The Militant (logo)  
Vol.63/No.35       October 11, 1999  
 
 
No to Moscow's war on Chechnya!  
{editorial} 
 
 
Moscow's anti-Islamic campaign against the peoples of Caucasus, now escalating with its bombing of Chechnya and military assault on rebels in neighboring Dagestan, is a blow to the interests of working people everywhere.

It's not surprising that the Clinton administration and big-business press quietly cheer the Yeltsin regime's bombing campaign, while fretting that it will backfire. The capitalist rulers in Washington and elsewhere hope Moscow will do their dirty work by suppressing the rebellious peoples of the Caucasus who chafe under second-class status.

The crisis in the Caucasus confirms that the collapse of the Soviet and Eastern European Stalinist regimes a decade ago represented a defeat for U.S. imperialism. For decades the imperialist rulers, unable to overthrow the workers state in the USSR, pressed the bureaucratic government there to police working people. But under the impact of the world capitalist crisis in the 1980s, the Stalinist apparatus shattered as workers and farmers began to resist attacks on their living standards and social rights. This has become a nightmare for Washington, London, and their fellow sharks. It is increasingly clear that the former Soviet Union is not moving toward capitalism, much less toward a stable democratic capitalism.

More and more, the imperialist powers will be forced to take on working people in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union with their own military forces in order to shore up their declining imperial order, as they have done with the savage NATO bombing war against the workers state in Yugoslavia.

Moscow, a regime based on permanent instability, is lashing out against Chechnya from growing weakness. Boris Yeltsin has to rely more and more on centralized executive power to hold together the warring factions of the dominant stratum and balance it against an increasingly restive working class, as living standards keep plummeting.

To bolster its position, the Russian government has whipped up anti-Islamic chauvinism — carrying out anti-immigrant raids in Moscow and raining terror on the civilian population of Grozny and other parts of Chechnya. Russian officials grotesquely justify their assault by comparing it to the barbaric U.S.-NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Their reactionary actions will only embolden ultrarightists like Russian fascist Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

National conflicts of all kinds will continue to explode throughout Russia and the central Asian workers states. They are an inevitable product of the Stalinist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union more than seven decades ago, which brutally reversed the internationalist course of the Bolshevik Party under V.I. Lenin's leadership. In the early years of the Russian revolution, the workers and farmers government there moved to restore to the majority-Muslim peoples of northern Caucasus the lands that had been stolen from them by czarist rulers.

In the first Caucasus war of 1994–96, Moscow unleashed a bloody onslaught but failed to crush the Chechen independence struggle, having to withdraw its humiliated army. The Chechen people won respect from working-class fighters everywhere for their heroic resistance to the Great Russian chauvinists. Today the Kremlin is in an even weaker position to stifle this struggle.

Working people around the world should demand that Moscow immediately withdraw its troops and stop its war on Chechnya and other peoples of the Caucasus.  
 
 
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