sshenfield
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Just received the following message from the director of Nonviolence International:
“Nonviolence International (NVI) has produced a unique internal report on Russian public opinion and anti-war messaging.
This report was written by Russian sociologists inside Russia. We are not widely distributing it for security reasons.
We hope that any of you with Russian friends or contacts will use this report to reach out to them to undermine support for the war in Ukraine.
https://www.nonviolenceinternational.net/nvi_ukraine_report_2022
We also have an annex to the report with some of our recommendations.
Our team in Russia and Ukraine will now test out anti-war messaging along the lines of research we have conducted.
The need for resistance to the war is essential. Please support our efforts with people in Russia and Ukraine to bring this war to an end.”
I participate in a Russian-language leftist listserv run by Professor Vladislav Bugera of Ufa (Bashkortostan, one of the republics in the Russian Federation). Other participants are in various post-Soviet states. Politically they are left communists, anarcho-syndicalists and social democrats. There has been a lot of discussion of the war in Ukraine. While all participants are ‘against’ the war there are different slants. Bugera defends Russia’s position with regard to the Donbass though not Ukraine as a whole. He believes that to some degree at least the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics express popular interests. Other participants say this is a delusory view of these repressive statelets and take a much more sharply anti-Kremlin stance. However, it is not clear what Bugera really thinks. He admits he is afraid that if he publishes sharply anti-Kremlin philippics his website will be taken down, as many others have been. So it seems he is playing some sort of game with the censor.
I got a notice from the International Action Center (iac@iacenter.org) that they are holding a Zoom discussion at 2 pm (Eastern US time), i.e., 9 am UK time, on Monday May 2 entitled ‘Reckoning with the Ukrainian government’s armed Nazi militias’. It says: ‘Join the IAC for live discussion with anti-fascist Ukrainians on the 2014 massacre at the Odessa House of Labor and the continuing struggle. Featuring: Leonid Ilderkin, Ukrainian communist in exile, member of coordination council of the Union of Political Refugees and Political Prisoners of Ukraine; Phil Wilayto, author and activist, coordinator of the Odessa Solidarity Campaign; Alexey, a survivor of the Odessa massacre currently living in Luhansk; and Sara Flounders and Teddie Kelly of the IAC. To register for the webinar go to: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_KS1g5l_hQi-kXZ0Jm-w3Cg.
The best reply to the question whether we are ‘left-wing’ is to ask what the questioner understands as left-wing and proceed from there. We may or may not be left-wing depending on what is meant by the term.
Today the International Workers’ Association issued a report on war resistance in Russia and Ukraine. I have reposted it on the WSPUS website:
Yes, there was a split in the emigre Menshevik movement. Dan was conciliatory toward the Bolsheviks. He thought that though authoritarian the Soviet Union was still a classless socialist society and predicted that it would become more democratic and humane over time. The ‘Martov group’, which included Abramovitch, said that Dan was no longer a Menshevik. They denied that the USSR was ‘genuinely’ socialist and said that the Communist Party was a new ruling class. However, they rejected the concept of ‘state capitalism’ and tended toward the view that the USSR was a new form of the ‘Asiatic mode of production.’ They also seemed to identify with the ‘democratic socialism’ of West European labor parties.
I think Martov was right to link Bolshevism not only to Russian but also to West European and in particular French elitist revolutionaries (the Jacobins, Babeuf, Blanqui). Lenin derived inspiration from both traditions.
I just watched the first part of a discussion between Canadian journalist Paul Jay and Indian commentator Vijay Prashad on ‘The Analysis’:
The main thesis of Prashad is that Ukraine is a pawn in the conflict between the US and China over which form of globalization should predominate: US–EU or One Belt One Road. He suggests that the US may have deliberately incited Russia into this adventure.
Governments may have an interest in keeping down expenditure on arms, but they rely on defense officials who are bribed by the arms companies, e.g., by promising them lucrative consulting positions after leaving government. Andrew Cockburn, in his book The Spoils of War, shows how the US government is induced to spend enormous sums of money on weapon systems that have been shown not to work and may not even be wanted by the military.
There is an interesting difference between Dan’s approach to the understanding of Bolshevism and Martov’s, though they were both recognized Menshevik theorists. While Dan emphasizes the specifically Russian roots of Bolshevism, Martov — as his book’s title implies — views it as an international phenomenon, a regression in working class consciousness brought about by wartime conditions. He sees it as an ideology characteristic of a new class of soldiers and sailors whose ties to industrial or agricultural production have been greatly weakened (or in the case of the youngest cohort never existed).
On the face of it Rutskoi’s statement is absurd. If ‘freeing Donbas’ were Russia’s main objective, what prevented them from doing it right at the start? It’s the only part of the country where the population is not hostile to Russia. Donbas has been peripheral to the fighting up to now. I suspect that placing the emphasis on Donbas is a way of indirectly scaling down goals for other parts of Ukraine as part of a face-saving exit strategy.
I contributed a paper on Russian nationalism to the State of the Region Report 2021 of the Center for Baltic and East European Studies at Sodertorn University, Stockholm, Sweden, entitled ‘The Many Faces of the Far Right in the Post-Communist Space’. A virtual launch of the Report will be conducted on Zoom on April 4, 2022 during 3—5 pm Central European or UK Time. I shall be one of the speakers.
For more details, program and Zoom link and to access or order the Report, please go to: https://www.sh.se/english/sodertorn-university/calendar/events/2022-04-04-launch-of-cbees-state-of-the-region-report-2021-the-far-right-in-the-post-communist-space
I have bought a book by another prominent Menshevik theorist, Theodore Dan, The Origins of Bolshevism (London: Secker & Warburg, 1964). It’s a long book, I’ve hardly got into it yet. I see that copyright has been claimed by the translator, Joel Carmichael.
The excellent article by Gegen Kapital und Nation, which views nationalism as an artificial ideology inculcated by small groups of intellectuals who create a national movement and capture state power, accords with — and may well be inspired by — the classic ‘Imagined Communities’ by Benedict Anderson. This account, which has become quite fashionable in academia, best fits the Italian and German cases. The fit is not so good for cases in which nationalism develops within pre-existing states, e.g., Britain, France, Russia. And there are a few cases in which nationalism bases itself on a real cultural-religious community that goes back to ancient times such as the Armenians and Jews. So it’s also worth reading a critique of Anderson such as Anthony Smith’s ‘Nationalism’.
