This year has seen numerous escalations in the ongoing proxy wars between the NATO-led Western alliance and the rising multipolar world. The two fronts of this conflict are both Israel’s Imperial conquest in the Middle East, both in Palestine and Syria, as well as the war in Ukraine, which has only escalated from its origin in 2014 and since the Russian state entered conflict in 2022. All is just a proxy for expanding both the EU and NATO eastward. As a result of conflicts in eastern Ukraine between the Ukrainian military and different militia groups that represented ethnic Russians, until 2022: 14,000 people had died, Trade Unions had been repressed to the point of non-existence, and the Communist Party was outlawed. The KPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation) has called for intervention in this conflict by the Russian government, which reluctantly joined the war in 2022, understanding the need to prevent NATO expansion for national security.
This created a united struggle for the Russian people politically, but has also intensified certain domestic struggles between the oligarch class & ordinary Russians, as the Russian government has also clamped down on workers’ rights in the name of national security. Today, we interview Alexander Rusakov from Komsomol ( комсомол), the youth wing of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), to ask about the conflict and clear up some of the misconceptions based on warmongering British news outlets as well as the chauvinistic Russian right-wing.
What is the general view of the Russian working class of this conflict and the KPRF’s position on its origin? How did we get to the geopolitical position we are in, and how is this viewed by the Russian people?
AR: So, I wanted to dive into the Marxist analysis, and after that, we will, of course, get into how it’s evolved in this military conflict that’s currently ongoing. So firstly, I wanted to return to the basics of Marxism and particularly the base and the superstructure in Marxist theory. And the base is, of course, everything that’s devoted to production, means of production, commodity production, and so on and so on. While the superstructure is, of course, everything devoted to cultural differences, religious differences or ethnic differences. And so when we analyse the different nations, different ethnicities, different cultures, and what’s happening in Ukraine currently – We have to firstly analyse the markets, the production, and we have to make that connection between the production and the crisis that’s ongoing in Ukraine. We do it because we are Marxists.
And I, of course, want to start with the fall of the Soviet Union, which is a great, great tragedy for us. I can’t even describe how tragic it was for our people in Russia and in Ukraine, because our production has basically decreased a lot. After 1991, we suffered many, I would even say, casualties of banditism and also of this economic crisis of the 1990s. We have 12.5 million people; a population decrease over the 1990s from 1990 to 2021. That’s millions of people lost in just 30 years. It all came down to the fall of the Soviet Union. The western commodities, firstly the American ones, but then the European ones, have flooded our markets in Russia, in Ukraine, in Belarus, and all 15 republics. And so, when it happens, these production lines, which were between the Ukraine and Russia, Russia and Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, they all crashed because they are not needed anymore. The Russian bourgeoisie had the most profits while trading with the West. So, our production lines, our factories were closed, they were shut down. All the big factories, like the Hammer and Sickle factory, which were demolished, and there are now living apartments built there.
And so, I’m glad, actually, that I’m speaking to a British person because you would understand this. In the Soviet Union, we of course had 15 Soviet republics and different ethnicities and nations. All of which was part of the USSR. You can identify yourself as British, as an English person, as a Scottish person, as a Welsh person, or even as a migrant. That’s totally normal for you to self-identify as British. And in the Soviet Union, it was totally okay, and most people did it. Yes, they’re Uzbek, yes, they’re Buryat. They all called themselves Soviet men. So that’s not an ethnicity, but that’s their self-representation as a Soviet man.
This was a part of the huge, I would say, policy of the friendship of the nations, of the different nations, which were different ethnicities, which were in the Soviet Union. There are production lines to this alliance, and these production lines are within the Russian borders. So, they associate with each other. People associate with each other, and they have no problem speaking with people of other ethnicities. But when these production lines are demolished, that tends not to exist anymore. This was all, I guess, brilliantly planned from the West, from America and Europe. And they know it perfectly. So, this crisis that’s ongoing in Ukraine was, I believe, planned with the fall of the Soviet Union by the Western countries as a strategic masterpiece. The capitalistic West has always known that these production lines’ crumbling will lead to that crisis.
Talking about Ukraine… 2014 is the starting point of this military conflict. So, there was Maidan. Maidan is basically like a square, the town square in the Ukrainian language. It was protests, and the pro-fascist government came to power after that. I guess they were not fascists at that point in time, but they were definitely pro-fascist and they have agreed to let fascism rise in their country and in 2014, one of the Komsomol members, Komsomol is the youth of the party of the Communist party of Ukraine, which were not banned at that time, was burned alive at the house of Soviets in Odessa. He was 14 years old, and the neo-Nazi protesters, so-called protesters, burned him alive with many, many, many different people, and that was around the time when the Crimean Peninsula and Russian Federation unified, and in which the Donetsk, I would say, rebellion and Lugansk rebellion of the people of the working class had actually begun.
And so talking about that and the role of the KPRF, one of the members and the leader of the Donetsk Communist Party branch, the leader of the Donetsk Communist Party, his name is Boris Litvinov, he’s actually the author of the Declaration of Independence of the Donetsk People’s Republic, so he was…I would not say behind the wheel, but he was one of the first protesters, and he was actually devoted to this protest. And this protest erupted when the neo-Nazi militia, the armed people, came to Donetsk and decided to demolish the Lenin statue in the town square. So, it was all like a working-class rebellion.
The Donbass region is famous for its coal mines. It’s always been between Ukrainians and Russians, and different ethnicities live there. And there are a lot of working-class people living there. And coming to 2022, when these crises were ongoing for eight years. So, the war in the Donbass region was [going on for] eight years already in 2022. In 2022, on the 15th of February, our party, the Communist Party in our Russian Parliament, called the Russian State Duma, had proposed that we recognise the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republic. And that was done by our government [on February 21st].
So, we can say that the Communist Party is also involved in saving these people in Donbass. And this proposal by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation has a great value, and that was really helpful to the people of Donbass. Since 2014, we’re the first major political party in Russia, just a political party in Russia, who have sent aid to help the Donbass region. We’ve sent aid to the people of Donbass, we’ve sent aid to the militia of Donbass, we’ve sent aid to our forces, our military forces, after 2022 in Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye, Kherson, and in Kurskoye Oblast, this, how they call it, counterattack by the Ukrainian army, so-called counterattack has occurred. And so nowadays the Communist Party is helping the people of Donbass. We started it first; we did it years before any bourgeois party did that, and we’ll still stand with Donbass, and we fight for our people.
How has the class struggle at home and during a time of conflict especially intensified, and what sort of approach has been taken by the bourgeois parties?
AR: So I guess in the early stages of this conflict in 2014, there was a big struggle in the bourgeoisie class on whether to support or not support these defendants of the Donbass region. While they were waiting, they were waiting for the final of this conflict. We were already helping Donbass, and we had volunteers there in the Donbass region. So we helped them with products, we helped them with medicine. While the bourgeoisie has just waited and waited and waited. And then, when it became popular, it became popular in Russia to help Donbass, where it became mainstream, and they rushed to help. Yes, they do help now, but we need to understand that that is just because of the political mainstream.
So is the mainstream opinion in Russia quite pro-war in the same predatory way as the UK ruling class, or is it quite different?
AR: Well, yes, we do see the NATO expansion to the east and the militarisation of Europe, and we tend to make analogies that are not great for Europe. They put us back into the start of the 20th century, which is not good. I do believe that we need to draw a line between the national unity – and we support national unity, and we support, of course, the cause of the special military operation in Donbass – and between the bourgeois regime and its puppets and its mass media workers and so on and so on.
So currently on the Russian television and in mass media, there is a lot, a ton of coverage of the special military operation. It’s, of course, it strikes all of us. It affects all of us. And you can’t blame the media for that coverage. But with that, there is a huge depoliticisation of the Russian media, and by depoliticisation, I mean that people do not tend to be interested in politics anymore. Yes, they are supportive of the Russian army, but they don’t have that opinion on class struggle or even the liberal political spectrum. They do not tend to support any political party, and that, of course, is a problem for Communists. We want them to self-identify as the working class, to understand that they are part of the working class.
In the mass media, currently, there are no debates between the political parties, so they have cancelled that. Some political forces are not giving words, and I guess the Communist Party is among them. So our TV time is very low. We are still the second most popular party by votes in Russia by far, by far the second one, and the time we get on TV is less than other parties, which are third, fourth, fifth, and in Russia there is a federal television, and that basically doesn’t monopolise, but it’s pretty much everything that people tend to watch. So that’s a big, huge problem. And what I wanted to tell you is that in drawing this line between the national unity and the class struggle in Russia, I have prepared this amazing quote by Vladimir Lenin:
“Not infrequently we find the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations talking of national revolt, while in practice it enters into reactionary compacts with the bourgeoisie of the oppressor nation behind the backs of, and against, its own people. In such cases the criticism of revolutionary Marxists should be directed not against the national movement, but against its degradation, vulgarisation, against the tendency to reduce it to a petty squabble. Incidentally, very many Austrian and Russian Social-Democrats overlook this and in their legitimate hatred of the petty, vulgar and sordid national squabbles – disputes and scuffles over the question, for instance, of which language shall have precedence in two-language street signs – refuse to support the national struggle.“
(Vladimir Lenin, A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism)
So Lenin wrote that in his work, a caricature of Marxism, in 1915 and he was right on points what happens in Russia now because the government they are still the bourgeoisie governments, they are still ran by the bourgeois forces and we have a lot of so-called political struggles, political problems, which are not class devoted and which are just this patsy vulgarised problems about the signs on the streets. For example, one of the most commonly discussed problems in Russia now is whether we want signs on Russian streets written in English. We try to get this opposition with America, with the West, and some political forces try to get the signs away, and that’s what Lenin said basically a century ago.
He told that and he also very greatly expressed that we should support this national unity, we should support this national struggle, and we should not support these acts of bourgeoisie that are devoted against this national struggle. We saw that in 2014, we saw that in the first months of the special military operation, where not all but parts of the bourgeois had not finished trading with the West or even transiting the gas through the Ukraine, and that’s of course part of the of this game between different capitalists.
I would also mention that about mass media that there is a struggle with the rising far-right agenda in Russia. There are some political forces and some parts of the bourgeoisie who are interested in this agenda to write and to spread. And there is, for example, a TV channel called Tsargrad, which basically, as you can maybe even hear, translates to like the ‘Tsar town’, ‘Tsar city’. It spreads false information against Vladimir Lenin and [its sponsor], called Konstantin Mollefev, he’s a Russian oligarch who is like very, very, he’s very right basically, so he supports all the different right movements.
I’m a member of the Komsomol, of the Communist Party Youth as well as the party itself, my comrades have started a project called Students Against Fascism. It was first devoted against the start of the school of Ivan Ilyin in one of the Russian universities. Ilyin is a famous Russian pro-fascist so-called philosopher. He lived in Nazi Germany. He left Nazi Germany, but he did live there. He was also working at the university when Hitler came to power, and he was apologetic to the Nazi regime. Years later, after World War II, his opinions somehow changed, but not entirely, and he still finds himself, at some moments, positive about the Nazi regime. But people now in Russia, some people, some parts of the bourgeoisie tend to make him like a national philosopher and etc.
So we see this process of the far-right agenda rising and fascism in different parts of the capitalist society. I know it happens in Europe. I know it happens in America. We’ve seen it happening in Ukraine before, as I believe there is a fascist government right now without elections, the Communist Party presence, Communist symbols, my Communist comrades are even expelled from the country or brought into prison, or even brought into the army, some people. So that’s the fascist regime, and we see the rise of this fascism, this process of creating fascist movements in all different capitalist countries.
And that’s my and Komsomol’s critiques of this capitalist regime as we support the cause of the special military operation. I would want to say to my fellow British comrades and people all around the world that the working class has no ethnicity, has no country, even, and must be involved and is involved already in the class struggle. So the working class must unify all over the world, must listen to the Marxist analysis, and must understand that all the problems, the major political problems that are currently in the world, are caused by the class of the bourgeoisie. So my deepest solidarity with the British working class, and thank you a lot for giving me this opportunity and we hope to work with the YCL again.
Jax Tennyson is a member of the YCL’s Glasgow Branch