Washington and its imperialist allies have seized on Moscow's offensive as a pretext to put greater pressure on the Russian government. "The violent military campaign in Chechnya is creating very negative reactions against Russia in the world," declared Michael Camdessus, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which represents the interests of the world's major imperialist powers. In his November 28 statement, Camdessus threatened that the IMF might hold up a promised loan to the Russian government.

Asked whether the White House would link backing for the IMF loan to the situation in Chechnya, State Department spokesman James Rubin stated, "Before one addresses the question whether one supports this loan in principle, there are a number of things the Russians have to do to satisfy the IMF, and we will not address ourselves to our decision as to whether to support the loan until they have met those steps." He said U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright would meet with the Russian foreign minister to raise "concerns about the way in which Russia is prosecuting this war... and the effect on civilians."

At the November 17-18 meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, held in Istanbul, Turkey, Clinton pointed at Russian president Boris Yeltsin and lectured, "If the attacks on [Chechen] civilians continue, the extremism Russia is trying to combat will only intensify." He called for a "political settlement."

Other bourgeois political figures have urged a more aggressive stance against Moscow. Conservative New York Times columnist William Safire criticized the White House for making "handwringing statements," and praised a declaration by Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush that "If the Russian government attacks innocent women and children in Chechnya it cannot expect international aid. Period."

In 1996, during Moscow's previous attempt to crush the independence struggle in Chechnya, Clinton gave tacit support for Russian president Boris Yeltsin's assault, fearing the destabilizing effects of a Chechen victory on his weak bureaucratic regime.

Since then, however, tensions between Washington and Moscow have increased. The U.S. rulers have found it harder than they had hoped to move toward the restoration of capitalism in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. As result, the Clinton administration has pushed ahead with moves to tighten the imperialist military encirclement of Russia, including expanding the NATO military alliance eastward, placing U.S. troops closer to the Russian border. The U.S. government is also trying to pressure Moscow to revise the 1972 Anti-Balistic Missile treaty, to allow the installation of a U.S. missile system in the Pacific that would effectively give Washington a first strike nuclear capacity. Both Beijing and Moscow oppose such a scheme.

The U.S. rulers are simultaneously trying to establish themselves as the dominant power in the former Soviet republics along Russia's southern flank, including carrying out military exercises in Kazakhstan. On the economic front, Washington has been pressing for an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Turkey that would bypass Russia. A deal to build such a pipeline was reached November 18 by the governments of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey.

Despite Clinton's pious statements of concern for civilian lives in Chechnya, the U.S. president made clear he's no supporter of self-determination for the people of that region. "We want Russia to overcome the scourge of terrorism and lawlessness," he told the OSCE summit. "We believe Russia has not only the right, but the obligation to defend its territorial integrity."  
 

Kremlin aims to retake Chechnya

Moscow has painted Chechen fighters as "terrorists" who are responsible for a series of explosions in apartment buildings that killed more than 300 people in several Russian cities in September. No one has claimed responsibility for the blasts. The Yeltsin regime has used the explosions and the attacks in Dagestan to justify its war against Chechnya. Since late September the Russian military has relentlessly directed bombs and artillery fire against the Chechen people with the stated aim of wiping out "Islamic terrorists" who the Kremlin claims launched raids into the neighboring republic of Dagestan.

Now the Russian government has begun to openly state that it aims to retake Chechnya, which won a degree of independence after Chechen rebels humiliated the Russian military in the 1994-96 war. At that time an invasion force of more than 30,000 Russian troops was dispatched to crush the independence movement. Some 80,000 people were killed and dozens of cities and villages were devastated, but the Chechen resistance remained unquelled.

On November 25 hundreds of Russian rockets launched from several directions pounded Grozny, killing scores of civilians and setting sections of the city ablaze. Rounds of mortar fire also hit the town of Urs-Martan, reportedly a base for 3,500 Chechen fighters. A Russian major said his troops had orders to continue shelling Grozny for the next several days, the Associated Press reported.

So far Moscow's bombing campaign against the 1.5 million Chechens has killed more than 4,000 people and forced at least 220,000 from their homes into the neighboring republic of Ingushetia and elsewhere. While claiming support from Chechen civilians in its war against "bandits and terrorists," the Kremlin's assault has angered the Chechen population.

"If you could talk to everyone in the villages you would see that 70 percent are against [Russian troops] being here," said Alisof Kolymanovich, a former tractor operator.

"Is this a war?" asked Grozny resident Ali Taisimov. "In a war soldiers fight in close combat...The Russians are only bombing civilians."

The Russian military has balked at storming into Grozny or advancing into the mountainous southern part of Chechnya. It has relied on air strikes and artillery fire, trying to avoid ground battles which inflicted heavy losses on Russian soldiers in the previous war.

"The logic of the military operation in Chechnya consists of minimizing losses," asserted Vladimir Baranovsky, an official of Moscow's Academy of Sciences. The "NATO operation in Yugoslavia was founded on the same principle," he added, referring to Washington's 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia earlier this year.  
 

Appeal to Russian troops

Some Russian soldiers now deployed in Chechnya are uncomfortable with their role as military occupiers. "Sometimes I don't know what we are doing," said Sergei Kuznetsov, a 19-year-old private. "During the day, the people in Gudermes smile at us and bring us goodies. But at night, they are out there shooting at us. I don't know whom we are protecting from whom."

Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov issued an appeal November 25 to the Russian troops to desert their units and support the Chechens' struggle against Moscow. "You are gun-fodder and human slaves in a high-profit business called war," he wrote in an open letter to the soldiers. "You're suffering the hardships of military service not for the sake of the Russian people, but in the interests of a small group of Russian politicians."

In the Kremlin's previous war against the largely Islamic people in the northern Caucasus mountains, Chechen women stood on the road leading to Grozny and appealed to Russian troops to refuse Moscow's orders and halt their advance. Many times the Russian soldiers and their officers refused to move their tanks any further.

Numerous articles have appeared in the big-business press cite the "popularity" of the war against the Chechen people compared to several years before, pointing to the rising star of Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin, whose conduct of the military campaign has made him Russia's "most popular political figure," according to the Washington Post.

That is not the universal view, however. Some Russian women, members of the Association of Soldier's Mothers, have been traveling to the Caucasus region to prevent their sons from being forced into battle against the Chechen people. The group also organized actions against Yeltsin's last war against Chechnya. Some help their sons to desert the military.

"These women stop at nothing to keep their sons alive," explained Valentina Melnikova, head of the association's Moscow branch.  
 

Conflict rooted in Stalinist betrayal

The Yeltsin regime's anti-Islamic crusade and war in the Caucasus has its roots in the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union more than 70 years ago. Following the victory of the Russian revolution of October 1917, the Bolshevik party headed by V.I. Lenin championed the right to national self-determination of peoples who had been oppressed under the tsarist empire, forging a genuinely voluntary federation. The bureaucratic caste that began to emerge in the early 1920s, with Joseph Stalin as its foremost figure, pushed to reverse this course. The Stalinist apparatus intensified and institutionalized Great Russian chauvinism in the 1930s, transforming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into a prison house of nations.

The bureaucratic regimes in the Soviet Union and those imposed on other countries of Eastern Europe where capitalist social relations had been overturned served as reliable instruments for the transmission of capitalist values. They disintegrated in 1989-91 under the accumulated weight of the social and economic crisis generated by decades of bureaucratic misrule and the pressure of the deepening downturn of the capitalist system worldwide. As this unfolded, the oppression of national groupings through the use of police repression and military force began to weaken.

The Yeltsin government today is attempting to quell the rising resistance to Russian chauvinism among the oppressed nations in the Caucasus. The Communist Party of Russia, another of the competing factions of the bureaucratic caste of opportunists and assassins that shattered a decade ago, has voiced its support for Yeltsin's war against Chechnya.

Maurice Williams contributed to this article.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home