03.03.2022

A lesson in courage

Anti-war protests in Russia give a glimmer of hope in a perilous situation, argues Paul Demarty

We might start with some (rough) numbers - thousands of Russian protestors, as I write, have braved the streets of Russia to demand an end to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Of these, slightly less than 6,000 had been arrested, according to OVD-Info, a Russian NGO that monitors such things. OVD-Info is backed financially by western institutions, such as the European Commission, so some scepticism is probably in order, but only to a point. It is quite undeniable that protestors have been met with the full force of Putin’s increasingly autocratic government. Most have been lifted on the pretext - naturally enough these days! - of Covid-19 regulations; but we somehow doubt that mass rallies in favour of the ‘deNazification’ of Ukraine would meet such intense concern for the exigencies of public health.

Compared to the size of the Russian population, of course, we are not talking about a huge number of people here - assuming the numbers for arrests are accurate, we could guess at 10,000 or 20,000, but a guess is all that is, given the inevitable Russian media blackouts. “It is a shame that there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of us and not millions”, one protestor told Al Jazeera. A shame indeed.

But that would be to miss the point. The repression of the protests was quite predictable, and as such, mere thousands on the streets is a real achievement. The Russian government has, of course, a long and ignoble tradition of attacking demonstrations - most notoriously to western observers, gay pride marches in major cities - but the screws have noticeably tightened recently (perhaps in retrospect a crude attempt to cow the home front in anticipation of something like the present military adventure). After the pro-western dissident, Alexei Navalny, was imprisoned last year, demonstrations in support of him were put down ruthlessly, to the point that Navalny himself implored people not to protest, so he would still have a friend left outside Russian jail cells.

As such, there are reasons to suppose that a far larger section of Russian opinion is somehow represented in these protests than merely the brave few who took part. Polls before the invasion suggested about 40% of Russians were opposed to it, but in any case the number is large.

Politics

The question of the politics of the demonstrators is posed here. An anti-war movement is always, at some level, a collective gut reaction, in which all manner of principles and anxieties find expression. In this case, there are enough ‘instinctive’ reasons to go around: the plainly fatuous pretexts for the invasion, the likely consequences of western sanctions for ordinary Russians, the close cultural ties between Russian and very many Ukrainian citizens and therefore the likelihood that some brother, sister or cousin is at direct risk of death or displacement in a hot war.

The more conscious politics on offer seem divided between the remnants of Russian liberalism - people who still have illusions in western democracy and ‘rule of law’ governance, which admittedly looks a little more attractive if you live under a gangster-oligarchy like present-day Russia - and small, marginal sections of the far left. It is presumably this configuration that led a Putinite duma deputy, Vitaly Milonov, to describe the protestors - with almost impressive crudity - as “gays, lesbians, Trotskyists and left scum” in a BBC interview. (Gays and lesbians stand in here partly for the western-backed ‘human rights’ NGO complex, as well as the particular anxieties they provoke among macho Great Russian bigots.)

Among the left parties to have come out clearly against the invasion is the Communist Workers Party (RKRP), which characterises the conflict as essentially an inter-imperialist war, and also as one in a long line of bloody conflicts that sooner or later attended the fall of the Soviet Union - “Sumgait, Karabakh, Transnistria, Tajikistan, Abkhazia, Georgia, Ossetia, Chechnya, Donbas, Ukraine …” - and, while the RKRP has an essentially nostalgist ambition to ‘put Humpty Dumpty back together again’, this element of the story is quite undeniable. The RKRP concedes, perhaps a little rashly, that “there is a certain positive element in Russia’s armed intervention - assistance in saving people in the Donbas from reprisals, and with luck, the change of the openly Nazi [sic] Kiev regime”. Nonetheless it concludes that the war is basically predatory and opposed to working class interests: “To die for class brothers is worthy. But to die and kill for the interests of the masters is stupid, criminal and unacceptable.”¹

While there are errors in this analysis, some too obvious even to mention, its fundamental practical conclusion is correct. Elsewhere, Alexander Batov, a Moscow-based RKRP activist, calls further for communists in the army to “conduct propaganda among [their] colleagues”, and advises readers in passing to “prepare for repression” and “take care of information security”.²

Certainly that is a braver take than a certain other party claiming the heritage of the Soviet Communist Party - the far larger Communist Party of the Russian Federation, whose presidium issued a statement supporting the war aims of demilitarisation and “deNazification”, and which - but for a feeble reference to the “path of social progress and social justice, the path of socialism”³ - may as well have been ghost-written by Putin’s speechwriters. The CPRF is eccentric even by the standards of global ‘official communism’, and has long been absorbed into the ranks of ‘loyal opposition’ parties, whose criticisms Putin and friends tolerate, so long as they do not exceed certain limits. Even within its ranks, however, we find flashes of courage, such as the duma deputy Mikhail Matveev, who said: “When I voted for the recognition of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR), I voted for peace, not for war; for Russia to become a shield, so that the Donbas was not bombed, but not for Kyiv to be bombed.”

Our tasks

The future prospects of Russia’s anti-war movement depend a great deal on the course of the war itself, which is presently quite unpredictable. The early days of the war were relatively ‘clean’, but, as I write, that is rapidly changing, with reports of thermobaric weapons being used in the Kyiv theatre and the prospect of grinding street-by-street battles between Russian troops and Azov paramilitaries looming in Mariupol. Either could feed into a real crisis of morale (although truly costly ground warfare might spur the thirst for revenge).

Our tasks, effectively on the other side of this conflict, have some subtlety. There is always, so to speak, a ‘franchise’ to represent some foreign social movement domestically, and it falls by default to the state and state-loyal media. In that respect, we should expect to hear a great deal from those Russian dissidents who either support or maintain diplomatic silence on western attempts to replace Putin with a pliable satrap. We must amplify the voices of the healthier opponents of Putin - those who understand that, to some extent, Putin is correct in his assessment of Nato policy in eastern Europe, that its aim is to so encircle Russia and denude it of its strategic strengths, so that it will cease to be counted among the great powers.

That will challenge, in some small way, the total unanimity of our own ruling class that Russia must be brought to heel by sanctions or even by sponsoring a guerrilla resistance - the victims of which endeavours will certainly be the Russian and Ukrainian working class respectively. It is quite inevitable that ordinary people in western countries will be revolted by the human cost of this war, especially should it continue its course into barbarity; but it is not inevitable that this should result in support for further (and potentially catastrophic) escalation by our rulers. When demonstrators face down Putin’s riot cops for the cause of peace and human brotherhood, they really ought to shame us into standing against our own countries’ pathological consensus (the pathetic remainder of Labour’s ‘left’ MPs apparently cannot even face down the whip’s office).

The Russian opponents of war, however, have one ‘advantage’ over our anti-war movements, which is merely that - in the immediate situation - Russia is clearly the aggressor. Those who do not back this adventure have at least a very clear slogan to unite around - ‘Troops out’ - which is acceptable to pacifists, liberals and indeed “gays, lesbians, Trotskyists and left scum”. If you want to remember what you are protesting against, you need only watch the news: no autocracy can ever completely suppress knowledge of the horrors of war.

Our argument in this period is far harder to make. We stand as the only people who care to remember the 30-year process which brought us here - a period in which the western powers’ provocations, blunders and strategic aggression play by far the largest role in our coming to this pass. We also need to establish that state competition is inescapably implied by a capitalist world order, and therefore that most intense form of competition: war. In the absence of that consciousness, the correct slogans - no sanctions, no military intervention, no more ‘lethal aid’, and above all withdrawal from Nato - can only seem insane and callous.

Making that historical argument is difficult within the parameters of a single-issue anti-war movement, since it involves rejecting social pacifism and determining that war is quite inevitable within the parameters of global capitalism. Social pacifism does not have the same moral stench as the social imperialism of a Paul Mason or the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty; but it is in the end corrosive of our understanding of war and our ability to end it for real.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk