Putin blames Lenin for Ukraine

The Russian president’s speech attacked Ukraine’s right to exist, denying it had achieved “stable statehood.” He claimed it was “an inalienable part” of Russia’s history and culture. He condemned “the severing of what is historically Russian land” by the Bolshevik Revolution.

There was a brief period during the early Russian Revolution — in the 1920s while Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin was alive — when the independence, the culture and the languages of Ukraine and other oppressed nationalities were encouraged. This was the Ukraine of which Lenin was “the author and architect,” in Putin’s words. This was brutally reversed as part of a bureaucratic counterrevolution against Lenin’s policies led by Joseph Stalin.

Putin, harking back to the Russian Empire, is driven by the expansionist appetite of Russia’s capitalist class to try to restore its domination over oppressed nations that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. Putin said that it was “madness” in 1991 for Moscow to give “these republics the right to leave the union without any terms and conditions.”

The nationalist “disease” Lenin and the Bolsheviks fought against was Great Russian chauvinism, the nationalism of the oppressor at the heart of the domination by the Russian Empire, both under the czars and later under the Stalinized Soviet Union. For more on this see the article, “Communist continuity backing Ukraine independence” in the Feb. 21 issue of the Militant.

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Defend the independence of Ukraine! Moscow out now! – The Militant

Oppose Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine! – The Militant

The Russian government’s invasion of Donetsk and Luhansk is a blow to working people in Ukraine, Russia and worldwide. It must be opposed. 

Like its occupation of Crimea in 2014, Moscow’s violation of Ukrainian sovereignty is aimed at advancing the reach of Russia’s capitalist rulers. They are seizing territory, subjugating the Ukrainian people and threatening peoples across Eastern Europe in countries Moscow lost control over when the Stalinist-run Soviet Union came apart in 1991. And Vladimir Putin’s regime will use these war moves to intensify assaults on political rights at home. 

In Ukraine, the Russian rulers seek to regain control they lost in 2014 when popular mobilizations by hundreds of thousands of workers, farmers and youth overthrew the tyrannical pro-Moscow regime of Viktor Yanukovych. 

After Yanukovych’s overthrow, the Kremlin seized Crimea, launching a brutal assault against the Tatar people and worsening living conditions for working people as a whole. They funded and orchestrated a war by pro-Moscow separatist forces in eastern Ukraine. The bloody toll from Moscow’s conflict is paid for by both Ukrainians and Russians. 

Putin insists that the Ukrainian people, who fought centuries of oppression imposed by Russia’s czarist rulers, are really Russians and their country’s independence should be crushed. 

As workers here organize to stand with workers and farmers in Ukraine against Moscow’s war, they should also oppose the sanctions imposed on Russia by Washington, as well as calls for the U.S. rulers to unleash its military might there. Their imperialist foreign policy is an extension of their relentless assaults on our wages, jobs and rights here. 

Working people need our own foreign policy — in opposition to U.S. military moves abroad and in solidarity with workers and farmers fighting to defend their interests against exploitation and oppression worldwide.

Washington’s last war in Europe was a brutal bombing campaign against the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, furthering the dismemberment of that country. The U.S. rulers asserted their dominance in Europe on the corpses of the Yugoslav peoples. Everywhere Washington intervenes it does so solely to advance the rulers’ power and enrich their class at the expense of workers and farmers. 

Under the revolutionary leadership of V.I. Lenin, the Bolshevik government in Russia championed the rights of the Ukrainian people to self-determination. It combated all expressions of Great Russian chauvinism and strengthened the unity and fighting capacities of working people to advance the forging of a truly voluntary Soviet republic. That was made possible because the Bolsheviks had led workers and farmers to overturn capitalist rule in 1917 and make a socialist revolution. 

Standing on that continuity, Socialist Workers Party members participate in and urge others to join actions to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Moscow’s forces from Ukraine.

Oppose Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine! – The Militant

SF school board recall reflects capitalist rulers’ political crisis – The Militant

After years of watching board members attempting to foist their “woke” politics on the cities’ schools, parents organized to put the recall on the ballot and won the vote.

The outcome echoed last year’s defeat of former Democratic Party Gov. Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, expressing the revulsion of working people toward high-handed actions by politicians and school administrators toward parents and students alike.

Democrats Alison Collins, Faauuga Moliga and Board President Gabriela López were turned out by resounding majorities of more than 70%. Democratic Mayor London Breed backed the move to unseat them and will select their replacements. López smeared her opponents, including a significant percentage of the city’s Asian population who voted to oust her, as bigots. “If you fight for racial justice,” she said, “this is the consequence. Don’t be mistaken, white supremacists are enjoying this.”

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SF school board recall reflects capitalist rulers’ political crisis – The Militant

Women’s rights fighter Jennifer Swayne thrown in jail in Wales – The Militant

LONDON — In an attack on the rights of all working people, Gwent police arrested women’s rights campaigner Jennifer Swayne under thought-control “hate-crime” laws Jan. 23. They searched her home, seizing materials, including the book Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Body.

Swayne, who is disabled, was arrested as she was riding her mobility scooter and putting up homemade posters along the streets of Newport, South Wales. The posters included slogans, “respect women’s spaces,” “no men in women’s prisons,” and the statement “no child is born in the wrong body, humans never change sex.”

Cops detained her for more than 12 hours for “displaying threatening or abusive writing likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.”

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Women’s rights fighter Jennifer Swayne thrown in jail in Wales – The Militant

Socialist Workers Party Candidates for U.S. Congress demand Russian troops out of Ukraine! - Insider NJ

The Socialist Workers Party demands Moscow pull its tanks and troops out of Ukraine immediately. Its invasion and bombardment of Ukraine is a violation of its sovereignty and a blow to the interests of all working people — here, in Ukraine, Russia and worldwide.

Since the Bolshevik revolution broke apart the Czarist prison house of nations in 1917, the communist movement has backed the right of Ukraine and all nations to self-determination and independence....

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https://www.insidernj.com/press-release/socialist-workers-party-candidates-for-u-s-congress-demand-russian-troops-out-of-ukraine/ 

Ukraine context: Internationalism or Russification?

Internationalism or Russification?: A study in the Soviet nationalities problem By Ivan Dzyuba is available here.

SWP: ‘Combat Jew-hatred wherever it raises its head’ – The Militant

[....]“The increasing attacks against Jews today are not one-off events,” she said. “They reflect the crisis of capitalism. Jew-hatred is an integral part of the imperialist epoch. This includes antisemitic demagogy of a growing number of bourgeois liberals in the Democratic Party and the middle-class left.”

Kuniansky pointed to Whoopi Goldberg’s comments on the TV show “The View” Jan. 31. Goldberg said the Holocaust was “not about race,” adding it just involved “two white groups of people.”

On the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” she stood by her remarks. But when ABC suspended her for two weeks, Goldberg issued an apology.

“But Goldberg’s ‘facts’ fly in the face of reality,” Kuniansky said. “In 1935 the Nuremberg race laws declared Jews, Romas and blacks enemies of the race-based state and stripped them of German citizenship. These laws prohibited mixing with these ‘subhuman races.’ Under Nazi rule 6 million Jews of all ages were exterminated.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti Defamation League’s chief executive, also blasted Goldberg for this reason, Kuniansky said.

But the ADL had changed its own definition of racism in 2020. It branded all Caucasians regardless of class or conviction as “privileged.” It says racism is “based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” But after Goldberg’s remarks the ADL is backtracking. It has replaced this “woke” definition with a statement that says racism is a “more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity.” Greenblatt went on “The View” to help Goldberg with damage control.

“Greenblatt and Goldberg share the same liberal bourgeois politics,” Kuniansky said. “Neither believes fascism will raise its head in the U.S., let alone do they have a course for fighting it.”

SWP: ‘Combat Jew-hatred wherever it raises its head’ – The Militant

Communist continuity backing Ukraine independence – The Militant

[....]Putin insists Stalin was right against Lenin.

Prior to the 1917 revolution, under czarist rule, Ukrainians, Jews, Tatars, and millions in Central Asia and the Caucasus region were oppressed, denied the basic right to read or use their native language, practice their religion or exercise control over cultural, economic and political affairs.

With the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution, the new workers and peasants government championed the right to self-determination of oppressed nationalities, within what had been the Russian Empire, and worldwide. The Ukrainian people established an autonomous republic and voluntarily joined the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. National pride grew. Use of the Ukrainian language, literature and the arts flourished.

In a 1922 memo to the Communist Party’s Political Bureau, Lenin declared “war to the death on dominant nation chauvinism.”

“Internationalism on the part of oppressors or ‘great’ nations,” he wrote to a party congress that same year, “must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but even as an inequality, through which the oppressor nation, the great nation, would compensate for the inequality which obtains in real life. Anybody who does not understand this has not grasped the real proletarian attitude to the national question.”

Communist continuity backing Ukraine independence – The Militant

FBI uses informers, entrapment to bring kidnap charges in Michigan – The Militant

At least 12 FBI informants and three FBI agents worked together to egg on and entrap 14 men, and then frame them up for supposedly plotting to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Party Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in late 2020.

In September 2020 a group of men gathered in a Michigan rural camp to conduct military-style exercises. As part of this, they were organized to survey the landscape around Whitmer’s nearby vacation cottage. Two of them inspected a bridge in the vicinity and allegedly discussed how it could be blown up. When they gathered together that evening, a man identified as “Big Dan” wanted to know if everyone was “down with what’s going on.”

Of the dozen men on that nighttime trip, four of them — including Big Dan, who was paid $54,000 for his services as “Confidential Human Source-2” — were either government informants or undercover FBI agents....

FBI uses informers, entrapment to bring kidnap charges in Michigan – The Militant

History of the fight for Ukrainian independence – The Militant

[....]For centuries the Ukrainian people were under the boot of Russia’s czarist rulers to the north. The Ukrainian people won independence briefly during the first few years of the 1917 Russian Revolution, as V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks fought for a voluntary Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that respected the Ukrainian people’s autonomy and the advance of the Ukrainian language and culture. After Lenin’s death, Joseph Stalin led a bloody counterrevolution, reimposing Great Russian national chauvinism, along with brutal policies that led to what Ukrainians know as the Holodomor, where millions perished of starvation. An independent Ukraine only reemerged on the heels of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In 2014 a popular mass Maidan uprising in Ukraine battled in the streets and overthrew the pro-Moscow regime of Viktor Yanukovych. Millions joined the political struggle, gaining in confidence as they fought Moscow’s plans to reimpose domination over the country. The struggle gave impetus to the national struggle of the Tatar people in Crimea.

Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by seizing the Crimean Peninsula and backing a long, bloody proxy war by separatists in eastern Ukraine. That crisis has deepened a sense of Ukrainian national identity among working people across the country....

History of the fight for Ukrainian independence – The Militant

‘Militant’ backs Ukraine independence – The Militant

[....]Working people in the U.S. and worldwide need to offer solidarity to fellow toilers in Ukraine by demanding “Russian hands off!” Washington, which has expanded its own NATO forces across Europe, is no friend of the Ukrainian people. It intervenes on behalf of the predatory interests of the U.S. capitalist rulers.

‘Militant’ backs Ukraine independence – The Militant

Defend right to strike, political rights! – The Militant

[....]Because of the worldwide stagnation of capitalist production and trade with sharpening competition for markets, both here and worldwide, the rulers are making preparations for conflict — wars abroad alongside assaults on jobs, wages and working conditions at home.

Without a course to organize independently of the exploiting class — at all levels — workers will run into insurmountable obstacles. Union officials urge workers to get Democrats elected, telling us we need “friends of labor” in office. But both parties rule for the bosses. This is the whole reason for the two party shell game, to keep us tethered to lesser-evil politics while guaranteeing profits for their capitalist masters.

Workers need to break out of this whole framework. We need our own party, a labor party. As union struggles grow, workers need to see ourselves, and to act, as a class. A labor party based on our unions would unify and mobilize labor’s ranks to fight for protection from inflation, joblessness and all attempts by the capitalist state to attack our rights. It would lead the fight against the capitalist rulers’ efforts to use workers and farmers as cannon fodder in their wars for markets, resources and domination abroad.

It would chart a course for our class to lead millions of toilers oppressed and exploited by capitalist rule to fight for political power and establish a workers and farmers government.

This is at the heart of the campaign being waged by the Socialist Workers Party in 2022. Join the SWP campaign!

Defend right to strike, political rights! – The Militant