RUSSIA Statement by Andrei Kalinkin, member of the Russian Group of OCRFI supporters

The world is on the brink of a new imperialist war. One of the points where these rival bourgeois interests clash is the conflict between Ukraine and the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. 

It is in this context that the confrontation between Russia and NATO has intensified. Both sides are building up large military forces in the conflict zone and launching economic, diplomatic and propaganda attacks against each other. 

As Russian Communists, our first duty is to oppose the imperialist tendencies of our own government. We do not support the dictatorship of big capital in our country. The oligarchic regime of Vladimir Putin is doing what every reactionary regime has always done: invoke an external threat to systematically attack the social and political rights of the workers. 

But this does not mean any benevolence towards the NATO imperialists. First of all, because 30 years ago capitalism was restored in Russia at the cost of destroying whole sections of the economy. Today, our country is a semi-peripheral country, a “raw material reserve” of the West, economically and technologically weaker than NATO. The governments of the United States and Europe therefore bear a heavy responsibility for the escalation. 

Secondly, on the other side of the always hypothetical “front line,” the interests of the workers are attacked in exactly the same way as at home. Instead of these attacks being carried out in the name of “Russian renaissance” and “Russian peace,” they are carried out in the name of “democratic values” (democracy for the rich) and “defense of Ukraine” (i.e., defense of Ukrainian oligarchs, Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists and Western investments). 

The only way out of the confrontation between Donetsk and Kiev, between Moscow and Brussels, between Beijing and Washington, etc., in the interest of the workers and broad masses of people in Russia and the world, is not to side with one of these imaginary banners (waved by equally disgusting bands), but to be on our own side: against the war for a new Zimmerwald; against world Capital for a Workers’ International; against the “market economy” for the Universal Republic of Councils!