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.
I think it is important in the context to see Ukraine as just a vassal of usa/nato and Russia as a 3rd party standing up for the LPR and DPR’s right to self determination. In a war for self determination against neo-imperialism we side with the anti-imperialists.
LPR and DRP are joining Russia as a practical response to the fact that they will never be allowed to be independent as long as usa and nato exist. Better to live as equals in a capitalists state than be an oppressed people under outright fascist imperialists.
It breaks down the nuance a bit further.
LPR/DPR have nothing to do with self determination because they are not nations. Russia and Ukraine are nations, both have their states, neither is fighting for self determination.
Donbass was not colonised by Ukraine, it’s a region of Ukraine with significant Russian population which is not unusual along borders.
This is a border dispute, of course people living there are affected, but that doesn’t make it a war for self-determination, otherwise all wars fought over territory would be wars of self determination.
The people living in the DPR and LPR disagree with you. For many of them this is about self-determination. It is about protection from a fascist regime that was seeking to exterminate them, their language, their culture and their religion. This is not a border dispute, that is completely ignorant of the reality of the situation and of how this started.
Go try and ask a person living in Donetsk what they think about the prospect of being left unprotected at the mercy of the Ukrainian Nazi regime that has been shelling them for a decade. All this started because the people there rose up against an illegal coup that brought to power a regime that declared everything Russian as anathema. The entire reason why there was a civil war for eight years in Ukraine is because of people fighting for self-determination. For autonomy or independence from a state that they felt no longer represented them and had become outright hostile to them. For them this is a war of national liberation.
This is not about a few people of another nationality living in a border area, these are entire regions, most of Eastern and Southern Ukraine in fact, that are and have been for centuries historically Russian, linguistically and culturally.
It is quite apparent that you don’t understand Ukraine, its national-ethnic composition or its history.(Edit: I should not have said that, i made unjustified assumptions about where you were coming from on this issue)The Banderite Ukrainian nationalist project, even if you wanted to ignore its deeply fascist character and roots, is a colonial one, in the sense that it seeks to establish a mono-linguistic ethnostate and erase the linguistic, cultural and ethnic diversity of Ukraine by forcibly imposing the language, culture and historical national conception of a minority in the far west of Ukraine.
There is a continuum of culture and language in Ukraine going from East to West. The distinction between Ukrainian and Russian national identity is not at all as clear as you make it out to be. No, the DPR and LPR are not nations, they never claimed that, they (now) consider themselves part of the Russian nation, as did much of Ukraine to some degree before the Ukrainian nationalist re-education project began post 1991 and accelerating after 2014 to aggressively promote the idea that the entire territory of Ukraine should view itself as “Ukrainian” according to a strictly Western Ukrainian conception of that term that is explicitly and aggressively anti-Russian.
OK this is laughable. I was raised in Ukraine and I don’t need a Westerner to tell me I don’t understand it, especially one who seems to think Ukrainians are “a minority in the far West of Ukraine”.
I’m aware, thanks. The way I’ve been taught, Dnipro marks the border between Eastern Ukraine, which was always under Russian influence, and Western Ukraine, which had significant Polish influence and cultural ties. But the same goes for Russia. Ukrainian language was spoken all the way to the Don, the Cossack dialect has strong Ukrainian influence, and really entire Southern Russia is a mixture of Ukrainian, Georgian, Abkhasian, Ingush, Circassian, and other influences. Where exactly is the “ethnically and historically correct” border between Ukraine and Russia? I have no idea, maybe it’s along Dnipro, maybe it’s along Don, or anywhere in between.
Where is the legally correct border between Ukraine and Russia? That’s much easier, that was peacefully agreed in 1991. Should Ukraine pursue a return to those borders? Fuck no, that ship has sailed and it’s time for Ukraine to cut its losses and accept whatever peace it can have.
Your post with date-by-date history of the lead up to this conflict is spot on and I’m aware of those events. They still don’t justify invading a brotherly nation. Again, having been raised in the USSR I can’t support Russia’s wars on its neighbours, even if the fault lies mostly with the West.
Look at China, it manages to maintain sovereignty without killing large numbers of people in Hong Kong or Taiwan, and without waging wars on internal separatists like in Xinjiang.
Again, having grown up in Ukraine in the 80s, I can assure you people living there considered themselves Ukrainian, even Russian speakers like me.
That’s not what i said. I said that this particular conception of Ukrainian national identity (as it began to be popularized after 1991 and has been forcefully imposed since 2014) is one which came from Western Ukraine. You may disagree but from my understanding of history this specific conception of what it means to be Ukrainian is clearly rooted in the Bandera-Shukhevych Ukrainian nationalist movement.
And Russian language was spoken all the way to Lvov. This is not an argument. The question is what is the majority language and culture, and that is not so easy to answer because it depends on where you draw a line that is to a degree somewhat arbitrary. Is Surzhik a Russian or a Ukrainian dialect? What distinguishes Ukrainian from Russian culture? Some people even argue that Ukrainian is (or started out as) a dialect of Russian: https://en.topwar.ru/193115-ukrainskij-jazyk-narechie-russkogo-jazyka.html That’s probably going too far but again, where exactly do you draw the line? I prefer not to get into these sorts of linguistic debates, my point is merely that there is a lot of ambiguity here.
And why was it necessary for post-Maidan Ukraine to begin such a harsh repression of the use of Russian language, suppression of Russian books and other media, etc. if it was an insignificant minority? https://softpanorama.org/Skeptics/Political_skeptic/Nationalism/Ukranian_nationalism/supression_of_russian_language_in_ukraine.shtml
I don’t doubt it. At that time the definition of Ukrainian was different, it was not yet the fanatically anti-Russian identity that is now promoted by Ukrainian nationalism. At that time it was still possible to identify as Ukrainian in the sense that you live on the territory of Ukraine, and still speak Russian, identify in part with Russian culture and history, belong to the traditional Ukrainian Orthodox Church (not the fake one invented by the nationalists) which is now banned etc.
The situation is not comparable. Hong Kong and Taiwan are officially part of China. Russia does not consider Ukraine part of its territory. And if Taiwan did attempt to officially declare independence China would almost certainly respond very forcefully.
The closest comparison would be if China didn’t consider Taiwan as part of China but had good relations with it until the US one day replaced Taiwan’s government in a coup, Taiwan started to heavily persecute its ethnic Chinese population (unrealistic because they are a vast majority but let’s say for the sake of argument they weren’t), suppressed the use of Mandarin Chinese, waged an open war on a part of its own population while building up an enormous army, and openly declared intentions to join a US led military alliance that refused to rule out the placing of nuclear capable missiles on the territory of Taiwan. In what world would China just sit by and do nothing?
Not nations? says who? regardless of your arbitrary (and incorrect) definition of “nation” they were autonomous and self governing for nearly a decade berfore the smo.
Whether they were colonized or not is irrelevant. The people of the LPR and DPR have the right to self determination. They have a right to fight for their freedom and they did that for 9 years. Russia started the SMO with the intention of assisting the LPR and DPR in defending from attacks by ukraine. The Russian offer to join was only extended after the zelensky government abandoned peace talks.
Calling it a border dispute is ahistorical.
Lenin, Stalin, and Marxist-Leninist theory in general.
Not any more than people of Hong Kong or Taiwan. Because they are not nations.
Lenin and stalin never said shit about the LPR or DPR because they didn’t exist. Stop pretending you speak for them.
How does that not apply to the Donbass republics?
The people of hong kong and taiwan are nations and have self determination. They haven’t used their self determination to secede from china because it isn’t the majority position. They aren’t independent states but they are nations, just like Tibet is.
There is no nation of Hong Kong, they are Han Chinese. There is no nation of Donbass, they are Russians and Ukrainians. The way you’re trying to read that quote from Lenin, every single town, every village, every district is a nation. That’s not at all what Lenin said.
Tibet does have it’s own language, territory, and culture, and so it is indeed a nation.
I disagree. The Donbass is a territory unique from others in the region. This can been seen in the major political ideological divide and is the very thing that the USA took advantage of in order to instigate this proxy war. I also believe that when two cultures come together, Russian and Ukrainian for example, that this creates a unique culture where traditions from both become mixed together. At least when the people live together harmoniously which they did for some time.
Saying it again doesn’t make it true. “nuh uh” is not a valid argument.
I think you need to (re?)read Marxism and the National Question. (I probably will) You seem to be crossing ethnicity and nationality. Ethnicity has nothing to do with national identity so I don’t know why you bring it up.
The entire ukraine conflict is because there were 2 national groups within the state of ukraine and one of those nations wished to eliminate the other. The banderites illegalized the Russian language because they wanted a single national identity within the borders of ukraine. That is what all nationalists want. That is why nationalism is dangerous because it leads to the subjugation and elimination of minority nations by forced assimilation, first by legislation then by violence.
Its impossible to say whether Lenin would have supported Russia in this war but he would have stood with the Donbas republics pre 2022. I imagine he would have frowned on them inviting Russia to annex them but if the alternative was pogroms (it was) I think he would understand.
We can look at the writing of past marxists but they didn’t write on the possibility of a capitalist state fighting an expansionist war against a mono-polar capitalist imperialist order. Dialectical materialism is not a religion it is a practice. You have to analyse each situation as it arises you cant just accept written words as dogma.
There are several Socialist Nations who have clearly chosen the side of Russia. The DPRK don’t fucking miss a beat and they side with Russia. China is usually pretty quiet about international politics that don’t involve them but they are clearly siding with Russia. Cuba also puts the blame on usa and nato expansionism.
Do you doubt the judgement of the professional Marxist academic theorist in the Communist Party of Cuba CPC and WPK to all be wrong? That’s a bold line to take.
As for the national character of hong kong and tiawan, its irrelevant to this discussion because they are nothing like the DPR and LPR were because they haven’t declared independence from China.