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