employment in the public administration and education sectors, which were experiencing budget cuts under IMF pressure. A revolutionary situation had developed in a number of countries. Unfortunately, the problem for the communists was not only the absence of the subjective factor — a communist party. In Iran 1979 there was such a party (Tudeh), but it did not prevent the Islamists from taking power.
The rise of Islamic fundamentalism is a consequence of a combination of two favorable factors. On the one hand, the strengthening of the economic role of the petty bourgeoisie, primarily the merchant bourgeoisie and the lumpen proletariat following it. On the other hand, the disillusionment of the masses with secular nationalism (both Syrian and pan-Arab). The masses instinctively feel that the main reason for the crisis of the Arab world is the limited nature of national economies.
A unified Arab state from Libya to Iraq, which, if established, would combine the labor resources of Egypt and Syria with Saudi oil and bring prosperity to the Arab world. The idea of Arab socialism was not empty words, it was a real political program that millions of people followed. It was undermined and destroyed by the forces of capital who feared a strong Arab state that could ensure peace in the Middle East and fair oil prices.
Radical Islamist organizations in the early period of their history were first supported by the Israeli intelligence services as a counterweight to Palestinian organizations of socialist orientation. Then they were supported by the CIA to mobilize Afghan mujahideen fighting against the pro-Soviet government of Afghanistan. Finally, the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 led to a political and humanitarian crisis, the end result of which was the emergence of ISIL. As before the idea of uniting all Arabs, so now the idea of uniting all Sunnis has mobilized lumpen-passionaries from many countries around the world. And although ISIL as a military organization has been defeated, its fighters have not gone anywhere. They remained in the same Syria, with the same ideas, only now they are called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. And it is they who have seized power in Syria, lost to the rotten and corrupt regime of Bashar al-Assad.
The main beneficiary of this Islamist victory was Israel, which not only occupied a strategically important part of Syria’s territory, but also deflected the generally unsuccessful war with Hamas and Hezbollah. The collapse of Bashir al-Assad’s regime is above all the defeat of the Alawite minority, adherents of the Gnostic current in the Shiite branch of Islam, who for several decades played a key role in Syrian politics. “Shiite” bloc, which included, besides Iran, militarily and economically Israel’s most powerful adversary in the region, also the Houthis, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Assad regime in Syria, was weakened. But Israel’s joy is premature. Tactically, discord and chaos are beneficial to Israel, but strategically, a force capable of uniting the Arab Middle East against Israel, as history has shown, cannot emerge out of order, out of established political forces — it can only emerge out of chaos. From the spontaneous tendency of the Arabs to unite.
The war that Israel has waged with exceptional brutality over the past year has shown not only the weakness and disunity of its opponents. It has reaffirmed the Palestinians’ willingness to fight to the end for the right to live on their land. More importantly, it demonstrated the limitations of Israel’s military capabilities, which could only succeed on the battlefield against a poorly armed enemy by extreme exertion. In the context of the general destabilization of world politics, the only way to ensure the security of the Jewish population of Palestine is the demolition of the apartheid regime, the return of refugees and the establishment of a unified secular Arab-Jewish state.
In June 2006, when the economic ministers of Brazil, Russia, India, and China signed the BRIC agreement at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, few took it seriously. Brazil, Russia and South Africa, which joined them in 2010, were quietly selling their raw materials and metals on Western commodity exchanges, China was critically dependent on exports to the United States, and India was most concerned about integration into the global capitalist division of labor.
The subsequent increase in turbulence in global politics and economy, Xi Jinping’s rise to power in China, Russia’s expulsion from the G8 club, Trump’s first term in office and the trade war he launched with China have given BRICS real political weight. The annual summits have become a kind of alternative to the G7 club. The symbolic marker was 2020, when the total GNP of the BRICS exceeded that of the G7. The imposition of a number of sanctions on Russia has reversed traditional commodity and raw material flows in global trade. Which has become more marginal, but also more risky. In early 2024, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, UAE and Egypt joined BRICS.
As we wrote above, Trump’s election as US president generates the risk of protectionism. It will almost certainly lead to the formation of imperialist alliances. The division of markets, raw materials, and capital investment will begin. The new alliance members (together with the hesitant Saudi Arabia) will finally balance such a market.
That’s not mean that further restrictions on exports to the US won’t be a brutal blow to China’s economy, but it has a lot to answer for. First of all, it is the threat of creating a new currency to challenge the US dollar. The US economy suffered quite painfully the emergence of the euro, the new currency, based on the import-export volumes of member countries may be even more dangerous. Trump has already warned the BRICS countries of imposing 100% duties if such a program is implemented. Although the plans to create a full-fledged currency look unrealistic at the moment, the creation of a technical currency for internal bank settlements is quite possible in case of deepening contradictions between the US and China. Another aspect is the growing scientific and technological cooperation between the BRICS countries, the development of which has intensified dramatically in recent years against the background of the rapid development of Chinese universities.
But there is another side to the triumphant growth of most of the bloc’s economies. Countries in the growth phase are much less resistant to crises of overproduction. First of all, it is the threat of mass unemployment combined with the lack of a developed system of support for the unemployed. Despite the fact that the 2008-10 crisis hit China weaker than the G7 countries, in purely social terms, China suffered the crisis even harder. Curtailing global trade will lead to mass unemployment and social protests. A revolutionary situation will arise. These countries are not the weak links of capitalism at this point. The bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy that protects its interests have great power to suppress the working class movement. But once a revolutionary movement starts in one of these countries, it simply by virtue of its scale cannot be suppressed from outside.
The greatest achievement of Hegel and Marx is that they showed that the present is the result of the struggle of historical tendencies born in the past. The economic and political system of modern Russia did not grow out of nowhere. It was built on the wreckage of the Soviet planned economy and its initial development was largely predetermined by it.
As a result of the revolution of 1917, power in Russia was in the hands of the proletariat. In the years that followed, the advanced, but unfortunately not numerous, working class of Soviet Russia made enormous sacrifices in the struggle against the attempts of the bourgeoisie it had overthrown to restore its class rule. The severity of the struggle against the internal and external counter-revolution resulted in the strengthening beyond all limits of the instrument of power of the working class — the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Initially, the basis of this state was the direct organization of the working class in the organs of its self-government — the workers’ councils. But in the early years of the revolution, the workers were only a small minority of the country’s population. The mobilization of the peasantry, i.e. the petty bourgeoisie, to the fronts of the Civil War played an important role in the victory of the Red Army, but at the same time led to an increase in the role of the peasantry in the economic and political life of the country. RCP(b) was forced to retreat in the economy, proclaiming the beginning of the New Economic Policy.
Having the opportunity to maneuver between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie, the superstructure, i.e. the state, was able to listen much less to the opinion of the working class and its councils. The threat of a split in the RCP(b), which had taken many peasant Red Army soldiers into its ranks, led to the gradual destruction of the democratic traditions of the Bolshevik Party. The political debate on the future of the revolution between the right wing (Bukharinist) of the party, which regarded the enrichment of the middle peasant and the satisfaction of its needs as the basis for the development of the Soviet economy, and the left wing, represented by Trotsky and Preobrazhensky, with its concept of initial socialist accumulation through the ruthless exploitation of pre-socialist ways of life, was used by Stalin’s centrist faction for a Thermidorian coup in the party leadership.
The established regime, which Trotsky himself called a deformed workers’ state, was a form of proletarian Bonapartism, i.e. a balancing between classes. Although by the end of the 1920s, against the background of the “bread strike”, it became obvious that the interests of the proletariat and the petty rural bourgeoisie were incompatible, and the predictions of the Left Opposition were fully justified, the persecution and exclusion of its supporters in the RCP(b) and the Communist International only intensified. The bureaucracy was forced to realize the ideas of the Left, but it did so in a hurry and in a crude bureaucratic form. Relying more on the state apparatus of violence than on the organized working class. The same is true of industrialization. Trotsky’s proposals, which had been ridiculed by Stalin as recently as three years earlier, were now being implemented in an even shorter time frame. Adventurism in planning and disproportion in economics led to a deterioration in the situation of the working class. Forced into collective farms, the peasantry languished in poverty. But, even at a high price, industrialization made the USSR by the end of the 30s developed country with a large young working class.
The threat of internal counter-revolution had passed and the objective prerequisites for democratization in the party and the workers’ state had emerged. In these conditions Stalin struck a preemptive blow: on the one hand, the Constitution of 1936 abolished the workers’ councils and declared the establishment of socialism, on the other hand, the horror of the “Great Terror” of 1937 paralyzed the will of the surviving party members. Lenin, as is well known, denied the possibility of building socialism in a single country, viewing the revolution in Russia exclusively in an international context. Now that the collectivized peasantry had completely lost its political subjectivity, the bureaucracy was forced to appeal to external threats (and the rise of German Nazism contributed to this). Whereas the USSR’s foreign policy had previously been, as far as possible, a policy of exporting revolution, now even military expansion was justified as the defense of a “besieged fortress”.
Industrialization was a powerful impetus for the development of the Soviet economy. But the economy of any transitional society contains internal contradictions. Initially, the Soviet economy that emerged from the NEP was commodity-based. Industrial goods and machinery were produced for sale on the market. Accelerated industrialization was aimed at creating the production of means of production, which went to other state enterprises and to the MTS within the framework of the established plan. Although economic payments between enterprises were made in rubles, these cash rubles were completely disconnected from the cash rubles used to pay workers’ and employees’ wages. The balance between workers’ wages and consumer prices was determined by the triad of Gosplan-Goskomtsen-Narkomtrud. Although the latter two declared that they were guided by “objective criteria” in setting prices and rates, in the absence of a market this was often a politically motivated fiction.
There was no financial market as such in the USSR, and only the “kolkhoz” market was relatively free (where collective farmers traded, not collective farms, which surrendered all agricultural products, except for small in-kind payments for labor days, to the state), the share of which was decreasing from year to year. At the same time, there was a labor market in the country. Although the salaries of workers and employees were set by the People’s Commissariat for Labour and were the same (without taking into account regional coefficients), starting from the late 1930s, the shortage of labor forced enterprises to compete for them. The main mechanism of this struggle (along with the distribution of free housing) was the accord system of labor remuneration2 and support for the Stakhanov movement. In the 1970s, the real wages of industrial workers could be two or more times their salary.
The “piecework” and constant overfulfillment of the plan disorganized the economy. Since raw materials and components were required for the manufacture of overplanned products, the enterprises tried by all rights and wrongs to obtain them more than the planned needs. Their huge stocks were accumulated at enterprises by frozen capital.3 At the same time at other enterprises there was a deficit of components. Party and economic bodies put pressure on the Gossnab, trying to “beat out” the extra parts. Large plants tried to produce components themselves in order not to depend on allied companies. This reduced the efficiency and quality of products. The planned economy was plunging into chaos. Another consequence of the desire to exceed the plan and the inevitable “Shturmovshchina”4 at the end of the year was mass defects, the scourge of Soviet industry.
Although investments in industry were growing all the time, the fixed assets turnover ratio began to decline from the mid-1970s. If at the shop floor level socialist competition led to scrap, at the level of departments and regions party committees it hindered modernization. Directors, Narkoms (later ministers) and First secretaries were required to overfulfill the plan. An enterprise stopped for reconstruction formally reduced these indicators. New factories were built in the country, but the old ones, with worn-out and obsolete equipment, were not closed. And, as a rule, the best, most experienced personnel were concentrated there, which were lacking in the new production facilities.
“Socialist competition” not only created competition among workers for the favorable orders and sowed discord among workers, but also contributed to the appearance in the economy of “excess” cash, which was not provided with the mass of goods. Under Stalin, this money was periodically withdrawn by confiscatory monetary reforms and State loans. In the subsequent period, it led to the emergence of the so-called “money overhang” — personal money savings in savings banks and accumulations in the form of cash. Since in the USSR prices were regulated by the state and inflation, starting from the 50s, was extremely low, it became a serious macroeconomic problem by the early 70s. Attempts to solve this problem through the construction of condominiums, mass production of passenger cars and high taxes on luxury goods could not solve the problem.
By the end of the 1970s, there was mass dissatisfaction with the situation, which covered all strata of society. There was a general feeling in the party top brass that it was necessary to somehow increase both motivation and labor discipline of workers and employees, but there was no consensus on how to do it. Workers and specialists felt the need to increase their role in production management, and in addition, everyone was annoyed by the informational insularity of Soviet society. As is often the case, an external factor — falling oil prices, a source of currency for the purchase of imported consumer goods5 to cover commodity shortages — became a kind of call to action for members of the Politburo, namely the election of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee in 1985.
Although the first words about greater openness in the work of party bodies were uttered as early as April 1985, the famous formula Perestroika-Glasnost-Acceleration was sounded at the January 1987 plenum of the CPSU Central Committee. The actual elimination of censorship in the press, and then on TV, allowed the press to address the most closed subject of Soviet history: the Stalinist repressions. “Thick” literary magazines began to publish critical articles analyzing the class nature of the USSR. Most of this analysis was reduced to various variants of the theory of state capitalism, but this was more a consequence of the fact that Trotsky’s writings on the nature of the USSR, and above all The Revolution Betrayed, were still locked away in Special vaults of two or three of the largest libraries in the country. The mass mood and aspirations of the masses in 1987-88 boiled down to the need to reform the USSR on the basis of greater democracy and transparency. The electrified air was filled with ideas of political revolution, as Lev Trotsky and the Left Opposition saw it.
The only thing missing was a subjective factor. The left-wing dissident movement in the USSR had several dozen active participants, and during Perestroika, most of it had adopted social-democratic positions. The only chance to ignite the masses would have been to import revolutionary Marxist ideas from abroad. Unfortunately, the fragments of the Fourth International, which by this time had disintegrated into many parts, were unable to fulfill their historical mission. This refers to the insignificance of the human resources that worked in the USSR during this period (no more than a dozen people), and even less to their publishing activity — “Revolution Betrayed” was first published in the USSR in mass circulation only in 1991, at the moment when the mood of the masses shifted far to the right.
1988 was the year of the first mass rallies organized by Memorial, which had emerged the year before, the year of the establishment of the Democratic Union, Nina Andreeva’s Stalinist declaration “I cannot compromise my principles”, and truly mass politicization. But at the same time, the economic situation in the country was changing. The 1987 regulation on the Centers for Scientific and Technical Creativity of Youth and the 1988 “Law on Cooperation” pierced the holes in the bulkheads separating the sea of “nobody’s” non-cash money of state factories from the salaries of workers and, especially, employees. Hundreds of enterprising Komsomol members (including Mikhail Khodorkovsky) made fortunes in the millions, but average nominal wages also grew. If in 1986 the inhabitants of the RSFSR had 181 billion rubles, with 46 billion rubles worth of various goods in state stores and warehouses, then by 1989 the ratio had become 155 to 42, and by 1991 — 548 to 79.
By mid-1989, commodity shortages and stagnant miners’ wages against a background of rising wages in other sectors led to mass miners’ strikes. Public sentiment moved to the right. The less goods were available in the stores, the more workers dreamed of a free market with its commodity abundance.
In two years, two influential social groups have emerged in the
community:
- enterprise directors and industry ministerial officials
wishing to maintain their status, influence and control over resources
and cooperators; - speculators and scrap metal dealers who had
by this time found corrupt routes to export control officials.
Russia’s political history is a protracted struggle between national capital, oriented towards the Chinese model of capitalist restoration, and comprador merchant capital seeking an open market and shock therapy. Its first stage took place in 1990-1991. Boris Yeltsin became the political “face” of the compradors after his triumphant election as People’s Deputy of the USSR in the Moscow national-territorial Moscow district. A slant-tongued alcoholic with an inarticulate economic program was in the right place at the right moment. He managed to clash with the party-economic nomenclature (and shamefully lose) at the very moment when it was completely discredited in the eyes of the masses. Although his political opponents had enormous political and military resources, they lacked the most important thing: political will. Gorbachev, who from the point of view of the bureaucratic logic was to be headed by the faction of “state capitalism”, not hurry to do it. There were at least two reasons for this: the budget of the USSR this moment sat firmly on the needle of Western loans, and Gorbachev is not wanted to quarrel with creditors, in addition, Gorbachev, accustomed to the adoration of the masses, which at that time had a negative attitude to the possible curtailment of democracy, feared losing the remnants of their support.
This led to Gorbachev’s arrest in August 1991 by the GKChP (State Committee on the State of Emergency), which was headed by Gennady Yanayev, whom the security forces had not even bothered to inform in advance about the details of the coup. The mass mobilization of Muscovites, including workers, combined with the incapacity of the state apparatus, which had decayed by that time, brought Yeltsin to power. As a direct consequence, the USSR collapsed in the fall of the same year. On January 2, 1992, price regulation was abolished, and by the end of the year prices had risen more than 25 times. “Shock therapy” imposed by American economic advisors and their Russian disciples was accompanied by a sharp rise in unemployment and impoverishment of the population. At the same time, the export of energy and metals, incredibly profitable due to the ruble’s depreciation, was still licensed. The lucky license holders from Yeltsin’s entourage were making hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile the government seized all foreign currency held in Vneshtorgbank’s accounts from state-owned industrial enterprises. Deputies of the Supreme the RSFSR Council, in its mass - the directors of the state enterprises or their lobby, were furious. The confrontation between the Supreme Council and Yeltsin began. But they were in no hurry to act, because they had an urgent matter — it was “voucher” privatization.
At the same time, the masses were moving to the left. The RCWP was bringing hundreds of thousands of its supporters to the Moscow streets. At the same time, the power of Yeltsin and his faction was not yet consolidated. There was ferment in the army, the average officer was mostly on the side of the White House on Krasnopresnenskaya embankment, where the Supreme Soviet was sitting. Instead of decisive action, the so-called “red-brown” opposition, consisting of communists and anti-Western patriots (including open anti-Semites from the RNU), wasted time in fruitless negotiations with Vice President of Russia Alexander Rutskoi, who had defected to the Supreme Soviet. Eventually Yeltsin himself took the offensive. The heroic struggle of the Communists against the troops and police loyal to the president in October 1993 ended in their defeat. The bourgeois counter-revolution in Russia was accomplished.
This is not to say that the regime had no social base. Privatization, combined with the strict financial policy of the Central Bank imposed by the IMF, destroyed both economic ties between enterprises and the centralized system of trade. Spontaneous markets sprang up everywhere, 24-hour stalls sprang up at every streetcar stop. Millions of yesterday’s engineers sold slippers imported from Turkey, while nearby female workers in knitwear factories sold socks that they had been given to offset their wages. A new class of petty bourgeoisie was being formed, in which there was a rapid process of capital concentration, which was sometimes interrupted by the murder of debtors.
Elections were free and democratic to the extent that they decided nothing. Local authorities simply had no money. The State Duma passed laws that no one was going to enforce. Before the 1996 presidential elections, the “Semibankirshchina” (“Seven Bankers’ Party”), ruling on behalf of an already incapacitated president, held bail auctions, privatizing the main oil-producing companies virtually free of charge. A 2% popularity rating did not prevent Yeltsin from defeating Zyuganov in the presidential election, with diametrically opposed results in Tatarstan in the first and second rounds. No one had any doubts that the election results were rigged, but neither the democratic public nor Zyuganov himself thought of protesting.
Taxes were collected only on income, and only from workers at large factories and from the miserable salaries of public sector employees. When Vladimir Petukhov, the mayor of Nefteyugansk, resented Yukos’ blatant tax evasion, Pichugin, the company’s head of security, organized his assassination as a birthday present for Khodorkovsky. Russia’s budget was financed almost exclusively through the State Short-Term Bonds (GKO) pyramid, which paid insane interest rates and enriched anyone with Central Bank insider knowledge.
But the “unipolar world” turned out to be not as stable as its creators had envisioned. And not only in politics — the conflict in the Balkans has now spread to Kosovo, an autonomous province within Yugoslavia. But also in the economy: in 1997, the Asian economic crisis broke out. The financial system, built in Russia according to the models of American advisors, could not withstand the pressure of the world market and collapsed with a crash. Mass bankruptcies and rapid devaluation of the ruble led to a political crisis in the country. The State Duma did not approve Kirienko as prime minister, and Yeltsin, not daring to dissolve the Duma, effectively recognized his capitulation. Under the circumstances, the CPRF could have taken power into its own hands, but preferred to compromise by supporting the “technical” government of Primakov-Maslyukov. However, as it turned out, this government was not “technical” at all. On the contrary, it expressed the interests of the owners of the old, and other Soviet enterprises that revived against the background of the fall of the ruble.
The political expression of this was the famous “Primakov Loop”. On March 24, 1999, Primakov went on an official visit to Washington. The not too advertised purpose of the visit was to agree on a five billion dollar IMF stabilization loan. The plane was already over the island of Newfoundland when US Vice President Albert Gore announced NATO’s decision to start bombing Yugoslavia. Primakov decided to cancel his visit to the US and ordered, turning the plane in the air, to return to Moscow. At this time, tens of thousands of Muscovites gathered outside the American Embassy compound in Moscow. A hail of stones smashed the windows of the third floor (they were not armored). The police did not intervene, at least not until some of the patriots fired a grenade launcher into the building.
Primakov’s reaction should not be surprising. Status of Kosovo and Metohija in Yugoslavia was not formally different from the status of Chechnya in of the Russian Federation. Both Muslim republics were autonomies that never have the right to withdraw from federations. In both cases, a powerful separatist movement used armed methods of struggle. Unless the Chechen resistance was more successful. After the loss of Grozny in 1996, the Russian army withdrew from the republic, which at that time de facto was an independent Islamic state. And yet, in the difference from Kosovo and Metohija — the historical part of Serbia — Chechnya was finally conquered by Russia only in the middle of the XIX century. Finally, with The “humanitarian” point of view, the actions of the Serbian army in Kosovo were just innocent pranks compared to the purges of the Chechen settlements. Although through the prism of European and American media the situation refracted in a completely different way. Chechnya was completely pushed out of information agenda, while skillfully directed reports Kosovo was a whole. It wasn’t an accident. After the Crisis 1998 Russia (as well as Ukraine) finally known as a “wasteland” in terms of investment. And as we all know, where there is no economic interest, the “humanitarian agenda” does not exist. But Primakov and standing behind him, the national-oriented bourgeoisie understood that the situation in Russia is changing. There is a trend for import substitution and search for niches for sales of high-tech products, which will inevitably lead to confrontation with the West.
The situation of Yeltsin and his political entourage was so hopeless that the national bourgeoisie, whose interests were represented by the CPRF faction in the Duma, decided to take revenge. Primakov, an Orientalist scholar, was appointed prime minister, and Maslyukov, a CPRF member and former chairman of the USSR State Planning Committee, was appointed deputy prime minister. It was not the best time to be in such a position, but by pushing the liberals out of economic management and taking advantage of the sharp fall in workers’ wages, the government managed to achieve substantial industrial growth in Russia, albeit of a restorative nature. The national-oriented bourgeoisie, which did not trust the CPRF too much, formed the Fatherland-All Russia bloc for the 1999 parliamentary elections and prepared to use the government’s successes to win the parliamentary and then presidential elections.
Two months later, Primakov was unexpectedly ousted as prime minister and a new liberal government was formed under the control of the “Family”, headed by Interior Minister Stepashin. It was obvious that Yeltsin was incapable of running the country, but a “small victorious war” was necessary to make an unpopular prime minister president. In August, the Chechen warlord Basayev (who had longstanding business relations with Berezovsky) invaded Dagestan. The casus belli was more appropriate than ever, but unforeseen circumstances intervened. Instead of welcoming the “brothers in faith”, the hastily formed Dagestani militia attacked and defeated the well-armed detachments of Basayev and Khattab. The not very decisive Stepashin simply did not have time to start the war!
But Berezovsky was unstoppable. On August 9, 1999, FSB director Vladimir Putin was appointed prime minister instead of the interior minister. And already in the first half of September, after a number of terrorist acts (explosions of residential buildings in Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk), Russian army units began to move towards the Chechen border. On October 1, the Second Chechen War began, which was accompanied by a huge number of casualties among the republic’s civilian population during bombings, shelling and mop-up operations in populated areas. Amnesty International estimated the total number of civilian deaths at 25,000.
Human rights groups tried to act, but ran into a deafening wall of silence from the Western media. The situation was strikingly different from the events of a year ago in Kosovo, where, according to the Center for Humanitarian Law, 8,661 Kosovo Albanians and 1,797 Serbs, 447 Roma and other nationalities were killed or missing civilians. And NATO bombing killed 207 Serb civilians and 219 Albanians.
This silence of the Western media had a very specific price. Although the political decision for the Baltic States to join NATO was made at the same time as the Eastern European countries discussed above, the United States did not seek to force their acceptance. In April, instead of joining NATO, they were offered to become “candidates”. They had to implement various programs to modernize and adapt their armed forces to NATO, which in the case of the Baltic States sounds rather ironic. One way or another, Primakov’s firmness and the rise of anti-American sentiment in Russia obviously impressed Clinton.6
At a meeting in Oakland on September 12, 1999, Putin openly apologized to Clinton for Yeltsin’s anti-American remarks in the midst of the Duma campaign, explaining that this was due to the immaturity of the Russian political system and the need to appeal to the sentiments of voters in solidarity with the people of Serbia and anti-American. Putin also promised Clinton in a series of telephone conversations not to support Milosevic during the September presidential election in Yugoslavia and, in effect, contributed to the success of the first of the so-called “color revolutions”. Finally, in March 2000, in an interview with the BBC, Putin was the first to publicly state that he did not rule out the possibility of Russia joining NATO.
Putin’s acquiescence to the Baltic States’ participation in NATO’s Fifth Enlargement should not be taken as a concession. The “Semibankirschina” which had the acting president in its clutches at that moment, had a vested interest in the Baltic States joining the European Union, and thus, inevitably, NATO. The Baltic ports were the most important hubs through which the compradors exported Russia’s mineral wealth, and their banking system was the most important channel for laundering stolen money. Since the end point of financial flows was usually London, the accession of these countries to the EU was supposed to simplify logistics and make financial monitoring more difficult.
So, we are left to understand how Putin went from a humble liberal seriously considering joining NATO to the West’s main enemy? An almost demonic figure. Putin’s transformation was not the result of the pressure of the grim stone walls of the Moscow Kremlin. It is the result of attempts to find a place for Russia in the global economy that matches its technical and natural potential.
The first stage of this transformation was purely political and was associated with the period of prolonged growth of oil prices in the early noughties. The main struggle was for control over it. As soon as the situation in the economy stabilized, and at the turn of the noughties mainly due to the fall in the living standards of workers, rather than the rise in oil prices, and thus the “threat of communism” in the face of the CPRF receded, disagreements arose among the oligarchs. With Kolesnikov’s light hand, Putin’s further process of maneuvering was informally called the “Equidistance of the oligarchs”.
While gradually freeing himself from the control of the “Family”, Putin has simultaneously had to fight against the trend of selling key assets related to oil production, transportation, and refining to Western multinationals. Although this process is most associated with Khodorkovsky’s failed attempt to sell a controlling stake in Yukos to ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil in 2003, Fridman and Vekselberg, with their Tyumen Oil Company, had managed to pull off a deal with British Petroleum a little earlier. For the oligarchs, it was the easiest way to move their capital to the West, where they thought they would be safe. For Putin, however, it meant a possible loss of control over a key sector of the economy. It was not possible to reach an agreement with Khodorkovsky. So he began to look for political ways to confront Putin, simply buying up seats on the electoral lists of all opposition parties on the eve of the election, hoping in this way to build a party in the State Duma controlled by himself. Shortly before the elections in the fall of 2003, he was arrested on charges of embezzlement and tax evasion; subsequently, Yukos went into bankruptcy proceedings and its assets were sold at auction.
The Second Chechen War and the campaign against terrorism, which becomes a global trend in September 2001, together with petrodollars, allowed Putin to strengthen the state apparatus, which had virtually disappeared in the 90s. This gave Putin a certain popularity in the working class. The Kremlin’s attempts to form mass youth movements of Putin supporters belong to this period. It is at this point that the regime displays the first features of Bonapartism. Meanwhile, in the area of economics and social policy, Putin attempted several liberal reforms, the most famous of which was the monetization of benefits in 2005, which was partially abolished after mass protests by pensioners.
State participation in the economy during this period is almost entirely centered in the oil and natural gas sector and customs regulation. Rising oil prices, and then revenues, led to a recovery and then growth in demand for long-term goods. This, combined with the apparent stabilization of the regime, led to a boom in investment, albeit mostly in the oil and gas sector and assembly plants, and at the same time opened up access for large Russian businesses and the financial sector to the global financial market. First of all, through bond issues, but also through share offerings.
In mechanical engineering, the main idea of the liberal government of the first half of the noughties was to create joint products with Western multi-national corporations on the basis of their high-tech components (and cheap money). The problem was that cooperation with direct competitors on world markets took an ugly turn from the very beginning. The symbol of this cooperation was the Sukhoi Superjet 100 airliner with its frankly unsuccessful joint PowerJet SaM146 engine, the only merit of which was the (fulfilled) promise of Western partners to ensure the certification process. At the same time, the projects of Russian, much more promising engines were “pushed to the back shelf”. The same fate awaited the promising high-speed train Sokol, which gave way to Siemens’ Sapsan.
The beginning of the 2000s was a period of Putin’s sincere interest in the West and attempts to integrate high-tech sectors of the Russian economy with Western MNCs. But almost all such attempts were unsuccessful. Worse, as consumers’ ability to pay grew, the power engineering, machine tool and especially aviation industries faced stiff competition from Western corporations willing to sell their more expensive machines on installments and leasing. High interest rates on the domestic financial market, fueled by oil money and currency speculators, did not allow lending to industry. State support and orders to the military-industrial complex were only enough to pay uncompetitively low wages to workers. The only loophole was direct or indirect access to loans in Western banks through Russian financial structures, which was advantageous in the conditions of constant growth of the ruble-dollar exchange rate against the background of rising oil prices.
However, Russia’s incorporation into the global financial system, as it had done a decade earlier, put it at risk of the global financial crisis of 2008; the exchange rate hike and falling oil prices caused a wave of panic and bankruptcies. Developers bought up industrial enterprises in megacities, primarily in Moscow, for commercial development for pennies.
Putin’s foreign policy during this period is an attempt to stabilize oil and gas prices through direct access to European consumers. First of all, Germany, then Austria and Italy. The political orientation towards cooperation with Germany, close cooperation with Schröder and Berlusconi, resulted in projects for the construction of new gas pipelines bypassing the territories of the former CIS and CMEA countries. It was then that Putin’s rhetoric about Russia as an “energy superpower” emerged, and the issue of NATO practically dropped from the political agenda. Meanwhile, the situation in the near abroad was not stable. There were rumblings of…
As we saw above, Putin in 2000 supported the first of the Color revolutions, the “Bulldozer” revolution in Serbia. During 2003-2005, three more post-Soviet leaders fell. There were all the prerequisites for this. In the 10 years since independence, most of the former Soviet republics have failed to stabilize their economic situation.
In Georgia, for example, GNI in PPP terms was still half of what it was in 1990 at the beginning of the noughties. Georgia’s defeat in the war with the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia resulted in tens of thousands of refugees in Tbilisi. Former Gorbachev associate Eduard Shevardnadze, who was called “the cunning fox” for good reason, came to power as a result of a military coup in the winter of 1992, survived three rebellions, three assassination attempts and won three elections, but failed to stabilize the political situation in the country. However, he quarreled with the Russian leadership not in 1994, when he called on the US to introduce troops into Georgia, but in 1998, when he agreed to the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline bypassing Russia. Shevardnadze has consistently focused his foreign policy on the US and was therefore quite surprised when, in the 2003 parliamentary elections, the State Department-controlled youth organization Kmara (Enough) accused his political bloc For a New Georgia of election fraud and initiated a mass civil movement that went down in history as the Rose Revolution.
It is fair to say that Shevardnadze obviously could not govern Georgia in the old way, the grassroots absolutely did not want to live in the old way, and the standard of living did not fall below the usual level only because there was nowhere else to fall. Not that Kmara was a serious force, but “law enforcers” were not eager to protect Shevardnadze, and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, who arrived at his request, offered the Georgian president to resign with obvious gloating. At the same time, Saakashvili’s blatantly anti-Russian rhetoric did not bother anyone in the Russian establishment at that time. Soon Mikheil Saakashvili visited Moscow, ingratiated himself with Putin and was generally received quite favorably. But there was one nuance. But we will talk about it below.
Contrary to the legend popular in the Russian pro-government media, until the end of the noughties Ukraine was of little interest to both American and European capital. It had the image of a kind of “black hole” in which any investment could irretrievably disappear. Former directors such as Kuchma and Yanukovych and their numerous relatives did everything to confirm this image. However, looking ahead, Tymoshenko and Poroshenko, who “made themselves” in the muddy business of Perestroika, were no different from them.
The political confrontation between the West and Russia on the Ukrainian issue in those years was provoked by the internal political struggle in Ukraine, not caused by it. The US and Europe showed little interest in Ukraine, reacting with horror to the murder of Gongadze, the poisoning of Yushchenko, and other “cute” features of Ukrainian politics.
One could often hear in those years that Ukraine was Russia stuck in the 90s. The reason for this was the lack of a “Bonapartist option” in the political arsenal of the bureaucracy. And this was not about the mythical freedom-loving Ukrainians, but about the political and linguistic division of the country. Authoritarian political regime inevitably meant civil war here, and that was the framework of the political processes of 2004. Most of the millions of people who went to the Maidan in the fall of 2004 and made the Orange Revolution wanted exactly the same thing that the people of Russia wanted in the 90s. Stability and a fairer distribution of the super-profits that the owners and managers of ferrous metallurgy enterprises received during those years. Unlike the events of 2014, the Orange Revolution was more of a carnival than a battle to the death.
The millionaires who defeated the billionaires and became the beneficiaries of Yushchenko’s victory over Yanukovych immediately started gnawing for pieces of the pie. Poroshenko-initiated sugar and then fuel crises drove up prices and brought their organizers millions. This led to a conflict between the president and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. And it is said that by appointing Yulia as prime minister, Yushchenko finally spoiled relations with Putin… With her resignation in Ukraine, the prime ministerial leapfrog began. During the term of Yushchenko’s presidency there were 8 changes of government, which were headed by representatives of three parties. The corruption of these governments was legendary.
If the coming to power of the “pro-European” faction aroused enthusiasm in the EU and NATO, it was only in words. Investments did not flow to Ukraine on their own, they had to be begged for. The only successful deal could be considered the sale of Krivorozhstal seized from Akhmetov and Pinchuk to Luxembourg’s Arcelor. At some point Yushchenko went for an outright adventure. It is no secret that the nuclear power industry in the West is in a protracted crisis. Few new nuclear power plants are being built, as well as nuclear submarines. In this situation, Westinghouse Electric Company is moving through mergers and acquisitions from one bankruptcy to another. In this situation, the supply of fuel assemblies for 4 Ukrainian Nuclear power plants turned out to be critically important for Westinghouse. But the Russian corporation TVEL did not want to lose the Ukrainian market at all. It is active in this supported the power plant manager of the Ukrainian “Energoatom”, employees did not seek to change the “native” TVEL to American ones. In addition, TVEL made a tempting offer for construction joint plant for the processing of spent fuel.
Along with the premiership leapfrog, the ping-ponging of NATO membership declarations continued, but whereas Kuchma had previously played with himself, the 2005 declaration of Yushchenko was withdrawn by Yanukovych, who became prime minister in 2006 after his party won the election. In early 2008, a scandal erupted when the NATO Secretary General announced that the organization had received a letter signed by the Ukrainian president, new Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and Parliament Speaker Arseniy Yatsenyuk requesting that Ukraine join the NATO Membership Action Plan. The scandal surrounding the appearance of this “letter of three” caused a political crisis that paralyzed the work of the Ukrainian parliament for two months.
Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 10, 2007, was a reaction to the US support for Yushchenko during the Orange Revolution and the State Department’s position on Ukraine’s accession to NATO. In it, he said: “For the modern world, a unipolar model is not only unacceptable, but impossible at all”. In addition, Putin for the first time spoke out sharply against the use of the OSCE for the political interests of the West, recalled guarantees of NATO’s non-expansion eastward, and hinted at the possible denunciation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty). Putin’s speech provoked a nervous reaction in American political circles, which unanimously predicted a resumption of the Cold War.
Further events developed at the Bucharest NATO summit in April 2008. Because of the fact that several problems painful for Russian diplomacy were discussed there: the recognition of Kosovo’s independence, the deployment of US missile defense systems in the Czech Republic and Poland, and, above all, the accession of Ukraine and Georgia to the NATO membership action plan, Bush decided to invite Putin to the last two days of the summit as a guest. The obvious purpose of this invitation was to appease Putin by explaining that, first, missile defense is just an unavoidable element of anti-Iran hysteria and, due to its limited nature, does not threaten Russia with its numerous missiles, and second, it is absolutely impossible to include Georgia and Ukraine in the NATO Membership Action Plan because the former has unresolved territorial conflicts and the latter is not clear whether it has applied or not.
Meanwhile, the main topic of the summit — discussion of the situation in Afghanistan, where the management of the International Force had long been transferred to NATO — was also perceived ambiguously by Putin and his advisers. The appearance a month earlier of a new US field manual, FM 3-07 Stability Operations, regulated the US Army’s operations in occupied territories. The US Army and the NATO machine were learning to fight “defensive” wars thousands of kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean.
Unfortunately for the world, 2008 was a presidential election year in the United States. Bush had just endorsed John McCain as the Republican candidate and was now forced to at least pay lip service to the political agenda of this “hawk” and “hero” of the Vietnam War. NATO’s statement on Ukraine and Georgia was a diplomatic form of rejection, but an irritated and feeling cheated Putin understood it quite differently. Incidentally, as we will see below, Georgian President Saakashvili understood it exactly the same way Putin did. This had tragic consequences.
The summit was held shortly before the inauguration of Dmitry Medvedev as Russia’s new president. Due to constitutional constraints, Putin could not participate, having become Prime Minister and facing the brunt of the global crisis.
For Saakashvili, as for many other liberal politicians who studied in the United States, joining NATO was always a magic wand that could solve any problem. And the problem facing Saakashvili after he came to power was his firm promise to annex the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Georgia. Since he promised this to refugees from Abkhazia, who have historically been the active core of any political protests in Tbilisi, failure to fulfill this promise was fraught with various troubles. On the other hand, the NATO charter forbids the admission of countries with territorial claims against their neighbors.
Anyone else would be embarrassed by this contradiction, but certainly not a politician who completed a short course at the International Institute of Human Rights. Since George W. Bush said that he welcomed Georgia’s decision to join NATO and that only formalities prevented it, he would obviously help to eliminate them. Especially the USA is always right, it is a unipolar world, isn’t it? So Saakashvili simply decided to attack South Ossetia. At first. From the point of view of logistics, and simply available forces, it is easier to fight with South Ossetia, which is separated from Russia by a large Caucasus ridge, than with Abkhazia.
To avoid being accused of starting a war, Saakashvili decided to start by escalating border conflicts. Therefore, by the time the Georgian troops began their assault on Tskhinvali, the advanced units of the Russian army were already entering the Roki tunnel. Having lost the factor of surprise, Saakashvili lost even minimal chances of success. Of course, the Americans did not intervene.
Nevertheless, in an interview with CNN on August 28, 2008, Vladimir Putin said that “Republicans in the White House facilitated Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia to boost the ratings of Republican candidate John McCain”. Putin was hardly lying, although it is clear that McCain had no chance of winning the presidential election in the midst of a financial crisis. Like Saakashvili, he took Bush’s statement literally.
In the spring of 2009, Medvedev met with newly inaugurated US President Obama. The purpose of the meeting was to “reset” the finally damaged US-Russian relations. On the surface, the results of the meeting were more than decent. A final agreement was reached on Russia’s accession to the WTO, a decision was made to begin negotiations on a new document on Strategic Offensive Arms… But in spirit, these talks were much closer to the Soviet-American meetings of the Cold War than to the friendly meetings between Yeltsin and early Putin and American presidents.
In the noughties, Russia’s economy grew rapidly. Internet providers and cell phone operators grew like mushrooms after rain, starting in the mid-90s. Even earlier, thousands of small banks sprang up. In fact, these were not credit institutions, but rather settlement centers where you could keep your money in relative safety. But it was the economic boom of the early noughties that created a massive demand for telecommunications and financial services. This led to a rapid process of capital concentration. Since then, the number of banks has shrunk by an order of magnitude, and the concentration of capital in cellular services back in the noughties led to the emergence of the Big Three.
This process was not limited to the Russian market, but spread to Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, where subsidiary company of the largest Russian cellular operators and banks began to emerge. This was the most noticeable part of the expansion of Russian capital into neighboring countries. Of course, this capital was not entirely Russian: the shares of all these companies were traded on the stock exchange, and they were not necessarily registered in Russia, but this is how all modern multinational corporations are organized. In any case, the business was managed from Moscow.
As a consequence of the development of these industries, there was a demand for programmers, business analysts and managers. Even earlier, the high-quality Soviet education system combined with the inability of most industrial enterprises to pay competitive wages filled the market with qualified and fairly cheap specialists. The combination of these factors stimulated the development of the IT sector, including export-oriented and foreign-owned sectors. This growing market of qualified labor force is known to have some peculiarities. First of all, it is part of the global labor market. There are two factors here. On the one hand, developed capitalist countries willingly hire specialists from China, India, Mexico, Russia, who are usually not burdened with educational credits, cannot freely change their place of work, and therefore are ready to work for less money than local specialists, and their earnings are usually significantly higher than their earnings in their home country. Another factor is outsourcing, removal of part of the development countries with cheaper labor. Both of these factors increase demand in the labor market, which leads to an increase in average wages fees in the industry and even greater wage growth in upper deciles.
Unlike the classical labor aristocracy of the early 20th century, whose privileged position was a consequence of the international division of labor, here we have the opposite situation. In the conditions of undervalued national currency, workers who receive their salaries in dollars (or their equivalent, as it was customary in the noughties) find themselves in an advantageous position. In purchasing power parity terms, their wages are higher than in industries with a localized labor market. The new labor aristocracy (let’s call it comprador for certainty) is inextricably linked to the globalization of the labor market, carefully regulated by imperialist countries. And while the classical labor aristocracy is politically always at the tail end of the national bourgeoisie, the comprador labor aristocracy, on the contrary, is politically linked to the imperialist powers that control the labor market.
This is a consequence of the service character of the “new economy”, technologically, economically and even culturally subordinated to Western imperialism. In a marginalized form, all this can be attributed to the new generation of creative intellectuals “producing culture” for the solvent comprador working class.
In Russia, the commodity comprador bourgeoisie has never before been able (or even tried) to politically lead the proletariat working for it. Unlike in Venezuela, where the oil workers opposed Chavez on the side of the PDVSA bureaucracy and its associated comprador bourgeoisie. But this is not the case with the “new” bourgeoisie in the IT sector, which has successfully established and long maintained a cultural hegemony over its employees.
Thus, by the end of the noughties, three types of economy coexisted in Russia. First of all, an export-oriented raw materials economy: extraction, processing and transportation of oil and gas, ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, extraction and synthesis of mineral fertilizers. Relying on the support of the masses, Putin was able to arrest or expel oligarchs who were unwilling to set aside their political ambitions, bringing the resource industries under state control. Secondly, the service economy and, thirdly, the old, rather degraded post-Soviet economy: energy and heavy machine building, machine tools, and aircraft industry. There were also numerous assembly plants of Western, Korean and Japanese manufacturers in the country, but they were never politically subjective.
Putin was made president by the comprador oligarchs, and his first two presidential terms were a struggle with them for political independence. To do this, Putin had to appeal not only to the petty and middle bourgeoisie, but also directly to the working class. Up to a certain point, this process was not public. For Putin, preserving Russia’s image as a country attractive to investors has always been a priority. The crisis of 2008-2009 changed this situation. Falling aluminum prices led to the shutdown of production at the alumina and cement plant in Pikalyovo in October 2008. In May, mass unemployment due to the shutdown and the paralysis of public infrastructure led to mass protests in this small industrial town in the Leningrad region. On May 20, a group of workers stormed the town hall during a meeting of the regional government’s working group, and on the morning of June 2, hundreds of workers blocked the Novaya Ladoga-Vologda highway. For 10 years, Putin was fundamental important never yield to the organized actions of the workers, but times changed. Putin flew to Pikalevo by helicopter and arranged “ceremonial flogging” one of the richest and most influential oligarchs Russia is Deripaska. It became clear — Bonaparte regime finally formed, the oligarchs are under the political and financial control.
But unexpectedly for Putin, the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2011-12 did not turn out to be an easy ride for the regime. The economic crisis of 2008 hit not only the extractive industries but also the workers of the “new” economy, with their dollar mortgages and precarious employment. The previously unshakeable confidence of this social group in the bright future of Putinism was undermined. The process of spontaneous protest politicization of these previously completely apolitical people began. Because of the permanent internal political crisis of Yabloko and, more broadly, of liberal political parties, for a long time the political expression of these sentiments had an openly marginal character, like the Libertarian Party of Russia. Atomization, the complete absence of trade unions and labor solidarity in this social group led to the fact that the protracted process of internal fermentation had a hidden character.
When in the summer of 2011 the liberals once again launched a campaign to recruit observers for the parliamentary elections, it suddenly aroused mass enthusiasm. Its core was the liberal-minded “new” proletariat, but as soon as the protests spilled out onto the streets of the megacities, masses of student youth with much more leftist views than the mainstream movement were also involved. This movement was defeated primarily because it was not understood or accepted by the “old” working class in industry.
Before the 2012 elections, Putin presented his new economic program7. Unlike the liberal “Strategy-2020” of 2008, a fruit of collective creativity of systemic liberals completely detached from the real economy, the new document was clearly focused on overcoming the technological lag and innovative growth of the Russian economy. The problem of capital outflow was related to the emergence of the Customs Union (created a year and a half earlier) and the common economic space, as well as the difficulty of penetrating foreign markets. Against the background of ritual incantations about the free market, a course to restore the competitiveness of the “old” Soviet industry was outlined. Against the background of the political crisis and, as a reaction of the regime, the attack on democratic rights, the publication of this document was almost unnoticed. At least, compared to the publicized “Strategies”. But it was this document that determined the foreign policy of Russia in the coming years.
What was the reason for Putin’s turnaround? There are a number of factors here. First of all, the global economic crisis showed how much the raw materials model is subject to market conditions. The second factor is the “shale revolution” — the introduction of directional drilling technology with multistage hydraulic fracturing, which has led to a rapid increase in oil and natural gas production in the United States. In 2009, the U.S. overtook Russia in terms of gas production. It has become clear that natural gas prices will decline on average as liquefaction plants are built. Third, the success of the China Model. It was at this time that the structure of Chinese exports was changing and becoming increasingly high-tech while growth rates were maintained. For demographic reasons, Russia has never been able to compete with China in assembly line assembly, but now China’s example has shown that it is possible to look for its own niches in the global high-tech market.
Finally, in addition to economic reasons, there were also political reasons. During the 2011 protests, Putin felt no support from either the surviving oligarch-compradors or the capitalists of the “new” economy. At the same time, management and business in the “old” post-Soviet industries strongly supported Putin and, to some extent, were able to mobilize their workers to support him. The most famous was the direct line of workers at Uralvagonzavod in Nizhny Tagil during Putin’s election campaign. While there was certainly an element of staging here, one should not ignore the workers’ fear of the threat of economic liberalization, which they had already faced in the 1990s. Thus, Putin was interested in relying on this more loyal part of society, which includes, along with the bureaucracy, part of the bourgeoisie and a disproportionately large part of the industrial proletariat.
But even more than China, Putin was attracted by the experience of Belarus. In 2012, GNP growth in PPP terms was 20% in Russia, -21% in Ukraine and 109% in Belarus compared to 1990. It was these percentages that kept did not give rest Putin and part of the Ukrainian political elite. How did this happen?
There was even less money in Belarus than in Ukraine, and the only alternative to the restoration of elements of the planned system was complete deindustrialization. Actually, this happened by 1995, when per capita GNP in PPP terms was below $6000, approximately at the level of agrarian Moldova (without Transnistria). In the USSR, Belarus specialized in electronics, machine-tool construction, transport machine building and chemical industry. All these industries in descending order faced tough competition in the world markets, including the CIS markets. In addition, they were closely tied to the supply of components from Russia.
After winning the elections in the summer of 1994, Lukashenko largely restored the functions of the Gosplan and Gosnab. Centralized state investment became the basis for modernization. If the term “state capitalism” has any right to life at all, it is most applicable to Lukashenko’s Belarus. The ownership structure has been blurred to such an extent that state statistics still does not separate large agricultural enterprises by form of ownership, they all pass as mere “organizations”.
It is known that such a structure — a combination of the public sector with small and medium-sized businesses — is a destabilizing factor due to corruption and embezzlement. The desire of directors for shadow privatization of state property inevitably has a political expression in the form of liberal political tendencies. That is why such an economic system is incompatible with representative democracy. The only way to maintain its sustainability is an authoritarian political system with severe suppression of the opposition.
Paradoxically, Kazakhstan, the most open to Western capital, and Belarus, the most “closed”, were for many years the most authoritarian states of the “big post-Soviet four”. And the political expression of the interests of all classes, including the working class organized in trade unions, was suppressed. And if for Nazarbayev it was primarily a question of preserving “investment attractiveness” in the eyes of foreign capital, then at the dawn of his presidential career Lukashenko faced powerful and uncontrollable Belarusian trade unions, first of all the Belarusian Congress of Democratic Trade Unions. Starting with the 1995 strike of subway drivers in Minsk, he waged a consistent struggle with trade unions, including the often post-Soviet FTUB, which he eventually turned into a purely nominal organization.
Of course, the “Belarusian miracle” had objective prerequisites: first of all, the open Russian market and then energy prices close to the Russian domestic ones. But all this applied a certain point to Ukrainian and any case to Russian enterprises.
The growth of the Belarusian model had, as it turned out in the mid-tens, objective limits. The drop in the quality of Russian components and replacement of engines with European ones made it extremely difficult to compete with Chinese tractors and trucks. But it became obvious for everyone much later.
The main difference between the Belarusian economy and the Russian economy was not so much the ownership structure as the lending structure. For many years, the Russian banking system was famous for its liberalism. The regulator’s task was primarily to prevent deliberate bankruptcies. At the macroscopic level, the government fought the inevitable “Dutch disease” for an oil-exporting country by creating reserves, but the banks always had clients willing to borrow at high interest rates. In addition to the oil industry, these were wholesalers, builders who earned super-profits from land rents, and merchants with their fast turnover. Finally, bankers constantly played on the volatile ruble exchange rate, using numerous insiders in the government and the Central Bank. Even lending to industry was often predatory, with banks lending to industrial enterprises at high interest rates, secured by land or real estate, and then bankrupting them and selling the money for redevelopment. In accordance with Putin’s personal instructions, the Government could force banks to give soft loans for large investment projects, but this could not work as a system. On the scale of Russia, the Ministry of Economy could not perform the same amount of functions that it performed in Belarus.
The second problem, especially in high-tech industries, was the breakdown of technological chains. Many enterprises went bankrupt and disappeared, while others, having no orders for a long time, reduced the range of products. Attempts to solve this problem by using imported components, usually more expensive, increased the cost of production, making it less competitive. It was the attempt to solve this problem that made Russian industrialists and officials look at Ukraine, where by the early 2010s a large number of machine-building enterprises had survived. Albeit often idle.
This also applied to the third problem: the shortage of skilled labor. Since Ukrainian machine building was mostly idle, labor migration from Ukraine to Russia in 2008-2012, according to various estimates, ranged from 500 thousand to 2 million people. Moreover, unlike migration to the EU countries, a significant part of them were skilled industrial workers.
From the business point of view, it would be much easier to restore industrial ties with Ukrainian enterprises for joint production of high-tech products. Moreover, there were such examples in the previous period. Suffice it to recall the joint Russian-Ukrainian Sea Launch project to launch satellites into geostationary orbit using Ukrainian Zenit-2 carriers from a Russian floating spaceport. Russian Helicopters used engines from Zaporozhye-based Motor Sich, many of whose components were manufactured in Russia. The Kharkiv-based Turboatom was also deeply integrated with Russian enterprises. But there were serious problems along the way. The main one is customs. Import of components may be subject to customs duties, and without VAT refund no industrial production is possible in today’s realities. From the point of view of business, the natural solution to this issue would be to join the Customs Union EAEU, free trade zone of Russia, Kazakhstan, Republic of Belarus, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.
No less, and maybe even more important, was the issue of standardization. The transition from Soviet standards of technical documentation and nomenclature to European standards and the inevitable change in the nomenclature of parts required a thorough revision of technological chains and a large amount of work with an unclear perspective.
In 2011, Ukraine’s exports to the Customs Union amounted to $22.7 billion, while exports to all European (in the political sense) countries amounted to $17.4 billion and to the US $1 billion. The alternative was the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU. Purely arithmetically, joining the Customs Union was more favorable for Ukraine; it covered both industrial and agricultural products (e.g., poultry meat). In addition, due to the conformity of the standards system, there was no problem with certification of industrial products, as the Euro-association itself did not mean signing an agreement on conformity assessment of industrial products (CAA) with Ukraine.
However, if we look at the structure of exports, we will see that exports of machine-building products to Russia were almost exclusively to Eastern Ukraine, and — if we exclude the private Motor Sich — to state enterprises, which, however, had a powerful lobby in the Verkhovna Rada. They were opposed by metallurgists — producers of rolled steel. In 2012, Ukraine exported about 80% of the rolled steel produced in the country. Meanwhile, the steel oligarchy is the most influential political force in Ukraine. For them, Russian businesses are not partners, but direct competitors. The partition took place in many business sectors. At first, the struggle took place in the Verkhovna Rada.
So, Russian industrial capital needed Ukraine. It remains to answer a more complicated question — why does the European Union, or, to put it bluntly, Germany, need it? The obvious answer is cheap labor, but no Euro-Association is needed to attract it to the EU. On the contrary, the visa-free regime has traditionally acted as a carrot to encourage Ukrainians to support Euro-Association. “Screwdriver” assembly? Now even within the EU there are countries with low wages and better logistics. Sales market? This statement is closer to the truth, but Ukraine is a poor country, most of its population cannot afford European goods.
By and large, Ukraine’s liquid assets remain its black soil, energy, primarily nuclear power, and ferrous metallurgy combined with large carbon dioxide emission quotas. The closer a country is to the EU, the more rapeseed and sunflower crops it has. It is hard to find crops that deplete the soil more. In 2012, experts estimated the allowable sunflower acreage in terms of crop rotation and soil fertility preservation at 3.9 million hectares; in 2021, 9.5 million hectares were planted, with the actual decrease in the total acreage after 2014.
The elimination of nuclear power in Germany and rising natural gas prices have increased the interest of German capital in Ukraine, which is a major exporter of electricity due to nuclear power plants and the Dnieper cascade built back in the Soviet era. The green agenda also includes the prospect of developing metallurgy and chemical industry at a sufficient distance from the European “green”, especially since the methodology for calculating greenhouse gas emission quotas is based on the level of 1990, when Ukrainian industry functioned on a much larger scale.
Ukraine began negotiating an Association Agreement with the European Union in 2007 under President Yushchenko, when no Customs Union yet existed. By November 2010, it was ready and Yanukovych, who had recently won the presidential election, was ready to sign it.
But then Ukraine once again launched a criminal case against Yulia Tymoshenko, and European officials themselves began to delay the signing in order to put pressure on the court. After Tymoshenko was convicted, the negotiations continued and on March 30, 2012, the agreement was initialed by the heads of delegations of Ukraine and the EU. Note, two months after Putin outlined his new vision for the Russian and, as it later turned out, Ukrainian economy. The reaction to the Russian-Ukrainian consultations on the issue of economic integration was the statement of European Commission President Barroso: “It should be made clear that you cannot be a member of the Customs Union and have a deep free trade zone with the European Union at the same time. It is impossible”.
In May 2013, Putin met with Yanukovych and urged him to consider the possibility of Ukraine joining the Customs Union. In addition to some carrots, Putin also had a stick: he said that “from 2015… free movement of [labor force] will be only for the Customs Union countries. This did not prevent the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers from unanimously approving the draft Association Agreement with the European Union on September 18. In October, Putin already said that Ukraine would not be able to join the Customs Union in case of an association with the EU. Ukraine was faced with a difficult choice. Realizing that it should hurry up, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on 23 October recommending signing the association agreement with Ukraine and agreeing to its partial application without finalizing its ratification.
Pressure on Yanukovych came from different directions. Sociological surveys showed that the course towards European integration was killing electoral support for the Party of Regions and the president personally. Since 2010, his rating has fallen from 71-90% to 23% in the east of the country and from 70% to 21% in the south. On 11 November, the Federation of Industrialists of Ukraine sent an open letter to the country’s president asking him to postpone the signing of the association agreement with the EU because after the signing of the agreement, the products of a number of Ukrainian industrial enterprises will become uncompetitive. On November 14, Ukrainian President Yanukovych said that the Ukrainian government has no money to modernize its enterprises in accordance with EU technical standards. This could be understood both as a refusal and as an offer to give money. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Yuriy Boyko said that the association talks would be suspended until the issue of compensation from the EU for Ukraine’s losses, which may result from a decrease in trade with Russia and other CIS countries if Ukraine signs the agreement, is resolved. There were persistent rumors that Ukraine expected the EU to write off debts and the provision of new loans. But I didn’t get it.
On 22 November, the EU rejected the Ukrainian government’s proposal to hold talks in the trilateral format of the EU-Ukraine-Russia, and on 15 December, European Commissioner for Enlargement Stefan Fule said that the EU leadership was suspending negotiations with Ukraine on an association agreement. Later, Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov claimed that Stefan Fule had repeatedly threatened him during the talks with the change of the Ukrainian government if this agreement was not signed.
Yanukovych, of course, realized that his decision would have political consequences, including “on the street”. At least twice in 2004 and 2007 he lost power amid opposition street actions. On the other hand, already as president, he was able to withstand the “Tax Maidan” of entrepreneurs in 2010 and the “Language Maidan” of Ukrainian nationalists in 2012.
According to opinion polls, Ukraine’s participation in the Customs Union was supported by 32.5% of Ukrainian citizens, while Ukraine’s accession to the EU (which could be a distant prospect) was supported by 49.1% of respondents. This was not a critical margin, but even more important was that the majority of Ukrainians were not very interested in this issue.
The first rally on Maidan Nezalezhnosti on November 21 in Kiev gathered 1,000 to 2,000 people, mostly political activists. The opposition set up several dozen tents on the square. The first mass rally (“People’s Evening”) took place on Sunday, November 24 and gathered 50 thousand participants. A lot, but not 500 thousand, as in 2004. It was only on the night of Saturday, November 30, when Berkut brutally dispersed the tent camp, that the protests became really massive and violent. Fearing accountability, Poroshenko accused the participants in the attack on the Presidential Administration of being provocateurs, after which he had to flee the impromptu stage. The opposition lost control of the movement.
The fundamental reason for the success of Euromaidan is the mood of young people. Whereas in 2004 young people took to the streets to change Ukraine, in 2013 they often came out to leave. At best, not to be prevented from living the way they do now. In Ukraine, the income gap between workers in the new “service” economy — programmers, testers, managers hiding under the vague terms “specialists” and “executives” and workers and engineers in industry — is even greater than in Russia. The globalization of the labor market has firmly tied their interests to Ukraine’s integration into Europe. And this social group is primarily young people. The same can be said about students, a significant part of whom, especially humanities students from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and Kyiv University, planned to continue their studies at the Central European University in Budapest or in Western Europe. The embodiment of the latter group was Kyiv artist Oleksa Mann, who drew the famous poster: “I am a girl! I don’t want to go to the CU! I want lace panties and the EU!”, — contains reference to widely discussed in those years (but not implemented) ban on the import of women’s cowards from some of the countries of the Customs Union Types of Synthetic Materials. Interestingly, the text on the poster was written not in Ukrainian, but on a mimicking Ukrainian Russian language.
This was not the only group of young people involved in the protests. Over the years, a youth subculture, with few exceptions, of far-right views has formed around soccer clubs. Soccer stadiums everywhere in Europe attract right-wing skinheads. In Eastern Europe, where there are more social problems, this phenomenon is even more pronounced. The only peculiarity in Ukraine was that the ultras movement fell under the influence of Ukrainian nationalists even in predominantly Russian-speaking cities such as Simferopol and Donetsk. For thousands of young people, “near-football” became a way to overcome atomization. First it is the natural desire for a holiday, which every match becomes, then the feeling of unity, of coming together shoulder to shoulder, requires and common enemies.
Consolidation of the fans began already in the first days of the protests, and the centers of crystallization were the far-right groups “Trident”, “Patriot of Ukraine” and the “Freedom” party, whose leader Oleg Tyahnybok initially distanced himself from the radicals. The resulting rather heterogeneous bloc became known as Right Sector. The common feature of the groups that joined it was the readiness for the most decisive actions. Despite the fact that the total number of Right Sector members never exceeded a few hundred, the bloc played a key role in the street confrontation with the authorities. Experienced in street fights, the ultras became Maidan’s storming squads, pelting internal troops with Molotov cocktails and attempting to storm administrative buildings. In this way, they tried to provoke the leadership of the “power bloc” in the government to retaliate against the protesters.
The success of Euromaidan critically depended on the unity of politically heterogeneous forces: liberals and far-right nationalists. Unlike the far-right, with its single ideology dating back to the 1930s, liberals were represented on the Maidan by a broad ideological spectrum: libertarians, various right-wing anarchist groups, moderate nationalists, the Greens, various feminist groups, and social democrats. Although they shared the ultimate goal of the movement — accession to the EU — they felt a natural discomfort fighting shoulder to shoulder with the people who had recently attacked their events, dispersed gay pride marches, and fought in stadiums with a small number of antifa ultras. However, the past tense is not quite applicable here — as we know, the ultra-rightists, who had full control over the Maidan’s security forces, did not allow the creation of the Anarchist Hundred. As for the more left-wing elements, they frankly hid from the Nazis on the periphery of the Maidan. Nevertheless, liberals and nationalists managed to find common ground. It became anti-communism.
The national policy of the USSR leadership was different in different periods. There were several runs of “Ukrainization”, when knowledge of Ukrainian was required for a senior position, and there were periods of persecution of even moderate Ukrainian nationalists, but even then, knowledge of Ukrainian was a plus in career advancement. There was collectivization, the bureaucratic overreaches of which did lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians (as well as Kazakhs and Russians). But the greatest number of deaths were in eastern Ukraine. The political forces popular in the Lviv region, which at the time was part of Poland, are most fond of remembering the “Holodomor”.
If historical memory is so important, we can recall that the Banderite movement emerged as a national movement against the Polish colonization of Nowy Kresy. And the bitterness on both sides was no less, if not more, than in the subsequent struggle against the Soviet power. Suffice it to recall the Volyn Massacre, which the present Ukrainian authorities would like so much to forget. Nevertheless, anti-Polish sentiments are completely marginal among the Ukrainian Right. Okay, these are “matters of bygone days”. But armed struggle against the Bandera underground is also a distant past. For several decades, starting in the late 50s, the leaders of the Soviet state were natives of Ukraine. Ukrainians were widely represented in the Politburo of the Central Committee. Eventually, Crimea, where Ukrainians were a small ethnic minority at the time, was handed over to Ukraine by the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. Obviously, during a bout of Ukrainophobia. It is interesting that the monuments to numerous Russian tsars and courtiers, who for the most part really carried out imperial policies, began to be dismantled only recently, many years after not a single monument to Lenin remained in the right-controlled part of Ukraine.
The hatred of nationalists and liberals for everything Soviet is not hatred for Stalin’s mistakes, overreaches and distortions of Lenin’s national policy. No! It is hate for that very proletarian internationalism, which alone could have freed Ukrainian culture from death and degradation. For that policy, which, in case of even not the most consistent implementation, did not leave Ukrainian nationalists any chance both in the 20s and in the 50s.
Marxist analysis can answer many political questions, but it has limits. At critical moments in history, there are situations when, for a short time, the role of the individual in history becomes decisive. Sometimes — and this is fortunate for historians — its creators, like Trotsky or Churchill, manage to leave memories. More often, we are left to guess at the motivation behind certain actions.
In the Kremlin narrative, Putin, angered by the violation of agreements and concerned about the fate of Crimea’s Russian-speaking population, made his decision on the 22nd; in the Kiev narrative, his goal was to annex Crimea regardless of the outcome of the struggle in Kiev. Both assertions are almost certainly wrong. On the one hand, the Russian bureaucratic machine cannot turn itself around not only in three days but also in a week — the operation was prepared in advance — but this does not mean at all that the final decision was made before Yanukovych fled. The foreign policy and economic cost of the annexation was expectedly high.
In retrospect, it is easy to attribute all the costs to the domestic political effect of the Russian Spring, which raised Putin’s personal rating to a fantastic 84%. Of course, there were objective prerequisites for this. In the Soviet years, Crimea was a favorite vacation destination, particularly for families. Many Russians had nostalgic memories of it. Khrushchev’s transfer of Crimea to Soviet Ukraine was often cited as an example of his voluntarism. Although in reality the transfer of territories from one republic to another was a fairly common practice in the USSR up to a certain point.
There is another side of the coin. In the 1990s, the Crimean topic was raised by probably all patriotic organizations and many popular politicians, including Moscow Mayor Luzhkov. They relied on the well-known sociological surveys of Russian Public Opinion Research Center and Levada Center: 77% of Russians surveyed in 1998 and 85% in 2008 wanted the return of Crimea, but only 9% of Russians thought it possible to use military force for this purpose.
However, the main argument against the annexation of Crimea is the inevitability of Ukraine’s “loss” in this scenario. Putin has been a popular politician in much of Ukraine. His hardline political opponents won the country more than once, but each time it ended in disillusionment with pro-Western politicians and majority voting for parties openly supported by Putin. The annexation of Crimea to Russia was supposed to put an end to this tug-of-war. Meanwhile, from a political, economic and even military point of view, it is quite impossible to compare the importance of Crimea and Ukraine as a whole. Politically, the annexation was more of an admission of defeat in the struggle for Ukraine than a triumph. The decision could only have been made at a time when Putin felt that Ukraine was already definitively lost.
From the perspective of Russian big capital, which lost its assets in Ukraine in 2014, the annexation of Crimea was a crazy gamble that resulted in economic sanctions and economic stagnation. Putin probably saw it coming, but by his actions he was able to kill two birds with one stone: first, to regain the massive support of Russians who were frightened by the Maidan and encouraged by the Crimean referendum, and second, to start repatriating capital to Russia and under sanctions that limited access to cheap foreign capital.
Recognition of the right of peoples to self-determination does not mean that any separatist or, on the contrary, irredentist movements are progressive. We can say openly what bourgeois politicians hide behind omissions and manipulation. 100 years ago, after the First World War, they at least had the courage to allow the peoples of Europe (but only Europe) to determine their belonging to a nation on the basis of plebiscites. Today they use the false propaganda of the bourgeois media to shape the so-called humanitarian agenda in the interests of big capital.
For us communists, what is decisive in any national movement is its class aspect. If a movement mobilizes the proletariat, which stands up under communist slogans, then it is progressive, even if the communist elements are ultimately defeated. We cannot and must not proceed from an afterthought.
And here there is a huge difference between Crimea, which from the very beginning relied on imperial Russia, and Donbass, where miners and heavy engineering workers tried to “storm the sky”.
The protests in the three regions of eastern Ukraine: Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv were not homogeneous from the outset. In Donetsk and especially in Luhansk, where the Communist Party enjoyed great influence, it was its activists who became the political core of the resistance to the anti-communist bloc of extreme nationalists and liberals who seized power in Kyiv. We are not talking about party bonzes, but about ordinary members and secretaries of district organizations of the party. In these regions, proletarian in nature, the ability of the working class to self-organize showed itself very early on. Unlike the Maidan glorified by the Western media, the barricades built by miners, metallurgists and metal workers in front of the city administrations of Donetsk and Luhansk are still waiting for their Jules Valles to share with him the story of those days.
These republics victorious and yet defeated. Independence from Ukraine came at too high a price. This is the dialectic of local revolution — it either makes a deal with one of the imperialist predators, betraying itself, or perishes without weapons, fuel, blockaded on all sides like the Paris Commune. Weapons came to Donbas together with adventurous imperialists like Strelkov, Cossacks, and countless FSB and GRU agents.
But many of the workers who fought with these weapons were convinced communists. Both from Donbas and from other regions of Ukraine and Russia. They were very quickly deprived of political representation. The declarations of independence of the republics, imbued with the spirit and words of socialist people’s power, were forgotten. The Communist Party of the DNR, created by Boris Litvinov, former secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine’s district committee, was not allowed to participate in the elections in the fall. Eventually, the Communists were forced to join the CPRF, which deprived them of political subjectivity. The process began in Donetsk, but gradually reached the frontline. A wave of terrorist attacks against the most prominent commanders of the “first wave” swept across the republic. An assassination attempt in the spring of 2015 killed Alexei Mozgovoy, the legendary commander of the Luhansk “Ghost”, the last commander who openly criticized the bourgeois counter-reforms of the republic’s leadership.
In the much more bourgeois Kharkov the movement was initially less radical. It was a labor movement in its composition, but not in its slogans. The slogans of the Customs Union and economic integration with Russia were a kind of reformism, and, like any reformism, they did not and could not go beyond demonstrations of a hundred thousand people.
The People’s Republics have always been Putin’s “white elephant” — he could not abandon them, because that would completely destroy all the political authority he had achieved inside Russia. It was very heavy duty them, and it was not a matter of direct financial support for the republics, but of sanctions and the rapid outflow of capital.
Putin was ready to give the republics to Ukraine, but did not know how to do it8. The second Minsk agreement was signed in February 2015. Russia recognized Ukraine’s sovereignty over the republics. The special status of certain areas of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions was to be enshrined in the Ukrainian Constitution, an amnesty was to be held, and local elections were to be organized. Ukraine would then have the opportunity to establish control over its border with Russia, a goal it never achieved in a year of fighting. The main result of the Minsk agreements was the cessation of hostilities.
What did the already former republics get in case of adoption of amendments to the Constitution:
The political points of the agreements were not fulfilled. In order for the process of liquidation of the republics to begin, the Verkhovna Rada had to pass amendments to the Constitution. But any attempt to do so would have led to the fact that the extreme nationalists, who had by this time established full control over the SBU, the National Guard and the army (which is not surprising, since no one else was particularly eager to fight for the integrity of Ukraine and it was they who bore the brunt of the war, suffering heavy losses), would have simply overthrown the government and dispersed the Verkhovna Rada.
The West’s first reaction to the annexation of Crimea was quite moderate. It was more about political declarations than real attempts to damage the Russian economy. However, by mid-summer 2014, when it became obvious that the Ukrainian army was unable to suppress the separatist movement in Donbas, the political line of the US and EU changed. While the sectoral sanctions themselves caused limited damage to the Russian economy, the ability of major banks, oil and gas and metallurgical corporations to raise finance from Western markets was sharply reduced.
Meanwhile, the need to refinance Western loans remained. It was a “perfect storm” situation. Many Western analysts predicted a default of the most indebted Russian companies. This did not happen because of government support. The supply of foreign currency on the Russian market decreased and by the end of the year the ruble exchange rate collapsed by half. This, of course, led to inflation. As is usually the case, the masses paid for the crisis. Over the next 7 years, the actual incomes of Russian residents (adjusted for price growth) fell by 10%. At the same time, wages even experienced a slight increase. Reduced demand turned into a concentration of trading capital and serious problems for small and medium-sized businesses.
Putin responded to Europe with counter-sanctions. By 2014, Russia’s integration into the system of the global division of labor led to the advanced development of export-oriented sectors of agriculture. Industries requiring a minimum of variable capital were developing. Agro-industrial holdings, which bought up former state farm workers’ land shares on the cheap, used land rents to make super-profits by growing wheat, sunflower and barley. The ban on imports of high value-added products from Western Europe stimulated the growth of the agro-industrial sector. And, of course, this growth was paid for by workers through higher prices.
The most noticeable changes occurred in machine building. Unable to import equipment, oil and gas corporations were forced to turn their attention to domestic machine building, which had been openly neglected before. The process of localization in transport machine-building began. The departure from Russia of Ford and General Motors was replaced by South Korean companies.
The 2014-15 sectoral sanctions did not kill Russia’s economy, although they did lead to a decline in GNP. This can be compared to how a small dose of strychnine or arsenic, once it enters the body and harms it, makes it less susceptible to large doses of poison. This effect played an important role in later years.
The Putin regime saw the 84% presidential support won during the annexation of Crimea as an opportunity to implement social and political measures unpopular in society. First and foremost, it was pension reform. In Russia, where, unlike many other countries, it is possible to both work and receive a pension at the same time, such a reform was bound to encounter difficulties. The mood of the masses was also influenced by the low life expectancy of men in Russia, approximately equal to the new retirement age.
Despite the indignation of the entire society, which manifested itself in a drop in Putin’s approval rating by about 20%, the regime was able to localize the protests. That the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia would not seriously resist the reforms was obvious. Despite a small front in the media, the union leaders — members of the United Russia faction in the Duma — obediently voted in favor of the government’s draft reform. Vostretsov’s Sotsprof behaved in the same way. The CPRF, the only parliamentary party whose faction voted against the draft, has once again shown itself to be a force capable of draining any protest into a meaningless collection of signatures.
Independent leftist groups, including the Marxist Tendency, joined with the sectoral trade unions from the KTR to form a coalition called People Against. Unfortunately, only in St. Petersburg, where the coalition was called “St. Petersburg Against”, was it able to compete with the populists and lead the movement. The United Front’s tactic of “Going separately - hitting together” once again proved its effectiveness. Only the indecisiveness of the Confederation of Labour of Russia leadership, which was passive at the decisive moment, prevented the movement from moving from street activism to struggle in enterprises.
In the rest of Russia, control of the movement remained in Navalny’s hands. As is typical of populists, he used the movement to promote his personal brand and build a vertically organized, leader-like organization, avoiding coordination with other groups and thus splintering the movement.
It is always more profitable for a dictator to fight a lone populist than a mass organization built on democratic principles. As long as Putin had to look to Western human rights organizations and institutions, Navalny managed to keep afloat by criticizing the corruption and ostentatious luxury of first Putin’s friends and then Putin himself. There was never a coherent political or economic program behind this criticism. It was typical populist “criticism for criticism’s sake”.
In bourgeois democracies, such a policy might have given him electoral chances. In Russia, the fact that the entire authority of the movement was centered on one man only made it easier for the regime’s executioners. His courageous but senseless demarche — his return to Russia — could have given Navalny a chance in a revolutionary situation. In its absence, it could only lead to his death.
The introduction of the institution of “foreign agents”, lists of extremists, the use of the long-overdue coronavirus pandemic to ban mass events, the detention of political opponents, their administrative and criminal prosecution. The arbitrariness of Roskomnadzor and the Internet censorship that is growing daily. The offensive against any organization capable of resisting the regime is going on on all fronts. Does this mean that the regime has changed its nature?
How are they different? As Trotsky pointed out, fascism begins as a mass protest movement of the petty bourgeoisie. In conditions of crisis, it finds itself squeezed between the revolutionary proletariat and big capital and seeks a radical way out in the creation of fascist gangs, involving mostly the lumpen proletariat. Unable to come to power on its own, it is looking for an opportunity to make a deal with big capital. For the latter this is a last resort; as long as it is possible, big capital tends to confine itself to the classic Papen-Schleicher Bonapartism. Only in the hopeless situation of a communist threat does it expose itself to the risk of becoming dependent on fascist storm troopers. Trotsky explained that although fascism had elements of Bonapartism, it could not be reduced to it alone.
The fact that Putin now sees the Rosgvardiya, not the Russian Community as an instrument to suppress a possible working class movement makes his regime more akin to Schleicher’s than to a fascist one. The mass movement of the working class has not yet raised the question of power, and Putin can still rely on the machinery of the bourgeois state.
A Bonapartist regime is always a police regime, strengthening the state to such an extent that even the ruling class begins to fear it. Although there are a lot of patriotic “public” organizations around the Presidential Administration, but all of them are a sham. A feeding trough for crooks. Putin relies on the bureaucracy and the army.
Such a regime seems to be eternal, but it is not. Talleyrand is credited with the phrase: “You can do anything with bayonets, but you can’t sit on them”. That is why Bonapartist regimes are so fond of using bayonets at the first opportunity. The atmosphere of external danger mobilizes society, raising the degree of hysteria. But an overheated steam boiler with a stuck valve can explode at any moment if this compressed steam is not put to use.
The peculiarity of imperialist wars is that the parties are not so much interested in them as they see no possibility of avoiding them. Outwardly it seems that they are trying to avoid conflict, but the invisible hand of the world market pushes them towards each other, as servants push andabata in the arena of a Roman circus, until they clash in mortal combat.
The isolation of Putin’s regime should have weakened it, but it has only made it more dangerous and aggressive. Unable to negotiate a decent place on world markets, Putin decided to pursue them by force. American imperialism’s desire to provoke conflict in Europe and thereby make it easier for itself to compete, while suicidal, seemed the best choice of the worst. A Ukraine mired in debt, divided into East and West? It is known that war is the most radical way to consolidate a divided society.
Encouraged by the example of Georgia’s forceful return to the orbit of Russian politics, Putin was counting on a “small victorious war”. The rest was to be provided by the many millions of dollars spent on bribing members of the Verkhovna Rada. The will of the Ukrainian people to resist and the determination of the British and American governments to continue the war at any cost thwarted Putin’s plans.
Again, as in 2014, Putin’s hysterical reaction to the breakdown of seemingly reached agreements resulted in a statement about the annexation of territories that had not even been conquered. This hysteria cost the lives of tens of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers. A senseless war that has neither end nor edge.
But the further we go, the more people at the front and in the rear realize the correctness of Lenin’s slogan: “For peace without annexations and reparations!”
The crisis of the world system of capitalism turns economic competition into a confrontation between imperialist camps. This confrontation, which is accompanied by proxy wars on the world periphery, is constantly aggravated. Contradictions arise everywhere. They can only be resolved by war, which destroys the productive forces and clears the space for a new round of capitalist expansion. But a war between nuclear-armed countries makes little sense. Most likely there will be no winner. There will only be the dead and those who envy the dead. Rosa Luxemburg’s prediction of “socialism or barbarism” seems too optimistic today.
The imperialist predators who do not want to die will look for an opportunity to negotiate. But the deeper the crisis, the closer we come to the edge of the abyss, the more expensive the price of getting out of the crisis. And this price will have to be paid by the working class. The upper classes will not be able to govern in the old way. The lower classes cannot live in the old way. In a hated, but so familiar and safe world. Unemployment, inflation, loss of savings, loss of housing — just to keep capital rule on the planet. Are workers willing to make such sacrifices? It’s a rhetorical question.
As long as we workers are divided, we are incapable of resistance. The capitalists and their political agents divide us by race, nation, gender. They make sure we don’t fight against capital shoulder to shoulder. The capitalists, gritting their teeth, are willing to tolerate, though not always, our unionization into shop-floor unions, hoping, sometimes naively, that they can maneuver around offering handouts to skilled workers at the cost of even greater oppression of migrant laborers. But there is something they have an animal fear of — the organized working class in the Party.
The mass workers’ party is an enormous force and it has enormous power; no gear, no turbine will turn without the participation of the working class. But for power to become action — it takes political will. The will to change the world. We communists know that it is not heroes who change the world. For us, the concentration of will is workers united by common ideas.
Ideas conquer the world, but it doesn’t happen by itself or by the magical will of youtube. Ideas are our analysis of the society around us, our understanding of its contradictions. They should give us an understanding of what we should do — that’s strategy. How to do things is tactics. Ideas are a science. Tactics are often an art. Theoretical analysis tells us the directions to hit — the points where the system is not as strong as it is elsewhere. That’s where we need to hit. Try it over and over again. Until we see the system crack and collapse.
Our analysis shows that capitalism is once again approaching an impasse in its development. Social and political upheavals are almost inevitable — but they need not necessarily lead to the end of capitalism. Our aim is to give them a communist character. The destruction of capitalism requires a channeling of political will. The Communist Party must become the channel to direct the indignation, despair and hatred of the masses to the scrapping of the family, private property and the state. And our current goal is to catch the current of mind and to shape ourselves as this channel.
Our goal is to become a mass party of the working class. We are now its embryo — people united by a common idea and realizing common tactics. But we are alien to all party fetishism. The party is an instrument, not a cult. There can be no forward movement without criticism. Criticism of ideas, criticism of tactics, self-criticism of the party. But we are not a debating club. The party needs political leadership.
He who does not master perfectly the weapon of criticism will never lead the party to the point at which the proletariat led by the party will begin to criticize with the weapon. Anyone who is afraid of criticism cannot be a member of the genuine collective leadership!
Parties, like all living things, are born, live, decay and die. Their life is one of constant splits, mergers and conflicts. This is exactly the history of the Bolshevik Party before October. But there is another political culture. Over-aged parties with a wise leadership and an apparatus that protects the leadership from criticism from below. The first layer of leadership, the second layer of leadership, and somewhere underneath these layers are the rank-and-file members of the party who pay dues, sell newspapers, applaud, and… that’s it.
Unable to win comrades on the basis of ideas, they rely on agitation rather than propaganda. Agitation allows them to grow, but that growth is not cadre growth. The new comrades have other ideas. When cadres become a minority in their own party, ideological unity gives way to bureaucratic control. Instead of discussion there is indoctrination, instead of theory there is ideology. In place of democratic centralism is the cult of party unity. This approach has nothing in common with genuine Leninism, with the way the real, living Lenin built his party.
Usually, such rebirth is a disease of parties that have experienced a long period of political isolation. But it also happens that people who grew up on the “Short Course in the History of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks” start to build a party according to ready-made bureaucratic models. What a pitiful sight!
For us, voting is not an end in itself. Internal party discussion is not a political struggle for leadership, it is a refinement of ideas, development of tactics. It is a constant work on the theoretical level of comrades. No democracy is possible in an organization where the majority of the party cannot participate in the discussion because of a low theoretical level.
The workers’ democracy of the proletarian state, where “every cook must learn to govern the state”, does not come from nowhere. It is precisely what Lenin defined as democratic centralism, the party traditions of the proletarian vanguard. And these mass party traditions are in turn inherited from smaller activist groups, from the democratic traditions of their internal political life. When Lenin wrote about the succession of officials from the bottom to the top, he was talking about a change of labor, when deprofessionalization becomes the dialectical negation of professionalization!
The party does not exist in a vacuum. We are surrounded by the working class. It’s everywhere. At work, even at school. It is the target group of our daily agitation. As soon as a class comes into movement — we have to be with it, to lead and radicalize the protest, for this we have to gain credibility including in the economic struggles of the class.
We must not forget that class organization is our primary task. The working class is constantly putting forward people who are ready to fight for the interests of the class. They must become members of our party! But it is not easy to win them over — for this we have to grow. And not only qualitatively — by raising our theoretical level, but also quantitatively. We must become from a mostly student group a cross-section of the working elements of society in order to gain access to every workers’ protest!
The 20th century was an era of incredible development of productive forces. Modern robotic lines can relieve workers of tedious labor. But capitalists, who need the living labor of workers to produce surplus value, create new, increasingly meaningless jobs. This vicious circle, caused by the mismatch between productive forces and relations of production, can only be broken with the destruction of capitalism and the commodity economy.
When objects are produced for immediate consumption, it will be found that most of the things produced today are nothing more than advertising-imposed garbage, or items needed by the individual so rarely as to be subject to shearing. Such shameful phenomena as the artificial and moral obsolescence of consumer items will be a thing of the past. On the contrary, the unification and planning of production cycles according to the life cycle of products will prevent the senseless use of human labor and pollution of the environment.
By removing the market from the food distribution system, it would be possible to feed all of humanity without increasing the area under cultivation, simply by rationally utilizing available food resources.
By reorganizing the urban environment, the working class will not just redistribute vacant, rented, and underutilized housing to the needy. It will create a comfortable environment for the elderly in formerly depressed regions, providing them with quality medicine in favorable natural conditions.
Reduced working hours will not mean empty idleness — the introduction of labor change will allow people to develop their creative abilities, but also to use their physical strength for the benefit of society. Socially useful labor will replace intensive physical training.
In full accordance with Leninist principles, governance will become a universal affair, everyone will take part in governance, although no one will do so on an exclusive “professional” basis.
To the extent that the distribution system will be necessary for some time, it will become completely transparent and open. Shortages of some special benefits will not disappear instantly, but abuses will be visible in real time to the whole society.
Prisons and other forms of isolation of people from society will disappear with the disappearance of private property and alienation. The usual norms of human society will be replaced by unnecessary laws.
Migration across the globe will become the norm of life. Cultural and economic backwardness, which is widespread in the most favorable areas, will be the object of cultural expansion and revolution.
A large-scale transformation of nature, not limited by the borders of nation-states, the widespread use of nuclear energy to terraform the terrain will turn deserts into thriving oases, thus lowering the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and halting global warming.
Space exploration will no longer be the business of politicians, bureaucrats or capitalists. The movement to the distant frontiers will become the engine of further development of mankind, as well as genetic transformations of man as a biological species.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
Long live the world Commune!
Chinese re-emigrants who played a key role in the Chinese Hydrogen Bomb and Intercontinental Ballistics missiles.↩︎
The piecework-bonus system of remuneration allowed, in the event of a significant overfulfillment of planned indicators by an employee or team, to receive a so-called “chord”, a one-time payment many times exceeding the additional amount that the worker received on piecework pay.↩︎
In the 90’s, theft and sale of metals abroad accumulated in large enterprises, became one of the ways initial accumulation of capital.↩︎
Shturmovshchina — intensive work, often overtime (with increased payment) in the last days of the reporting period (month, quarter or year), when the company received all the necessary components. Simplification and acceleration of technological chains, along with fatigue of workers, led to the release of defective products.↩︎
Ironically, this happened just a few years before a sharp drop in world prices for consumer goods caused by China’s entry into world markets.↩︎
This can be seen from a series declassified in 1999 documents in the Presidential Clinton Library.↩︎
Vladimir Putin: “We need a new economy” to Vedomosti, 30 January 2012↩︎
The Russian Federation recognized the independence of the DPR and LPR 21 February 2022, almost 7 years after the completion of the active phase of combat actions.↩︎