Behind the disaster in southern Russia
By Deirdre Griswold
When President Boris Yeltsin dissolved the Soviet Union in
1991, it was to the cheers of the entire Western capitalist
political establishment and media. Their universal prognosis
was that the introduction of a capitalist market and private
ownership of the means of production in the territories of the
former USSR would vastly benefit all the peoples. The release
of individual initiative combined with Western democratic forms
of rule would bring prosperity and freedom to those "behind the
Iron Curtain."
The well-being of the people--that was supposed to have been
the main U.S. aim in the incredibly costly 45-year "Cold War"
against the Soviet Union.
Those rosy predictions have all turned to ashes. From time
to time over the past decade, subdued news reports have
appeared in the West with alarming statistics showing that in
the vast area of the former Soviet Union, where a planned
economy had once provided jobs, free health care and education
for nearly 300 million people, life expectancy was dropping and
the population declining. This reflected the fact that infant
mortality, curable diseases, unemployment, prostitution, drug
abuse, organized crime, ethnic antagonisms and civil wars had
all surged upward.
But these statistics were mere abstractions and caused
little comment. The human suffering they represented was
certainly not brought to the attention of the workers in the
major imperialist countries by any of the capitalist media.
Now come the horrendous events in Breslan, North Ossetia--a
small region in southern Russia near Chechnya--where on Sept. 3
more than 350 people were killed, including many children, as
Russian forces stormed a school in which over 1,000 students,
parents and teachers had been taken hostage by an armed group.
Suddenly the media are swarming all over the area, sending back
heart-breaking reports on the dead and wounded children and
their grieving families.
But of course they are saying nothing about the role that
capitalist counter-revolution has played in these events.
This terrible tragedy followed the downing of two passenger
planes, apparently by suicide bombers, and an attempt to bomb a
Moscow subway. The combined death toll of all these recent
attacks was over 500. The Russian government says they are the
work of Chechen separatists, but the Russian news agency
Novosti reports the hostage-takers at the school also included
Dagestanis, Tatars, Kazakhs and even Koreans. About half a
million Koreans live in this area, having immigrated in the
last century.
A decade of war in Chechnya
Since 1994, Russia has been conducting a devastating war
against Chechnya, whose oil and strategic location for a
pipeline from the energy-rich Caspian Sea have drawn the
attention of the imperialists. The Russian government's aim is
to keep Chechnya from seceding, which it fears could set off
other secessionist movements in the area.
The estimates of how many people have died in this war vary
widely, but run as high as 38,000 combatants and 200,000
civilians. (Time, Nov. 11, 2002) The groups trying to secede
appear to have an unlimited supply of volunteers ready to die
for their cause. A number of the suicide bombers have been
women. The Russian media has dubbed them "Black Widows" because
they became fighters after their husbands died in the war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin does not say anything
linking this terrible situation to the emergence of capitalism.
He is angry, however, at the U.S. and Britain for raising
criticisms of how the Russian assault on the school was
conducted--it appears to have triggered the main explosion that
killed so many people.
Western imperialist governments are careful to express
sympathy for Russia over the recent bloody incidents, but the
U.S. State Department has also called on Putin to negotiate,
and this view has been repeated in editorials by leading U.S.
newspapers like the Los Angeles Times. Putin refuses to do so,
claiming the Chech ens are linked to Muslim fundamentalists
like al Qaeda.
The Associated Press reported on Sept. 7 that a State
Department comment "also left open the possibility of U.S.
meetings with Chechens who are not linked to terrorists."
That Washington would take advantage of Russia's struggle
with Chechnya to intervene there has infuriated Putin.
Comparing his situation to that of the U.S. after 9/11, he
reportedly told a British newspaper in a tone of bitter
sarcasm, "Why don't you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to
Brussels or to the White House and engage in talks, ask him
what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace? Why
don't you do that?" (The Guardian, Sept. 7)
"There are Muslims along the Volga, in Tatarstan and
Bashkortostan," he continued. "Chechnya isn't Iraq. It's not
far away. It's a vital part of our territory. This is all about
Russia's territorial integrity."
In these chauvinist remarks, Putin widened his attack to
include other peoples, besides Chechens, in southern Russia who
are Muslims. While that might earn him praise from George W.
Bush and Tony Blair, it is bound to further inflame what is
already a disastrous situation.
How did the animosity between the Chechens and Russia become
so venom ous that they would feel justified in resorting to
tactics like taking over a school and risking the lives of
hundreds of children?
Most bourgeois commentators describe it as a resurfacing of
nationalist passions from the past. But why they resurfaced is
never addressed.
Workers' and peasants' revolution offered
self-determination
Chechnya is a predominantly Muslim area that was taken over
by the czarist Russian Empire in 1859 after 29 years of
resistance. When the workers and peasants of Russia took power
in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, they dissolved the empire
and declared that all nations oppressed by the Great Russians
had the right to self-determination, including secession if
they so desired. At the same time, the Bolsheviks promoted
class solidarity and unity of all the oppressed.
It was on this basis that the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics was founded in 1922. Hundreds of nationalities and
ethnic groups, including the Chechens, joined the socialist
federation, many with local autonomy. It had a very unique
bicameral legislative structure. In addition to the Soviet of
the Union, with deputies based on proportional representation,
the state contained a Soviet of Nationalities. All nations, no
matter how small, were guaranteed representation there.
The first years of the socialist revolution were
extraordinarily difficult. It took a decade before it recovered
sufficiently from the devastating impact of World War I, civil
war and a counter-revolutionary invasion by 14 imperialist
countries to be able to start transforming the economy.
Finally, in 1929, the first Five-Year Plan was launched. By the
mid-1930s, while capitalist economies around the world were
imploding in the Great Depression, Soviet industrial output was
soaring. For the smaller nationalities, especially in the less
developed regions, there was great hope that they would prosper
as members of this large socialist union while maintaining
their distinct cultures, languages and political
structures.
But the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany in
1941, while it evoked enor mous heroism by Soviet workers and
peasants of all nationalities in defense of their gains, also
sowed the seeds of later discord.
According to the NationMaster online encyclopedia, "The
Chechnya-Ingushetia region received status of an autonomous
republic within the Soviet Union in 1936. During World War II,
the Soviet government accused the Chechens of cooperating with
the Nazi invaders, which had controlled the western parts of
Chechnya-Ingushetia for several months in 1942 1943 winter. On
orders from Stalin, the entire population of the republic was
exiled to Kazak hstan. Over a quarter died. The Che chens were
allowed to return only in 1957, four years after Stalin's death
in 1953."
This was just one example of many grievous violations of
Leninist doctrine on the national question that Stalin carried
out under the pressure of the war.
The Soviet Union encompassed hundreds of nationalities and
ethnic groups. In its 70-odd years of economic development,
many people moved from ethnically homogeneous rural areas into
the rapidly growing cities. Russians were also encouraged to
settle in areas of the south and west, leading to a mix of many
different nationalities. The goal was to even out the different
stages of development across this vast country by committing
resources to the poorer areas.
But the leadership in Moscow, worn down by unrelenting
imperialist pressure and even threats of nuclear war,
increasingly accommodated to bourgeois demands and favored the
more privileged social groups and geographical areas. President
Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s began decentralizing the
economy in a series of reforms called "perestroika."
This immediately began to unravel the framework for
development of the less prosperous areas of the USSR. The Gorba
chev period saw rebellions in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan,
brought on when the Kremlin replaced Indigenous officials with
ethnic Russians in key posts. It was an ominous foretaste of
what could be expected if the Soviet government continued to
violate Leninist principles on the national question.
In 1991, President Boris Yeltsin dissolved the USSR and
turned the country over to the pro-capitalists, completing the
counter-revolution that his predecessor had begun.
With the dismantling of the state-owned economy and the
Soviet state itself, a mad scramble began among would-be
entrepreneurs to grab control of everything that had been
publicly owned. The winners were mostly those who had worked
their way up the bureaucratic ladder; the losers were the
workers and farmers.
In the chaos that followed, Chechnya and Ingushetia split
apart. Ingushetia became part of the now-separate republic of
Georgia while, in Chechnya, a grouping took over that soon
declared its independence from Russia. The Russian government
refused to recognize any separate government, and in 1994,
under Yeltsin, invaded with 30,000 troops.
Two periods of brutal war followed. Today the capital,
Grozny, is a completely bombed-out city. In the spring of 2003,
the Danish Refugee Council began a survey of the internally
displaced persons who had returned to Chechnya after fleeing
the war. It found that, using the officially established
subsistence level of $70.80 a month income per family, "well
over 99 percent of Chechnya's population lives below the
poverty line." It also found that "the high levels of physical
destruction of the industrial, agricultural, financial,
commercial and public infrastructure make prospects for a
sustained economic recovery in the foreseeable future unlikely.
Inside Chech nya, it is estimated that up to 60 percent of the
working age population is unemployed and the same proportion of
the population reports being regularly unable to meet regular
household expenses."
These abysmal conditions are not uni que to Chechnya.
Neighboring Ingushetia has the same problems. And throughout
the Muslim areas in the south, especially, the
counter-revolution turned back the clock of economic
development. Increas ingly, these peoples have had to turn to
imperialist corporations and financiers, selling off their
natural resources to survive.
Bourgeoisie turns to 'god and country'
Even before the USSR was dismantled, its leaders had tried
to placate the capitalist world. Under Soviet rule, the Russian
Orthodox Church had lost its privileged position as the state
religion of the czars. The communist stand had been to promote
science and atheism instead of superstition among the people,
while not allowing the state to interfere with their freedom of
worship. The Western media applauded when President Gorbachev
in 1988 abandoned this position and attended the celebration of
1,000 years of the Russian Orthodox Church, thereby giving his
support not only to religion but to Christianity--in a country
where other religions also had deep roots among the various
peoples.
All these developments have created implacable hatred among
many of the non-Russians for the rule of Moscow. Like those who
now sit in the Kremlin, the current leaders of the various
nationalities are not communists and do not put forward any
program for unity or cooperation of the workers and peasants of
the region on a class basis. However, at a time when the U.S.
and Britain, especially, have embarked on an anti-Muslim
campaign under the guise of a "war on terror," which is really
a war for oil, it is important that the progressive and
anti-war movements reject any facile stereotyping or
attributing everything to a few plotters.
It is time to be objective about the tortured history of the
USSR, to admit its great achievements as well as its
weaknesses, in order to understand why its dismantling has led
to such disaster.
Reprinted from the Sept. 16, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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