Chechnya: Let's Denounce Russian Imperialism Unambiguously

By Francisco Brotons
Communist Party of Spain (Reconstituted)

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When only a few years ago, the regime of the Soviet revisionists headed by Gorbachev collapsed shamefully, nobody could imagine that very soon the imperialist powers, which have helped the new Russian bourgeoisie to emerge from its ashes, would demand it accounts in return for all of their services. In order to achieve this, they placed Yeltsin at the head of this State and always supported him until the end; and for the same reason they have put another puppet of his same sort in his post. At the same time, they besieged the remains of the former territory of the USSR to prevent whatever could happen in the future. Nowadays, the US-NATO military siege around the Russian Federation is an accomplished fact and the imperialist powers do not even hide their true plans of complete dismemberment and subsequent sharing of Russia. However, this undeniable fact cannot be used as an excuse to justify, or even less to defend, the policy of all oppression, plundering, siege, annihilation carried out by the new Russian imperialism in the Caucasus, especially against Chechnya. Imperialist character of all this aggression must be denounced now and revealed, just like we have done with the war against Yugoslavia by NATO. In fact, there is a tight relationship between these two aggressions: they are nothing else than preparations for the outbreak of a much more generalized conflict among the imperialist powers for a new sharing of the world.

The new Russian bourgeoisie, fascinated by the cake that has fallen into its hands, has taken a long time before reacting to the unaccountable rapaciousness of all the Western "allies"; but, as could be expected, in the end it has got ready to hold its prey, even threatening to use the nuclear weapons that it still owns, if necessary. This is a first explanation - certainly a bit simpler, although not less true - for the brutal intervention of the Russian Army in Chechnya, a small country that inflicted a severe defeat to the Russian Army in 1994, winning through the arms and the lives of thousands of patriots its right to independence. From our point of view, there is no reason to justify the attack of the new great-Russian imperialism on the Chechen people. The right of all nations and all people to self-determination and independence must be admitted without reservations, and even more as regards the peoples and nations that voluntarily formed part of the former Soviet Union. In this point there is no place for ambiguity using as an excuse either the present "reactionary" character of their social regime or the accusation of "terrorism" that the Kremlin butchers have made in order to justify the aggression and the slaughter that they are perpetrating, taking advantage of the superiority of their military forces.

It is necessary to ask what interests and rights is the Russian Army now defending in Chechnya? Undoubtedly these are imperialist interests of the new Russian bourgeoisie, the "rights" of the Russian capitalists to plunder the wealth of the Chechens and of the Russian working people. When the social-chauvinist Zyuganov of the CPRF talks about the defense of the "Russian Motherland", that "motherland" has nothing to do with the former Soviet Union nor with the interests of the workers, but it is the motherland of the Mafiosi who hold power in Russia for their own benefit. The Russian workers and youth are being used again, as in the time of the Czars, as cannon fodder for the published defense of the "motherland" of that handful of rich Mafiosi who now have dragged the honour of their country in the mud so many times, and that have snatched - with the help of the rest of the imperialist sharks and birds of prey - all the rights, revolutionary achievements and collective cultural and material good which had been achieved at the cost of blood and immense sacrifices. These criminals do not represent the heroic Soviet people and must be combated resolutely, even by turning the guns against them.

Nowadays, the Russian Federation is nothing but a conglomerate of peoples with no more links than a past of unity - which has been broken by the capitalist restoration - and the force that the new Czars try to impose from Moscow. To sum up, Russia is another capitalist power, and unfortunately a "prison of peoples" that, although weak and threatened by the other powers, tries to reestablish some order in its "backyard". And it does this with the same ferocity used repeatedly by the power of USA in its "interventions" in Santo Domingo, Guatemala, Panama, Chile, Grenada, etc. Not to consider the affairs of the current Russia from this point of view would lead us to justify and to become accomplices of each and every one of the aggressions that any world imperialist power has perpetrated and will perpetrate in the future.

Chechens, as well as many other peoples and nations, had freely acquired a historic genuine "compromise" of unity within the former Soviet Union, and its people counted with the fraternal help of the State and the rest of the peoples of the Union to defend itself from exploiters and national traitors; once the USSR disappeared and the power was usurped by the bourgeoisie, there are now no political, moral, economic or even geo-strategical compromises that compel the people of Chechnya to continue united to the Russian state. Therefore for the very interest of the socialist revolution and proletarian internationalism, it is now necessary to advocate the right to self-determination and independence of Chechnya. It is especially necessary now to highlight that, nowadays, as a nation within a world of capitalist nations, the Chechen people have the right to govern themselves as they wish to, to have their own independent State and even to sell themselves to the highest bidder, in the same way as only they have the right and can square up with their leaders and change their social regime if the present one become an unbearable charge for them.

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