Moscow is trying to quell unrest among the impoverished people in the entire Caucasus region with its onslaught against the 1.5 million Chechens.

"The ultimate goal is to send a message to all the North Caucasian republics," declared presidential press spokesman Dmitry Yakushkin. "We want to show that there must be some kind of central authority that can resolve the most complicated conflicts."

Russian soldiers are now occupying the northern third of Chechnya. Moscow has set up a blockade, banned foreign trade and suspended international flights to the region. The regime also forced Georgia to shut its northern border near Chechnya.

The Kremlin, which originally claimed it needed to create a "buffer zone" against "Islamic terrorists," is more openly stating that its aim is to retake the Chechen republic, which won a degree of autonomy after Chechen fighters humiliated the regime of Russian president Boris Yeltsin in the 1994–1996 war.

"The ring of our 'sanitary zone' is tightening up," said Russian general Gennadi Troshev, commander of the military operation. "The ring will be gradually tightened until the whole territory is under the full control of the federal forces."

On November 12 Russian officials announced the army had seized Gudermes, the second largest city in the republic. Moscow has floated plans to establish Gudermes as the new capital as the regime tightened its military ring around Grozny. The day it seized Gudermes, the Kremlin launched one of its heaviest bombardments yet, destroying oil refineries near Grozny, the capital, and leveling other villages. The next day Russian warplanes and helicopters flew a record 180 sorties against the Chechen rebel strongholds of Bamut and Samashki.

The Russian government has rained bombs and artillery fire on Chechnya since late September in an attempt to crush rebel fighters who Moscow claims conducted raids into neighboring Dagestan, to the east of Chechnya. Guerrilla forces fighting for the independence of Dagestan had captured six villages there in early September.

As part of justifying their bombardment of Chechnya, Russian government officials smeared Chechen rebels as "terrorists" who are responsible for the series of explosions in Moscow that killed more than 300 people. No one has claimed responsibility for the blasts.  
 

Struggle for self-determination

The Yeltsin regime is trying to stanch the rising resistance to Russian chauvinism among the oppressed nations in Caucasus and to crush their fight for self-determination. As the victory of workers and peasants in the October 1917 revolution in Russia gave impulse to uprisings throughout the old tsarist empire, the communist leadership of the Bolshevik Party began to forge a voluntary federation of workers and farmers republics.

The Bolshevik revolution broke the domination of capitalist social relations and led to the expropriation of capitalist property in industry, banking, and wholesale trade. State monopoly of foreign trade and a planned economy were also established —the foundations of a workers state.

In the early 1920s, however, a bureaucratic caste led by Joseph Stalin began to emerge in the Russian workers state and it pressed to reverse the Bolsheviks' policy on national self-determination and voluntary federation. This counterrevolutionary course was intensified and institutionalized in the 1930s and the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" became in fact another prison house of nations inherited from the old tsarist regime and imperialism.

The Stalinist apparatus in the Soviet Union and those imposed on the workers states in Eastern and Central Europe reinforced national oppression and divisions, while serving as a reliable instrument for the transmission of capitalist values. The bureaucratic oppression through the use of police repression and military force —which was a service for imperialism — began disintegrating in 1989.

The procapitalist Yeltsin administration is a remnant of this bureaucratic caste of opportunists and assassins, which has now shattered into competing factions. Popular explosions among broad layers of working people, middle class layers, and youth against the regime in Moscow are inevitable.

The political instability in the region has alarmed Washington and other imperialist powers. The U.S. rulers, whose ultimate aim is to reimpose capitalist property relations in Russia, have counted on the Yeltsin government to curtail social unrest in the region. That explains the statement in a November 15 New York Times news article that "Washington has said it understands when the Russians insist that they are fighting to protect their sovereignty against terrorists."  
 

Claim to be fighting terrorism

"The antiterrorist campaign was forced upon us," Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin declared in a column printed in the Times the day before. He claimed U.S. spy agencies reported that "the world's most wanted terrorist," Osama bin Laden, "himself is helping to finance the guerrillas."

Putin asserted that Moscow's actions are similar to those of Washington, which accused bin Laden of organizing the Aug. 7, 1998, bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Two weeks later U.S. warships stationed in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea launched 79 cruise missiles on Afghanistan and Sudan. The White House claimed the missiles were fired in "self-defense" against an "international terrorism network" allegedly organized by bin Laden. Earlier this year, the New York Times admitted that "no known evidence implicates" the Saudi businessman.

While the Clinton administration has amplified its mild criticism of Moscow's onslaught slightly, the White House continues to give tacit support to the military operation against the Chechens, as it has in the past. Chechnya is a part of Russia, which "has a right to protect its territorial integrity," U.S. national security adviser Samuel Berger declared November 12.

More than 200,000 Chechens have fled the Russian military's constant rocketing and shelling. Most of them went to the neighboring republic of Ingushetia, where many people are living in tents or rail cars in freezing temperatures. Chechen officials estimate more than 4,000 civilians have been killed by the bombardment.

Moscow's anti-Muslim crusade has embittered the largely Islamic people of Chechnya. "They surround you and want to destroy every thing in sight," said Leche Ansarov, a Chechen resident who fled into Ingushetia but was returning to Grozny to retrieve his family. "What else can I do but take up arms?" he stated.

Russian officials "say they are fighting terrorists, but they are the only terrorists I've seen," Liza Nagalayeva, a schoolteacher from the Chechen town of Kulari, told the Christian Science Monitor. "We are a small people but we want our freedom."

Moscow is trying to avoid repeating the defeat of the previous Chechen war — when Russian ground troops took heavy losses from guerrilla attacks — by using long-range artillery, pilotless aircraft, and warplanes to bombard Chechnya. Troops are sent into a village or town only after it has surrendered or is empty.

In 1994 the Yeltsin regime dispatched an invasion force of 30,000 Russian troops to crush the independence movement there. Some 80,000 people were killed, and the city of Grozny and dozens of villages were demolished.

Although Yeltsin was forced to sign accords in 1996 granting Chechnya de facto self-government, Moscow refuses to recognize the region's independence. "Our position is that Chechnya is Russian territory and nothing has changed," said Yeltsin spokesman Dmitry Yakushkin.  
 

'Pushed to brink of civil war'

The conflict has heightened tensions among Russia's bureaucratic ruling factions. Russian generals have threatened to disobey any government decision that would deny what they see as an all-out military victory. Gen. Anatoly Kvashnin, chief of the Russian general staff, reportedly declared he would resign when Yeltsin administration officials floated proposals to talk with Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov, according to the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets.

While Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev hinted that negotiations to end Moscow's military campaign might be near, Gen. Vladimir Shamanov, Russian commander of the western front in Chechnya, told the Nezavismaya Gazeta newspaper, "If the army is stopped, there would be a massive defection of all ranks from the armed forces, including the generals. Russia's officer corps will not stand for another slap in the face." Shamanov said if they could not score a decisive military victory, "the country would be pushed to the brink of civil war."

The ultrarightist provincial governor of Siberia, Alexander Lebed, a retired general who negotiated the agreement that ended the last Chechen war, has indicated his willingness to repeat that performance.

"The Russian armed forces have fulfilled their mission," declared Grigory Yavlinsky, a leader of one of the more openly procapitalist factions in parliament. He called for a halt to the bombing, arguing that the war on Chechnya has resulted in growing strains between the military and government officials and "leads to a serious political destabilization."

One of Yavlinsky's advisers, Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the Center for Strategic Studies, warned that a "creeping military coup" was developing in Russia, the Financial Times reported November 10.

Anxiety over the escalating strife in the region has increased among imperialist powers. "The stakes are high," asserted an article in the November 13 Economist. "They include not just the suffering of the Chechens but the instability of the Caucasus, and perhaps of Russia itself."

"Moscow has lost its way in this adventure in the north Caucasus," declared French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine. "There is a Chechen problem that goes far beyond the issue of terrorism."

Meanwhile, hostility to Great Russian chauvinism is smoldering in the restive republics in the North Caucasus, which include Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Karbardino-Balkaria, and Karachayevo-Cherkess.

"[Russian] soldiers come out to the road to beg for food and cigarettes from passing cars," said an Ingush policeman at a checkpoint. "But if we try to approach them, they crouch down and raise their guns. They're scared to death of us."

Moscow's attempts to subjugate the mostly Islamic peoples of the North Caucasus "means endless war and dissension," asserted Franz Sheregi, an official with the Institute of Social and National Issues in Moscow. "This is a colonial war, and it will end with the republics in the North Caucasus breaking free from Russia."  
 
 
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