It is Wednesday morning. 48 hours earlier I was evacuated from the Russian Federation on order of the American embassy. As I sat reading and re-reading their email, I was receiving messages from American friends scared for me, and Russian friends scared for themselves and embarrassed by their government. Everybody, especially those working-class victims in Ukraine, are helpless about what is going on, but I felt only a fraction of that helplessness. The order to evacuate, for me, felt like I was being forced to abandon my Russian comrades I had a way out, and most of them do not.
Yet, even as they asked me to leave, western governments canceled all flights over Russian airspace. So how was I to return? Luckily, I was in St. Petersburg, which is close to the border of Finland, so I had the option of taking a bus over the border and catching a flight out of Helsinki. (I heard through colleagues that alternate buses to Estonia were canceled). For a trip that usually cost around 12 Euros, I bought a ticket for 48. The same thing happened for the flight from Helsinki: 200,000 rubles ($2,000 USD) for a ticket that is normally around $600. Price gouging in a time of crisis isnt anything new its a reflection of the much deeper contradictions in neo-liberal capitalism. Requesting nationals to leave while private companies hike prices evinces a fundamental flaw in liberalism between the interests of capital and the best interest of its people.
To be honest, at first I thought the supposed threat to my life was overblown. The night before I left, a few friends and I went to a local pub to collect our thoughts and talk, possibly for the last time in person. We were speaking in English, and at some point, a man behind us yelled What the fuck you speaking a foreign language for? He then pulled out a knife and began playing with it at his table, as if threatening. The bartenders called the Russian police, and when they arrived, they asked him to see the knife, which in fact was a knife pen. He showed them the pen side, and they didnt pursue the issue anymore and left. Not about to be stabbed, I turned to him, extended my hand, and said in Russian Im sorry about that. I hope we are all ok. He said we were fine, that it was just a new knife, and he shook my hand with a smile. There is a lot of paranoia and fear going on in Russia, as well as in Ukraine, but I understood that I was lucky his intentions could have been bad.
Lets be real here: the contradictions surrounding this crisis are not only felt on a personal level. Russias invasion and NATOs blunder are direct consequences of Post-Cold War politics, where the United States and NATO, gleeful from its self-proclaimed victory over Communism, initiated a process of plundering Soviet state enterprises, resources, and the livelihood of its working class people. As the United States and friends helped privatize Russia in the 1990s, they sat idly by while powerful oligarchs seized control of the ex-Soviet Unions vast technical, financial, and resource infrastructure. Just so we are clear, when I say the Soviet Union I dont mean just Russia Im referring to all 15 republics of the USSR. These oligarchs own mansions and apartment complexes in the West (including in American cities like New York!), yachts and multiple private western bank accounts. They are heavily invested in Western oil and natural gas companies. As the neo-liberal world order was formed in the 1990s, Germany, France, and the USA believed such economic ties would ensure peace in the continent. When Putin became president in 2000, he expressed a willingness to improve relations with the West, and there were relatively few confrontations with NATO or the EU until 2008. In 2008 Putin managed to reign in the oligarchs, so much so that by 2014, after the supposed Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, many of them got rid of their foreign assets to demonstrate their loyalty to Putin. Putin had the chessboard in his overwhelming favor: political loyalty of Russias wealthy, a growing faith in Russia autarky, and NATOs willingness to let the Minsk protocol collect dust.
Meanwhile the working class of Russia grew increasingly powerless throughout the process. Since 2011 there have been several anti-corruption and anti-war protests in the country, but Putins OMON forces have tightened the noose around civil society, to such an level that these people are met today with the fullest extent of Russias punitive military industrial complex: mass arrests, fake trials, executions, and familial harassment.
The argument that Russia has not done enough to prevent something like this from happening is completely flawed, promoted by half-baked neo-liberal warmongers who want to legitimate punishing average Russians for their own inability to resist for the last 20 years and the power of one man that they have no control over, no political means of impeachment. As I write this, more than 6,800 protesters have been detained, and 53 out of 57 Russian Communist Party members have openly opposed the war.
Yet we still hear from people like President Obamas ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul:
This kind of war mongering ignores the fact that much of the development of Putinism was enabled by Western inaction and the United States continued unwillingness to employ real experts as political consultants. Another contradiction.
Indeed, as leftists we must understand that Putin is the Wests own creation. We played Dr. Frankenstein in the 1990s and got ourselves a full-blown monster that is now completely unbound by the global economic order that Europe expected to keep peace. Indeed, even Germanys chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is so awestruck that all he can really do is insure that economic stability is still possible. No matter how it is sugarcoated, there were indeed promises made to Russia after 1991 that NATO would not expand, and many Russians, particularly after the events in Yugoslavia, agreed that NATO was no longer justified, that America was the real aggressor and danger. If you asked anyone in Moscow whether Ukraine would become a member of NATO in 1994, they would have laughed at you. By Clintons presidency, the promises to put a lid over NATO evaporated. Russians of all classes looked on as NATO bombed Kosovo to smitheries, wondering in awe why such a peace keeping organization still needed to exist if not simply to enforce Western financial and geo-political hegemony.
Things increasingly got worse as the United States and its allies failed to pursue lasting agreements after Minsk in 2014. The United States and its NATO allies could have brokered a lasting peace agreement, but instead they were willing to allow a temporary ceasefire to grow increasingly stale. Russians in power began to understand the redundancy of NATO, and promote it as a form of continued Western provocation, while Western governments have continued to legitimate it as a defense from their very own creation (Putin). It is a cyclical pattern, where one is begetting the other and now justifications on both sides are hardening. Russians now see the need for NATO to protect against the autocratic decision making of Putin, and Putin can now demonstrate the danger of NATO. Another contradiction.
The bus ride from St. Petersburg to Finland was the scariest part of my personal exodus. I woke up at 5am with two of my best friends (McFauls supposed enemies) and hopped on a bus with other Russians and EU members. I had no time to drink water or eat anything, and the bus offered nothing. Many families were leaving each other in tears and visible anxiety. Along the route, the bus was stopped three times by passport control officers in Russia who checked everyones documents. Luckily two out of three times the guard passed my row (I dont think he cared as much as he was supposed to, which is quite normal in Russias smaller bureaucracies) and eventually I made it through. At Russian customs, I asked an officer if I could buy water somewhere, and his response was to drink from the bathroom sink, which, considering the ancient plumbing technology, I was unwilling to risk.
After I passed Russian customs, we rode for another hour to the Finnish border. At one point the bus driver turned the bus off, and we sat sweltering for about an hour and a half, hungry and thirsty. I understood that my exodus was far less harsh than some fleeing Kyiv and Kharkov, so I tried to rest my eyes and meditate out of it.
After passing Finnish passport control, I went into the bathroom and gulped sink water for about 5 solid minutes from the palms of my hands. It felt degrading and lonely, but at the same time I knew that I had crossed the threshold, and that I was safe.
Originally Putins propaganda machine advertised this war as an anti-NATO effort meant to restrict Ukrainian membership. Yet, over time it has developed into a raw nationalist crusade, and the lexicon of what Russia calls the Great Patriotic War (WW2) is elicited to cultivate national support. A friend of mine with a 13-year-old daughter told me that students across Russia were to be exposed to a state-mandated (and state written) lesson propagandizing the reasons for war. That is, the state narrative is to be taught to children whether the parents want it or not.
In this propaganda, Ukrainians have been branded as Nazis, and Putin has even denied the validity of Ukrainian nationhood. To be clear, there are neo-nazi fighters and groups in Ukraine. Weve all seen their videos and imagery heavily laden with Wehrmacht obsessionism. But neo-nazis are everywhere (again another creation of neo-liberalism), and by no means defines the vast majority of Ukraines working class. Yet Putins bombing of Kyiv and Kharkov, and his soldiers callous engagements with regular people on the streets, has strengthened the flame of Ukrainian nationalism, again emboldening Putins argument. Another cyclical pattern, another contradiction.
The truth is that Ukraine and Russia share a common history, and I do think it is important to explicate that history briefly here. In the ninth century, the ancient chronicle of Kyivan Rus wrote that princes incapable of ruling the land of present day Russia and Ukraine invited a foreign king Rurik to rule over the people of Rus. Ruriks dynasty established itself in what is now Velikii Novgorod, south of present day St. Petersburg, and extended its rule down to what is now Kyiv incorporating a number of diverse ethnic peoples, including Permeans, Mari, Mordvinians, and more. In the 1200s, the Mongol Horde from the far east swept through Kyivin Rus destroying the state almost completely (Velikii Novgorod remained somewhat independent but still paid dues to the Mongol Khans). Independence from Mongol suzerainty did not come until the late 1400s, when the powerful city-state of Moscow was able to repel the Horde for the first time, but as youd imagine, many ethnic Mongolians and their culture remained in what is now western Russia and parts of Ukraine.
By the 1500s, Ukraine was almost completely absorbed by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, again sprinkling non-Russian characteristics throughout the region, changing the language, strengthening the Catholic, Ruthenian, and Lutheran Churches at the expense of Orthodoxy and, through resistance to Poles, giving Ukraine some of its earliest national myths. At this time, the Kingdom of Muscovy was fighting its own Boyars (old aristocrats) and expanding south and eastward to areas still held by the Khans. The history demonstrates that the region is so ethnically, confessionally, and linguistically mixed that its difficult to even see what is Russian about places like Tatarstan and Udmurtia, let alone Crimea or the Donbas.
That was a very simplified version of Ukrainian and Russian history, understanding that most people reading this may not care about the details. It goes to show that while an argument can be made that Russians and Ukrainians share a similar history and culture, their paths parted ways well before World War One, World War Two, and 1991. Thus, Putins argument that Lenin created Ukraine is not only historically inaccurate, but its simply an attack on the Russian Communist Party, a competitor to his own power, that ignores centuries of independent Ukrainian cultural development. Actually, Im sure Mr. Putin is aware that one of the biggest anti-Bolshevik resistance movements was the Ukrainian peasantry. History shows that Ukraine is and has always been a blood land where European powers have battled for land, wealth, and power. Ukrainian culture is different from Russian precisely because it has been punctuated for hundreds of years by aggression on both sides of Europe.
This position in between also played itself out in the USSR and continues to impact the region today. Russia is the main exporter of natural gas to Europe, and much of that gas infrastructure (built in the Soviet period) moves directly through Ukraine. With the expansion of oil and natural gas initiatives, in partnership with China, it is in Russias best interest to have firm control over the route of travel, lest 2014 repeat itself. One can see why it may not be in Europes best financial interest to really reprimand Russian capital. Another contradiction.
The bus ride was so late that I arrived at Helsinki airport with less than 20 minutes to board my flight. After explaining why I was so late, a representative from Finnair called her colleagues and told me to run, except I couldnt run because I had to clear baggage check. No time to get a drink or food, I cleared the process and then began to literally run from one end of the airport to the other. Luckily I was greeted on the plane by flight attendants with a water bottle.
In the air for 9 hours, still without food or water, I explained to a Finnish attendant the situation, and he brought me a cornucopia of snacks and salads pulled from various meals, including their own personal lunches.
What is happening is a dynamic and complicated situation that is eliciting confusion and in-fighting amongst leftists everywhere. So where should we stand as socialists / communists / anarchists / progressives? There is a real fear and anxiety of nuclear escalation, but we cannot allow that fear to pull us down to the level of Russophobia or blind NATO support. We also cannot denigrate the severity of this conflict by comparing it to American war crimes. America has and continues to perpetrate war crimes around the world, but What Aboutism is the exact same tactic that Putin has used his entire career, and in this case, it diminishes the potential severity of what is unfolding.
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the geopolitical order has been dislodged, for better or for worse, but it is going to come at the expense of the worlds biggest refugee crisis, and thousands of civilian and soldier deaths. Putin has demonstrated to the world that NATO support, which has been given to Ukraine more than most countries in the world in terms of billions in armaments and training, amounts to absolutely nothing when the situation escalates. Nobody wants a full-blown war with the West, but if were witnessing the ineffectiveness of NATO, and the redundancy of Western sanctions, why does it need to exist? It appears that Western leaders have sewn the economic ties of the neo-liberal world order so tight that theyve exposed themselves as interested in nothing but the security of global capital, i.e. their assets. What is more, Bidens State of the Union address clearly demonstrated that suffering Ukranians have become cannon fodder for partisan politics within the American political establishment.
Thus, we need to make clear that we are resoundingly against NATO and stand united with the working class people of Russia who oppose their governments attack. We stand most resolutely with the working-class people of Ukraine the people in the so-called blood lands who are currently victims of a feud that geography alone has enveloped them in. We oppose American involvement, warmongering, and politicization for the purpose of domestic partisan politics. We oppose fascism on both sides of this conflict but recognize that the strongest response the West could have, its most humanely logical reaction, is to seize the foreign assets and property of Russias oligarchs who are powerful investors in Western capitalist institutions, use their mansions and yachts for refugees, invest that money and property in green energy that will once and for all eliminate Europes dependence on Russian oil and natural gas, and stop the expansion of NATO.
I have doubts that Bidens new task force to hunt oligarchs will take any decisive action because punishing the oligarchs would hurt western capital, including American capitalists who have their hands in the same pot. Instead, new sanctions will hurt working class Russians disproportionately while leaving the true enablers of this conflict relatively unscathed. Another contradiction.
Ill leave you with two illustrative experiences from my journey. As I boarded the bus in St. Petersburg, an older gay woman sat next to me. We were directly parallel to the side door, and as she got on, her girlfriend was crying and explaining to her partner that they have a toilet on this bus! A coffee station, free movies. You will be good, I promise as a way of comforting her. They may never see each other again if another iron curtain descends, which is a high possibility.
When I arrived in Chicago, famous for Ukrainian Village, I exited US customs to a sea of children meeting their grandmothers and parents who had no-doubt escaped Ukraine. Nobody should have to experience that kind of fear just because two old men must appear strong to their people and are committed to maintaining their wealth. This war is pointless on both sides, and the United States and NATO are not guilt free.
Originally posted here:
Confronting experience and contradictions in the Russia-Ukraine Crisis - Uprise RI
