We’re starting off with a very short one for the first week. This text was published in 1915, two years before the October revolution, and is sadly still highly relevant in the imperial core.
This reading group is meant to educate, and people from any instances federated with Lemmygrad are welcome. Any comments not engaging in good faith will be removed (don’t respond to hostile comments, just report them).
You can post questions or share your thoughts at any time. We’ll be moving on to a new text next week, but this thread won’t be locked.
You can read the text here.
Its fairly straightforward for imperialist countries, e.g. US, European states. But it gets incredibly complex when it’s about ascendant capitalist countries like Russia.
It really doesn’t though. Russia was a backwards agrarian state barely on its way out of feudalism when Lenin wrote this, he even explicitly acknowledges it right in this text:
If Lenin’s thesis applied to WW1 Russia, it surely applies to SMO Russia.
Both war contexts are very different. WW1 was inherently imperialist, imperialist countries fighting for a better share of the world while the current war is about stopping NATO expansion in Ukraine, NATO being the alliance of imperialist countries, Russia is found in a progressive side in this time.
Russia is simply not a part of the imperial core, like nor is Iran, another locally reactionary state. I cannot find myself supporting a movement, regardless of their politics, that weakens these states that one way or another are found themselves fighting against US hegemony, because that would make me end up in the pro-US side.
I think Domenico Losurdo “Class Struggle” does a really good job explaining the nuances of class struggle and the different forms it can take from small to global perspectives. Locally progressive struggles can find themselves helping a globally reactionary struggle while locally reactionary struggles can find themselves helping a globally progressive struggle.
This is lesser evilism. Sure, Russia has legitimate security concerns about NATO expansion, this doesn’t make this war a “progressive struggle” though. Ultimately it is just as much about control over Ukrainian resources and Russia simply acts like any capitalist power would. Russia does support some progressive struggles around the world but Ukraine isn’t it.
In a world with an unchallenged-anti communist global hegemon the growth of socialism is stunted. Anyone who challenges the anti-communist imperialists is whether they intend it or not is making the word safer for socialism. Burkina Faso has only gotten as far as they have because the imperialists are busy.
You’re basically saying it’s fine when a reactionary capitalist power invades their neighbours to control them, as long as it’s detrimental to US interests. This is campism and it’s completely incompatible with Marxism-Leninism.
Yes the war was provoked by the US and NATO but this doesn’t absolve Russia from all responsibility and it definitely doesn’t make it a “progressive struggle”. It’s undeniable Russia escalated the conflict 3 years ago and it wasn’t necessary - Russia absolutely had enough power in Ukraine to meddle and pull strings, hell do some assassinations, sanctions, etc.
What did we get out of this?
Over a million people dead, over 10 millions displaced, Ukraine is destroyed, the debt will surpass the GDP this year with state assets already sold off to foreign capital for chicken feed, it’s the most landmined nation in the world (84% of landmine victims globally are civilians, with children accounting for 37%), it’s polluted by depleted uranium which will cause cancers and birth defects for generations, its population reduced by a quartrer and will likely never reach its pre-war levels. You’re sitting on the sidelines cheering cause you just want to see US snubbed.
But the opposite is happening, US has achieved its goals in this war. This war has accelerated the European descent into fascism, it made Europe dependent on the US energy, it triggered European countries to join NATO and to raise their defense budgets by billions. This is exactly what the US wanted and Trump is pushing NATO countries to increase their defense budgets even further.
Regardless. The question is whether this text by Lenin suggests that Russian communists should desire the defeat of Russia in this war so that they can turn it into a civil war, a revolution. The answer is yes, unambiguously. You can disagree with Lenin and that’s fine, but that doesn’t change what Lenin said.
You are completely misunderstanding the context and the reality of the Ukraine conflict. As you yourself have pointed out in another comment here, Palestine’s struggle is just because it is anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist. The same applies to Russia in the context of the Ukraine conflict.
This is simply not true. Russia had no such power in Ukraine to fundamentally change the trajectory. You are massively overestimating the ability of Russia to exert that kind of influence. Assassinations would have achieved nothing, in fact they would likely have strengthened the imperialist grip on Ukraine. Moreover, the escalation did not come from Russia, it came from NATO via its Ukrainian proxy army.
By 2022 the Donbass Republics and the ethnic Russian people living there were facing an existential threat. Ukraine had been building up an enormous army with the help of NATO since 2015. Starting in late 2021 they had been amassing forces and preparing to launch an all out assault on the Donbass which would have been a bloodbath for the civilians there. Anyone perceived as having collaborated with the rebels would either have had to flee or would be tortured and brutally murdered in retribution for the years of rebellion. It is clear that this attack was coming as preparatory shelling from the Ukrainian side had already begun just a few weeks prior to Russia launching the SMO. I have explained this in a prior comment on another post where i also provided sources confirming that this occurred in the lead up to the SMO: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7112898/6016809
The Donbass militia was not going to be able to withstand an all out attack by a Ukrainian army that had been reconstituted, massively expanded and armed to the teeth by NATO. It is enough to look at how the Ukrainians treated the civilians in the Kursk region, where now countless massacres and atrocities are being uncovered to see what would have happened had Russia not intervened. It was imperative that Russia not allow that attack to begin in earnest, as once the Ukrainian forces had lodged themselves into the urban areas of Donetsk and Lugansk - which they would have done quickly had they broken the militia lines as the frontline was extremely close to the city and the Ukrainians were trained in NATO’s blitzkrieg style of war - they would have been impossible to dislodge without the widespread destruction of the cities, as we have seen throughout this conflict.
We saw in Mariupol what happens when Ukrainian units take over a majority Russian city in Ukraine, how they treat civilians, use them as human shields, and how they entrench themselves into every civilian building. Except it would have been worse even than Mariupol, which was surrounded and cut off from supply and reinforcements and thus could be partly preserved intact despite the best efforts of the Azov and other Ukrainian units to ensure maximum destruction of the city. If Russia had reacted only after the invasion by the Ukrainian forces began they could not have surrounded and cut off the incursion into Donetsk as the Donbass was too heavily fortified by Ukraine. We have seen how long it took Russia to break through those defenses.
Liberating Donetsk would have been a grinding affair more akin to Bakhmut in which the entire city would have been ruined and with Donetsk being an order of magnitude larger almost a million civilians would have been killed or displaced. And Russia would still have been portrayed as the aggressor and be blamed for starting a war and for all the destruction.
The goal of the Banderite Nazis was and is ethnic cleansing. They have explicitly said this. See the sources on this that i gave here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7263447/6081888 The Ukrainian nationalist project is fundamentally a colonialist one in Eastern Ukraine and the struggle against it is anti-colonialist. And on a broader scale Russia’s SMO is an anti-imperialist and anti-fascist operation, pushing back the expansion of the imperialist NATO by defeating its Ukrainian proxy army and the fascist Kiev regime. Russia’s defeat in this conflict would not accelerate the socialist revolution in Russia any more than the victory of NATO’s jihadi proxies in Syria has done for Syria. Syria and the entire region is now further away from socialism than it has ever been, and imperialism and colonialism have been greatly strengthened there.
I think none of us here disagree with Lenin’s stated position in this text. But you are committing a dogmatic, ultra-left error by reading it as if its application is universal regardless of objective material context. The geopolitical context surrounding the Ukraine conflict and the Western imperialist assault on today’s Russia more broadly is simply not the same as the context in which this text was written. The current context is closer to the one you yourself quoted in your comment about the Palestinian struggle. It is closer to the struggle of the Emir of Afghanistan which Stalin spoke about. A reactionary and capitalist regime but one which in the present context is serving an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist function.
Very good and well thought answers, thank you. I upvoted both, no idea why would someone downvote a well researched comment, especially in the reading group / discussion thread.
I’ll reply to both your comments here to keep it in one place. I’ll need some time to think about what you wrote and go over your sources with a fine comb. Just a couple of questions now, and thank you in advance for the help:
It looks like the only source for amassment of troops is this, are there any other sources, at least a link directly to the Russian ministry of foreign affairs statement it references?
Regardless, amassment of troops can be a show of force and more often than not doesn’t lead to an invasion, for instance Russia has amassed troops and held military exercises along Ukrainian border regularly since 2014.
As for preparatory shelling, your post has no sources at all, it only links this article which is not from OSCE and doesn’t link to OSCE source. Do you have a link directly to OSCE report?
The only source is one unnamed guy saying this. I’d like to know who he is and what the context was cause most likely he was calling to kill separatists, not just ethnic Russians. That’s horrible but no different from what you could hear some people say on Russian TV about separatists within Russia.
That’s not enough to claim Zelensky’s govt was going to ethnically cleanse Donbass.
Yes but in this case there was a clearly stated intent from the Ukrainian side. As early as 2019 Zelensky publicly said that he would go to war to resolve the Donbass situation. I believe this is in one of the links i provided in the comments on the posts i mentioned earlier.
This was something that the Kiev regime, its spokespeople and all the Ukrainian nationalists were constantly talking about. Since they started their so-called “Anti-Terrorist Operation” in 2014 their stated goal was always to militarily subdue the rebels. The term “subhuman” was and is frequently used by them to refer to the ethnic Russians in the Donbass.
The only other option of resolving the situation would have been the Minsk agreements, but by 2021 the Ukrainian side was declaring them dead and was effectively saying they would never abide by them. NATO didn’t spend 8 years training and building up a new army for Ukraine for nothing.
Either way it was not a risk that Russia was prepared to take, due to the reasons i laid out.
You can use Yandex to search for OSCE report Donbass shelling 2022. There have been a number of articles written about this in the alternative media space as well as of course the Russian media that reference this.
This is not just something one guy was saying, this was and is a common talking point in the Ukrainan post-Maidan media and among Ukrainian nationalists. Zelensky himself was saying at one point that anyone who “feels Russian” should leave and go to Russia. This is also linked in one of the comments i made.
All this needs to be understood in the broader context of the anti-Russian laws that were being passed in post-Maidan Ukraine, as well as the atrocities that were being committed against anti-Maidan protestors and pro-Russian activists such as the Odessa Massacre.
I’m sorry i can’t look up the exact links right now, but they should be in one of my comments addressing this issue.
Edit: here is the OSCE report: https://www.osce.org/special-monitoring-mission-to-ukraine/512683
And here is a Reuters article saying that shelling was noticeably escalating in Feb 2022: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/osce-reports-surge-number-explosions-east-ukraine-2022-02-19/
(Reuters of course purposely omits and OSCE tries to obfuscate which side the majority of the shelling was coming from; but this can be seen when you look at maps of the registered impacts and how most of them were on the rebel controlled side)
More on who was responsible for the shelling here: https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/02/ukraine-who-is-firing-at-whom-and-who-is-lying-about-it.html
Here an article that lays out the chronology and shows how the shelling was clearly increasing in the lead-up to the SMO: https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/04/09/the-united-states-and-ukraine-started-the-war-not-russia/
And here another article laying out the argument why it wasn’t Russia that started the war (the website it was originally published on is reactionary but the article itself is solid): https://archive.org/details/setting-the-record-straight-on-ukraine
Here is a statement by the Russian MOD claiming to have documents showing Kiev was preparing to invade the Donbass republics: https://www.sott.net/article/465263-The-Russian-Ministry-of-Defene-Original-documents-show-Kiev-planned-offensive-operation-against-Donbass-in-March-of-this-year
Here DPR authorities allege that Ukrainian soldiers who surrendered confirmed that the attack was planned and imminent: https://tass.com/defense/1413035
LPR authorities said the same thing: https://sputnikglobe.com/20220315/kiev-was-preparing-full-scale-offensive-against-donbass-in-march-2022--lpr-head-1093898027.html
This preparation was already evident and being talked about months in advance: https://anna-news.info/kiev-is-ready-to-attack-donbass/
Essentially Kiev was planning a “final solution” for the Donbass, using primarily hardcore Nazi punisher units; Russia’s SMO pre-empted them by four days: https://newcoldwar.org/kiev-was-planning-final-solution-operation-in-donbass-russian-ministry/
On the topic of the stated intent of ethnic cleansing: https://www.sott.net/article/292240-Ukraine-government-admits-to-targeting-civilians-in-Donbass-region
This is not just one random person, this is someone associated with the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian military units who clearly says that the task of the Interior Ministry for which they work is to “cleanse” the cities after the military takes them over
The Kiev regime straight up denies the existence of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, which itself can be taken as a statement of intent of ethnic cleansing: https://en.topwar.ru/229905-vice-premer-ukrainy-stefanishina-zajavila-ob-otsutstvii-v-strane-russkogo-nacmenshinstva.html
We are talking about seven million people just in the DPR and LPR who unambiguously identify as Russian and by now have Russian citizenship. What do you suppose would happen to them if Russian forces pulled out and allowed Ukrainian Nazi units to move in who have a history of treating ethnic Russians and “separatists” like this: https://21stcenturywire.com/2014/11/17/natos-nazis-ethnic-cleansing-their-opposition-in-east-ukraine/
This intent was already understood by Ukrainians in 2014, it’s not something Russia came up with after the fact to justify its actions: https://www.globalresearch.ca/ethnic-and-cultural-cleansing-in-ukraine/5387539