Socialist Action /November 1999
Russia Resorts to a Racist War Against the Chechens
By GERRY FOLEY
In the run up to elections in Russia, Yeltsin's premier, Vladimir Putin,
launched a second war against the Chechen people, who number barely a million.
At least 500 Chechen civilians have already been killed by long distance
artillery and bombing. Hundreds of thousands have fled into the dirt poor
neighboring autonomous republic of Ingushetia.
Even the refugees have come under attack from the air. In the Oct. 9
issue of the Italian left daily Il Manifesto, Astrit Dakli reported Putin's
denial of a hit on a bus carrying people trying to escape the fighting.
The premier said, "If it were true, they wouldn't keep coming to Russia."
Putin's statement was a snide suggestion that Chechens in particular
and former Soviet Middle East peoples in general were swarming over Russia
like a plague of locusts. That is in line with the racist campaign put forward
by all the reactionary political forces in Russia today, from the government
to the neo-Stalinists.
In the Oct. 14 issue of Rouge , the weekly newspaper of the French Ligue
Communiste Revolutionnaire, Denis Paillard wrote: "The opposition is
singing the same Great Russian chauvinist song as the government. Yuri Luzhkov,
mayor of Moscow [a major opponent of the government], has been waging a
witch hunt against 'persons of the Caucasus nationality' since 1998, as
has Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF).
As early as 1996, some CP leaders called for the expulsion of all Chechens
and the confiscation of their property.
"The media are not lagging beyond. The editor in chief of the Moscow
News published a long article explaining that the Chechens are mere savages,
who only understand force.
"On TV, A. Nevzorov [a well known neo-Stalinist commentator] has
called for the formation of death squadrons in the FSB [ex-KGB]. The newspaper
Komersant [an organ of the new business class] has published the exploits
of an oil trust boss who personally liquidated dozens of 'bandits' after
his brother was kidnapped."
The Oct. 9 Il Manifesto carried an interview with Aleksandr Kuvaev, secretary
of the Moscow organization of the CPRF. The post-Stalinist leader explained
that his party had organized militias, utilizing former members of the political
police, to maintain surveillance of people with a Middle Eastern appearance:
"Sad to say, they maintain a special watch on people from the Caucasus.
You know that they are the focus of suspicion."
Astrit Dakli asked him what he thought of Luzhkov's measures against
people from the old Soviet Middle East. Kuvaev said: "Luzhkov has allowed
a terrible situation to develop in Moscow by opening the doors up wide,
concentrating all the wealth and criminality of the country here. ... In
Moscow, the Caucasians are a problem. They control the markets, they force
up prices of fruit and vegetables, and prevent Russian peasants from selling
their products."
Kuvaev looked back to better times: "We can say what you want about
Stalin. But he never had a war on Russian territory." Of course, the
"Father of the Peoples" did deport the entire Chechen people from
their homeland during World War II, condemning them to hardship and many
thousands to death.
There is, however, an obvious contradiction in the campaign to rid Russia
of Chechens or reduce them to a class of enemy aliens. Putin claims that
Chechnya is just as much a part of Russia as Moscow. Il Manifesto of Oct.
9 quoted him as saying, "Chechnya is Russian territory. The armed forces
of Russia can go anywhere they want on the territory of the Russian federation."
Putin rejected any idea of negotiations with the Chechen leaders. "We
will not stop half way in the fight against Chechen terrorism." The
implication of this is that Putin intends to occupy all of Chechnya and
impose a made-in-Moscow government.
Nonetheless, in its return engagement, the Russian army does not seem
to be any better of a fighting organization than it was in the first. It
has been concentrating mainly on bombing and shelling from a distance. The
badly paid or unpaid officer corps is still up to its neck in all sorts
of illegal traffic, and there is no evidence that the rank-and-file soldiers
are any less demoralized than before.
The military and political leaders obviously know that they have to avoid
casualties, or risk provoking the sort of mass upsurge against the war that
forced them to grant de facto independence to the Chechens in the first
place.
For the moment, Putin is gaining from his chauvinist campaign against
the Chechens. The polls show him with a 65 percent approval rating, as opposed
to only 6 percent for his boss, Boris Yeltsin. Chauvinism has been the last
refuge of scoundrels for both the open defenders of the legacy of Stalinism
and the most strident advocates of capitalist restoration. It has an effect
on people demoralized by bureaucratic rule and hypocrisy and reduced to
fighting each other for increasingly scarce means of survival.
The rulers of Russia argue that the breakdown of their rule over Chechnya
produced a dangerous disorder, creating a breeding ground for terrorism.
But their attempts to restore capitalism has led to deprivation and chaos
throughout the former Soviet Union that are already far more disastrous
than any conceivable "Islamic terrorism."
The only thing that can stop the continuing slide into anarchy is the
reorganization of the working people to take control of the economy and
sweep away the profiteers and robbers spawned by the ultimate degeneration
of the counterrevolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy.
In order to do that, the ideals and perspectives of socialism have to
be revived. And that requires an unyielding fight against Great Russian
chauvinism, which was the precondition for the victory of the Russian socialist
revolution in the first place.
Today, it seems that most Russians have forgotten that the Chechen people,
attracted by the Bolshevik leaders' promises of self-determination, played
a decisive role in the defeat of the reactionary White armies on the southern
front during the civil war.
A new revolutionary leadership must remind them of this, and once again
win the Chechen fighters as allies in the struggle against reaction, this
time against the betrayers of the revolution.
Socialist Action /November 1999 |