Russia

After the dramatic turn in events, with Russian President Vladimir Putin recognising the breakaway republics in eastern Ukraine followed by the sending in of Russian military forces, we are publishing a statement by the Marxist Tendency (Russia), elaborated together with Marxists in Ukraine and the Donbas, in opposition to this inter-imperialist conflict.

Over the past few months, the world’s media has been full of talk of a new war in Europe. According to US intelligence services, Russia has moved over 100,000 troops to its border with Ukraine. It is also carrying out a joint military exercise with Belarus. The US and NATO have held a series of talks with Russia, although none have yet resolved the situation.

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The most powerful deformed workers’ state was collapsing into chaos as supposed communists were looting the state and its assets, cheered on by the imperialists of the west. Capitalism reared its ugly head, and the workers of the Soviet Union had to pay the price.

The federal elections in Russia have passed. As we predicted, they were completely rigged by the regime. While it would appear that Communist Party received a majority of the real votes, literally overnight the authorities produced the result they needed. This brazen act of completely rewriting the election results will only provoke growing anger in society.

The current elections in Russia have been marked by the dirtiest campaign in decades. Having previously declared liberal opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s supporters extremists, the Putin regime has now turned the full force of its propaganda and police apparatus against the Communist Party.

Cracks are opening up in the foundations of Putin's regime, which is forced to rest on increasingly brutal and arbitrary repression. With the regime entering into a period of crisis, and broad masses of the Russian population openly questioning it, the question arises: how will the Communist Party of the Russian Federation respond?

An escalation of tension in the Donbas region raised the spectre of open conflict, which would plunge people on both sides into a nightmare of bloodshed once more. Although troops have now withdrawn from the border, why did this scare take place? And who stands to benefit from continued strife in the region?

The following interview was conducted last month (in English) between our German comrades of Der Funke, and a Russian member of the International Marxist Tendency. They discuss the protest movement that rocked Russia following the arrest of Alexei Navalny, explaining the class nature of these demonstrations, what they mean for the Putin regime, and the attitude of Marxists towards them. This is an invaluable insight into a very important episode in world politics, from an activist who has witnessed these events unfold first hand. 

Only a month into 2021, this year is turning out to be, if not a turning point in the modern history of Russia, then certainly a year of tremendous importance. No matter how much the authorities may wish it was so, the start of a new year doesn’t herald a new beginning or a fresh slate as far as the accumulated contradictions of Russian capitalism are concerned. On the contrary, these contradictions are being sharpened by the day, raising more and more sharply the question, “socialism or barbarism?”

Big protests broke out in Russia on 23 January in response to the arrest of oppositionist Alexei Navalny by Putin’s regime. While we have no illusions in liberals like Navalny, our Russian comrades intervened in these protests against political repression by Putin’s gangsters (which will hit working-class and socialist movements hardest), and raised a revolutionary Marxist banner.

On 19 May, Ukrainian opposition MP Andriy Derkach called a press conference to release a series of recordings of phone conversations in 2016 between Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and then-US Vice President Joe Biden, along with US Secretary of State John Kerry. The recordings reveal several aspects of the relationship between the administrations of Poroshenko and Obama at the time; and furthermore, the influence that US imperialism had on the actions of the Poroshenko administration from 2014 to 2019. Just a couple of months later, Derkach revealed recordings between Poroshenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Although these discussions were much shorter, they revealed a

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On 9 July began the first day of strike action by couriers in Moscow. Most of the strikers are employees of the Delivery Club franchise owned by major Russian IT corporation, the Mail.ru group.

Rinat Akhmetchin, the Mayor of Norilsk, an industrial city in Russia, has been charged with negligence following a catastrophic oil spill from a local power plant. The spill has been ongoing since 29 May, with over 20,000 tonnes of diesel seeping into the surrounding soil and waterways. On 4 June, the Kremlin issued a state of emergency in Norilsk. The city is situated in Siberia, inside the Arctic Circle, where the local ecology is already severely disturbed due to some extremely worrying symptoms of climate change: a product of the irrational, rotten capitalist system, which is placing the planet in peril.

On 7 June, an event that we predicted and the background of which we’ve long explained took place. Elena Shuvalova, one of the most prominent representatives of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in Moscow, was expelled from the party following a manoeuvre by the right-wing party bureaucracy.