Dear Gillian
This email is ‘long’ and the following article is interesting (Auto-translated). If you get to the bottom of both – I salute you!
It covers the story of the Ukrainian Neo-Nazi attack on a Romany camp in Lviv during 2018! I came across it on Yandex – the Russian-language internet search-engine. The author is described on his own website in the following terms:
‘Alexey Kuzmenko is a journalist based in Washington DC, USA. He writes about Ukraine and specific country issues such as LGBT rights and women’s rights. In early 2017, he investigated a Ukraine-related report by CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity authority that was the first to link the US Democratic Party hack to Russia.’
The author lives in the US and is writing in 2018. The article seems measured, but it is difficult say whether the author can be trusted. Officially at least, the Russian government ‘denies’ any support for Neo-Nazism and has openly banned several movements associated with it (including Pan Slavic variants) and yet I encounter racism and homophobia daily – throughout several unrelated (Russian-language) Telegram Channels. Not mentioned by this author is the alleged Zionist financial support for the ‘Nationalist Battalions’ in Ukraine despite their ideology being Hitlerite and obviously Neo-Nazi! I have written elsewhere, of Israel encouraging IDF Veterans to join these Battalions! For instance, the author says:
‘The Ukrainian website Zaxid.net was the first to report that a police source linked the attackers to the Sober and Evil Youth Group. Subsequently, this was confirmed by other sources in the Ukrainian police and special services. There is no evidence of any connection between Popovich and any of the Roma camp attackers in Lviv (or with the attack itself). At the same time, the move he popularized is related to this attack.
On Monday, the head of the SBU, Vasily Gritsak, noted that “Russia could be behind this.” “We understand that Russia can be behind this, but I can’t say 100%, it will be incorrect,” Hrytsak said at a joint press conference with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin.
Gritsak said that “an organization with the same name was registered in Russia in 2014.” It is not known whether he meant that the organization was officially registered, or whether it simply appeared in Russia. If Hrytsak meant a large community on VKontakte, which was also registered in 2014, then he was mistaken, because Popovich lived and, apparently, lives in Ukraine. The Kremlin is known to finance and support various ultra-right and neo-Nazi groups in Europe and Russia, in particular because of the billionaire Konstantin Malofeev (suspected of financing the self-proclaimed “LPR” and “DPR”). However, there is no obvious connection between the Sober and Evil Youth and the Kremlin, except for the Pan-Slavist ideology that is characteristic of various far-right groups in the region.’
Of course, if it is true that the entire Donbass Movement was funded by the Russian far-right – then it means we have all been duped on a massive scale! Yes – Russia has been responding to a sustained NATO provocation – and it is equally true that the US, UK and EU have propagated a Neo-Nazi ‘Maidan’ government in Kyiv, but the Russian response is ‘right-wing’ and not ‘left-wing’, despite a veneer of leftism. Despite the continuous racism and homophobia, I have observed online in Russia (just as I see it in the US) – why would the Communist Party of Russia throw its ideological weight behind supporting the LPR and the DPR?
Many Communists in Russia support the KPR and it has a substantial number of elected MPs in the Russian Parliament. Indeed, it is thoroughly invested in the new bourgeois system extant in Russia, but there are many other Communists in Russia that accuse the KPR of betraying the genuine Bolshevik Cause and of collaborating with the forces of the capitalism it should be striving to overthrow! This distinctly ‘Trotskyite’ approach has been used by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and its ‘Communist Party of Britain’ (CPB) descendant for decades – some might argue since Khrushchev’s betrayal of Comrade Stalin in 1956!
The Communist Parties of Donetsk and Lugansk were the local (regional) branches of the Communist Party of the Ukraine which the ‘Maidan’ Junta ‘banned’ in 2016! Indeed, me, Gee and the children were stood outside the Ukrainian Embassy in London (on a rainy Winter’s Saturday morning) a few years ago with the Young Communists of the CPB ‘protesting’ this when the Embassy Staff a) verbally threatened us, and b) called the British ‘Armed-Police’! The Comrades present that day formed a physical barrier to shield my family (protecting the children) so that we could sneak away (round a convenient street-corner) before the Police could ‘detain’ or ‘arrest’ us!
After translating ideological and current affairs documents for both the LPR and DPR Communist Parties for around six-years – it seems to me that they function as extensions of the Communist Party of Russia – and will be eventually absorbed into it. This explains why neither ‘Communist Party’ is officially ‘recognised’ by the independent States they exist within, or why neither entity ideologically departs in anyway from the official position of the KPR. I suspect the KPR believes it has the potential to win a bourgeois (liberal) election in Russia – hence its ideological stance. The KPR identifies with the modern, bourgeois Russian State and therefore, it is collaborating with the Donbass annexation. As I have said, from the evidence I have see, the DPR and LPR, once ‘cleared’ of any Ukrainian Civil and Military Authorities (a point that has almost arrived) – both ‘States’ will be dissolved as separate and self-identifying ‘People’s Republics’ (eradicating any assumed association with ‘Socialism’ and solving that problem for good) and will be absorbed into the Russian Federation.
The glaring contradiction is that the Russians talk of ‘denazification’ in the Ukraine – whilst many Russians hold and routinely express ‘Neo-Nazi’ opinions, sentiment and ideological tendency. Yes, although it is perfectly true that the West has built several Neo-Nazi States aggressive to Russia in and around the Ukraine – it is also true that many Russians hold the same racist and homophobic views themselves. Neo-Nazis in the Ukraine – and Russians who believe they are opposing Neo-Nazism – hold identical anti-gay and anti non-White opinions.
The point of Marxist-Leninist (Maoist) dialectical assessment is that the world is assessed, analysed and interpreted EXACTLY as it presents itself to the human senses – and nothing more. When the ‘Red Flag’ is held aloft wherever the Russian military prevails – it reminds me of the Soviet Red Army’s Victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 (the origination of this Battle Honour)! It is nothing less than the VICTORY of the unified Working-Class (and its Socialist ideology) over the misled branches of the Working-Class that subscribed to fascism! For me, a billion people in China, and millions all over the world – the ‘Red Flag’ symbolises the VICTORY of Communism over capitalism! Perhaps one of our greatest Victories!
What does it mean for the average ‘modern’ Russian soldier? Certainly, NONE of the above. It symbolises a ‘victory’ of their military unit over an enemy identified as such by the ruling (bourgeois) liberal government! It means that the contemporary Russian military unit involved – did a good job and overcame all hardships to prevail on the battlefield. It means nothing ideologically as the two sides fighting represent the same bourgeois class! The ‘victory’ concerned means that men fought and died for a passing bourgeois political policy and nothing more. Two branches of the former USSR, in just 31-years of being capitalist, were seduced and goaded by the West into fight one another! Perhaps the greatest irony is that the Hitlerites (between 1941-1943) carried-out the bulk of their genocidal murdering in the Ukraine (attempting to eradicate the Slavic race) – whilst little (if any) mass-killing occurred in geographical Russia! It was the Ukraine (as part of the Western USSR) that suffered most because it was hit first and hard by fresh and ideologically inspired German and Axis troops – many pumped-up by blessings from Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and the Catholic Church and Trotsky! Even Churchill believed Hitler was doing the world a favour – he just thought it should be Britain invading (and ‘claiming’ the territory of the USSR and NOT the Germans)!
I disagree with your comment suggesting I am being ‘unfair’ toward the contemporary Russians due to my straightforward reporting. I made it clear years ago that I did not (and do not) support modern Russian nationalism in anyway. After-all, thirty-one years ago the average Russian (or ‘Soviet’ citizen not necessarily ‘Russian’) would write like I am writing now (from the proletarian point of view – rejecting the bourgeois). Politics and sentiment often prevent people from telling the truth. Perhaps one of the saddest points is that many young Russians now associate the Communist left in the West as being part of a decadent, gay-loving EU conspiracy designed to infiltrate the ‘manliness’ of Russia and corrupt its population (nothing is said about the heterosexual ‘anal’ sex which is one of the most popular categories of Russian-made pornography which is sold and exported around the world). They demean the USSR and denigrate its ideology that has influenced so much of the left in the West! In fact, much more of Soviet ideology exists as influences within the left of the West – than it does in Russia which still possesses statues of Lenin and Stalin that schoolchildren no longer understand in the proper historical context! Many aspects of contemporary Russian society openly collude with the US in the misrepresentation and disrespect of the Soviet Union and its past!
THE SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 