There is something about the Ukraine conflict that’s crucial for communists worldwide to understand. It’s a part of the story about this war which shows where we now strategically stand in the global class struggle, and therefore informs how we should proceed in this struggle. This important reality is that Russia’s government decided to take action in Ukraine so that it could maintain the balance which Putin, and the Russian bourgeoisie, depend on to keep their status secure.
Had the Kremlin not intervened within Ukraine, there would have been a backlash from Russia’s population that the pro-capitalist elements may not have been able to manage, and that Russia’s communists would have been able to take great advantage of. By February 2022, peaceful solutions to the Ukraine crisis had long been exhausted, and Russia was overdue to combat the fascist regime in Kiev. Eight years ago, the U.S. had installed a government which glorifies Stepan Bandera, the Nazi collaborator who assisted Hitler in carrying out the Holocaust. The eastern regions of Ukraine, where the Russian speakers are concentrated, overwhelmingly did not accept the idea of being governed by these fascists. And when they constitutionally broke away from Kiev, the Banderites responded by bombing the Donbass civilians as a strategy.
The deliberate nature of the harm Kiev inflicted upon these civilians was apparent from the regime’s open calls for ethnic cleansing, which Ukrainian officials made in reaction to the separatist movement’s success. They did not and do not view Russian speakers as equals, something they’ve also shown in their discriminatory policies which act to erase the Russian language from public life. And if these people didn’t want to live as second-class citizens, the Banderites believed the solution was to murder or forcibly relocate them.
The regime’s actions led to the creation of mass graves, the disabling of many non-combatants who were caught in the shelling, and atrocities committed by both the Kiev-backed fascist militias as well as the Ukrainian National Guard. Now, at the start of 2022, Kiev had just increased the rate of its shelling by 400%. The Banderite junta, which had easily maintained control over Ukrainian policy even following the election of a Jewish president, was about to commit an unprecedented amount of war crimes. It was apparent that if Russia didn’t push back against Kiev’s forces, and push back against them fast, the fascists would succeed at massacring great parts of the communities within the Donbass.
Putin had been hesitating to begin this operation for almost a decade, but now he had no choice. He needed to follow the advice of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which was to respond to the rise of Banderism in a serious way. Had he remained passive, he would have been responsible for letting the fascists repeat many of the crimes they’d committed against the Russian people during World War II. And the Banderites had already been able to commit a great deal of such crimes since 2014 alone. So with everything to lose and much to gain, he began Operation Z.
This is not Putin’s war, because Putin only happened to be the one who was president when it became necessary for Russia to do this. Any country in Russia’s situation would respond to the situation in Ukraine the way Russia has. Which shows that had Putin refused to take action, or had he failed to lead Russia towards as much military success as it’s now gained, he would have become politically imperiled. The Russian people would have seen the fascists slaughter their Donbass brothers and sisters on a vast scale, and to a degree which good Russian leadership could clearly have prevented. Then a mandate would have appeared for Putin to be replaced. And the Communist Party, due to its consistent record of seeking a proportionate response to the Ukraine coup, would have been seen by many as a good candidate to fill this leadership role.
We know this because even though Russia is now governed by a bourgeois state, the sentiments of the great majority of Russia’s people are much more closely aligned with Marxism-Leninism than with pro-bourgeois ideology. Around seventy percent of Russians believe Stalin had at least a mostly positive role in history. Around three-quarters of them see the Soviet era as the best time in the country’s history. This was why when the Banderite threat reached unprecedented heights in February 2022, the CPRF was able to gain greater policy leverage than it ever had: the Russian people broadly share a strong sense of anti-fascism and anti-imperialism.
Even the younger generation, which doesn’t remember the Soviet times and is more exposed to the diverse views found on social media, is going to stay essentially as connected to their people’s revolutionary history as the older Russians. This is because Russia makes sure to educate each new generation on the story of the Soviet victory against the Nazi invasion, and to commemorate this victory every year.
In the context of this widespread awareness of the need to combat fascism, as well as of communism’s historically proven superiority towards capitalism, the only way Russia’s bourgeois state could respond to the Kiev regime’s escalations was by executing this war. The sole alternative was to let the bourgeois state be destabilized, making it far more possible for a socialist state to return. That Operation Z happened, and happened under a bourgeois state, means the revolutionary elements within Russia have been able to force the non-revolutionary elements into a compromise. Either the existing Russian state goes along with the anti-imperialist direction of history, or that state isn’t going to be allowed to take part in this history.
For the working class, both in Russia and everywhere else, this is an extremely encouraging sign. It shows that the global proletariat is much more capable of reversing its losses from the USSR’s downfall, and of making massive new gains on top of that, than it seemed just a decade ago. In 2014, it looked like the U.S. empire had gained a long-term strategic victory through its Ukraine coup. But within ten years, the Russian masses and communist forces have managed to turn this into a decisive strategic loss for our class enemies. They’ve rendered Washington too thinly spread to be able to handle its war on Palestine. They’ve accelerated the decline of the dollar, and the Global South’s rejection of U.S. foreign policies. They’ve driven Russia and China closer together. They’ve sped up the internal collapse of capitalism throughout the U.S. bloc, sharpening the class contradictions created by imperialist wars.
And in Russia itself, they’ve furthered the class struggle in an equivalent way: by bringing communism back to a place of serious relevance, both on foreign and domestic policy. The bourgeois state hasn’t just needed to adopt the foreign policy stances of the communists in order to survive; because of the war effort, it’s also had to make the economy more resemble socialism by increasing the country’s nationalizations. Whatever the full restoration of socialism in Russia may look like, the provocations by the imperialists and their fascist proxies have ironically brought that great victory closer. As communists in the empire’s core, what we must do is take advantage of the strength our class has been shown to have, and continue assisting in the demise of U.S. hegemony. At this stage, that’s the most impactful thing we can do to help bring a new wave of workers revolutions.
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