At the time when Gorbachev was attempting to reach a friendly agreement with Washington, President Reagan gave him an undertaking that if Russia would wind up the Warsaw Pact, America would reciprocate by dissolving NATO. Gorbachev obediently got rid of the Warsaw Pact, but NATO, far from dissolving, began its implacable march eastwards.
Following the plans of US imperialism, NATO advanced right up to the frontiers of Russia. First the Balkan states were incorporated into NATO, and then Poland joined. These were blatant provocations that enraged the military elite in Moscow. Under Putin things immediately began to change. The first concern of the Kremlin (that is, of the ruling oligarchy) was and is to reassert Russia’s domination over its old spheres of influence, starting with the former Soviet Republics that lie on its borders.
The Russian army’s advance through Chechnya brought it right up to the border of Georgia. The experts in Washington had decided that the Caucasus would be the Saudi Arabia of the next century. They very much wanted to get their hands on the oil and other natural resources the area has in abundance, but there was a problem: Russia held the Northern Caucasus and had important points of support in all the other states.
The Americans had the idea of building an oil pipeline through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey bypassing Russia altogether. This would effectively cut Russia out of the picture, while simultaneously compensating Turkey, an ally of the US, for the loss of Iraqi oil. Such a plan inevitably meant war. An important part of American strategy was to install a pro-Western government in Tbilisi and get Georgia to join NATO. From Moscow’s point of view this was a step too far.
In the 2008 war in Georgia, Moscow did not hesitate to use its military power to draw a red line in the sand. The Americans received a kick in the teeth. The Russian army was sent in and Georgia was swiftly crushed. Now it was the Americans’ turn to be humiliated, as the Russians seized large quantities of arms and equipment provided to the Georgian ruling clique by Washington – even the toilet seats.
That showed the limitations of the power of US imperialism and the growing power and confidence of the Russian ruling clique. It was a clear warning to the Americans. But the US ruling circles were – and are – blind, deaf and dumb. They went on to intrigue in Ukraine, hoping to draw it away from Russia and closer to the EU and NATO.
At the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was a country of 52 million people, with a GDP the size of Belgium and the third largest army in Europe. It achieved formal independence but was still tied to Russia by economic factors and had a significant Russian-speaking minority (21 per cent) within its borders. But the return to capitalism was an even bigger catastrophe for the people of Ukraine than it was for Russia.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian economy soon found itself in a worse mess than Russia’s. Living standards collapsed and the people of Ukraine found themselves under the domination of corrupt oligarchs who imitated their counterparts in Russia in an even more rapacious and revolting manner, if that was possible. The desperation of a section of the masses, particularly in western Ukraine, expressed itself in a desire to join the European Union – an aspiration that had no basis whatsoever in reality, but which was deliberately encouraged by the imperialists and reactionary nationalist forces in Ukraine.
The result of these imperialist intrigues was a right-wing coup in Kiev, backed by extreme nationalist and fascist forces, which succeeded in toppling the government of Yanukovych but in so doing plunged Ukraine into an abyss of economic collapse and civil war. After the coup d’état that was supposed to liberate Ukraine from oligarchic rule, the country is still dominated by oligarchs – only a different clique. Moreover, this immediately provoked a conflict with Moscow. The idea that Putin would quietly accept the loss of Ukraine was foolish in the extreme. It was even more foolish to expect him to accept the loss of the Crimea, where the Russian navy has a big base at Sevastopol.
The reactionary nature of Putin is clear, and so are the real aims of his foreign policy. Putin stands for the interests of the Russian oligarchy. He is no more interested in the cause of the workers of Donbass than he is in those of the working class of the Russian Federation itself. But it is also necessary to understand that, for many Russian workers, this is by no means clear. When compared to the humiliating subordination of Yeltsin to the West, Putin appears to be standing up to US imperialism.
The fact that the Kiev government based itself on the support of openly fascist elements, like the Banderists, who backed Hitler during the Second World War, provoked the understandable indignation of the workers. Its rabid chauvinism and attempts to discriminate against the Russian speaking population of Ukraine stoked the fires that led to an insurrection in the Donbass region and the breakaway of Crimea, which has a majority of Russian population. There Putin was seen as a liberator.
The attempts of the imperialists to attack Putin on this front therefore have had precisely the opposite effect of that which was intended. He was able to ride on a wave of patriotic and anti-American feeling. Gorbachev pointed out that his approval rating was now 82% and he warned that if the West continued its tactic of attacking Russia, it would rise to 120%. Of course, this is an exaggeration. Sooner or later the fog of nationalism will disperse, preparing the way for a new and even more powerful movement of the Russian working class.
The right-wing nationalists now in power in Kiev promised everything and have delivered nothing but disasters for the people of Ukraine. The country is now economically shattered and its population divided as never before. It has lost Crimea, possibly forever, and has lost control of the important Donbass region. The West, predictably, has not delivered any of its promises to the Ukrainian people. Nor have they done anything to confront Russia, despite all their fist-shaking and threats. On a capitalist basis, the independence of Ukraine has turned out to be a disaster.
Before the war, Trotsky understood the problem of Ukrainian unity and the aspirations of the Ukrainian people for a state of their own. Stalin united Ukraine bureaucratically, under the boot of the Moscow bureaucracy. What was lacking was democracy and genuine autonomy for the Ukrainian people. That is why Trotsky put forward the slogan of an independent Soviet Socialist Ukraine as a step towards the genuine unification of all the peoples of the USSR on the basis of workers’ democracy. That is the only way forward.