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Vol.64/No.1      January 10, 2000 
 
 
Chechnya invasion, imperialist hostility are backdrop to elections in Russia  
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BY PATRICK O'NEILL 
As Russian artillery and planes hammer the capital Grozny in Chechnya, voters in Russia have elected a new Duma, or parliament. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and the president who appointed him, Boris Yeltsin, emerged after the December 19 ballot with an increased roll of supporters in the 450-seat house. Putin has built his popularity as champion of the still-undefeated military offensive in Chechnya.

Judged by the response of the big-business media, the election results were met with some relief in Washington and other imperialist capitals. At the same time, the rulers of the United States and the major European powers, frustrated by the longer-term lack of progress toward "market reforms" in Russia, have grasped the destructive assault on Chechnya as a pretext for stepping up pressure on Moscow.

"The nation is pinning great hopes on the new Duma," Putin said December 21. The prime minister is the current front-runner in the lead-up to next June's elections to replace Boris Yeltsin as president. The two parties that Putin endorsed in the parliamentary campaign, Unity and the Union of Right Forces, together polled around 30 percent. Both parties were formed less than a year ago and feature present or past government figures.

The Communist Party remains the single largest party in the Duma with 24.3 percent of the vote. The party of the rightist Zhirinovsky polled around 6 percent.

"This opens a lot of possibilities that no one had expected," said Anders Aslund of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a pro-imperialist outfit. "Putin can now change the political stage by having a reformist parliament." The prime minister and his parliamentary supporters back increased reforms, the code word for steps towards reintroducing ownership by private capitalists of the major factories, enterprises, and banks.

Washington Post reporter David Hoffman described the deadlock in the former parliament as perceived by the capitalists. "The Communists and nationalists who dominate the lower chamber have frustrated many attempts to pass more market-oriented economic legislation," he wrote on December 19. "[They] have fought each other to a bitter stalemate over creating a land code to fill one of the many gaps in the quest to become a market economy."

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote, "While Russia still has a long way to go before it gets what I believe it needs most, the rule of law and institutions that must undergird any free market.... [The] Communists' stranglehold over the ...Duma, which has blocked the legal and tax reforms Russia needs... will be broken." 
 

Capitalists hope for 'reform'

"Russia Votes Right" announced the Wall Street Journal in an approving headline. The New York Times editors noted that "Unity, allied with President Boris Yeltsin and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, built its success on jingoistic exploitation of the brutal Russian military campaign in Chechnya." The editorial added that "moderates could end up with more than half the total seats. Those gains could help bring economic reform back to life."

These commentators hope the new parliament can kick start the opening up of Russia's economy to profitable capitalist investment. They falsely identify the Communist Party as the main block to such "reforms," and the fragile coalition around Putin as a potentially powerful ally.

But social relations in Russia do not blend with the priorities of capitalist investors. There is no native capitalist class that can self-confidently seize the social assets—the factories, mines, farms, and other means of production—and impose the conditions of labor demanded by the profit system. Workers and peasants, accustomed to minimal rights to employment and social services, defend those rights against the prerogatives of capital. The ruling layers in Russia fear the resistance of working people. Many also fear for their own privileged positions should capitalist relations triumph.

For electoral purposes the Communist Party portrays itself as a defender of working people's interests in the Duma. But its roots do not lie in the revolutionary vanguard of workers and peasants built by revolutionaries in Russia, which led working people in a victorious struggle for power in 1917 and in the first years of the revolutionary government. In that tumultuous period the workers and peasants government expropriated the landlords and capitalists and established the basis of a nationalized economy, state monopoly of foreign trade, and economic planning.

Rather, it is a decrepit shadow of the political machine that developed out of the political counterrevolution of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which for decades represented the interests of privileged bureaucratic layers in the former Soviet Union. The conditions of extreme hardship and civil war that prevailed in the young Soviet Union in the 1920s weakened the Soviet-based power of the toiling masses. Such difficulties provided a basis for a parasitic layer to rise to a leading position, including in the Communist Party. The bureaucracy seized power by killing and imprisoning millions, including the most political conscious and experienced workers and peasants. Great Russian chauvinism and oppression of the peoples of the Caucuses and Central Asia reemerged, in a reversal of the course charted by the Bolsheviks under the leadership of V.I. Lenin of championing the right of oppressed nations to self-determination.

This brutal exclusion of working people from political life also drastically weakened the economic gains of the revolution. Washington and other the imperialist powers relied on the Stalinist murder machine to police the workers and peasants and drive them out of politics. Although the bureaucratic apparatus served as an instrument for transmitting capitalist values, the post-capitalist property forms remain, even in the midst of generalized crisis and want.

The ruling classes of the imperialists powers entered the 1990s with expectations that the decline of CP-led regimes and the election of pro-capitalist politicians would unlock the Russian economy—and others like it—to capitalist exploitation. As the "reform" process has stalled the imperialists have become frustrated.

Washington has struck a more hostile stance to Moscow and to its erstwhile ally, Boris Yeltsin. The U.S. rulers have boosted their military strength in Europe, stationing thousands of troops in Yugoslavia and expanding the borders of NATO, the military alliance they dominate.

Recently the two powers have clashed verbally over the U.S. military's development of a missile system designed to provide it with a first-strike advantage in a nuclear conflict. On December 21 Putin called for the ratification of the Start II treaty to limit the number of nuclear arms, but "noted" some "serious obstacles," reported the New York Times.

Less then two weeks earlier, Yeltsin pointedly stated during a visit to Beijing that in attempting to pressure Moscow the Clinton administration should not forget "that Russia has a full arsenal of nuclear weapons."  
 

Washington boosts nuclear force

Putin cited Washington's proposal to build a "limited defense" against missiles launched by "rogue states."

"Skeptical military officials in Russia and China" reported the Times, "argue that the United States' real goal is to build a defense against the shrunken nuclear force that Russia would possess once ... arms-control treaties are implemented." Beijing and above all Moscow control substantial nuclear arsenals.

The development of new weapons systems is now openly discussed in Washington. The Washington Post reported on December 10 that "A blue-ribbon scientific panel... has recommended... the design [of] a new, billion-dollar plutonium weapons plant and... [of] new warheads for the first time in more than a decade." According to the Post the findings are "likely to be welcomed by members of Congress who... recently voted to reject the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty."

When Moscow invaded the breakaway Caucasian republic of Chechnya in 1994, Washington gave its tacit support. Not so this time. "The Russians are self-isolating from the rest of the international community," said U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albricht on December 17 at a meeting of government representatives from the "Group of 8" nations, at which Yeltsin joined representatives of the seven most powerful imperialist countries of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

"No sanctions but no aid" summarizes the stance of the imperialist governments in Europe towards the military offensive of the Russian army in the Caucasian republic of Chechnya.

On December 21 Albright ordered the Export-Import Bank of the United States to deny an agreed $500 million loan to the Siberia-based Tyumen oil company. The refusal stops "American companies from selling oil-drilling and environmental equipment to... a company that is 49.8 percent owned by the Russian government," wrote David Sanger in the New York Times, adding that the "Clinton administration has... slowed money to a trickle while insisting on major changes in the Russian economic and legal system." 
 

Oil wealth at stake

The oil wealth of the Caspian sea and Caucasus area is also at issue in the tensions between the U.S. and Russian rulers. Capitalist oil companies have expanding interests in the region (see map above). The Christchurch Press from New Zealand commented in a December 22 editorial on the Chechnya conflict that were "Russia ...to widen the conflict to other parts of its sphere of influence ... the West might find its interests endangered... supplies of oil from Kazakhstan might be at risk."

Rising oil export revenues have helped to finance Moscow's war against forces in Chechnya that demand independence for the southwestern republic. Moscow's ability to at least minimally supply and feed its soldiers stands in contrast to the 1994 invasion. The Russian generals have held casualties down by relying on the heavy use of artillery and air bombardment first and direct clashes with Chechen forces second.

The dangers that lie in wait for a Russian attempt to take and hold the capital Grozny on the ground were revealed when over a hundred troops in a tank column were killed in a battle on December 17. After that setback the Russian forces resumed their bombardment. Ground troops are sent to the edge of the city to try to determine the positions of the well-entrenched rebels. The Russian troops have set up roadblocks around Grozny and Chechnya more widely to control the movement of people.

Prime Minister Putin announced on December 18 that Russian troops had taken control of a key road linking the independent country of Georgia with Chechnya, claiming it is used by Chechnyan forces to move supplies. The Georgian government said on December 17 that Russian bombs had fallen near a Georgian village.

Putin presents himself as a "tough guy" dealing with "terrorism" in Chechnya. Moscow claims its invasion is aimed at "Islamic terrorists." Putin claims that civilian casualties in the offensive, which has created 200,000 refugees and depopulated Grozny,"could be counted on one's fingers." The parliamentary elections came at the right moment for this politician, who has tied his fortunes to those of the bludgeoning Russian offensive.  
 
 
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