They Fought For A Workers State and Socialist Nation

Through the storms the sun of freedom shone for us,
And the great Lenin lit up the path for us.
We were raised by Stalin – to loyalty to the people
He inspired us to work and to exploits.

National Anthem of the USSR 1944

Between 1941 and 1945 on the eastern front the invading fascist armies of Germany, Romania, Hungary, Italy and contingents from almost every continental European country killed up to 30 million Soviet nationals. Eight million of these casualties are classified as military the other nineteen million were civilians it is a casualty rate only matched in terms of devastation by China which saw at least twenty million dead in their war against the invasion carried by imperialist Japan. The slaughter carried out the invading fascist forces was so immense that it amounted to 20,000 dead per day for four years. Compared to that the casualties of the British, French and Americans in the Second World War seem very minor and that it because what was being waged by the Hitlerian fascist armies was partly a war of conquest (similar to that waged by the Kaiser in the first world war) but with a level of barbarity that only a counter revolutionary war can unleash. They sought to make the peoples of the USSR into slaves but the violence of the fascists also represented the most base and horrific expression of the class interests of German and wider European capitalism and landlordism. The level of violence was deliberate as they sought to physically annihilate socialism using many of the same methods that the US imperialists and their stooges would employ in Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia. In these countries the Nazi ways of war and repression were pursued with as much vigour as the Hitlerites themselves did in the USSR, when threatened with revolution the capitalist class will unleash unending and unremitting violence in defence of their property interests. That was true in 1941 and it is true now, as can be clearly seen in the words of Josep Borrel and Ursual Von Der Leyen, the only difference between these representatives of European bourgeois liberalism and the jack booted men of the third reich is the level of class struggle. The officialdom of the European “garden” would all flock to the banner of the frustrated Austrian painted all over again should a similar level of threat emerge to that posed by the USSR and the international communist movement in the 1930s.

Hitler was of course convinced that not only would the war go his way but that it would be a relatively quick war. He was fond of the phrase “kick the door in and the whole rotten structure comes down” and had been eagerly reading the work of Trotsky describing how the awful reign of Stalin and his clique had alienated the masses from the party, that the Soviet state was brittle and would collapse when fascism attacked. Hitler believed this and his early campaigns in World War 2 only reinforced his belief in his own military infallibility. The rapid collapse of France was not supposed to have been militarily possible but the Blitzkrieg had triumphed in short order. Why was this? Was it because of the unique way the German commanders organised their forces? This was certainly part of it but the tactics the Germans used were no wholly new, European militaries had been experimenting with the usage of concentrated massed armoured attacks and the integration of air power for many years. The French army actually outnumbered the German forces in 1940 but the collapse was rapid and total. This came from the fact that the French ruling class was deeply split with many of the bourgeoisie favouring the fascist take over by Petain and a bargain with the Nazis that would enable them to destroy the working class’s ability to resist and (of course) annihilate the Communist Party. The rapid collapse proved that the allied military commanders were totally inept but the really fatal factor was that the ruling class themselves were more afraid of the domestic working class than they were the Nazis, in fact the western European capitalists got on just fine with the Nazis for four years with resistance being carried out by Communists for the most part with only a minority of bourgeoisie taking the route of patriotic resistance.

With such rapid success in the west the Nazi leaders had good reason to believe themselves on the brink of total victory. What they found across the territories of the USSR though was that, for all their early breakthroughs, the resistance against them was unending and ferocious. The decade of rapid industrialisation of the Soviet Union bore fruit with the ability of the Soviet government to rapidly reassemble the war industries far outside of the reach of the Germany air force. Far from fracturing the peoples of the USSR came together as never before to resist the Nazi invasion. This is now ascribed to Russian “national feeling” or something similar by reactionaries who wish to dismiss the class politics of this and how the masses of all the Soviet nations rallied to the defence of their homeland or they simply put it down to the “terror” exercised by Stalin. A comparison to World War One can give us an indication of what difference the revolution made though. In 1917 the Tsarist Army, poorly led and ill equipped, faced total defeat by the armies of imperial Germany. Mutinies frequently broke out and when a bread riot in February (started by working class women) the army rapidly escaped the control of its commanders and never returned to it. Even when the Germans advanced further into Russian territory (almost reaching Petrograd) the Russian peasants who made up this army simply turned around went home. They had no desire to fight in a war that they understood had been started by landlords and capitalists even when the Germans were well inside Russian territory. By 1941 the Russian workers and peasants had seen the rapid transformation of their own lives for the better. They were better educated, lived longer and had (most crucially of all) real ownership over a state which they understood was qualitatively different. The CPSU (Communist Party) had real and deep roots in every part of the proletariat and peasantry across the USSR, it was able to call all the nations and peoples of the Soviet Union to the defence of the state because these workers understood it was truly their state. In a war to defend their state, their revolution, their homeland against the Nazi horde the strength of the peoples of the USSR proved too great for the Hitlerite brigands. There would have been no victory without the mass industrialisation of the 1930’s, without collectivisation of agriculture and without the party and the masses acting in concert with each other. The victory of 1945 was one made by revolution and the masses who shaped and were in turn shaped by that revolutionary process.

The leaders of capitalist Russia have been slowly forced as time has gone by to position themselves as the true successor to this great legacy. This of course reflects the fact that for all their grovelling to the imperialists and their trampling all over the Communist period the US and its puppets would never accept anything other than complete and cringing submission. Since 2008 the Putin leadership has moved inch by inch towards confrontation with the US as they realised that it would become unavoidable. Thus now at Victory Day celebrations Putin has drawn a direct line from the actions of European fascists in The Great Patriotic War to the actions of the US imperialists and their proxies in Ukraine today. Putin is of course correct in making such a comparison and his appearing with the leaders of the CIS countries at the Victory Day parade was surely not merely a matter of making a polite invitation to neighbouring states. The Russians are looking to solidify their relations with Armenia and the Central Asian states where US imperialism has been making moves to try and increase their influence over all these countries.

The pro-capitalist elements are always the last to learn of the devastating consequences of failing to resist imperialism. It is clear now that the most ambitious sections of the Russian bourgeois have woken up to this point but their attempts to rally the nation are still limited and timid in comparison with what would actually produce a victory that would hurl back the imperialist forces in a decisive manner. Whilst the Russian armed forces can and will beat the NATO sponsored Ukrainian army (indeed they have destroyed this army at least twice already) the US strategy here is to play for time and hope that a political crisis develops within Russia itself. They hope that the comprador elements will be able to make some kind of move to destabilise the Russian state. So far that bet is proving to be a bad one but it is not one that is entirely misplaced, the bulk of the Russian capitalist class would happily sell their own nation down the river many times over rather than see their own interests damaged by US sanctions. As the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) has pointed out many times, the oligarchy continued to extract billions of rubles from the country right up to this day. Even at this stage the Russian government has not put in place the capital controls which would be required to at least do something about this process. In their attempts to stop an outright revolt of the capitalist class the Putin government has not acted against these parasites ability to loot the country despite the urgings of the KPRF. Putin is, after all, a Russian liberal. Albeit he is not a fool and is prepared to take action to reinforce state control over the economy he is still very much afraid of going too far, he remains an anti-communist even though he is having to retreat on this as time goes on. The only reason why Russia can resist the US imperialists is because enough of the Soviet military legacy remains in terms of the giant military-industrial capacity built up during the cold war period, its rather hard to rail against the old system when your tank and shell manufacturing is based upon its industrial legacy. It is likely though that to win this battle the Russian government will have to go much further in acting against the interests of the domestic capitalist class who have proven utterly parasitic and useless in terms of economic development of the country.

As the KPRF General Secretary Gennady Zyuganov recently argued in a letter to Putin:

Neo-liberal dogma has cost our people dearly. It is high time to recognise that nurturing hatred towards the Soviet era is a harmful and criminal practice.

Zyunganov – Open Letter to President Putin

Zyuganov, correctly, argues that the Soviet period was a high point in terms of the development of Russian civilisation and that nothing either before or since has matched it. But the current Russian government remains afraid, they wish to claim the legacy of the victory in the great patriotic war whilst still distancing themselves from the foundations of that victory, the revolution itself. Zyuganov again:

The military parade on Red Square on May 2023 should carry oa special message oriented towards the future. The participants in the parade deserve being greeted from the stand of the Lenin mausoleum. Such a momentous event would be a powerful symbol of our spiritual fortitude.

Zyuganov – Open Letter to President Putin

Of course, as Zyuganov probably knows very well, the covering of the Lenin mausoleum serves as an ideological signifier. A symbol to capital that even though the Russian government seeks to claim certain aspects of the Soviet legacy, that the legacy of Lenin remains buried lest the delicate sensibilities of these parasites be further upset. In his letter to Putin Zyuganov offers to establish a joint patriotic front until victory is won in the war against US imperialism in Ukraine. At this stage Putin is very unlikely to take the KPRF up on this but it is the intelligent political choice given the growing severity of the actions of US imperialism against Russia and the continued treachery of the comprador elements within the country. What is certain though is that the US imperialists are not simply going to fade away, their clownish leadership at the moment will give way to more capable imperialist leaders and they will return to try and attain their aim of breaking up the Russian state and subordinating the CIS states along with it. As another Victory Day goes by it becomes ever more obvious that Russian capitalism is too rotten to successfully wage this struggle, the Bonapartist state constructed by Putin has gone a long way in undoing the worst damage of the 1990s but to actually free itself Russia and the other former Soviet states must return to the socialist path. The lesson of the great victory won by the heroic sacrifice of so many Russian, Ukrainian, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Uzbek, Armenian, Azeri, Tajik, Belarussian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian lives is that the fight against imperialism must also be a battle waged for socialism. The masses united as a class and a nation can defeat even the most brutal of imperialist forces as destruction of the Hitlerite war machine shows very clearly.

Comrades! Our Great Patriotic War has terminated in our complete victory. The period of war in Europe has closed. A period of peaceful development has been ushered in.

Congratulations on our victory, my dear fellow countrymen and countrywomen!

Glory to our heroic Red Army, which upheld the independence of our country and achieved victory over the enemy!

Glory to our great people, the victor people!

Eternal glory to the heroes who fell fighting the enemy and who gave their lives for the freedom and happiness of our people!

Stalin – Speech given on Victory Day May 9th 1945