Issue 197 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published May 1996 Copyright © Socialist Review

Feature Article: The empire state

Dave Crouch

Boris Yeltsin is standing for re-election as Russia's president in June. He launched his campaign with two major policy statements made at the beginning of April.

The first is a plan to end the war in Chechnya, the second an agreement for a common market, currency and defence policy with Belorus, an advanced industrial country of 10 million inhabitants lying between Russia and Poland that won its independence from the USSR in 1991.

Both initiatives have been hailed as skilful moves that will assist Yeltsin to victory. Both, however, are deeply flawed.

When Russian troops went into Chechnya in December 1994, the minister of defence, Pavel Grachev, believed that the war could be won by one paratroop regiment in 36 hours. Now, 15 months later, Russian troops and bombers are still conducting operations on a grand scale.

The sheer ferocity of Russia's onslaught is terrifying: according to official figures, which are likely to grossly underestimate the true situation, 20,000 people have died and 600,000 have been made homeless.

Russian state terrorism has provoked two cases of mass hostage taking by the Chechen resistance, the last incident in January, when 2,000 people were seized in a hospital in Dagestan. The Russian media - even those sections which had initially opposed the war - bayed for Chechen blood, calling for Russia to 'shoot the mad dogs', words consciously taken from Stalin's show trials of 1937. The majority of Russians were undoubtedly in favour of freeing the hostages by force.

However, the Russian state is so weak and deeply divided that the attempt by troops to free the remaining 150 hostages and finish off the Chechens turned into a bloody farce. With three or four different commands vying with each other to take credit for the operation, and demoralised troops unwilling to lay down their lives for the sake of their officers' promotions, the operation against the village of Pervomaiskoye, where the Chechens had taken refuge took several days, killed dozens of hostages, razed the town to the ground and let the Chechen leader Raduyev escape.

The leadership's attempts to explain their failure were so half witted that they only re-emphasised the bestiality of the war: for example General Barsukov, head of the former KGB, said that the Chechens had managed to escape because they had fought barefoot in the snow. In fact impoverished Russian troops had stripped the boots from Chechen corpses before Barsukov had arrived to inspect them. The result was a massive wave of revulsion against the war. In some cities this turned into demonstrations accompanying the coffins of Russian soldiers. A major Moscow daily devoted its front page to calling on its readers to write to Yeltsin and demand an end to the fighting. In the Kuzbass mining region people started collecting signatures calling to pull the troops out, and in Nizhny Novgorod a million signatures were collected on the initiative of the city governor, Boris Nemtsov.

Yeltsin was forced to promise an end to the war. He said he had seven different plans, and that the troops would soon be withdrawn. But these statements were followed by a sharp intensification of operations by the Russian army and airforce. In February Chechen towns including Novogroznensky, Sernovodsk, Samashki and Bamut were subjected to colossal bombardments. Tens of thousands of people were made homeless and countless others were killed.

On the day that Yeltsin announced his big peace initiative, 31 March, 28 Russian soldiers died in combat. A few days later the town of Shalazhi, which had just signed a 'peace accord' with troops, was bombed from the air. The army claimed it did not know who had done it. A few days later it was bombed again. Within days it was obvious to millions that Yeltsin's 'peace' was just another political bluff.

Russia is fighting the war in Chechnya to the bitter end because its ruling class is desperate to halt the succession of military defeats that began in Afghanistan and led to the collapse of the Soviet empire. Even talk of peace is seen by the army leadership as betrayal. But the ruling class is caught in a dilemma. The harder it hits the Chechens, the deeper and more bitter their resistance, which has its roots in the Caucasus wars of the last century and the deportation of the entire Chechen population by Stalin in 1944. Russia cannot win the war, but neither can it afford to lose it.

So the bloodshed in Chechnya will continue well past the presidential elections. Nor will a change of president make any difference: Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist leader, is an extreme Russian nationalist and has made plain his intention for the troops to stay, while Grigory Yavlinsky, the leading liberal candidate, is using anti-war rhetoric in his campaign but is sharing platforms with General Alexander Lebed, a supporter of military rule in Russia and a fanatical opponent of peace.

Only when the price of staying in Chechnya becomes too high - in terms of either mass protest by Russians and revolt in the army, or a decisive victory by the Chechens - will the Russian ruling class end this war.

Yeltsin's second major initiative followed hot on the heels of his peace plan. On 2 April, amid great pomp and ceremony, he and the president of Belorus, Alexander Lukashenka, announced the creation of the Union of Sovereign Republics (USR), marking the beginning of the political and economic unification of the two countries. Yeltsin successfully stole the thunder of the Communist Party, which had won a vote in parliament two weeks earlier calling for a resurrection of the USSR and denouncing the 1991 agreement that established the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The idea of integration with former Soviet republics has tapped into the soft Russian nationalism widespread in Russian society. To most Russians the new USR - the name was obviously chosen to be as close as possible to its predecessor - is a welcome move towards a natural pan-Slav unity disrupted by the collapse of empire, a counter-attack to NATO's plans to expand into eastern Europe, and a boost to Russia's prestige. Many believe that the USR will also bring economic benefits.

But the unity agreement is mainly a political gesture: it was signed with indecent haste, without consultation with the national parliaments (let alone the electorate), and with few concrete suggestions about how to overcome the enormous obstacles to its implementation.

The purported economic gains of unity are illusory. When two capitalist states unite this can only mean the intensification of competition between firms in each country, no longer subject to protectionist tariff and tax policies: weaker firms will go to the wall and unemployment will rise. Companies in both countries that once relied on each other for orders have long since switched to different customers and suppliers. A glance at Russia is enough to show that it is the chaos produced by privatisation, increased competition with the west and the lack of investment that are to blame for the economic crisis, rather than simply the erection of national boundaries.

Of far greater importance is the military side of the new union. To the Russian ruling class, Belorus has enormous strategic significance. Its incorporation within common borders means an end to uncertainty over trade routes with the west, easy access to Russia's enclave in Kaliningrad on the Baltic coast, and an end to Baltic-Black Sea integration that was threatening to create a buffer stretching from Ukraine to Estonia.

Anti-missile defences on Belorussian territory will now be under Russian control, while Russian troops will be stationed on the border with Poland. In this sense the USR is a continuation of the Kremlin's policy in Chechnya by diplomatic means. The USR has been welcomed in Russia by everyone from the Communists to the fascists, but in Belorus it has led to mass protests. In almost no other Soviet republic was forced Russification taken to such extremes as in Belorus, where in the mid-1930s some 90 percent of the national intelligentsia were murdered or sent to the camps. By the 1980s there were no schools using the Belorussian language, even though 83 percent of the population claimed it as their native tongue. The legacy of this colonial history is a population that is largely hostile to Russia, but also containing a large element of the middle and ruling classes with an orientation on Moscow. Lukashenka belongs to this latter group. He has ruled since 1994 with a ruthless authoritarianism: he has sent police against strikes and jailed their leaders, driven the independent press out of the country, and closed Belorussian language schools and departments. Last year he gave an interview to a German newspaper in which he praised Adolf Hitler.

We spoke to a young Belorussian activist about the demonstrations in Minsk, capital of Belorus. The first came on 24 March and was led by the nationalist Belorussian People's Front (BPF). It drew 30,000 and ended with fights with the police. A week later Lukashenka bussed in supporters from across the country and mustered a similar number in favour of the union.

On 2 April, however, a largely spontaneous demonstration took place. The BPF tried to take charge of it, but failed. The demo was very large - some 30,000 people again - but made up mainly of young people completely new to politics. They are hostile to Lukashenka, because they see Russian expansion as a threat to their freedom to listen to western music and dress in western clothes, and because they don't want a return to the command economy. The demo was conscious of its age - demonstrators chanted, 'Youth against Lukashenka!' - and unwilling to obey the BPF. Some came with pockets full of stones, looking for a fight with the police.

In the last six years Belorussian workers have developed a militant tradition, assisted by their proximity to Poland and the successful anti-imperialist struggle against the USSR. Although they have not been involved in an organised fashion in the recent demonstrations, we must hope that the size and militancy of the protests will encourage workers to take up the fight against Lukashenka and the USR.

Their slogan must be unity from below of Russian and Belorussian workers, and not unity from above of reactionary leaders to shore up their rule. This would be a blow to both Russian imperialism and NATO expansionism to the east.


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