Foreword by translator Renfrey Clarke:

How do Russian Marxists view the Ukraine conflict? In the essay that follows, this and related topics are addressed by Andrey Kolganov, a Professor of Political Economy at Moscow State University and a key figure in the loosely organised but intellectually potent political current known as the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism.

Professor Kolganov is the author of hundreds of published articles, and together with the late Aleksandr Buzgalin, co-author of the monumental study Global Capital, published by Manchester University Press in 2021 as Twenty-First Century Capital.

Russian Marxists, as understood in the proper sense, make a variety of analyses of the Ukraine conflict. In virtually all cases, they find crude ethno-nationalist slurs against Ukrainians put about by Russian popular media to be quite repugnant. Nor are Russian Marxists impressed to any notable extent by liberal preaching of ‘civilised Western values’. Like most Russians, they are only too aware of the actual Western record of double-dealing and aggression. Typically, Russian Marxists are informed in their thinking by a grasp of Russia’s place in the modern capitalist world-system combined with a familiarity with the complex, fraught history of relations over the decades between Russia, Ukraine, and the NATO countries. Such familiarity is broadly lacking among most progressives in the West, including most self-proclaimed Marxists.

Russian Marxists have been little attracted by the liberal and non-Marxist notion of ‘Russian imperialism’ that is endorsed, usually without meaningful analysis, by many if not most Western leftists. Long ago in 2016, Andrey Kolganov was among the authors of an extensive paper critiquing this concept.

As Kolganov and others argued then and argue today, Russia is not an emerging imperialist power. It is part of the ‘Global South’ that is resisting imperialism. The Russian Federation and its allied countries are today in the unique historical position of being able to successfully resist imperialist threats and aggression, to the point where a future world without such aggression is beginning to take shape ever so slowly. All of this is fundamentally important to reaching an informed, anti-imperialist understanding of today’s struggle in and around Ukraine.

Imperialism and the war in Ukraine

According to a well-known view, countries that are part of the periphery or semi-periphery of the world economy may, in their relations with still weaker countries, act as something in the mould of imperialist exploiters, or as ‘sub-imperialists’. Claims of this sort are directed at a long list of states, Russia among them.

It would be foolish to deny that Russian capitalist corporations exploit workers when they conduct business on the territory of other countries, just as they exploit workers in Russia itself. But is Russian capital (or that of Mexico or Brazil) capable of exercising the kind of imperialist dictates that would allow it to extract super-profits from the super-exploitation of weaker states?

If we are to answer this question correctly, we need to keep in mind that international economic relations in the modern world are not the sum of specific relationships between particular sets of countries, for example, between Russia and Tajikistan, or China and Guinea-Bissau. All such relationships inevitably take shape within the framework of the whole system of relations of the world economy, and are influenced decisively by the manner in which this system is organised.

Within this system, it is only the countries of the centre (or core) of world capitalism that hold the monopoly power, allowing them to exert pressure on other countries in order to obtain one-sided economic advantages. This is not because the capitalist corporations of countries that are suspected of sub-imperialism lack the desire for lopsided gains, or display a special altruism that impels them to renounce such benefits. No, they are representatives of capital like all the others, and are just as much consumed by the thirst for profits. The difference in this case lies elsewhere.

Holding the top spots as exploiters of less-developed states are, whenever they can manage it, the largest transnational corporations, based in the countries at the centre of the world capitalist system. The financial, technological, and political prowess of these corporations, along with their capacity for ideological manipulation and cultural expansion, plus, of course, their ability to exert direct military pressure, allow them to seize the kind of positions in weaker countries that permit them to impose their will. Moreover, these transnationals are not at all inclined to tolerate the presence of competing corporations from less powerful countries that would wish to grab a share of the pie.

The result is that the corporations of less powerful countries, if they are to have any possibility of conducting business on the territory of developing states, need to enjoy more or less equal conditions for their economic operations. I repeat, this is not about fairness, but for the reason that otherwise, they would find it completely impossible to penetrate the economies of these countries; powerful transnational corporations from the countries of the ‘centre’ would already have divided up all the promising opportunities among themselves. Russia, for example, has almost no transnational corporations, and those that do exist are incomparably weaker than the transnationals of Western countries.

Still further from the truth is the suggestion that Russia began waging war on Ukraine in order to open up Ukrainian labour, natural resources and so forth, to profitable exploitation by Russian capital.

War began in Ukraine in 2014

Historically, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine does not date from February 2022, but from February 22, 2014, following the far-right, paramilitary coup d’état in the capital city Kiev that was encouraged and actively supported by Western countries. Even before the coup, open efforts to rehabilitate Nazi ideology had begun in Ukraine, roughly since the contested presidential election in 2004, officially won by Victor Yushchenko on a platform advocating closer economic ties to imperialist Europe.

Nazi-collaborationist leaders of the Second World War era such as Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevich were responsible at the time for the grisly, mass exterminations of Poles, Jews, Russians and Ukrainians. Following the 2014 coup, their history and those of other veterans WW2 collaboration Nazi Germany, began to be widely glorified, including by the officials of the new, coup regime. Extreme nationalist organisations began operating openly, conducting anti-Russian and anti-communist propaganda. Simultaneously, discriminatory measures aimed against the Russian language and culture begun to be introduced. At first, these measures were minor, but they gathered steam during the years following.  

The coup d’état of February 22, 2014 was spearheaded by armed, paramilitary squads made up of members of neo-Nazi organisations which even before February 2014 had begun seizing power in Ukraine’s western provinces. The post-coup Ukrainian government faced constant threats and was under the strong influence of these groups. But Ukraine’s Russian population, concentrated mainly in the provinces of the east and south-east, refused to recognise the authorities installed by the coup, fearing further attacks on their interests by extreme nationalist currents. In the majority, Russian-speaking provinces, protest actions began breaking out in April 2014 with slogans calling for disaffected regions in Ukraine to be granted autonomous governing powers. At this stage, there was no talk of secession from Ukraine except among the population of Crimea, where decades of economic, social and cultural under-development under Ukraine combined with outrage over a coup against an elected president and government to create strong support for a return of the peninsula to Russia.

The new Ukrainian government relied on police units of the Interior Ministry and paramilitary formations of extreme right-wing nationalist organisations in attempts to crush the rising, pro-autonomy protest actions in the east of Ukraine. Pro-coup forces borrowed Western terminology, accusing the pro-autonomy protests of “separatism”. At the same time, growing pressure began to be exerted against political forces within central and western Ukraine which were advocating negotiations to secure a peaceful resolution of the rising conflict. In particular, many regional offices of the Communist Party of Ukraine, which was advocating understanding and talks between the two sides, were ransacked and set on fire while numerous physical assaults were conducted against the party’s activists.

On March 16, 2014 a referendum was held in Crimea, resulting in an overwhelming vote in favour of joining the Russian Federation. Russian military forces were invited by the government of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (ARC) to ensure security in a number of Crimean districts and stand ready to repel neo-Nazi invaders from Ukraine.

The ARC was the only government in Ukraine outside of Kiev holding autonomous powers, a holdover from Soviet Crimea’s original, autonomous status dating from 1921, while Russian military forces were present in Crimea in 2014 according to a 1996 treaty between post-Soviet Ukraine and post-Soviet Russia. The accusation that Crimea was forcibly annexed does not match the reality. There is no evidence that Russian service personnel exerted any pressure on the Crimean authorities nor on the vote of the region’s residents expressing their political will. Nor did Russian troops engage in clashes with units of the Ukrainian armed forces stationed on the territory of Crimea. Subsequent polling of the Crimean population, including by Western-funded polling agencies, confirmed by even larger numbers than the referendum itself the will to secede from coup Ukraine. Consequently, there is no doubt whatsoever that it was an act of political self-determination by the residents of Crimea to join the Russian Federation that took place in March 2014.

In the eastern provinces, meanwhile, radical Ukrainian nationalists began staging armed attacks against continued, pro-autonomy protests. In April/May of 2014, protestors began occupying provincial administration buildings in cities and towns in Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkov regions, including in Mariupol. In the city of Slavyansk in Donetsk Province, administration premises were seized by a group of volunteer fighters who had travelled from Crimea. This incident, in particular, was used by the authorities in Kiev as a pretext for declaring that it was now waging an “anti-terrorist operation” against the population of the eastern provinces. This language was presumed to appeal to Western leaders and to opinion-makers in Western media.

In the city of Kharkov (second-largest in Ukraine) in the eastern, Donbass region, an attempt by protesters to occupy the provincial administration building was beaten off by a detachment of Kiev’s special forces. But in the cities of nearby Lugansk and Donetsk provinces, protesters were taking control. On April 7, a ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ was proclaimed. Throughout the Donbass and in the Odessa region, popular militia units began to be formed. A referendum on the status of the Donbass was called for May 11, 2014.

Kiev then decided to stake on a further heightening of the confrontation. In Odessa on May 2, 2014, using the pretext of a hotly contested football match featuring one hostile team from Kharkov, thousands of members and supporters of far-right, ultra-nationalist groups assembled in the city center, bent on confrontation with pro-autonomy advocates. Following many hours of street clashes between the rival sides, a section of the anti-coup protesters took refuge in the large and historic House of Trade Unions. The building was then set on fire by the ultras. Dozens of people died in the fire, including many who jumped from windows and were then beaten to death as police and firefighters sympathetic to the ultras stood by, often captured by news cameras.

On May 9, 2014, during a public demonstration by Mariupol residents in honour of Victory Day, marking the anniversary of the WW2 victory over Nazi Germany, a battle erupted between Ukrainian troops that had entered the city and a police unit that was refusing to take part in suppressing the demonstrators whom authorities had declared to be “separatists”. Clashes also took place between soldiers and demonstrators, resulting in several unarmed demonstrators being killed.

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Based on the results of referendum votes on May 11 in Donetsk and Lugansk, in which a number of polling stations and referendum organisers had come under attack, the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic were proclaimed. Initially, no world government recognized the proclamations, including the government of the Russian Federation.

Kiev then launched a top-to-bottom reorganization of its army (following many examples of soldiers refusing to suppress pro-autonomy protests) and began a steady buildup of its paramilitaries and revamped army in the Donbass region. Armed clashes took place in May as population centers being defended by poorly armed, popular militias fell. The far-right Azov Battalion took control of the port city of Mariupol. In July, pro-autonomy forces were unable to hold the cities of Slavyansk and Kramatorsk amidst heavy fighting. Elsewhere in Donbass, efforts by Kiev forces to impose their control were less successful. Gradually, defense lines were created by the Donbass militias, prompting Kiev authorities to resort to artillery and rocket attacks against those cities or residential districts they no longer controlled, in the first instance against Donetsk and Lugansk cities. The civilian populations suffered significant casualties, and this was now to last for years. A full-scale civil war by Kiev was now taking place. But victory eluded Kiev and its self-declared, “anti-terrorist operation”.

Despite numerous assertions, there is no proof that Russian military forces took part directly in the military clashes in Donbass. Although many thousands of people were demonstrating in Moscow demanding that armed defense be provided to the populations there, the Russian government refrained from taking this step, opting instead for diplomacy.

For all that, the Russian government did not stand aside completely from the conflict. Regular shipments of humanitarian aid commenced early on because Ukrainian forces were blocking supplies of food, water, electricity, and other essentials. Volunteer fighters were streaming in from Russia, but these were not mercenaries. They were not being paid to take part in the fighting. They were volunteers. They brought military equipment with them, alongside the civilian-style firearms and ammunition they possessed. It cannot be excluded that obsolete weapons also seeped into Donbass from the stores of the Russian army, but a large proportion of the weapons and other military hardware in the hands of the Donbass militias had been seized from the Ukrainian armed forces, or in many cases were purchased from Ukrainian soldiers, among whom corruption was already reaching previously unheard-of dimensions.

The Minsk peace agreements of September 2014 and February 2015

Ultimately, the Ukrainian forces suffered a series of painful military defeats between the summer of 2014 and the early months of 2015. Two peace agreements between the rebel forces and Kiev were discussed and agreed in talks in the Belarus capital of Minsk. For the second one, France, Germany, and Russia agreed to act as guarantors. These agreements provided for ceasefires, while the ‘Minsk 2’ agreement in February 2015 provided for measures of political autonomy for the Donetsk and Lugansk republics (as they now termed themselves) as well as integration of rebel military forces into the Ukrainian armed forces.

The provisions of Minsk 2 were never respected nor implemented by Kiev, which took advantage of the fact that the new lines of demarcation set by Minsk 2 passed close by many densely settled districts and cities. Ukrainian armed forces began constant shelling against residential neighbourhoods, causing many deaths and injuries among the civilian populations with no letup. Evidence was later obtained indicating that a number of members of the mission in Ukraine of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) were effectively providing the Ukrainian forces with the coordinates for targets to be shelled. The mission was nominally entrusted with monitoring compliance with the accord itself.

Acts of sabotage were being carried out against the pro-autonomy forces as well as assassinations of public figures. Tragically, the head of the Donetsk Republic, the highly respected Aleksandr Zakharchenko, was assassinated on August 31, 2018.

Kiev showed no interest in adopting legislation providing for a return of the autonomous republics of Donetsk and Lugansk to the fold of Ukraine. The deputy head of the provincial administration of Dnipropetrovsk province (bordering Donetsk), Borys Filatov, wrote on Facebook on the eve of the referendum in Crimea: “Don’t send paramilitary forces from the Maidan and do not make extremist declarations. We should give these scum all kinds of promises and guarantees, and make all kinds of concessions. As for hanging them, well take care of that later.”

The supreme tragedy for Donbass lay in the fact that its future was not being entirely decided by Kiev. The patrons of the ultra-nationalists in power in Kiev, that is Washington and Brussels, did not want autonomy and peace. They wanted Russia to suffer the continuing pain of a military conflict right on its border. After leaving office, Angela Merkel and François Hollande, who had taken part in drafting the ‘Minsk 2’agreement of February 2015 and co-signed it as guarantors, began to publicly admit that the purpose of the agreement had been to allow time for Kiev to prepare for war against Russia. In 2019, Kiev stated bluntly that it would not fulfil Minsk 2. The fuse for an armed conflict was thus lit as Kiev proceeded with intensive preparations to solve its ‘Donbass problem’ by military means.

A complex of causes

Without a detailed account as above of the history of the military conflict that broke open in Ukraine in February 2022, it is difficult to reach a correct understanding of the reasons that impelled Russia to undertake military action. For this to finally happen, a larger complex of causes had to come together.

The first of the reasons for Russia’s military intervention was the imperative of defending the populations of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics from Ukrainian attacks. Russia had acquired a perfect grasp of the lessons of ‘Operation Storm’ in Serbia in August 1995 when the Serbian region of Krajina was “ethnically cleansed” in a four-day operation by the far larger armed forces of Croatia, along with the armed forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Earlier, the Serbs had been guaranteed a ceasefire under the supervision of United Nations peacekeepers. With the participation of the US, however, an invasion of the Serbian territories was planned, under the protection of the US and the European NATO countries. The agreement for a ceasefire that had been reached was crudely violated. The result was that with support from NATO aircraft, the forces of Serbian Krajina were smashed in just four days. More than 200,000 citizens became refugees, and thousands of civilians were killed by the Croatian forces. Homes, often entire settlements, were demolished by artillery fire or were looted and burned.

Russia was not prepared to permit something similar to happen to the populations of Donbass. A majority of them were of Russian ethnicity, while many who were of Ukrainian or mixed Slavic ancestry had for many decades lived together in harmony with their neighbors.

Since 2014, the ultra-nationalist forces of the Kiev administration have been unleashing terror against the peaceful population of the Donbass territories, be they under Ukrainian occupation or living in territories now controlled by pro-autonomy forces. Through shelling and other methods, civilians beyond the front lines in the rear areas of the former Ukrainian provinces were being constantly injured or killed by Kiev. Russians proper were also being attacked by cross-border attacks or intrusions. These facts served to confirm the worst fears of Donbass residents, who were also cognizant of the threats being issued by the leaders of Ukraine to ‘exterminate’ entirely the pro-autonomy movement. There is good reason to believe that if the Russian military intervention of February 2022 had not occurred, the world would have witnessed genocidal actions more terrible than the crimes of the Croatian regime against the people of Serbia.

A second reason was the threat posed by the rebirth of Nazism in Ukraine. For many years, a spirit of hatred for Russia and everything Russian had been quietly cultivated in the Ukrainian population by neo-Nazis. Now they were armed with official propaganda spreading openly chauvinist and even racist views against all things Russian. Hatred of Russia began to be implanted in. Armed terrorist organisations of extreme right-wing and ultra-nationalist ideology were flourishing in Ukraine and were able to force Kiev to bend to their will and submit to their influence. Neo-Nazi ideology was actively preached, including the justification of the World War Two collaboration with Hitler and Nazi Germany. Nazi symbols were now openly flaunted. Historically, the Western world had looked with substantial indifference on the spread of Nazi ideology in Germany during the 1920s and into the 1930s; at first, it had even encouraged Hitler’s expansionist appetite. Then it became too late: the ‘problem’ of Hitler and Nazism was transformed into a catastrophic world war. By 2022, Russia was categorically unprepared to accept any kind of similar outcome.

A third reason lies in the fact that the NATO countries were deliberately and consistently advancing their military infrastructure to the east, toward the borders of Russia. Regardless of whether Ukraine was formally a NATO member or not, the North Atlantic alliance actively set about re-organizing and re-arming the Ukrainian military, training its personnel and supplying it with advisors and instructors, who for practical purposes came to run Ukraine’s military and intelligence apparatus.

The combination of NATO’s military threat through expansion and extreme, anti-Russian ideology - in essence, a neo-Nazi ideology - became dominant in Kiev. This was expressed as a maniacal urge to ‘punish’ the people of Donbass and Crimea for defending their rights to self-determination politically and culturally, creating a dangerous mixture. When combined with the factors detailed earlier, this toxic mixture was destined inevitably to explode both politically and militarily. The NATO governments, however, showed themselves to be deaf to Russia’s concerns, refusing to acknowledge the country’s right to be concerned for its own national security. A final appeal by Russia to NATO governments to curb their expansion appetites was delivered on December 17, 2021, containing specific proposals to ease the growing tensions. This was rejected. Russia was then forced to resort to unilateral measures that would ensure its national security, and ensure the safety of the citizens of Donbass.

A fourth reason for Russia’s military action is that it was not only the Donetsk and Lugansk republics that were under attack. The rights and freedoms in the rest of Ukraine were being trampled underfoot, and it was not only the Russian-speaking population being affected. Political assassinations were taking place and going unpunished. “Undesirables” were being subjected to reprisals, unlawful arrests, and torture in underground prisons, many of which were operated by neo-Nazi paramilitaries. Opposition newspapers and television channels were forcibly shut down. Opposition parties were banned, as were many other media outlets that were simply independent. The properties of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) were arbitrarily seized, and its priests arrested. Such were the ‘European democratic values’ for which, Western politicians assure us, Ukraine is today fighting.

The present armed struggle on the territory of Ukraine is not a struggle by Russia to seize territory, nor is it a struggle against independent Ukrainian statehood. In practice, Russia intervened in a continuing civil war in Ukraine in order to guarantee the ethnic Russian population and all people opposed to neo-Nazi ideology their right to political self-determination. The conflict in Ukraine would not have arisen if the rights and freedoms of ethnic Russians in the previously multinational and multicultural Soviet Ukraine had been respected. Unfortunately, the Kiev authorities, with the support of the West did everything in their power to ensure that these rights and freedoms would need to be defended arms in hand.

Exploitation?

What is the picture regarding “exploitation” on the territories once part of Ukraine where the population has decided to unite with Russia? Just as before, the basic economic system remains capitalist; in this respect, nothing has changed. Large Ukrainian capital has been replaced by Russian capital, not as a result of the expropriation of property but because of Ukrainian oligarchs ceasing their activity on the territories that had joined Russia and leaving their enterprises to the hands of fate. A number of these enterprises (for example, the Mariupol Metallurgical Combine, which became the main stronghold of occupation by the neo-Nazi ‘Azov Battalion’) have been destroyed in the course of fighting, but small and medium-sized businesses have, for the most part, remained as they were earlier.

The example of Crimea shows that from the time when the peninsula returned to Russian jurisdiction in March 2014 until the beginning of Russian military action on Ukrainian territory in February 2022, there were no confiscations of the property of Ukrainian entrepreneurs. Large-scale investments in the fields of transport infrastructure, energy and water supply, agriculture, and the urban economy have been made in Crimea using funds from the Russian federal budget.

Since 2022, and despite the continuing military actions by NATO and Ukraine, similar investments have also been made on the territories of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Lugansk People’s Republic, and the new Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Provinces of the Russian Federation. Housing is being constructed along with the building of schools, hospitals, and cultural and sporting facilities.

It should be stressed that the new regions of Russia, which were formerly part of Ukraine, made major contributions to Ukraine’s GDP and state budget but received little national budget support in return. Transport infrastructure and municipal services on these territories were run-down, in a dismal state; large-scale repair works are now under way.

Simultaneously, the incomes of residents of the regions that have joined Russia are being raised to the general Russian level, which is substantially higher than in Ukraine. In the year 2000, before any conflicts had broken out, incomes in Ukraine on average were only half those in Russia. In 2013, on the eve of the Ukrainian coup d’état, the figure was about 42% of Russian incomes.

Following the coup in February 2014, living standards in Ukraine began falling rapidly. The purchasing power of incomes has recovered only slightly since then. In 2023, average incomes in Ukraine, as calculated by various international organisations, were between one-third and 40 per cent of average incomes in the Russian Federation. Higher Russian living standards are available to residents of the new Russian regions, including higher social incomes, pensions, minimum wages, health care benefits and other social welfare. Furthermore, the costs of utilities to residents of Russia are lower.

This is how so-called imperialist plunder, as said to be conducted by Russia, actually appears in practice. By joining the Russian Federation, the new regions formerly part of Ukraine have, of course, also come to share all the social and economic problems that characterize Russian capitalist society. Ukraine, however, left such a baneful legacy behind it on these territories that an unsympathetic Russian capitalism nevertheless holds out the prospect of a much better life, not least a life protected from the current, expansionist war moves by the NATO imperialists as well as any new such threats that may arise.

The Western imperialists are not make-believe imperialists, but the real thing. All of their cruelty and uncaring of human life and dignity stand bare today for the entire world to see.