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Comment: Prospects for an anti-war/solidarity movement in Ukraine and Russia

Anti-war protest in Chernivtsi, western Ukraine, July 23, 2014. Signs read, “Bring our children back!” and “Stop the bloodshed!”

Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal has published various left viewpoints on the political situation in Ukraine. These do not necessarily represent the views of the publishers.

By Roger
Annis

August 18, 2014 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — In an article published on
Left-East on August 10, Russian left-wing
writer Ilya Budraitskis laments “there is no anti-war movement in Russia”.
His article is a rather bleak, despairing outlook on the prospects of organising
against “war” in the border regions between Ukraine and Russia. He titles his
article “Hope in a hopeless place”.

Budraitskis describes
the war being waged by the neo-conservative governing regime in Kyiv as an
“interstate conflict”, meaning that Russia bears an equal, if not
greater, responsibility for the conflict. This scenario is not only a gross
misread of Russia’s position and role in the conflict, it also leads us nowhere
in understanding what to do.

The immediate
victims of this war are the conscripted foot soldiers of the Ukraine army, the
residents of south-eastern Ukraine and the international volunteers (mostly
from Russia) who are fighting with self-defence forces in the southeast. In Budraitskis’
discouraging scenario, the victims are hapless and without a voice or role.

He writes of the
“unfortunate residents of Luhansk and Donetsk” who are left defenceless
to “face the destructive elements of war”. The nature of the conflict
as “interstate” means they are bystanders to forces far more powerful than they.
The “state”’ that emerges victorious, he writes, will be “able to bring
stability, even if to smoking ruins [and] will receive such a level of
submission and obedience of which no state in peace time could even dream”.

Budraitskis
makes an explicit call for a “third”, anti-war, position, between the NATO
powers backing Kyiv, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other. He writes, “The
anti-war moment, if it is really trying to bring disagreement back to society,
should hold a ‘third position’.”

Rather
oddly, he explains, “Such a movement fundamentally should not determine the
greater or lesser degree of responsibility of each side, it should not ‘understand
the point of view’ of those who never have taken our [anti-war] point of
view.”

Two worlds

Fortunately for the victims of Kyiv’s
war, the author is dead wrong in his assessment. He grossly misreads and
misrepresents the people of eastern Ukraine. There is not a chance they could
have resisted for so long and so successfully Kyiv’s NATO-backed military
offensive if they didn’t have a political and social cause worth fighting for.

Kyiv’s “Anti-Terrorist Operation” was
launched in April. Four months later, it has killed several thousand people and
driven at least 850,000 people from their towns and villages into refugee
conditions in Russia and Ukraine. But the regime’s claims that it is on the
verge of taking the large towns and cities of the Donbas region (Donetsk and
Luhansk oblasts) is looking increasingly
like bluster. Indeed, on August 17, it’s delegation on its way to Berlin for
talks with Russia that will try to achieve at a negotiation table what has
eluded it so far on its battlefield—a surrender of the people of eastern
Ukraine to its austerity economic program. Austerity is a condition by Europe
and by international financial agencies for loans and for vague promises of trade
deals and investments to follow.

Kyiv is in a race against time with its
war. It reinstituted
obligatory military service on May 1 (conscription was abolished last year
by President Victor Yanukovych, who was overthrown in February this year). It
has held three conscription drives. The latest one, announced last month, has
provoked militant protests. These are spearheaded by the wives, fiancées and
mothers of conscripts. The protests have been explicit in their concern about
the high casualty rates being suffered by the army. As Bloomberg
News reported earlier this month, “The fact that a third mobilization is
needed is a sign the war is far from over.”

Kyiv’s budget, including for war, is
now entirely dependent on international financiers. So far in 2014, its
currency is the worst performing in the world against the US dollar, losing 40
per cent of its value. A very serious energy crisis is upon it, due to the
combined loss of supplies of Russian gas and Donbas coal. Hot water service has
been cut in its cities (the Soviet system of planned economy created cheap,
centralised provision of heat and hot water to dwellings) and fuel prices are
rising sharply. What will happen in a few months when winter arrives?

Many young men are refusing to answer
the conscription call, and the numbers of disaffected and deserting soldiers
are on the rise. Conscripts are told they are being sent to fight a war against
“terrorists” and pro-Russian fanatics. But when they arrive in eastern Ukraine,
they find they are shooting at people who look and live a lot like them–people
who are defending their homes, their families and their communities from what
they consider to be a foreign invasion.

Conscripts doubly resemble the
proletarian population of the east because as Kyiv’s conscription reaches
deeper into the population in central and western Ukraine, the wealthy classes are
exercising the option to pay bribes (to doctors, for example) or fines to
exempt their youth from service.

Because Western media has largely become
a mouthpiece of Kyiv’s propaganda services, it is difficult to quantify the effects
of everything on the morale and fighting capacity of Kyiv’s army. We don’t know,
exactly, what casualties it is suffering; varying reports show them to be very
high. But we do know that in order to capture towns and rural territory, Kyiv cannot
rely on its conscript army. It is obliged to use war crimes—the indiscriminate shelling
of civilians—and the shock troops of its fascist
militia battalions.

Not ‘anti-war’ but solidarity

Another issue that Budraitskis gets
wrong is positing that Russian people should build an “anti-war” movement. This
way of describing what is needed is vague and misleads. During the Vietnam War,
everyone in the world knew what it meant to be “anti-war”—it meant opposing the
murderous war of the United States government against the people of Vietnam. The
anti-war movement of the day debated the finer points of whether and how it
should solidarise with the Vietnamese people, but no one who was sincere denied
the required solution to the conflict—a complete, total and unconditional
withdrawal of US military forces from Vietnam and the region.

What does “anti-war” mean
today in the context of Ukraine and Russia? It’s a term which easily lends
itself to misunderstanding because it means very different things depending on
who is uttering it and who is listening. To informed people, it is clear who and
what is responsible for the war—Kyiv, its desired austerity/economic
association with Europe and NATO’s military expansionism. But to “third positions”’
like Budraitskis or to people influenced by Western media or otherwise
uninformed, it can mean that “everyone” is to blame—Russia, NATO, Kyiv, eastern
Ukrainian “separatists”.

So what’s needed in place of an “anti-war
movement” that means something or nothing to the observer is a solidarity movement. Such a movement
must support the victims of the war and of NATO expansionism, and it should
support people throughout Ukraine who oppose the plans of Ukraine’s billionaire
elite for Greek-style austerity. Once a movement gets that basic orientation
figured out, it can discuss and decide its exact stance towards the political
movements of the people of the east and southeast.

Some sections of a solidarity movement
will want to solidarise directly with the socially progressive and proletarian content
of the struggle of the peoples of the south-east and their declared “peoples
republics”. The declaration
of the Ukrainian delegates who attended the anti-war conference in Yalta,
Crimea on July 6-7, 2014, is an excellent expression of this, not only for
south-east Ukraine but for all of the country.

Meanwhile, the foundational program for
a broad, solidarity/anti-war movement must demand an end to Kyiv’s war and
NATO’s support to that. An excellent guideline for this comes, again, from the
Yalta conference in the form of an
appeal for international solidarity against Kyiv’s war.

Like the Ukrainian delegates’
declaration, the anti-war call proposes measures for a political resolution of
the conflict. These must be centered on recognition of the right of people in
the east of the country to political self-determination.

Self-determination for southeast
Ukraine may or may not take the form of secession. The surest and only way for
Ukrainians to have a unified country is to recognise Ukraine’s diverse and
multinational character and fashion a decentralised and democratic government
and constitution accordingly. What’s more, this applies not only to eastern
Ukraine but also to the multinational regions in the south and west of the
country.

A solidarity movement already exists in Russia

Once we clear away the confusion that Budraitskis’
terminology creates, we can see that he is quite wrong in his bleak estimation of
the situation in Russia with respect to the war in eastern Ukraine. A rather
substantial solidarity movement already exists in Russia and it offers much
more hope than he lets on.

Many Russians or residents of Russia have
volunteered to go and fight against Kyiv’s and NATO’s war. Tens of thousands of
Russian people are working to shelter and care for the three quarters of a
million residents-and-counting of south-east Ukraine who have been forced out
of their homes and country by Kyiv’s war.

On August 12, the Russian government
dispatched a large truck convoy of humanitarian aid to the towns and cities in
Donetsk and Luhansk regions that have come under intense bombardment and are
now lacking basic, life-supporting systems such as water, electricity and
communication. The convoy has helped to focus Russian and international
attention on the humanitarian disaster that Kyiv has created.

Russia has embarked on a program of
massive spending of social services and economic investment in Crimea to raise the
social and economic conditions inherited from post-independence Ukraine, which
are much lower than in Russia. Substantial aid will be required for
reconstruction in southeast Ukraine once Kyiv is obliged to withdraw its army
and militias.

Russians are debating how to pay for
all this. One proposal in Russia’s parliament is to raise income taxes on the
wealthy. Presently, Russians pay an across-the-board, 13 per cent income tax, a
very low rate compared to imperialist countries.

Russians are also debating what to do
about the sanctions that Europe and North America have levied against Russia.
What to do about food procurement, for example? Presently, Russia imports about
40 per cent of the food it consumes. What must be done to promote food
sovereignty as well as expanded economic relations with Asia and Latin America?

All of Russia is bracing for worse to
come from the NATO countries that are backing and arming Kyiv, including more
sanctions and military provocations.

So a solidarity movement in Russia truly exists. It just doesn’t happen to take
the “third camp” form that Budraitskis would like to see. As he more or less
explicitly recognises, most Russians are wise enough to see who it is that has
created the crisis in Ukraine. It’s not their own government.

It’s true there are not popular,
citizen mobilisations in the streets of Russia’s cities to oppose Kyiv’s war.
There should be, just as there should be in Europe, North America, Latin
America and elsewhere. Russia’s capitalist government represses the right to
protest, just as other capitalist governments do. And to the extent that
progressives in Russia and elsewhere in the world project “third camp” views,
this, too, results discourages and demobilises people.

Pro-Kyiv Ukraine propaganda says that
Russia is arming and inciting the rebellion in the south-east. But this turns
matters on its head. Russia has the right to defend itself against the stated
goals of NATO and Kyiv to weaken and subjugate it. Any solidarity or anti-war
movement worth its salt should recognise this and condemn Kyiv’s and NATO’s
ambitions.

As well, Russia can hardly be expected
to bow to NATO’s demands that it become a policeman in eastern Ukraine on
NATO’s behalf. Indeed, a solidarity movement should explicitly demand that it
refuse to do so. The very clear will of the Russian people is to see an end to
Kyiv’s war and an end to NATO’s
threats against Russia. The Russian government should act forcefully to
represent and carry out that will.

It is not complicated to see that Russia’s
capitalists want to preserve their ties to capitalist Europe and international
financial markets and have little, real sympathy with the autonomous political
movements in eastern Ukraine. Capitalism is a system that thrives on social
inequality, exploitation and war. But Russia’s elite must take account of very
strong domestic opinion that opposes NATO’s threats and the course of the
rightist regime in Kyiv. That is a good thing.

The flow of rifles, ammunition and
other weaponry to eastern Ukraine from Russia is politically impossible for the
Kremlin to prevent. That, too, is a good and necessary thing, however much we
may lament war and the loss of life. Let’s not forget that most rebels are
poorly armed and many equip themselves from the capture of the poor and
outdated equipment of the other side.

A solidarity movement should also be
thankful that unlike so many governments in the world coming under attack or
pressure from the imperialist governments and militaries, Russia’s government is
prepared to defend its interests and fight back. This encourages and creates
important political space for other peoples to defend themselves similarly,
such as in Latin America.

This is the complex mix which a
solidarity movement must navigate.

It is no loss that the third camp anti-war
movement advocated by Budraitskis finds little support or social base in Russia
today. He references the large march against “war” that took place in Moscow in
mid-March as events in Crimea were heating up. But that event was a hindrance,
not a help. Much of it was directed at blaming Russia for stirring up trouble
in Crimea. It urged Russia’s rulers to leave Kyiv a free hand there. Luckily,
the people of Crimea exercised much better judgement than what misguided “leftists”
in Russia had on offer. They voted in a plebiscite in March to get out of the
way of Kyiv’s planned austerity civil war and secede. Thus ended Crimea’s brief
23-year association with independent Ukraine.

The Russian state didn’t want a war in
Ukraine, nor did it provoke it. The slide to war began when fascist bands began
making raids into the Ukrainian south-east as early as late February this year
in order to impose a centralised, intolerant and socially regressive governing
authority out of Kyiv. Local people took up arms to defend themselves and Russia
became confronted not only with a conflict that it could not ignore but also
with an opportunist NATO military alliance that seized an opening to press its goal
of dismembering the Russian Federation.

It is in the vital interest of the free
people of the world that neither Kyiv nor NATO succeeds in its ambitions.

* * *

One of the outlets where the articles
of Budraitskis are published, including this latest one, is International Viewpoint. It is a
monthly, print magazine published under the auspices of the Fourth
International, an association of small Marxist parties in Europe and some other
countries of the world.

International Viewpoint‘s reporting on the war in Ukraine consists exclusively of a
“third camp”, Russia-and-NATO-as-equal-protagonists outlook. I co-authored a
critique of this viewpoint in early July: Fourth
International needs to oppose the war and austerity drive against Ukrainian
people.

Two key themes in
the Fourth International view is that Russia is an “imperialist”
country and that the Maidan political protest movement in Ukraine that sparked
the overthrow of Ukraine’s government in February of this year was a
progressive social movement. This view is shared with many of the groups of the
International Socialist tradition.

The Fourth
International also argues that the ascendance of right-wing nationalism in
Ukraine, including its large, fascist wing, is a fiction. Writer Murray Smith
argues this view forcefully in a July 26
article in International Viewpoint.
He goes a step further in saying that a much larger far-right danger exists in
Russia. Little wonder, then, that his article expresses zero sympathy or
support for the popular struggle in eastern Ukraine. On the contrary, he writes
in a postscript that the article was originally published in May and he sees no
need for any changes in re-issuing it. In other words, the past three months of
grisly war and killings by Kyiv have changed nothing in Smith’s outlook.

Among the Fourth
International groups, the most vociferous in arguing the view described above
is Socialist Resistance, in Britain. Its latest article, “The imperialist carve-up of Ukraine: where does the left and
anti-war movement stand?”, is published in International Viewpoint
on August 12, 2014. This one reads alarmingly in several places like the “State
Department socialism” that Marxists warned against during and after World War II,
that is, the view that the Soviet Union as it then existed (soon emulated by
China and Korea) was a larger threat to “democracy” than imperialism itself.

Author Fred Leplat
chides the Marxists in the UK who, in his opinion, argue wrongly that “today, the major threat of war comes
from Western imperialism, in particular the USA as it is the major military and
imperialist power in the world”.

Leplat’s
article condemns the decision of anti-war groups in Britain to invite Russian
socialist Boris Kagarlitsky to speak at protest events planned next month in
Wales on the occasion of a summit meeting of NATO. Kagarlitsky is probably the
sharpest writer being published in English to describe the complex and
contradictory reality of Russia today.

Russia is a
middle-ranking capitalist power whose security ambitions, in total contrast to
those of the US and Europe, are narrowly local. Its foreign policy stances,
like those of the USSR before it, are cautious and typically regressive (such
as its long-standing support for Israel). Mostly, its foreign policy is focused
on its border security.

Nothing in the
current conflict suggests a break with this pattern. But NATO’s pressure and
threats are radicalising the political context. Strong anti-war, anti-fascist and social
justice views are being stirred among the populations of Russia and Ukraine.
Russia is obliged by the embargos it is facing to
shift its economic ties and foreign policy outlook towards the countries of
Asia and Latin America. Presenting Russia as an “imperialist’ mirror image of
the likes of the US, France or Britain is a muddle from which only confusion
and political disarray can follow.