Since the great low point for revolutionary politics in 1992, Russia’s historical trajectory has been following a cyclical pattern: the capitalist state fails to fulfill the people’s desires, the state changes its policies to better accommodate the popular will, this provokes retaliation from the U.S. empire, then the state is forced to choose between appeasing the empire and doing what will further satisfy the people. Because this has been happening at the same time American hegemony has been declining, and because Russians are mostly a people with an unshakeable anti-imperialist consciousness, the state has in almost all cases been choosing the relatively progressive policy route.
After Yeltsin destroyed Russia’s economy by fully acting as a facilitator of the U.S. empire’s looting operations, and he got replaced with Putin, it became apparent that the new government would have to improve upon the last one. Putin, even though he was initially within Yeltsin’s camp on economic policies and wanted Russia to join NATO, then left behind these stances. He needed to make Russia more independent in order to prevent a political crisis which would threaten him. Due to this shift, Russia’s wages have vastly gone up during his presidency. It’s not a revolutionary development, merely a compromise between the capitalist state and the people. A compromise which has shown the rulers know if they don’t keep a balance between protecting their interests and the people’s interests, they’ll be overthrown like the czar was.
By the end of the 2000s, Putin had obviously abandoned his idea that joining NATO would be in his own best interests. As Washington had shown it would never be willing to compromise with Russia, only to try to dominate it. And even a leader who’s simply ambivalent towards Washington, like Putin was, would respond to such disrespect by growing more assertive. So he became unconcerned about being labeled as an aggressor and an autocrat by Washington’s narrative agents, or about being charged with crimes by Washington’s sham international legal authorities. He would take military action wherever and whenever he needed in order to stop the USA from encroaching upon Russia’s interests.
Because triangulation is his core impulse, he’s still tried to reconcile this policy with attempts to minimize the backlash from the imperialists. He waited eight years to start the demilitarization effort in Ukraine, even as Kiev shelled the Donbass throughout that time. His statement that “With Ukraine, our Western partners have crossed the line” in response to Washington’s Kiev coup felt like him seeking to keep reconciliation a possibility. Yet the more lines Washington has crossed, the less able he’s been to act like it’s a partner.
This is why Operation Z is not Putin’s war, but the Russian people’s war. The collective project by the people to defeat fascism and U.S. hegemony that he had to be pressured into starting. Due to his decisions being based in a sense of bourgeois pragmatism, rather than in the principled anti-imperialism of the communists who helped convince him to start the operation, he’s been criticized for conducting the war with too much hesitancy. “Putin has misread the West and if he doesn’t wake up soon, Armageddon is upon us,” said the commentator Paul Craig Roberts in December of last year. “by his inaction Putin has convinced Washington and its European puppet states that he doesn’t mean what he says and will endlessly accept ever worsening provocations, which have gone from sanctions to Western financial help to Ukraine, weapons supply, training and targeting information, provision of missiles capable of attacking internal Russia, attack on the Crimea bridge, destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, torture of Russian POWs, attacks on Russian parts of Ukraine reincorporated into the Russian Federation, and attacks on internal Russia. At some point there will be a provocation that is too much. That’s when the SHTF.”
In an incredible irony, this week’s betrayal of the operation by a private military company leader has potentially made Russia able to avoid that mistake of appeasing the rogue American state. This unintended benefit that the PMC leader’s recklessness and opportunism has provided Z with comes from the class character of his actions; and from the response that these actions will produce. This incident happened as a consequence of Russia’s being a capitalist state, which created the conditions for rogue non-state military elements to emerge. The people, and their class representatives in the pro-Z communist orgs, understand this bourgeois origin of the disruption. They’ll respond to it by either explicitly or implicitly putting more pressure on the bourgeois state to win the war. Which, as Roberts has pointed out, is a task Putin could quite promptly complete if he were to act more forcefully.
“What Putin needed was a quick victory that made it completely clear that Russia had enforceable red lines that Ukraine had violated,” said Roberts. “A show of Russian military force would have stopped all provocations. The decadent West would have learned that it must leave the bear alone. Instead the Kremlin, misreading the West, wasted eight years on the Minsk Agreement that former German Chancellor Merket said was a deception to keep Russia from acting when Russia could have easily succeeded. Putin now agrees with me that it was his mistake not to have intervened in Donbass before the US created a Ukrainian army. My last word to Mike’s question is that Putin has misread the West. He still thinks the West has in its ‘leadership’ reasonable people, who no doubt act the role for Putin’s benefit, with whom he can have negotiations. Putin should go read the Wolfowitz Doctrine. If Putin doesn’t soon wake up, Armageddon is upon us, unless Russia surrenders.”
For the insipid infighting within Russia’s capitalist ruling class to cause this disruption to the war effort is an outrage. An offense towards the majority of Russians, who essentially agree Putin should have started the operation sooner. There’s a gargantuan social base behind Z. A base whose political representatives will hold the bourgeois state accountable if it falters in its assignment of defeating Ukrainian fascism. This is why while responding to the crisis, the government hasn’t come to have any doubts that it will have to continue the operation. For Putin to grow weak in his commitment to the war would be political suicide.
The Russian people are so determined to have a government which wins this war because of their collective memory of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa. The Nazis took 27 million of the lives of both the Russian people, and the people within the other Soviet republics. That crime needs to be rectified. So Russia has defied the circumstances imposed upon it by the 1990s counterrevolution, and pressured its new bourgeois rulers into taking action against the world’s new great fascist state. The disruptive activities of this PMC leader—which have promptly been halted regardless—are creating better political conditions for the government to be convinced into finally ending the Banderite menace.
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