(english / italiano)
Quelli che vogliono squartare la Russia (12)
1. INIZIATIVA-DIBATTITO A TORINO, IL 22 OTTOBRE
2. CIA analysts predict: Russia will disintegrate into 5-8 states,
while the US will prosper - Pravda.RU
(LA CIA "PROFETIZZA": ENTRO 10 ANNI LA RUSSIA SARA' SQUARTATA IN 5-8
STATI)
3. AFP: Cyprus Minister Says Chechens Being Trained In North To Strike
Russia
(I SEPARATISTI CECENI VENGONO ADDESTRATI NELLA AUTOPROCLAMATA
"REPUBBLICA TURCA DI CIPRO DEL NORD")
4. The link between Chechnya war and Caspian oil
By Brian Becker - Workers World
(SUL LEGAME TRA CECENIA E PETROLIO DEL CASPIO)
=== 1 ===
VENERDI 22 OTTOBRE
Centro “Principessa Isabella”
Via Verolengo 210 – Torino
Ore 20.30
CECENIA E QUESTIONE CAUCASICA
MICRONAZIONALISMI E QUESTIONE NAZIONALE
Incontro di Informazione e Dibattito
Relatori:
Domenico Losurdo - Docente Università di Urbino
Mauro Gemma - Nuovi Partigiani della Pace
Organizza:
Movimento Nuovi Partigiani della Pace – Piemonte
Via S. Anselmo 13 – TO (338/1755563) mail:posta@...
=== 2 ===
http://english.pravda.ru/printed.html?news_id=12649
CIA analysts predict: Russia will disintegrate into 5-8 states, while
the US will prosper - 04/28/2004 19:52
Russia will be instability zone and may disintegrate into 6-8 states,
says the report about the future of the world in the 10 years to come
published on CIA website.
Russia's economic and political isolation is named as the main cause
of its problems.
There is no new information in this report. CIA analysts have been
publishing the same prognosis for Russia since 2000. Earlier, such
prognoses were published as CIA classified information. Probably CIA
analysts do not believe in their prognoses any more and decided to make
them a tool for public foreign policy. In other words, they want to
create the image of an unstable country for Russia.
In fact, Russia's isolation resulted not from the country's policy,
but from the West's failure to give Russia equal opportunities, and
this prognosis is aimed at Russia's begging the West for mercy and
becoming its subordinate.
Certainly, some ideas of the report make sense. Bu even the statement
that the economy based on natural resources, has no future, can be
debated. Hi-tech economy is more perspective, but Russia understands it
without CIA. Russia also realizes that following the West's demand to
make the domestic price for natural gas on the same level with global
prices could devastate the country.
=== 3 ===
http://www.turkishpress.com/turkishpress/news.asp?ID=28590
Cyprus Minister Says Chechens Being Trained In North To Strike Russia
NICOSIA, Sept 26 (AFP) - Cypriot Justice Minister Doros Theodorou said
in remarks published on Sunday that Chechen terrorists were being
trained in the Turkish-held part of the divided Mediterranean island to
strike Russian targets.
The charges were carried in an interview with the mass circulation
Phileleftheros newspaper.
"There are Chechens and other terrorist groups over there (north) being
trained," Theodorou was quoted by Phileleftheros.
"But we are mainly talking about Chechens who are trained to hit
predominantly Russian targets," he said.
Earlier this month after the Breslan school massacre in southern
Russia, a Greek Cypriot government spokesman denied that the
authorities had any hard evidence of terrorist activity in the
Turkish-held part of the island.
Theodorou insisted that the intellingence reports received by the
internationally-recognised Greek Cypriot government were trustworthy.
He said he would suggest that the government make known the terrorist
threat in the north to the international community, especially the
European Union and the United States.
Both Brussels and Washington are seen as sympathetic to the Turkish
Cypriot cause since Greek Cypriots rejected an UN peace plan at a
referendum in April.
"Our side must establish what illegalities are going on and make the
accusations at every level," said Theodorou.
"Our information is clean and from credible sources and we have every
reason to trust them," he added.
=== 4 ===
The link between Chechnya war and Caspian oil
By Brian Becker
This coming March will mark nine years since the peoples of the 15
republics of the Soviet Union went to the polls to vote for the last
time. The issue could not have been more vital. A simple question was
put before them: Should the Soviet Union dissolve itself, so Russia,
Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Khazakhstan, Tadjikistan and the other
republics would become independent countries?
Boris Yeltsin was the champion of the breakup of the USSR. The Bush
administration fully supported his position on the referendum.
For over a year prior to the vote, U.S. government officials traveled
frequently to Russia to meet with Yeltsin and other dissident leaders.
These diplomatic maneuvers were meant to show the Soviet peoples that
if they voted to break up the socialist federation, they would receive
the friendship of the United States, the end of economic sanctions by
the West, and relief from the danger of a new war.
How did they vote? On March 17, 1991, some 75 percent of the Soviet
people went to the polls. To the shock of Yeltsin and his backers in
Washington, the people of the Soviet Union voted overwhelmingly to
retain the USSR.
Within nine months, however, the Soviet Union was dissolved anyway, as
Yeltsin and the pro-capitalist elements took power.
Great historic developments are never decided at the ballot box. That's
a fantasy promoted by the capitalist ruling class only when it serves
their interests. If an election goes against them, they ignore the
outcome and use other means to accomplish their predatory objectives.
Independent in form but dependent on imperialism
Eight years after they became formally independent, the former
republics of the USSR are economically and militarily dependent on the
United States and the major capitalist countries in Western Europe.
Concretely, governments that function as puppets of Washington and Wall
Street now rule the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan, Georgia and
Kazakhstan. A tiny stratum of the population have become super-rich
proxies for Western corporations while the workers and peasants have
become very poor, suffering from high unemployment and the loss of
rights once guaranteed under the Soviet system.
These three republics all border the Caspian Sea. The Caspian is a
landlocked body of water with no access to any ocean. It contains huge
oil and natural gas deposits.
Before 1991, the Caspian was bordered by the Soviet Union on the east,
west and north. On the south was Iran. Because it was landlocked, the
key to Caspian oil was its transport through an underground pipeline
that traveled through Chechnya and other areas of Russia to the Black
Sea.
A new U.S. sphere of influence
Washington has now engineered an agreement to build a new oil pipeline
that will carry the Caspian oil directly through Turkey to U.S. oil
tankers in the Mediterranean Sea. It is designed to bypass Russia.
The U.S. hopes to make the Caspian Sea another Persian Gulf--that is,
under total U.S. domination. A consortium of 11 Western oil monopolies,
including BP-Amoco and Exxon, now controls more than 50 percent of all
oil investments in the Caspian. It has agreed to finance the pipeline,
which is likely to cost more than $2 billion by the time it is
completed in 2004.
The U.S. government insisted that the new conduit be built so as to
bypass existing oil pipelines that travel through Chechnya, an
autonomous region of Russia, and other Russian territory. A New York
Times headline of Nov. 20 made the objectives explicit: "U.S. Seeks to
End Russian Domination of the Caspian."
The headline would have been even more accurate if it had read: "U.S.
Seeks to Dominate Caspian Oil."
While it existed, the Soviet Union was the number one producer of oil
and natural gas in the world. Much of its oil and natural gas fields
were located in and around the Caspian Sea. The production from these
fields was even greater than that of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the
United States.
Soviet oil flowing from the Caspian Sea area became a major factor in
the stupendous climb of the USSR, including Russia and the other 14
republics, from impoverished semi-vassal states in 1917 to the world's
second-largest economy in 60 years.
Oil and gas production in the USSR was primarily used to meet the needs
of Soviet society and industry. It was a state-owned industry. It
differed from Exxon-Mobil, Texaco and BP-Amoco in that it was not used
for the enrichment of a class of billionaire investors and owners. Nor
was it used only for domestic consumption. Soviet oil and natural gas
were sold on the world market and became a major source of hard
currency earnings to buy foodstuffs and technology.
Politics is concentrated economics
While the U.S. government championed the cause of "self-determination
and independence" for the various republics and nationalities inside
the USSR, it did so with the political goal of destroying the largest
socialist government. Politics is not an ideological or philosophical
abstraction; it's an _expression of concentrated economics. The
"economics" of imperialism meant turning over the land, labor and
natural resources of the former USSR to profit-making Wall Street
corporations.
The U.S. capitalist establishment was a vigorous supporter of Boris
Yeltsin and his faction in their struggle to destroy the old socialist
planned economy and the Soviet state.
U.S. billionaires did not do this as a favor to the nascent capitalist
class in Russia, but for their own reasons. They didn't want a strong
and prosperous capitalist Russia. They wanted to exploit Russia the way
they do Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. This is the
ABCs of a Marxist understanding of U.S. foreign policy.
A new partition of global markets
Did Yeltsin and his anti-communist followers really think that the
assistance they got from the U.S. government and Wall Street was
motivated by a yearning for "individual freedom"? Or was the new
Russian bourgeoisie too busy lining its pockets with the sale of
privatized socialist property to care about the larger U.S.
geopolitical designs to permanently weaken Russia after the Soviet
Union was dissolved? If so, they can't help but notice now.
Yeltsin's Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev complained at a Nov. 12 press
conference that "The U.S. strategy toward Russia is aimed at weakening
its international position and ousting it from strategically important
regions of the world, above all the Caspian region, the Trans Caucasus
and Central Asia."
He was defending Russia's use of military force in its fight against
pro-Western separatist forces in Chechnya and Dagestan. Both are
strategic regions in Russia located close to the Caspian Sea.
Yeltsin and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin justify their massive
military attacks against the separatist forces in Chechnya on the
grounds that those fighting for an independent Chechnya are "bandits
and terrorists."
In early August 1999, a force of more than 1,000 fighters from Chechnya
under the leadership of Shamil Basayev entered the neighboring region
of Dagestan. The timing of the invasion is noteworthy. The Russian
crude-oil pipeline monopoly Transneft had lost control of the main
crude-oil pipeline running across Chechnya from Baku, in Azerbaijan on
the Caspian Sea, to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. The
Russians closed that pipeline and were attempting to move the oil by
rail through Dagestan at the time of the Chechen invasion in early
August.
Was the Chechnyan invasion of Dagestan part of a larger conspiracy by
the United States to detach the countries surrounding the Caspian Sea
from Russia? This is certainly what the Russian government now fears is
happening. The U.S. government would like a "permanent smoldering of a
manageable armed conflict [resulting] in a weakened Russia that will
help the U.S. obtain full control over the Northern Caucasus," stated
Russian Defense Minister Sergeyev at his press conference
The U.S. is attempting to do to Russia now precisely what they have
done in the past decade to Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia, the U.S. used the
loan and credit practices of the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank to foster the break-up of a multinational socialist state.
Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia could receive credit and investment only
to the extent that they broke away from federal Yugoslavia.
At the same time the CIA and other covert operations stimulated
national and ethnic rivalries by arming nationalist and separatist
groupings in each ethnic community.
Yeltsin and his advisers saw the U.S. seize Kosovo in Yugoslavia,
making that province into a virtual protectorate. They certainly feared
that the U.S. and NATO could do the same in the Caucasus. In fact,
Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev recently invited NATO to intervene
in its dispute with Armenia. Azerbaijan's capital city of Baku is the
center of oil production in the Caspian Sea.
Socialist construction was the answer
The U.S. media portrays the ethnic struggles raging in Yugoslavia and
the former USSR as the incurable condition of human nature.
But the former territories of the USSR are not simply a collection of
nationalities. Classes exist in these areas, just as in the United
States, Britain, Germany and Japan.
In the Caucasus, the most multinational part of Russia, millions of
workers and peasants enjoyed unity under the USSR. They sought
internationalism and working-class unity against the parasitic elite
groupings who promoted a reactionary nationalism so that they could
help imperialism exploit the home market.
It was precisely in the Caucasus in 1996 that the Communist vote in the
last parliamentary election was greater than in any other part of
Russia: 66 percent in Dagestan, 63 percent in North Ossetia, and 57
percent in Karachoy Cherkessia.
The workers and peasants of the Caucasus and the south Asian republics
of the USSR voted in the 1991 referendum to maintain the Soviet Union
as a unitary state because they had a long and bitter experience of
what imperialist-sponsored "independence" meant. The last time they
were "independent," in 1918-1920, British, Turkish and German troops
moved in their armies and put communist workers before the firing squad.
Yeltsin wants to prevent the U.S. takeover of the Caspian Sea and the
Caucasus, but he is unable to reach these workers with a message of
genuine anti-imperialist solidarity. Yeltsin represents the Russian
bourgeoisie that wants to exploit the Caucasus. He represents a
throwback to the days of czarist oppression when Russia served as an
instrument of national oppression.
Yeltsin can offer only bombs and tanks. But this will fail. National
oppression and division cannot be overcome through force. Only the
reforging of socialist solidarity, including the militant defense of
the right of self-determination, can overcome imperialist manipulation.
Lenin and the early Bolshevik Party offered proletarian
internationalism in place of bourgeois nationalism and the
divide-and-conquer imperialist manipulation of ethnic rivalries. In
their famous appeal at the Baku Conference of 1918, the Bolsheviks
electrified the poor and attracted a mass following from all
nationalities in the region with this unique message:
"Muslims in Russia, Tartars of the Volga and the Crimea, Kirgiz,
Kazakhs, and Sarts of Siberia and Turkestan, Turks and Tartars of
Transcaucasia, Chechens and Mountaineers of the Caucasus, and all you
whose mosques and oratories have been destroyed, whose beliefs and
customs have been trampled under foot by the Czars and the oppressors
of Russia: Your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural
institutions are henceforth free and inviolable. Organize your life in
complete freedom. You have the right. Know that your rights, like all
the peoples of Russia, are under the powerful safeguard of the
revolution and of its organs, the Soviets of workers, soldiers, and
peasants. Lend your support to this revolution and to its government."
The revolutionary struggle to revive socialism in the lands of the
former Soviet Union, while directed first and foremost at imperialism
and its lackeys, must make Lenin's pledge a reality by rejecting
Russian chauvinism and respecting the national rights of all peoples.
- END -
(Copyleft Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and
distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not
allowed. For more information contactWorkers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY,
NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@.... For subscription info send
message to: info@.... Web: http://www.workers.org)
Quelli che vogliono squartare la Russia (12)
1. INIZIATIVA-DIBATTITO A TORINO, IL 22 OTTOBRE
2. CIA analysts predict: Russia will disintegrate into 5-8 states,
while the US will prosper - Pravda.RU
(LA CIA "PROFETIZZA": ENTRO 10 ANNI LA RUSSIA SARA' SQUARTATA IN 5-8
STATI)
3. AFP: Cyprus Minister Says Chechens Being Trained In North To Strike
Russia
(I SEPARATISTI CECENI VENGONO ADDESTRATI NELLA AUTOPROCLAMATA
"REPUBBLICA TURCA DI CIPRO DEL NORD")
4. The link between Chechnya war and Caspian oil
By Brian Becker - Workers World
(SUL LEGAME TRA CECENIA E PETROLIO DEL CASPIO)
=== 1 ===
VENERDI 22 OTTOBRE
Centro “Principessa Isabella”
Via Verolengo 210 – Torino
Ore 20.30
CECENIA E QUESTIONE CAUCASICA
MICRONAZIONALISMI E QUESTIONE NAZIONALE
Incontro di Informazione e Dibattito
Relatori:
Domenico Losurdo - Docente Università di Urbino
Mauro Gemma - Nuovi Partigiani della Pace
Organizza:
Movimento Nuovi Partigiani della Pace – Piemonte
Via S. Anselmo 13 – TO (338/1755563) mail:posta@...
=== 2 ===
http://english.pravda.ru/printed.html?news_id=12649
CIA analysts predict: Russia will disintegrate into 5-8 states, while
the US will prosper - 04/28/2004 19:52
Russia will be instability zone and may disintegrate into 6-8 states,
says the report about the future of the world in the 10 years to come
published on CIA website.
Russia's economic and political isolation is named as the main cause
of its problems.
There is no new information in this report. CIA analysts have been
publishing the same prognosis for Russia since 2000. Earlier, such
prognoses were published as CIA classified information. Probably CIA
analysts do not believe in their prognoses any more and decided to make
them a tool for public foreign policy. In other words, they want to
create the image of an unstable country for Russia.
In fact, Russia's isolation resulted not from the country's policy,
but from the West's failure to give Russia equal opportunities, and
this prognosis is aimed at Russia's begging the West for mercy and
becoming its subordinate.
Certainly, some ideas of the report make sense. Bu even the statement
that the economy based on natural resources, has no future, can be
debated. Hi-tech economy is more perspective, but Russia understands it
without CIA. Russia also realizes that following the West's demand to
make the domestic price for natural gas on the same level with global
prices could devastate the country.
=== 3 ===
http://www.turkishpress.com/turkishpress/news.asp?ID=28590
Cyprus Minister Says Chechens Being Trained In North To Strike Russia
NICOSIA, Sept 26 (AFP) - Cypriot Justice Minister Doros Theodorou said
in remarks published on Sunday that Chechen terrorists were being
trained in the Turkish-held part of the divided Mediterranean island to
strike Russian targets.
The charges were carried in an interview with the mass circulation
Phileleftheros newspaper.
"There are Chechens and other terrorist groups over there (north) being
trained," Theodorou was quoted by Phileleftheros.
"But we are mainly talking about Chechens who are trained to hit
predominantly Russian targets," he said.
Earlier this month after the Breslan school massacre in southern
Russia, a Greek Cypriot government spokesman denied that the
authorities had any hard evidence of terrorist activity in the
Turkish-held part of the island.
Theodorou insisted that the intellingence reports received by the
internationally-recognised Greek Cypriot government were trustworthy.
He said he would suggest that the government make known the terrorist
threat in the north to the international community, especially the
European Union and the United States.
Both Brussels and Washington are seen as sympathetic to the Turkish
Cypriot cause since Greek Cypriots rejected an UN peace plan at a
referendum in April.
"Our side must establish what illegalities are going on and make the
accusations at every level," said Theodorou.
"Our information is clean and from credible sources and we have every
reason to trust them," he added.
=== 4 ===
The link between Chechnya war and Caspian oil
By Brian Becker
This coming March will mark nine years since the peoples of the 15
republics of the Soviet Union went to the polls to vote for the last
time. The issue could not have been more vital. A simple question was
put before them: Should the Soviet Union dissolve itself, so Russia,
Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Khazakhstan, Tadjikistan and the other
republics would become independent countries?
Boris Yeltsin was the champion of the breakup of the USSR. The Bush
administration fully supported his position on the referendum.
For over a year prior to the vote, U.S. government officials traveled
frequently to Russia to meet with Yeltsin and other dissident leaders.
These diplomatic maneuvers were meant to show the Soviet peoples that
if they voted to break up the socialist federation, they would receive
the friendship of the United States, the end of economic sanctions by
the West, and relief from the danger of a new war.
How did they vote? On March 17, 1991, some 75 percent of the Soviet
people went to the polls. To the shock of Yeltsin and his backers in
Washington, the people of the Soviet Union voted overwhelmingly to
retain the USSR.
Within nine months, however, the Soviet Union was dissolved anyway, as
Yeltsin and the pro-capitalist elements took power.
Great historic developments are never decided at the ballot box. That's
a fantasy promoted by the capitalist ruling class only when it serves
their interests. If an election goes against them, they ignore the
outcome and use other means to accomplish their predatory objectives.
Independent in form but dependent on imperialism
Eight years after they became formally independent, the former
republics of the USSR are economically and militarily dependent on the
United States and the major capitalist countries in Western Europe.
Concretely, governments that function as puppets of Washington and Wall
Street now rule the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan, Georgia and
Kazakhstan. A tiny stratum of the population have become super-rich
proxies for Western corporations while the workers and peasants have
become very poor, suffering from high unemployment and the loss of
rights once guaranteed under the Soviet system.
These three republics all border the Caspian Sea. The Caspian is a
landlocked body of water with no access to any ocean. It contains huge
oil and natural gas deposits.
Before 1991, the Caspian was bordered by the Soviet Union on the east,
west and north. On the south was Iran. Because it was landlocked, the
key to Caspian oil was its transport through an underground pipeline
that traveled through Chechnya and other areas of Russia to the Black
Sea.
A new U.S. sphere of influence
Washington has now engineered an agreement to build a new oil pipeline
that will carry the Caspian oil directly through Turkey to U.S. oil
tankers in the Mediterranean Sea. It is designed to bypass Russia.
The U.S. hopes to make the Caspian Sea another Persian Gulf--that is,
under total U.S. domination. A consortium of 11 Western oil monopolies,
including BP-Amoco and Exxon, now controls more than 50 percent of all
oil investments in the Caspian. It has agreed to finance the pipeline,
which is likely to cost more than $2 billion by the time it is
completed in 2004.
The U.S. government insisted that the new conduit be built so as to
bypass existing oil pipelines that travel through Chechnya, an
autonomous region of Russia, and other Russian territory. A New York
Times headline of Nov. 20 made the objectives explicit: "U.S. Seeks to
End Russian Domination of the Caspian."
The headline would have been even more accurate if it had read: "U.S.
Seeks to Dominate Caspian Oil."
While it existed, the Soviet Union was the number one producer of oil
and natural gas in the world. Much of its oil and natural gas fields
were located in and around the Caspian Sea. The production from these
fields was even greater than that of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the
United States.
Soviet oil flowing from the Caspian Sea area became a major factor in
the stupendous climb of the USSR, including Russia and the other 14
republics, from impoverished semi-vassal states in 1917 to the world's
second-largest economy in 60 years.
Oil and gas production in the USSR was primarily used to meet the needs
of Soviet society and industry. It was a state-owned industry. It
differed from Exxon-Mobil, Texaco and BP-Amoco in that it was not used
for the enrichment of a class of billionaire investors and owners. Nor
was it used only for domestic consumption. Soviet oil and natural gas
were sold on the world market and became a major source of hard
currency earnings to buy foodstuffs and technology.
Politics is concentrated economics
While the U.S. government championed the cause of "self-determination
and independence" for the various republics and nationalities inside
the USSR, it did so with the political goal of destroying the largest
socialist government. Politics is not an ideological or philosophical
abstraction; it's an _expression of concentrated economics. The
"economics" of imperialism meant turning over the land, labor and
natural resources of the former USSR to profit-making Wall Street
corporations.
The U.S. capitalist establishment was a vigorous supporter of Boris
Yeltsin and his faction in their struggle to destroy the old socialist
planned economy and the Soviet state.
U.S. billionaires did not do this as a favor to the nascent capitalist
class in Russia, but for their own reasons. They didn't want a strong
and prosperous capitalist Russia. They wanted to exploit Russia the way
they do Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. This is the
ABCs of a Marxist understanding of U.S. foreign policy.
A new partition of global markets
Did Yeltsin and his anti-communist followers really think that the
assistance they got from the U.S. government and Wall Street was
motivated by a yearning for "individual freedom"? Or was the new
Russian bourgeoisie too busy lining its pockets with the sale of
privatized socialist property to care about the larger U.S.
geopolitical designs to permanently weaken Russia after the Soviet
Union was dissolved? If so, they can't help but notice now.
Yeltsin's Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev complained at a Nov. 12 press
conference that "The U.S. strategy toward Russia is aimed at weakening
its international position and ousting it from strategically important
regions of the world, above all the Caspian region, the Trans Caucasus
and Central Asia."
He was defending Russia's use of military force in its fight against
pro-Western separatist forces in Chechnya and Dagestan. Both are
strategic regions in Russia located close to the Caspian Sea.
Yeltsin and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin justify their massive
military attacks against the separatist forces in Chechnya on the
grounds that those fighting for an independent Chechnya are "bandits
and terrorists."
In early August 1999, a force of more than 1,000 fighters from Chechnya
under the leadership of Shamil Basayev entered the neighboring region
of Dagestan. The timing of the invasion is noteworthy. The Russian
crude-oil pipeline monopoly Transneft had lost control of the main
crude-oil pipeline running across Chechnya from Baku, in Azerbaijan on
the Caspian Sea, to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. The
Russians closed that pipeline and were attempting to move the oil by
rail through Dagestan at the time of the Chechen invasion in early
August.
Was the Chechnyan invasion of Dagestan part of a larger conspiracy by
the United States to detach the countries surrounding the Caspian Sea
from Russia? This is certainly what the Russian government now fears is
happening. The U.S. government would like a "permanent smoldering of a
manageable armed conflict [resulting] in a weakened Russia that will
help the U.S. obtain full control over the Northern Caucasus," stated
Russian Defense Minister Sergeyev at his press conference
The U.S. is attempting to do to Russia now precisely what they have
done in the past decade to Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia, the U.S. used the
loan and credit practices of the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank to foster the break-up of a multinational socialist state.
Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia could receive credit and investment only
to the extent that they broke away from federal Yugoslavia.
At the same time the CIA and other covert operations stimulated
national and ethnic rivalries by arming nationalist and separatist
groupings in each ethnic community.
Yeltsin and his advisers saw the U.S. seize Kosovo in Yugoslavia,
making that province into a virtual protectorate. They certainly feared
that the U.S. and NATO could do the same in the Caucasus. In fact,
Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev recently invited NATO to intervene
in its dispute with Armenia. Azerbaijan's capital city of Baku is the
center of oil production in the Caspian Sea.
Socialist construction was the answer
The U.S. media portrays the ethnic struggles raging in Yugoslavia and
the former USSR as the incurable condition of human nature.
But the former territories of the USSR are not simply a collection of
nationalities. Classes exist in these areas, just as in the United
States, Britain, Germany and Japan.
In the Caucasus, the most multinational part of Russia, millions of
workers and peasants enjoyed unity under the USSR. They sought
internationalism and working-class unity against the parasitic elite
groupings who promoted a reactionary nationalism so that they could
help imperialism exploit the home market.
It was precisely in the Caucasus in 1996 that the Communist vote in the
last parliamentary election was greater than in any other part of
Russia: 66 percent in Dagestan, 63 percent in North Ossetia, and 57
percent in Karachoy Cherkessia.
The workers and peasants of the Caucasus and the south Asian republics
of the USSR voted in the 1991 referendum to maintain the Soviet Union
as a unitary state because they had a long and bitter experience of
what imperialist-sponsored "independence" meant. The last time they
were "independent," in 1918-1920, British, Turkish and German troops
moved in their armies and put communist workers before the firing squad.
Yeltsin wants to prevent the U.S. takeover of the Caspian Sea and the
Caucasus, but he is unable to reach these workers with a message of
genuine anti-imperialist solidarity. Yeltsin represents the Russian
bourgeoisie that wants to exploit the Caucasus. He represents a
throwback to the days of czarist oppression when Russia served as an
instrument of national oppression.
Yeltsin can offer only bombs and tanks. But this will fail. National
oppression and division cannot be overcome through force. Only the
reforging of socialist solidarity, including the militant defense of
the right of self-determination, can overcome imperialist manipulation.
Lenin and the early Bolshevik Party offered proletarian
internationalism in place of bourgeois nationalism and the
divide-and-conquer imperialist manipulation of ethnic rivalries. In
their famous appeal at the Baku Conference of 1918, the Bolsheviks
electrified the poor and attracted a mass following from all
nationalities in the region with this unique message:
"Muslims in Russia, Tartars of the Volga and the Crimea, Kirgiz,
Kazakhs, and Sarts of Siberia and Turkestan, Turks and Tartars of
Transcaucasia, Chechens and Mountaineers of the Caucasus, and all you
whose mosques and oratories have been destroyed, whose beliefs and
customs have been trampled under foot by the Czars and the oppressors
of Russia: Your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural
institutions are henceforth free and inviolable. Organize your life in
complete freedom. You have the right. Know that your rights, like all
the peoples of Russia, are under the powerful safeguard of the
revolution and of its organs, the Soviets of workers, soldiers, and
peasants. Lend your support to this revolution and to its government."
The revolutionary struggle to revive socialism in the lands of the
former Soviet Union, while directed first and foremost at imperialism
and its lackeys, must make Lenin's pledge a reality by rejecting
Russian chauvinism and respecting the national rights of all peoples.
- END -
(Copyleft Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and
distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not
allowed. For more information contactWorkers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY,
NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@.... For subscription info send
message to: info@.... Web: http://www.workers.org)