Comrade Leonardt, a trade-unionist and socialist in Namibia, asked a few days ago for an explanation for the crisis and war in Ukraine.

He speaks for millions of people all over the world, who have been increasingly horrified by the growing savagery of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is right to denounce this appalling brutality on the part of the Russian government and it is right, as many people are now doing, drop their daily routines and make a great effort to support the millions of Ukrainian refugees fleeing their country.

But it is not enough. We have to do our best to understand the driving forces behind this crisis situation, which is a warning to everybody in the world.

The mounting crisis points to a central feature of world politics, economy and diplomacy: the growing rivalry between the established “Western” (or “First World”, to use that repulsive and misleading term) powers and the rising economic, diplomatic and military powers of Russia and China.

Just over a month ago (January 31, 2022) these words were posted on the “LA Progressive” website:

“This moment in history will be remembered for the massive shift in global relations currently underway. On one side stand the forces of peace and multipolarity led by China, Russia and their allies in the Global South. On the other is the forces of empire and conquest spearheaded by the US and its allies. The conflict between these two camps is about much more than competing visions for planetary development. World politics has transitioned from a war between socialism and capitalism to a protracted struggle for the survival of humanity itself”.

(As the US threatens endless war with Russia over Ukraine, confidence in China surges, by Danny Haiphong).

The Russian invasion of independent sovereign Ukraine has literally dropped a bombshell into this type of wishful thinking. Millions of people around the world are deeply shocked and revolted by the cynicism, brutality and lies with which the Russian state has set about destroying an entire people.

Following immediately on the heels of the wordy joint declaration by President Xi (China) and President Putin (Russia) during the 2022 Winter Olympics, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has severely embarrassed the Chinese state. President Xi’s government urgently needs to distract world public attention from its own treatment of the Tibetan and Uighur peoples and to paint in the most appealing colours possible its seizure of Hong Kong, its intention to seize Taiwan, and its broader ambitions around the world, including the Belt and Road Initiative (“The New Silk Road”) to extend Chinese trading, financial and diplomatic relations around the globe.

Where does Modern Imperialism Come From?

Danny Haiphong and those who think like him understand imperialism simplistically as “the forces of empire and conquest” and specifically identify this solely with “the US and its allies”, as if there had never been any other imperialists in modern times. On this point, as on others, Danny Haiphong is putting aside the discoveries of generations of socialist thinkers and activists who have probed beyond the appearance of “empire and conquest” to discern the social and economic driving forces of the phenomenon.

A good starting point is Chapter 31 of volume 1 of Karl Marx’s Capital, which locates the beginnings of “empire and conquest” in the “genesis of the industrial capitalist” in Europe, specifically in Britain. Moreover, a few pages later in his discussion of what colonialism reveals about the inner workings of capital, Marx explains the direction in which the laws of capitalist society push the whole system. He talks about:

“… the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour-process, the conscious technical development of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all people in the net of the world market, and with this, the International character of the capitalist regime”. (K.Marx, Capitalvol 1, London 1974 pp 714-715.)

In the same passage, Marx explicitly talks about the way forward in:

“… the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself” until “the knell of capitalist private property sounds, the expropriators are expropriated”.

It was upon these conceptions that Lenin based his analysis of capitalism in its imperialist phase during World War I. His quite short and readable book, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism,is essential reading for anyone who really wants to understand what is going on.

Imperialism is not the result of “bad” or “evil” people (although it certainly spawns monsters), but of the social relations of capitalism. By reproducing these contradictory relations on a world scale, imperialism ushers in not only constant rivalry and war, invasions and annexations, between imperialist powers and also against their victims, but also the epoch of world revolution of the working class to achieve socialism.

What is the “Global South”?

The “Global south” is a confusing euphemism for the huge territories exploited and oppressed in various ways by imperialism over many centuries and still today. The first point to make about these territories is that they have become part of “the entanglement of all people in the net of the world market” and “the international character of the world market”, albeit under very different conditions from those in the imperialist nations.

Imperialist nations (like the USA, UK, EU, Japan, Russia and China) certainly have “allies” in these parts, but these are either “compradors” (businesspeople who facilitate the exploitation of their compatriots by the imperialists) or outright corrupt puppets. There is no “third road” forward in these countries. Not one of them is going to find a peaceful way forward through a peaceful capitalist development. The end of imperialist exploitation can only come when masses of people join the “revolt of the working class” and fight to end the capitalist system. The very few polities that will be able to become imperialist powers themselves (as, for example, Germany and Japan did in the late 19^thcentury, and Russia and China are doing now) will only be able to do so through brutal dictatorship and the ruthless exploitation of their own people and the oppression of other peoples. The rulers of Myanmar present a good example of a bourgeoisie with that type of ambition.

What is Russia? What is China?

What can Russia and China now bring to the “global south”? These regimes (the Peoples Republic of China and until 1992 the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics) were the products of mass revolutions whose original inspiration was the insights of Marx and Lenin. But for decades their leaders have followed a “capitalist road”. The Chinese government maintains in words an appearance of socialism, and the country is still ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, which maintains a continuing but distant relationship with the actual ideas of Karl Marx. But 30 years ago, the Russian state, the USSR, simply collapsed.

The last “Communist” leaders, Gorbatchev and Yeltsin, threw themselves upon the mercy of the “Western” imperialists. The USSR fell apart. Many national minorities had suffered grievously under Stalinist rule. This was particularly true of the peoples of the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) and of Ukraine, who demanded autonomy. (It should be remembered that there were also significant number of Russians living in these areas). The huge state-controlled industry and economy of the USSR was “privatised” under conditions which resembled piracy. Gorbatchev and others promised Russian workers that they could join in a “common European home” and enjoy “western” standards of pay and conditions, but the reality was very different. Bandit Russian entrepreneurs fought like jackals with rapacious foreign “investors” over the corpse of the workers’ state. Living-standards plummeted as jobs disappeared and welfare and health services suffered. Life expectancy actually fell in the former USSR.

The “Pacific Rim” financial and monetary crisis of the late 1990s was a body-blow to the fledgling Russian stock market and banking system. The new Russian (bandit) capitalist class lacked the depth of experience and culture of rule of its foreign counterparts and was not able to deal with this situation. With the working class in disarray and leaderless, the only force which could restore a certain amount of order was the old security authorities of the former Soviet Union, and accordingly the kind of electoral dictatorship which we see today was established around the person of what is increasingly looking like President-for-life Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Putin’s state echoes the brutal barbarity of the Tsarist Empire. The President enjoys wide and unchallengeable powers. The electoral campaigns of opposition politicians encounter novel and inventive obstacles. Serious opponents are shot, poisoned and imprisoned. Personal freedom is curtailed by officially-imposed standards of conformity. Even slightly outrageous behaviour in public is viciously suppressed. The Russian Orthodox Church with all its taboos and prescriptions is the mentor of people’s private lives as well as a source of nationalist fervour. Those like the “Pussy Riot” protestors who took pot-shots at both the patriarchal stupidity of the church and the stifling conformism of the government suffered appalling reprisals. Now, with the invasion of the Ukraine underway, thousands or anti-war demonstrators are brutally arrested and worse, and all independent media outlets are suppressed.

While retaining Communist Party rule, considerable state industries and above all state control of the country’s main banking institutions, the People’s Republic of China some fifty years ago chose a “capitalist road”. US and other Western politicians were at bay against on the one hand a growing independence movement in their (official or unofficial) colonial dependencies and on the other a working class at home determined to preserve the gains it had made in the class struggle and press ahead to make more gains. This struggle of the working-class bit deeply into company profits, while body-bags coming back from Vietnam fuelled a national resistance to imperialist war. Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon looked around for allies – and found them in the Chinese Communist leadership.

The alliance with the Chinese and Russian leaders enabled the USA to broker “independence” deals in the colonies and semi-colonies which left the basic imperialist economic structures in place under new but pliant “liberation” leaders. It enabled the US, British and European capitalist classes to close down industry after industry at “home” and simply pull the rug out from under their “own” working classes, and it meant that the same capitalists could get their products made by Chinese labour in Chinese factories and mines at a fraction of the cost of production “at home”.

By doing this, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have, over the last forty years, called into being two significant and numerous classes. The first is the now massive Chinese working class, by far the biggest contingent in the world proletariat. The second is the new Chinese entrepreneurial class, the bourgeoisie. For the moment, the CCP has been able to keep the lid on the class struggle between these two classes because for China the economic story of those forty years has been one of almost continuous and massive growth. However, that growth has now stalled. Meanwhile, Chinese businesses have become major players in technical advances and on stock markets around the world. On the other hand, China is now well on the way to projecting her economic power around the world.

No wonder President Xi has taken very public steps to punish high-level corruption, rein in the most powerful business leaders and reassure workers that the next ten years will see improvements in their living standards. “Communist” China has to face the implications of a domestic class struggle just like any nation with a largely capitalist economy dependent on world trade.

China’s Belt and Road initiative has organised logistical, commercial and political arrangements to facilitate the movement of strategic resources, food and raw materials into China and manufactured good out of China. Chinese loans are offered to struggling nations in order to provide the infrastructure that will underpin these arrangements. No doubt, given the moral character of many “liberation” governments, much of this “aid” is understood as a contribution to the President’s retirement fund, but it is still a debt which will have to be repaid one way or another.

When the Chinese state and businesses approach vulnerable foreign territories, their aim is to penetrate into new markets for their products, win new access to raw materials, or gain a strategic or logistical advantage. Like Portugal, Holland and Britain in previous centuries, China establishes trade routes, bases, harbours and transport links around the world as well as investing in foreign countries and buying political influence.

Whatever “allies” China, and to a lesser extent, Russia, do have in these places are in many cases the corrupt and bankrupt local satraps of imperialism dressed up as “liberation” leaders. And China and Russia have played their part in corrupting them.

Many years ago, Russian politicians cut off military aid to the Cuban soldiers who were beating Apartheid South Africa’s forces in Angola. These Soviet politicians stood godfather to the puppet regimes which were established under the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa and South-West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) in Namibia at the end of apartheid. Gross forms of discrimination were done away with, while imperialism kept its control of the mineral resources and industry. Poverty, unemployment and oppression is still the lot of the masses there.

After the negotiated withdrawal of the apartheid regime, it was Chinese politicians who persuaded Nelson Mandela to leave the mining industry in South Africa in the hands of capitalist monopolies. They told him that it would be a mistake to take the socialist road. What this meant became evident in 2012 with the massacre of 34 striking miners at the Lonmin owned Marikana platinum mine.

The Chinese government is fostering relationships with some of the most corrupt regimes in Africa, such as Namibia, where the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) in cahoots with the Swapo government has unlawfully sacked the committee members of the Mineworkers’ Union of Namibia at the Rössing uranium mine. Trade unions were organised in the mine in the days of apartheid in the face of the most evil forms of oppression and exploitation. Most of the labour force was made up of contract labourers provided and disciplined by tribal leaders. Workers endured appalling living and working conditions, but in the end – and with international working-class support – they achieved recognition for their trade union and much improved wages and conditions.

When CNNC bought the mine from Rio Tinto, promises were made that the union and its local executive would continue to be recognised and that there would be no change in workers’ terms and conditions. However, quite soon there were indeed attacks on workers’ health provision and other issues and new middle-management were employed recruited from abroad. The company unilaterally imposed changes in workers’ terms and conditions of employment against the wishes of the workers and their representatives. The local executive of the Mineworkers’ Union of Namibia protested and its officers were unlawfully sacked. They are still in a battle to establish their legal rights to a labour court hearing and to get their jobs back.

The revelations of the “Fishrot” scandal in Namibia heavily implicate Swapo government figures. Foreign interests have bribed ministers and government official to grant fishing quotas above and beyond sustainable levels. The companies which own the fishing fleet have ridden roughshod over crew members’ constitutionally-recognised trade union and health and safety rights. These crew-members, who went out on strike and maintained that strike for several years, were let down by a trade union dominated by Swapo politicians. They were denied access to justice by venal lawyers and corrupt judges.

Thanks to an agreement the government of the People’s Republic of China reached with western imperialist powers during the 1970s, which developed into China’s entry into the world market as a capitalist power herself, the country is now enjoying growing prestige and strength. However, it will inevitably become more and more deeply involved in rivalry and conflict with the established world power, the USA.

The Russian government’s attitude to Ukraine very closely matches the attitude the British ruling class had for many years to Ireland. They thought that Ireland “belonged” to them and that it was part of Great Britain’s “sphere of influence”. It cost the Irish people a great deal of pain and effort to teach them otherwise.

To return to the LA Progressive: It is true that a “massive shift in global relations” is “currently underway”. It is true that there is a “protracted struggle for the survival of humanity itself”. But the points presented in between are a farrago of confusion and deception.

The “shift in global relations” is the emergence of China and Russia as claimants to the role of global imperialist hegemons, challenging the position that the USA has occupied since the mid-20^thcentury.

To dress this “grab for world power” as inspired by “peace and multipolarity” is an enormous misrepresentation of the real world, a misrepresentation which is elaborated as the paragraph goes on. Danny Haiphong asserts that the conflict between socialism and capitalism is a thing of the past. This is the constant message of all enemies of the working class and the constant refrain of all apologists for capitalism. It is a message which disarms workers at the very point that they face the fight for a future.

For nearly two centuries, the movement of the working class to overcome capitalist social relations, which inherently involve oppression, exploitation, war and conquest, has made advances and it has suffered setbacks. The imperialist epoch concentrates all the tensions and contradictions of these social relations and creates the necessity and at the same time the possibility of a socialist revolution. The environmental damage caused by enslavement to the profit motive also makes this revolution essential if humanity is to have a future at all. The key issue is whether the force of progress, the working class, can develop the kind of leadership which can guide that revolution successfully.

Workers International to rebuild the fourth International will work loyally alongside all workers and groups of workers who set about resolving that crisis of leadership.

Bob Archer

10 March 2022

By Balazs Nagy
First published in Lutte des Classes No. 11, September 2013.[threecolumns]We really ought to draw our readers’ attention to two major current events which ̶ each in its own political and economic way ̶ testify to a considerable deterioration in the painful death-agony of capitalism-imperialism. On the one hand, there is the current stage reached in the breakdown of its arrangements in the Middle East with the in itself unusual and surprising but real political blockage affecting this system in relation to the civil war in Syria; on the other, the fresh upsurge of world crisis in the ̶ for many ̶ unexpected shape of a general fall in the rate of growth in production among more or less all the so-called “emerging” countries: India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, etc., including China. This fall is expressed and accompanied by a real upheaval in their financial system through a brutal fall in the values of their currencies, excepting China. As luck would have it, all of these serious problems of imperialism have matured and are concentrated at the Moscow meeting of the 20 countries which are considered to be the most important, the famous G20 on 7 and 8 September 2013.

The attempt to consolidate imperialism’s rickety mechanism in the Middle East has turned into its opposite in Iraq and Afghanistan, accelerating its decomposition throughout the region. This historical set-back has laid bare its congenital weaknesses and its contradictions to such an extent that, faced with the rise of the proletarian revolution, even in its incomplete and unfinished form, in North Africa, and the Middle East, it finds itself almost completely impotent and incapacitated. The civil war in Syria has completely paralysed it; its leaders no longer have a clue what to do or how to do it to win back dominance. And that is their only pre-occupation. Their breast-beating about the miserable fate of the Syrian people is merely a hypocritical facade to mask their real concerns. To put it more exactly: the existence of a near-unanimous camp of those who advocate inactivity and abstention shows their disarray in the face of uncertainty. Imperialist war-lust has been reduced to the roaring of a toothless lion. But beware ̶ it is still a ferocious predator!

On the other hand, there few better indications of the notable shortcomings and retreat of the workers’ movement than the total absence of its voice and independent initiatives on this whole question.

Under these conditions, the process of decomposition will go on, as we can already see in Libya and Turkey. But this disarray is also an opportunity which the various oppressed peoples (like the Palestinians and Kurds) will seize in order to break free from the imperialist yoke and its local satraps, who will not give up easily, so that there is a risk the whole region will become the seat of a future inter-imperialist war. The charges are already laid and the fuses lit.

* * *

The other event of considerable international import is the sudden economic deterioration in the so-called “emerging” countries, with a significant and rapid drop in their economic growth, which since the beginning of the new century had been spectacular. The basis for this fall was when the US central bank (the Fed) decided to stop the artificial issue of millions of dollars not backed by actual production. It is common knowledge that in the last six months alone, this bank has bought back worthless bonds to the value of $86 billion a month (!) in order to bolster the sickly US economy.

As soon as this policy was announced, US interest rates started an irresistible rise, so much so that capital massively deserted the economies of India and other “emerging” countries. At the same time their currencies depreciated dangerously, thus expressing the fact that the value of their production was actually rather modest. At a stroke, their real growth was shown to be quite a lot lower than it had appeared to be previously. Even China’s growth rate fell because her exports are marking time. At a general level, what we are dealing with is a persistent phenomenon which lays bare the organic inter-dependence of national economies within the contradictions of the system as a whole. Despite what the proponents of so-called “globalisation” say about the economic levels of these countries as a whole tending to converge, with the more backward ones catching up with the more advanced (really?), following the same scheme of development as the advanced countries, this inter-dependence actually makes the differences between their levels greater and more obvious. As it happens, the massive displacement of dollars ̶ the expression of the economic dominance of the US ̶ has placed the “emerging” countries at a disadvantage and caused their fictitious growth to evaporate. In place of growing “equality” or “catching up” harmoniously, what we have is the development of contradictions. In place of the fantasy of the everywhere uniform and even capitalism that was an article of faith for those who swore by “globalisation” or “mondialisation”, we see an ever greater accentuation of capitalism’s internal contradictions. The problems of China, which still has a non-capitalism system, are at a different level, even if, overall, she cannot absolutely escape the constraining effects of international economic interdependence and its contradictions.

All of this also drives forward and exacerbates international competition, which contains within itself the germ of a new international conflagration, the warning signs of which are already visible. We shall have occasion to return to its various aspects in greater detail in future.[/threecolumns]

by Radolslav Pavlovic April 2014
Since Ukraine was declared independent in 1991, Russia has had the use of the Crimea as a base for its Southern Fleet along with 25 000 personnel through a long-term contract in due and proper form. The majority of the population speaks Russian, so their support is secure. The Russian army set up shop there as a state within a state. Never for a single moment has Kiev had the slightest intention of putting this contract into question, partly because it brought them certain advantages and partly because the military relationship of forces meant it was inviolable. The coup d’etat has shown that the Ukrainian army’s presence there is mainly symbolic. There was no Maidan protest in Crimea, just Russian propaganda about a Nazi coup d’etat in Kiev.

Nor was there any economic interest for Russia, who now will have to bear the enormous cost of paying the salaries, pensions and welfare benefits for which the local state is responsible. Not to mention the cost of gas, sold cheaply to Ukraine when the government there is amenable, but at prohibitive cost when the government shows signs of independence (but then cannot pay the bill). In neither case does Russia make a great deal out of it. To supply the peninsula, Putin will have to either cross Ukrainian territory or take over more of it. That would shake things up much more than Moscow can handle, leave aside the turbulence on the stock market, capital flight and so on. So why is he playing with fire?

Explaining the seizure of the Crimea in terms of Putins megalomania and desire to stand in monument alongside Stalin and the Tsars is no profounder than blaming the Yugoslav wars on Slobodan Milosevic’s delusions of grandeur. Both cases involve incomparably deeper social, class, motive forces than the acrobatics of some tightrope athlete. To get to the answer, you have to dig a lot further than superficial journalistic platitudes.

In fact, a short note such as this does not provide enough space to deal with it as thoroughly as it deserves. Lets just say: Putin invaded Crimea because it was the easiest and most accessible. He cant stop there if he wants to bring Ukraine to heel. At the very least he would have to cut the country in two and take over the whole of the eastern part, with its industries and mining, not for its economic wealth, but to make Ukraine unviable as a state the idea that a few hundred kilometres of land are urgently needed to protect Russia’s borders against the threat posed by NATO bases is simply a fairy tale. In 1999 an American shell launched from the Adriatic, 400km away as the crow flies, was laser-guided right into Milosevic’s conjugal bedroom in his villa in the upper-class Belgrade enclave of Dedinje; to within a metre! They knew Milosevic wasn’t actually staying there, they just wanted to show off how powerful and accurate their weapons are. NATOs bases in Turkey are just as able to target the Crimea as anything they can set up in Kiev. So the legitimate national defence argument doesn’t stand up. Russia’s best defence against hostile western imperialism is a free, democratic and friendly Ukrainian state.

No, what is pushing Putin is neither economic nor military, but political. And although its possible that the few hundred Ukrainian Nazis have been manipulated from the start by the Russian FSB to use as a pretext, the impact they have owes more to the nationalism of a people under threat from their big brother than to any fascist ideology. What Putin is afraid of is how hugely the whole nation thirsts for democracy. His fear of the Maidan in Kiev is really fear of a Maidan in Moscow.

Putins regime is in no way different from Yanukovych’s absolute rule by oligarchs protected by the political police. He could not let the contagion spread unchecked. The Kiev Maidan wasn’t in any way different from the ones in Tunisia or Egypt: it was a cry of opposition to the political oligarchy turned financial oligarchy protected by semi-fascist police. Bread and democracy; no more and no less. There were just as many salafists and Muslim Brothers in the mass rallies in Tunisia and Egypt as there were partisans of Bandera in the Kiev versions.

They talk of revolution on one side and fascism on the other! Could anything be more short-sighted? And why did Putin send the fascist Zhirinovsky as ambassador to the Crimea? And what about the hooded common criminals dressed in military uniforms without insignia? Isn’t it all a bit over the top to talk about spontaneous popular support, or to claim that these battle-ready Cossacks are inspired by democratic values, while those that inspire their Ukrainian counterparts are supposed to be fascist?

The Yanukovych regime decided the social and democratic contagion had gone on too long and hoped to stop it in its tracks, using rooftop snipers to ignobly massacre 80 civilians. But it had the opposite effect: Yanukovych and his Berkut forces were forced to flee to avoid being lynched. They could not have done more to help the far right in Ukraine if they had tried. Their failed gamble was followed by another, and this time the stakes are considerably higher. Putin takes the risks he does because he knows that Western Europe and the USA are mainly worried about their own interests and will just bluff to fool the Ukrainians and shore up their own democratic credentials in the eyes of public opinion. But there are still the Russian people.

Nobody who saw how Greater Serb nationalist propaganda grew in power has anything to learn from todays Russia. A regime with its back to the wall, unable to meet the peoples elementary social and political needs, or those of the new generation, plays the card of the great nation humiliated by history, the celestial people, chosen but not recognised, to turn them against their weaker neighbours, the present or former members of the federation that emerged from the revolution. To sow distrust and then fear among neighbours of different nationalities who have lived together their whole lives in harmony and mutual aid, they had to find something big: propaganda that gets into every household; deliberately provoked bloodshed; the state; the media; glory-seeking intellectuals; journalists who would sell their grandmother for a good meal or a holiday in the sun; the church seeking income and ideological influence; fascist émigrés seeking a country; civil servants who would take orders from the Devil just to keep their petty jobs; and above all the numerous social class emerging from the social ruins, the Lumpenproletariat.

This is a class apart, the product of the ruin of all social classes, including the proletariat; a class ready to sell itself to anyone who suggests a way out of the sewers of society. A class of sporting, show-business and dodgy-dealing celebs, envied by a rag-tag army surviving from hand to mouth. Get them drunk on national myths, a patriotic song and some brandy or vodka, and then hand out the weapons. But watch out, anyone who says no, even on pacifist moral grounds, must be a traitor or a paedo. Saying no takes courage, a lot of it, because there is nothing to face down this sacred union, no organised workers movement, no progressive or socialist alternative.

And yet the Russian people has shown its greatness. Not Putin and his admirers, not out of nostalgia for the Russia of the Tsars or Stalin, but in the democratic young people of Moscow. You can spread terror by killing their journalists, you can use the fascist brutes of Putins Nachi youth movement to stop them demonstrating ? the nationalists proclaim there will be no Maidan in Moscow but they found the strength to demonstrate 50,000 strong through Moscow against the war in the Crimea: For your freedom and ours!. Given the general configuration of forces in Russia, this is an achievement little short of a miracle. A country that could produce a Chernyshevsky and a Dobrolyubov in the darkest days of Tsarism or a Trotsky in the darkest days of Stalinism and an Anna Politovskaia to castigate the war in Chchenya will have what it takes to create the phalanxes of a Russian, Ukrainian and European renewal.[/threecolumns]