New 'freedom'--to exploit
The link between Chechnya war and Caspian oil
By Brian
Becker
This coming March will mark nine years since the peoples of
the 15 republics of the Soviet Union went to the polls to vote
for the last time. The issue could not have been more vital. A
simple question was put before them: Should the Soviet Union
dissolve itself, so Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan,
Khazakhstan, Tadjikistan and the other republics would become
independent countries?
Boris Yeltsin was the champion of the breakup of the USSR.
The Bush administration fully supported his position on the
referendum.
For over a year prior to the vote, U.S. government officials
traveled frequently to Russia to meet with Yeltsin and other
dissident leaders. These diplomatic maneuvers were meant to
show the Soviet peoples that if they voted to break up the
socialist federation, they would receive the friendship of the
United States, the end of economic sanctions by the West, and
relief from the danger of a new war.
How did they vote? On March 17, 1991, some 75 percent of the
Soviet people went to the polls. To the shock of Yeltsin and
his backers in Washington, the people of the Soviet Union voted
overwhelmingly to retain the USSR.
Within nine months, however, the Soviet Union was dissolved
anyway, as Yeltsin and the pro-capitalist elements took
power.
Great historic developments are never decided at the ballot
box. That's a fantasy promoted by the capitalist ruling class
only when it serves their interests. If an election goes
against them, they ignore the outcome and use other means to
accomplish their predatory objectives.
Independent in form but dependent on imperialism
Eight years after they became formally independent, the
former republics of the USSR are economically and militarily
dependent on the United States and the major capitalist
countries in Western Europe.
Concretely, governments that function as puppets of
Washington and Wall Street now rule the former Soviet republics
of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Kazakhstan. A tiny stratum of the
population have become super-rich proxies for Western
corporations while the workers and peasants have become very
poor, suffering from high unemployment and the loss of rights
once guaranteed under the Soviet system.
These three republics all border the Caspian Sea. The
Caspian is a landlocked body of water with no access to any
ocean. It contains huge oil and natural gas deposits.
Before 1991, the Caspian was bordered by the Soviet Union on
the east, west and north. On the south was Iran. Because it was
landlocked, the key to Caspian oil was its transport through an
underground pipeline that traveled through Chechnya and other
areas of Russia to the Black Sea.
A new U.S. sphere of influence
Washington has now engineered an agreement to build a new
oil pipeline that will carry the Caspian oil directly through
Turkey to U.S. oil tankers in the Mediterranean Sea. It is
designed to bypass Russia.
The U.S. hopes to make the Caspian Sea another Persian
Gulf--that is, under total U.S. domination. A consortium of 11
Western oil monopolies, including BP-Amoco and Exxon, now
controls more than 50 percent of all oil investments in the
Caspian. It has agreed to finance the pipeline, which is likely
to cost more than $2 billion by the time it is completed in
2004.
The U.S. government insisted that the new conduit be built
so as to bypass existing oil pipelines that travel through
Chechnya, an autonomous region of Russia, and other Russian
territory. A New York Times headline of Nov. 20 made the
objectives explicit: "U.S. Seeks to End Russian Domination of
the Caspian."
The headline would have been even more accurate if it had
read: "U.S. Seeks to Dominate Caspian Oil."
While it existed, the Soviet Union was the number one
producer of oil and natural gas in the world. Much of its oil
and natural gas fields were located in and around the Caspian
Sea. The production from these fields was even greater than
that of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United States.
Soviet oil flowing from the Caspian Sea area became a major
factor in the stupendous climb of the USSR, including Russia
and the other 14 republics, from impoverished semi-vassal
states in 1917 to the world's second-largest economy in 60
years.
Oil and gas production in the USSR was primarily used to
meet the needs of Soviet society and industry. It was a
state-owned industry. It differed from Exxon-Mobil, Texaco and
BP-Amoco in that it was not used for the enrichment of a class
of billionaire investors and owners. Nor was it used only for
domestic consumption. Soviet oil and natural gas were sold on
the world market and became a major source of hard currency
earnings to buy foodstuffs and technology.
Politics is concentrated economics
While the U.S. government championed the cause of
"self-determination and independence" for the various republics
and nationalities inside the USSR, it did so with the political
goal of destroying the largest socialist government. Politics
is not an ideological or philosophical abstraction; it's an
expression of concentrated economics. The "economics" of
imperialism meant turning over the land, labor and natural
resources of the former USSR to profit-making Wall Street
corporations.
The U.S. capitalist establishment was a vigorous supporter
of Boris Yeltsin and his faction in their struggle to destroy
the old socialist planned economy and the Soviet state.
U.S. billionaires did not do this as a favor to the nascent
capitalist class in Russia, but for their own reasons. They
didn't want a strong and prosperous capitalist Russia. They
wanted to exploit Russia the way they do Africa, Asia, Latin
America and the Middle East. This is the ABCs of a Marxist
understanding of U.S. foreign policy.
A new partition of global markets
Did Yeltsin and his anti-communist followers really think
that the assistance they got from the U.S. government and Wall
Street was motivated by a yearning for "individual freedom"? Or
was the new Russian bourgeoisie too busy lining its pockets
with the sale of privatized socialist property to care about
the larger U.S. geopolitical designs to permanently weaken
Russia after the Soviet Union was dissolved? If so, they can't
help but notice now.
Yeltsin's Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev complained at a
Nov. 12 press conference that "The U.S. strategy toward Russia
is aimed at weakening its international position and ousting it
from strategically important regions of the world, above all
the Caspian region, the Trans Caucasus and Central Asia."
He was defending Russia's use of military force in its fight
against pro-Western separatist forces in Chechnya and Dagestan.
Both are strategic regions in Russia located close to the
Caspian Sea.
Yeltsin and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin justify their
massive military attacks against the separatist forces in
Chechnya on the grounds that those fighting for an independent
Chechnya are "bandits and terrorists."
In early August 1999, a force of more than 1,000 fighters
from Chechnya under the leadership of Shamil Basayev entered
the neighboring region of Dagestan. The timing of the invasion
is noteworthy. The Russian crude-oil pipeline monopoly
Transneft had lost control of the main crude-oil pipeline
running across Chechnya from Baku, in Azerbaijan on the Caspian
Sea, to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. The
Russians closed that pipeline and were attempting to move the
oil by rail through Dagestan at the time of the Chechen
invasion in early August.
Was the Chechnyan invasion of Dagestan part of a larger
conspiracy by the United States to detach the countries
surrounding the Caspian Sea from Russia? This is certainly what
the Russian government now fears is happening. The U.S.
government would like a "permanent smoldering of a manageable
armed conflict [resulting] in a weakened Russia that will help
the U.S. obtain full control over the Northern Caucasus,"
stated Russian Defense Minister Sergeyev at his press
conference
The U.S. is attempting to do to Russia now precisely what
they have done in the past decade to Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia,
the U.S. used the loan and credit practices of the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to foster the
break-up of a multinational socialist state. Croatia, Slovenia
and Bosnia could receive credit and investment only to the
extent that they broke away from federal Yugoslavia.
At the same time the CIA and other covert operations
stimulated national and ethnic rivalries by arming nationalist
and separatist groupings in each ethnic community.
Yeltsin and his advisers saw the U.S. seize Kosovo in
Yugoslavia, making that province into a virtual protectorate.
They certainly feared that the U.S. and NATO could do the same
in the Caucasus. In fact, Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev
recently invited NATO to intervene in its dispute with Armenia.
Azerbaijan's capital city of Baku is the center of oil
production in the Caspian Sea.
Socialist construction was
the answer
The U.S. media portrays the ethnic struggles raging in
Yugoslavia and the former USSR as the incurable condition of
human nature.
But the former territories of the USSR are not simply a
collection of nationalities. Classes exist in these areas, just
as in the United States, Britain, Germany and Japan.
In the Caucasus, the most multinational part of Russia,
millions of workers and peasants enjoyed unity under the USSR.
They sought internationalism and working-class unity against
the parasitic elite groupings who promoted a reactionary
nationalism so that they could help imperialism exploit the
home market.
It was precisely in the Caucasus in 1996 that the Communist
vote in the last parliamentary election was greater than in any
other part of Russia: 66 percent in Dagestan, 63 percent in
North Ossetia, and 57 percent in Karachoy Cherkessia.
The workers and peasants of the Caucasus and the south Asian
republics of the USSR voted in the 1991 referendum to maintain
the Soviet Union as a unitary state because they had a long and
bitter experience of what imperialist-sponsored "independence"
meant. The last time they were "independent," in 1918-1920,
British, Turkish and German troops moved in their armies and
put communist workers before the firing squad.
Yeltsin wants to prevent the U.S. takeover of the Caspian
Sea and the Caucasus, but he is unable to reach these workers
with a message of genuine anti-imperialist solidarity. Yeltsin
represents the Russian bourgeoisie that wants to exploit the
Caucasus. He represents a throwback to the days of czarist
oppression when Russia served as an instrument of national
oppression.
Yeltsin can offer only bombs and tanks. But this will fail.
National oppression and division cannot be overcome through
force. Only the reforging of socialist solidarity, including
the militant defense of the right of self-determination, can
overcome imperialist manipulation.
Lenin and the early Bolshevik Party offered proletarian
internationalism in place of bourgeois nationalism and the
divide-and-conquer imperialist manipulation of ethnic
rivalries. In their famous appeal at the Baku Conference of
1918, the Bolsheviks electrified the poor and attracted a mass
following from all nationalities in the region with this unique
message:
"Muslims in Russia, Tartars of the Volga and the Crimea,
Kirgiz, Kazakhs, and Sarts of Siberia and Turkestan, Turks and
Tartars of Transcaucasia, Chechens and Mountaineers of the
Caucasus, and all you whose mosques and oratories have been
destroyed, whose beliefs and customs have been trampled under
foot by the Czars and the oppressors of Russia: Your beliefs
and customs, your national and cultural institutions are
henceforth free and inviolable. Organize your life in complete
freedom. You have the right. Know that your rights, like all
the peoples of Russia, are under the powerful safeguard of the
revolution and of its organs, the Soviets of workers, soldiers,
and peasants. Lend your support to this revolution and to its
government."
The revolutionary struggle to revive socialism in the lands
of the former Soviet Union, while directed first and foremost
at imperialism and its lackeys, must make Lenin's pledge a
reality by rejecting Russian chauvinism and respecting the
national rights of all peoples.
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