The fierce resistance of a small band of vastly outgunned Chechen fighters against thousands of Russian troops is another serious blow to Russian president Boris Yeltsin and to Yeltsin's friends in the imperialist capitals of the world.
Moscow's inability to quickly squash the rebel force is a testament to the fighting spirit and capacity of all oppressed people. "Does Boris Yeltsin think this will stop Chechnya from wanting to be free?" asked one resident in Dagestan - underscoring the reality that the struggle against national oppression can never be extinguished short of annihilation of entire peoples.
The drama unfolding in Dagestan has developed into a major fiasco for Yeltsin and his military commanders. The steady pounding of Russian missiles - one per minute - and leveling of the tiny village of Pervomayskoye is earning the regime in Moscow the hatred of millions of workers and peasants all over the region.
Yeltsin's response to the Chechen demands for national rights is that of a regime in permanent crisis. The Stalinist forces who have recently experienced a political revival, gaining the biggest bloc of seats in parliament, called the assault "a shame for Russian democracy." The most prominent voice rising to the defense of Yeltsin's war is fascist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who asked for more, calling for napalm bombing the Chechen rebels throughout their land.
The defiant struggle of the Chechen people is a nightmare not only for Yeltsin, but for the imperialist rulers in Washington as well who have treated Boris as their darling in Moscow. It is a painful reminder to them that they are far from being able to reimpose stable and profitable capitalist domination in Russia, the other Soviet republics, or any of the other workers states in the region.
U.S. defense secretary William Perry made it clear that Yeltsin continues to have the Clinton administration's blessing in his assault on Chechnya. "We believe the Russian government is entirely correct in resisting this hostage- taking effort and resisting it very strongly," Perry said after Russian rockets had turned Pervomayskoye to rubble. He did suggest that a "surgical operation" would have been better - presumably like the one the Pentagon carried out in its war against Iraq, where 200,000 fleeing Iraqi soldiers and civilians were massacred under the careful guidance of Colin "Turkey Shoot" Powell.
On this score, the Clinton administration gets no quarrel from ultrarightist Patrick Buchanan who - a la Zhirinovsky - has warned about the dangers of the "nationalist virus" in places such as Chechnya "spreading to the West."
The independence struggle in Chechnya is a just one. It strengthens the working class and oppressed peoples in Russia and the region. The communist movement has always championed the right of oppressed nations to self- determination as a precondition to building genuine unity on the basis of equality among all the toilers.
There is an especially bitter irony to the anti-Islamic crusade in Russia that has its boiling point in Chechnya at the moment. Because one of the very first decrees of the Bolshevik-led government, issued in early December 1917, just after the triumph of the Russian revolution, was an "Appeal to all toiling Muslims of Russia and the East."
Without lending an iota of credence to any progressive character of Islam or any other religious beliefs or institutions, the Soviet republic declared: "All you whose mosques and shrines have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs have been trampled on by the czars and the Russian oppressors! Henceforth your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural institutions are declared free and inviolable. Build your national life freely and without hindrance. It is your right. Know that your rights - like those of all the peoples of Russia - are defended by the full force of the revolution and its organs, the soviets of workers', soldiers', and peasants' deputies."
And a few years later, at the 1920 Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East, leaders of the Communist International joined with other revolutionary fighters - from inside the borders of the old czarist empire and beyond - in calling on all Muslim toilers in the region to join in a "holy war for the liberation of all humanity from the yoke of capitalist and imperialist slavery, for the ending of all forms of exploitation of man by man!"
Three quarters of a century later, we can confidently assert that for class-struggle minded workers in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, reaffirming this clear pledge to oppressed and exploited toilers who may be Muslim, or who hail from parts of the world that are predominantly Muslim, is not a remote or external matter. From Chechnya and the Caucasus and all along the Silk Road, national groupings and minorities who are predominantly Muslim chafe against subordination to the Great Russian overlords and their agents, making mockery of Moscow's claims of normalization and stability, let alone the inviolability of borders.
This is not an external question for communist workers and for all working people in France, in Sweden, in the United Kingdom, or in Germany today. It comes directly into the fight to oppose NATO's imperialist war drive against Yugoslavia.
It comes directly into the fight by the workers and peasants in Russia to defend the political space they carved out with the collapse of the Stalinist regime there.
It also comes directly into the fight for democratic rights inside the United States. U.S. federal prosecutors just succeeded - after the first open sedition trial in many decades, a frame-up trial built around agents provocateurs - in railroading an Islamic cleric from Egypt and other defendants to prison with several facing life sentences.
The Chechens and other oppressed peoples in the mountain republics will continue to resist the Great Russian chauvinism that was reimposed on them by the regime of Stalin and continues to this day. Working people around the world should actively oppose the carnage meted out by the bloodthirsty Yeltsin regime, with Washington's backing, and welcome the example of fighting resistance set by the Chechen people.