This year’s 1st May finds Russia in a situation of falling industrial production, massive cuts in social spending, higher prices and taxes, and a growing budget deficit. Against this bleak background the Kremlin is preoccupied with geo-political adventures, propaganda, and combating political dissidence.
While the Russian authorities display a touching ‘concern’ for the workers of Crimea and Donets, the workers and underprivileged in Russia itself experience ever more intensely the consequences of the economic crisis.
According to opinion polls, 69% of Russians are worried about inflation, 51% about poverty, 33% about the rise in unemployment, 32% about corruption, 29% about the economic crisis, 27% about the acute divisions between rich and poor, and 25% about inadequate health care.
Ongoing stagnation in the processing branches of industry has already led to massive cuts in the workforce and the growth of short-time working. More and more industrial disputes are triggered by the non-payment of wages.
In many cities the grim scenes of the 1990s are being repeated as municipal rebuilding comes to a standstill. In the public sector the number of labour protests is increasing, after last year’s ‘Italian’ strike by hospital staff laid the basis for a whole series of collective actions in pursuit of pay rises.
But the ruling class is preoccupied with ‘more important’ matters: building the empire, propaganda, and combating dissidents.
Have gifted construction monopolies and corrupt bureaucrats the most expensive Olympics ever, the Putin government intervened in the civil conflict in Ukraine in order to save and increase the assets of the oligarchs linked to the Kremlin.
Skillfully exploiting the justified dissatisfaction of the inhabitants of the south-eastern regions with the nationalist course pursued by the new authorities in Kiev, the Russian elite was able to annex Crimea and facilitate the kindling of civil war in the Donbas and other regions bordering Russia.
Blackmailing Kiev with the threat of military intervention, the Kremlin is trying to restore economic and political control over the country, which it regards as belonging to its sphere of influence.
Demagogy about the defence of Russian-speaking inhabitants of Ukraine is used to defend the property and income of a small circle of Russian-speaking millionaires. Making military threats benefits both the Russian and the Ukrainian authorities.
The former are attempting to transform the Ukrainian revolution into senseless fratricidal strike in order to discourage their own citizens from protesting. The latter hope to divert the growing anti-government and anti-oligarch mood into nationalist channels. And both are objectively helping to strengthen the positions of the neo-Nazis.
The make-believe ‘anti-fascism’ of the Kremlin is incapable of concealing its open flirting with fascist ideology, as manifested in its financing of ultra-right parties abroad, its active use of Russian nationalists in the role of its agents in Ukraine, its creation of Cossack militias, and its encouragement of xenophobic and anti-semitic statements in the semi-official mass media, etc.
The whipping-up of a great-power-patriotic psychosis within Russia, the new and even more severe anti-extremist legislation, the pursuit of so-called ‘national traitors’, and the closing of opposition media are aimed at crushing social unrest, perpetuating the existing system of power, and making external enemies responsible for the increasingly wretched situation in the country.
In spite of the fact that returning to being part of Russia met the mood of a significant part of the population of Crimea, and also despite the fact that pro-Russian separatism exists in a number of other regions of Ukraine, aggression against what is known to be a much weaker nation which has only just overthrown a corrupt regime is nothing other than an act of imperialist plunder.
In the medium-term perspective, the inclusion of Crimea and any other Ukrainian territories into the structure of an authoritarian and oligarchic Russian state will only result in the crushing of the civil liberties and a continuation of the economic exploitation of the workers of those territories.
In this situation the duty of all left-wing and democratic forces in our country is to oppose the goading of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples against each other in the interests of different groups of capitalists. Their competition for markets and resources, against the background of the intensifying economic crisis, threatens to escalate into a war from which Russian imperialism cannot emerge victorious.
Supporting the right to self-determination for all ethnic or linguistic groups, sharing the alarm of the inhabitants of the south-east with regard to the radically right-wing course of Turchinov’s cabinet, we, together with them, oppose military intervention by the Kremlin in the political struggle in Ukraine.
The workers of Russia and Ukraine must rally together – not around their own or foreign governments and oligarchs, but around the demands of democracy and social and national equality.
The Russian Socialist Movement calls for support for protest actions on 1st May under the slogans:
We Will Not Pay for Crises and Wars!
No to Political Repression!
For Freedom of Information, Assembly and Strikes!
Cut the Number of Bureaucrats, not Workers!
Freeze Prices, not Wages!
No to the Wars of the Oligarchs, Yes to the Solidarity of the Peoples!
Russian Socialist Movement