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Those who follow Ukrainian issues today know that many foreigners who consider themselves radical leftists oppose that country’s attempt to break away from its former imperial master. Surprisingly, they support the attempt of a capitalist Russian government that legitimates itself in terms of religion, has an imperialist foreign agenda based on settler-colonist minorities beyond its borders, and subscribes to “spheres of influence” thinking to re-impose its control over Ukraine. It is a re-imposition that, as of 2014, involved the use of military force in Ukraine.1 Such a position is at odds with such fundamental statements of left-wing positions as the Zimmerwald Manifesto of 1915 and Trotsky’s 1939 comments on Ukraine’s experience of Stalinism:2
The bureaucracy strangled and plundered the people within Great Russia, too. But in Ukraine matters were further complicated by the massacre of national hopes. Nowhere did restrictions, purges, repressions and in general all forms of bureaucratic hooliganism assume such murderous sweep as they did in Ukraine in the struggle against the powerful, deeply-rooted longings of the Ukrainian masses for greater freedom and independence.
Their stance places such leftists alongside those they normally regard as their enemies: big bankers, corporate directors, and lawyers who profit from their contacts with Vladimir Putin and his associates, as well as pro-Kremlin fascist and neo-Nazi parties in their respective countries.3 Normally, North American and EU pro-Kremlin radical leftists have little influence on the foreign policies of their countries. Academic analysts who do not research radicalism normally ignore them. However, they deserve attention today because, together with the other above-mentioned pro-Kremlin groupings and parties, they influence public opinion, and sometimes a government foreign policy decision, in matters related to Russia and Ukraine. Internet commentary on Maidan-related articles reveals that many such leftists share the Russian government’s anti-Ukrainian position.4 EU voters recently gave approximately the same percentage of votes to radical left as to radical right parties (8-10%).5 Certainly, specific political circumstances account for this phenomenon. 6 However, there is also a historical factor that explains why many in today’s foreign Left, who without hesitation oppose Anglo-American neo-colonialism and neo-liberal capitalism within their own countries, suspend their avowed anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-corporate democratic ideals when looking at what is Russian neo-colonialism in eastern Europe and Ukraine.7
While foreign pro-Russian leftists differ among themselves in details, they share, along with Putin and the Kremlin ruling elite, two basic ideas. First, that Russia has a “sphere of influence” like the US, but that unlike those living within the US “sphere,” those living within the Russian “sphere” should make no effort to rid themselves of Russian domination and/or hegemony. And, second, that “nationalism” in Ukraine never had and does not have today the “progressive” role such leftists assign, or assigned to, countries subject to American or western European imperialism or to neo-imperialist and neo-colonialist rule. In their view, Russian migrants to Ukraine were not settler-colonists, as claimed by Ukrainian Marxists, and Russian rule in, or control over, Ukraine neither was nor is imperialist or colonialist. Implicit in these assumptions is the Russian Bolshevik idea that “the proletariat” could not be chauvinist or nationalist, and that “socialism” could not be imperialist.
Although the USSR, the CPSU, and the Comintern no longer exist and Putin’s ruling circle no longer shares the latter two opinions, networks of comrades still subscribe to such notions. Pro-Kremlin leftists, in short, are blind to Russian imperialism past and present.8 A major step in channeling foreign radical leftists to think about Russia and its old empire according to such Russo-centric criteria and blinding them to the existence of a Ukrainian anti-colonial Marxist tradition occurred in 1920 when Russian Bolshevik leaders excluded the Ukrainian Communist Party, from the Second Comintern Congress.
full: https://krytyka.com/en/articles/russian-bolsheviks-ukrainian-communists-and-comintern-how-russian-bolsheviks-shaped-foreign
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