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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Feb.1, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Russian revolutionary leader V. I. Lenin once called czarist Russia a "prisonhouse of nations." The brutal mid- January assault by Russian troops against a small band of Chechen rebels shows that Boris Yeltsin is trying desperately to revive that infamous legacy.
Yeltsin's focus of attack against the many small nations in Russia is Chechnya, a semi-autonomous region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chechnya declared independence from Russia under the leadership of former Soviet Gen. Dzhokhar Dudayev.
In December 1994, Yeltsin opened a military offensive against Chechnya, destroying the Chechen capital of Grozny. Over 30,000 people were killed in the next year, mostly by Russian troops.
The current crisis began Jan. 9, when Chechen independence fighters attacked Russian airports in the neighboring republic of Dagestan. They were retreating back to Chechnya with about 100 hostages when Russian forces stopped them at the town of Pervomayskoye, on the Dagestan side of the Dagestan-Chechnya border.
Dagestani officials tried to mediate the crisis. But the Russian government--clearly looking for a military solution- -refused to guarantee that the Chechen soldiers would be given safe passage to Chechnya after releasing the hostages.
On Jan. 17, after giving the Chechnyan troops 10 minutes to surrender unconditionally, Russian troops began shelling the town.
However, after several days of heavy fighting, the 200 Chechnyan fighters had kept the thousands of elite Russian troops at bay. The Chechnyans--including their commander, Salman Raduyev--finally slipped out of the town.
There have been no estimates of the number of civilians killed in the Russian attack. But it was a massacre. The town has been reduced to rubble.
The Russian military is denying all access to the area. Before the assault, Russian military guards unleashed dogs on journalists and shot at least one.
The crisis has shaken the Russian government--especially President Boris Yeltsin--to the core.
The only party in the Duma (parliament) to openly support Yeltsin's assault was Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultra- nationalist, right-wing Liberal Democratic Party. Zhirinovsky has called on Yeltsin to napalm Chechen villages.
Gen. Aleksandr Lebed is portrayed in the Western media as a "hard-liner." He said Yeltsin's main mistake was talking to the Chechen rebels in the first place, as opposed to crushing them outright.
"He laughs last who shoots first," Lebed was quoted as saying.
Yeltsin's pro-capitalist rivals in the Duma, particularly Grigorii Yavlinskii of the Yabloko party, have called Yeltsin's war on Chechnya "a shame for Russian democracy." Yabloko represents the Western-oriented capitalists in Russia, who criticize Yeltsin for being too moderate in his attempt to bring back capitalism.
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation has the biggest parliamentary bloc. It has consistently condemned Yeltsin's adventure, although softly, with words like "tragic" and "irresponsible."
The Russian Communist Workers Party, which has several seats in the Duma, has been the only party to consistently insist on the Chechen people's right to self-determination.
The U.S. government gave support to Yeltsin during the bombardment. Defense Secretary William Perry said as the fighting broke out, "We believe the Russian Government is entirely correct in resisting this hostage-taking effort and resisting very strongly."
This newest crisis in Chechnya comes at a time when Yeltsin has taken heavy political blows.
Last month's parliamentary elections gave the Communist faction very close to a majority in the Duma. Outlying regions voted more heavily for the Communists.
Dagestan, for example, was the region where Communists won the highest vote--56 percent.
Many view Yeltsin's massacre in Chechnya as a military adventure to divert the Russian people's attention from the economic crisis they are facing. Yeltsin may also use the threat of growing civil war to increase repression against political opponents across the country--or even cancel the upcoming June election.
The basis for the crisis in Chechnya is the collapse of the socialist framework of the Soviet Union. Without the economic basis for socialist unity, the only relationship that can exist between different nationalities is domination of the weak by the strong.
Chechen leader Dudayev has vowed that "Russian racism in the Caucasus will not go unpunished." But the only sure path to end the bloodshed will be the class struggle of Russian and Chechen workers--based on the right of nations to self- determination--against Western capitalism and its Russian lackeys.
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