Ukraine - December 2017

Once more, about the Russian question

The relationship between the imperialist powers
and the "great Russia" of the butcher Putin

Preview of the book Ukraine in Civil,
next publication of the Editorial Rudolph Klement

The Ukrainian revolution not only rekindled the question of the Eastern European countries and the unabashed struggle of imperialism to recolonize them, but it turned red hot the Russian question again, and as we will explain in this chapter, also the dispute by imperialism to historically define the status of this state -as it should also do with China-, which has not been resolved since Stalinism handed over the former workers' states to capitalism and Wall Street. This is a strategic issue that we will go over through this chapter, using the theoretical corpus that our current elaborated about it in the book "1989: The Stalinist bureaucracy handed over the Workers' States to Wall Street and world capitalism", published by the Rudolph Klement Socialist Publishing House.
As we have said, Ukraine is a fundamental piece in this path, because it is on the very borders of Russia and there have been for long the closest ties between those countries. We have already mentioned the economic overlap between the two countries and how the gas pipelines that transport Russian gas towards Germany and from there supply the latter's industry and the European industry in general, crossing the beaten Eastern European country.

The US has stepped on Ukraine and taken away Putin’s control over this country. As we say in the 2013-2014 book Syria under fire: "Ultimately, the struggle for the "new markets" conquered by capitalism in 1989 and their recolonization will be the cause of enormous confrontations, trade wars, political wars and in the future (if the proletariat does not prevent it) military wars between the different imperialist powers. The victorious imperialist powers (of the trade war, (EdN) need to remove any intermediaries in the plundering of Russia's wealth, its gas and its oil, and in the exploitation of Chinese labor." (Carlos Munzer, Abu Muad, Abu al-Baraa; 2014)

As we will explain later, the Citibank is the main bank in Russia, and the one that controls its finances. Germany is the largest foreign investor, especially in regard to the control and transfer of Russian gas to Europe. The great inter-imperialist dispute that has opened up between the US, France and Germany is about who controls, in addition to the gas pipelines that supply Europe with Russian gas, the businesses of the Russian military industry. Ukraine is a fundamental piece for imperialism on the road to the recolonization of Russia because it is the coal and steel mines of the Don Basin that supply the Russian military industrial apparatus, so imperialism, by controlling them, would control the supply to that industry. Only the proletariat and its revolution will be able to stop this inexorable path.
Imperialism is reaction along the entire line: the former workers' states are transitional capitalist states whose ultimate destiny will be resolved on the terrain of the world class struggle.

Almost 30 years after the restoration of capitalism in the former USSR, the iron law defined by Lenin in 1916 is tragically confirmed once again: imperialism is reaction all along the line. This means, first of all, that there is no possibility for the emergence of new imperialist powers. On the other hand, the brutal crisis of the capitalist-imperialist world economy in 2008 clearly marked that there are too many imperialist powers, and that the exacerbated inter-imperialist dispute – today in the economic and political fields, and tomorrow in the military one– will have to be defined as to which are the victorious powers and which ones are the losers?
The revisionist "theories" that affirmed, and still today dare to without blushing, that China and Russia would be transforming into new imperialist powers, end up in the dustbin of history. Rotten imperialist capitalism today shows that Russia and China do not have even an iota of “imperialist powers” ​​and that, if the proletariat does not prevent it, their destiny is to be colonies, semi-colonies or protectorates of this or that imperialist power.
Because in this imperialist epoch of reaction, where there is no place for new imperialist powers to arise, to believe that the existence of independent capitalist countries – neither imperialist nor semi-colonial or colonial – can endure, is nothing more than a reactionary utopia dreamed of by the new Great Russian and Chinese bourgeoisie.

The definitive location of the former workers' states in the world labor division remained as a undefined task in 1989. The book "1989: The Stalinist bureaucracy handed over the Workers' States to Wall Street and world capitalism” poses this question: “¿ What was the outcome of the abortion of the political revolution in 1989;  the imposition in the deformed and degenerated workers' states of  restorationist bourgeois governments and regimes that performed the liquidation of the foreign trade monopoly,  the collective ownership of the production means and  the planned economy? the interruption of the transition from capitalism to socialism,  the transition regime, that is,  the dictatorship of the proletariat (...) But these countries must be called transitory capitalists, because their definitive location  as semi-colonies of imperialism is not defined(...) We maintain that this imperialist success is not yet defined because imperialism has not been able to resolve in its favor the confrontation between revolution and counterrevolution at the world level (...) For this reason, because this confrontation is not resolved, our definition is a provisional one: they are transitory capitalist states or former workers' states in liquidation. (…) The historical destiny of those states can only be determined by the result of the international class struggle: Either the proletariat, and its most concentrated battalions, the working classes of the imperialist countries, advance along the path of proletarian revolution, giving impetus not only to a "complementary" revolution (that is, a political revolution. RN ) but to a social revolution in the former workers' states in liquidation that restores the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms, to re-expropriate the "new rich"  and imperialist estates as well as the banks, to re-impose the state monopoly of foreign trade, the planned economy and a genuine Soviet democracy; or the victorious counterrevolution, through crashes, wars, crushing, and historical defeats of the international proletariat, etc., ends up incorporating these states into the world division of labor as semi-colonies, colonies, or direct protectorates.”

This definition and this prognosis are confirmed by the bankruptcy and the convulsive events that are going through Eastern Europe, the countries of the former USSR, and Russia and China themselves. The 2008 crisis revealed with brutal crudeness that the era in which there were businesses in the former workers' states to be distributed among all the imperialist powers had come to an end. In this new period of historical convulsions that has begun, we are witnessing the first steps in the final race between the imperialist powers to historically define the character of Russia and China, and this will not be done peacefully but, as we have said, through a ferocious inter-imperialist dispute.

Only the working class can stop it. Since 2008, we have witnessed heroic combats by the international proletariat, in particular by the battle-hardened masses of the Maghreb and the Middle East and the Ukrainian masses with their war cry "Let the USSR return!". In Eastern Europe, between 2007/2009, the Romanian, Lithuanian, Georgian, Latvian, Hungarian, Czech, Bulgarian, Moldovan masses rose up in enormous processes against imperialism and its plans to redouble semi-colonization. Only the decisive advances of the world revolution and new victorious October revolutions that restore the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms in the former workers' states, would be able to avoid the future of plunder, submission, war and slavery for the working class and the exploited who knew in the 20th century, to expropriate the bourgeoisie in a third of the planet. 

The current dispute within imperialism for Russia

The policy of imperialism is to penetrate Russia economically and financially. Citibank, American Express, Visa, manage the Russian banking and financial circuit. Meanwhile, German companies own 50% of Gazprom, which supplies gas to all of Europe and is one of the largest oil-gas companies in the world; and thousands of German capitalists own their companies in Russia, above all linked to the gas, oil and military industries.

Imperialism presses to colonize Russia more and more, and even more it must force and blackmail the Russian oligarchy to surrender. For this reason, USA and European imperialism have expropriated all Russian funds abroad for 300 billion dollars and they still have not returned them; meanwhile they are demanding Russia to return Crimea. 
Before the Russian masses rise up and go for Putin's head, imperialism is seeking at the same time to create a "democratic variant", a direct agent of imperialism, that anticipates and channels the hatred of the masses against the Putin and the Russian oligarchs’ oppressor regime.
Meanwhile, imperialism uses Putin and the Russian oligarchy as hitmen and bodyguards, as we see in Ukraine, Syria, and first of all in Afghanistan. US imperialism knows that if it has to withdraw from Afghanistan due to a new revolutionary attack by the masses of the region or by the masses of the US it has notwithstanding a guard dog already tested in Syria, to massacre in Kabul. 
The same thing happens with China. First, Obama fenced it off with a Free Trade Agreement with 14 Pacific countries, an issue that did not coalesced, since China began a negotiation and a trade agreement with Europe, including a new infrastructure for the transit of goods from Beijing to London. Now comes Trump, ass-kicking, blackmailing and threatening that US transnationals would withdraw from China and the US would close its market, the largest in the world, for the Chinese products; by increasing the productivity of the US economy, he tries to make China surrender and kneel down on its all-fours and promise it would hand over its profitable state-owned companies and most of its bank holdings. The military threat against North Korea is also part of a strategic offensive by the US and Japan to semi-colonize China.
US imperialism, from the puppet government in Kiev, now controls all the gas pipelines that pass through Ukraine - except the one that has been left to Putin in Crimea as payment for his counterrevolutionary services.   
In order to impose Ukraine's entry into NATO, as is the plan already voted in the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada, imperialism will not only need to crush the exploited of the entire nation, starting with Donbass, but it will also have to expel Russia and its military base in Crimea, since the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula to the Russian Federation was not officially recognized and anyone who has a military base from a non-aligned country such as Russia cannot join NATO.  The siege of Russia, with the blocking of accounts of the Russian establishment by US and European imperialism through their banks, has exposed once again how all Russian businesses are tied to imperialist banks such as Citibank and the Bundesbank.

Putin, a Citibank manager and junior partner of France and Germany in the high-tech military and gas business

The traitorous leaderships grouped in the WSF, made up of Stalinists and a wing of the renegades of Trotskyism, have been proclaiming the “anti-imperialism” of the assassin Putin.  This is just a joke, and in bad taste.
From the financial point of view, Russia is tied with multiple ties of dependency to imperialism.  Citibank has, in assets alone, more than 10.3 million dollars, being the largest bank in Russia, managing financial transactions and having as clients a large part of the transnational and Russian companies that operate in the country.  There is not even a hint of "anti-imperialism" in Putin, he is a manager of Citibank.
Other traitorous currents proclaim that Russia is a “military power”.  The reality is that Russia has the capacity for mass production of conventional weapons that it exports to backward countries, inherited from the former USSR.  But it is far from producing state-of-the-art weapons.  The companies of imperialism do the enormous and bulkiest businesses, including supplying high technology to the Russian military industrial apparatus.
The entire Russian army and navy depend on the high technology of the imperialist powers.  In 2011 Putin signed a contract for the acquisition of two French Mistral helicopter carriers, for 1.4 billion euros.  These ships have capacity for up to 16 heavy or 35 light helicopters, some 50 military vehicles, including a dozen tanks, four assault boats and half a thousand soldiers.
These were going to be built, at the end of 2014, in Russian shipyards, where French imperialism would consolidate its technology in Russia to produce, in the future, on a large scale, weapons of this type, to be sold in the world through the huge arms marketing chain that Russia has in the world market (27%), only lower than that of the US (which has 30%).  However, these helicopter carriers never made it into the hands of the Russian military.  In 2015 the agreement between France and Russia for these ships was terminated by Hollande due to the Ukrainian conflict.  Finally, these helicopter carriers were awarded to Al Sisi, the bloodthirsty Egyptian dictator.

 In 2011, Russia also signed an agreement with Germany for the construction of a military training camp for 120 million euros, in the Mulino industrial estate (Nizhny Novgorod province), 400 km east of Moscow.  This training camp works virtually, it is a true simulator of any war situation, and in it you can train an entire battalion, of up to 30,000 Russian soldiers, who travel to Germany every year for military training.  Due to the embargo policy against Putin, this project was also stopped in 2014. As a result, the German steel company, Rheinmetall, initiated a lawsuit against the German state.
The USA licks its lips over these deals it loses with Russia, which French and German imperialism are doing today.  For this reason, the US is doubly aggressive with Russia in the Ukrainian crisis.  As we have seen, USA requires from Germany and France, and all European countries, to "put the due funds into NATO, if they want to keep their freedom."  Hollande and Merkel put up the funds… to do business – whenever they want – with Putin.
The US has placed a missile shield in Eastern Europe (in countries like Poland or Hungary), which means huge business for its transnational companies.  Ukraine must be "a new USA's Poland".
That is the "high technology of transnational corporations and imperialism."  Ultimately, it has momentarily managed to emerge from the crack of 2008, surrounded by a legion of paid traitor leaders who saved it from the proletarian revolution, increasing the exploitation of the working class, the plundering of the semi-colonial world and developing destructive forces, that is to say, weapons, high military technology, robotics dedicated to war, drones, in other words, forces capable of destroying the entire human civilization.  Only starting from there, imperialism would be able to recompose its rate of profit.
Everything else is a lie of reformism that denies the parasitic character of capitalism in the imperialist era.  Reformism states that imperialism stops its expansion, then becomes the crisis and, with the same impulse similar to the previous one, it expands again.  They deny the tendency towards the decline of capitalism in this imperialist phase.  They deny the collapse of the productive forces and their decline as a historical trend and the development of destructive forces as the most determining economic factor of this time.

Putin "confronts" the embargo of imperialism by auctioning off the actions of Russian state-owned companies and throws the crisis on the bones of the workers

Russia is nothing more than a capitalist country in transition, dependent of imperialism on its economy, finances and world politics.  Imperialism fences Russia because more and more it seeks to colonize this country; but in the meantime, it needs Russia's counterrevolutionary forces to keep all the masses of Eurasia and Russia itself at bay, as we will see in the next section.
The latest round of the crash hit the BRICS hard, including Russia; and the drop in the price of oil to $25 halved its annual budget in 2016. Putin's response has been to brutally dump the costs of the crisis on the exploited masses.  Between the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016, in a matter of days the value of the ruble (Russian currency) was devalued by 50%, so the capitalists, in one fell swoop, took half the wages of the workers.  Millions of Russians fell below the poverty line (41% do not have enough money even for clothes and food) and the economic gap deepened.  The official level of poverty stands at 16%, although it is estimated that between 30% and 50% of the Russian population would be in the poverty risk zone.  Only 1% of the population owns 71% of private assets.

With the embargo of the accounts of the Russian oligarchs and tycoons, the US and Europe corner and suffocate Russia.  Putin's "solution" has been to launch a plan to sell shares of state-owned companies, to deal with the suffocating debt.  "The accumulation of Russian state debt currently at 14% of the country's GDP may lead to deplorable consequences," Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in June 2017.
In January, Putin announced the sale of stocks of the RZD railway company, Alrosa (mineral extraction company), VTB bank, Aeroflot airlines, Sovcomflot shipyard, Rostelecom (the main Russian provider of long distance calls) and the oil companies Bahneft and Rosneft.
The first sale was for a 10.9% equity in Alrosa diamond company, the largest diamond producer in the world, worth 865 million dollars. The European funds bought a third of the package launched to the market. Russian investors bought another part, while the Americans bought only 5% of the package.
The Russian government plans to sell 50% plus one stock of Bashneft, whose market value is 567.8 million rubles (8.9 billion dollars).

Rosneft, due to its production in 2013, became the largest oil producer in the world and the most expensive one. Rosneft owns 50.755% of Bashneft stocks, another oil company whose stocks are about to be sold. British company BP owns 19.75% of Rosneft stocks.
In December 2016, there was a sale of 19.5% of its shares, worth 10500 million euros. The buyers were Glencore (Switzerland) and the Soverign Fund of Qatar.
It is necessary to clarify that Rosneft owns 49.9% of CITGO, a company who in turn owns refineries and petrol distribution in the US. CITGO belongs to the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA. Rosneft got these CITGO shares as payment warranty for the loans conceded to PDVSA for 1.5 million dollars.
The case of the shipping company Sovcomflot is a two years plan (2017-2019) to sell a package of shares equal to 25% less one, with which the government hopes to get the equivalent to 138 million euros.

In May 2016 the word was of a possible privatization of Bashnef, although the stock sale finally was for Russian assets, favouring Rosneft, who purchased a 50.0755% for 5.3 billion dollars.
It is important to clarify that, as happened in this last case, the privatizations are undercover, as they are done through mixed companies. That is to say, about Bashnef as well as other companies, the Russian state and the press claim they were not privatized because it remains in the hands of Rosnef, which is a state company. But this state company, as we said before, has been partially privatized to BP, Glencore and the Sovereing Fund of Qatar.
The embargo launched by USA and Europe against Russia led Putin to auction partially the state companies’ shares. As we have seen, imperialism advances in taking advantage of the Russian natural resources. From Citibank it controls most of the Russian transactions, whereas Germany and France are already making huge business deals in the military industry.

Imperialism increases the usage of these procedures in this new round of the world crash that is hitting the BRICS. This way, in exchange for trash worthless bonds, imperialism buys at cheap price the stocks of the companies that make more profits. The imperialist pirates are taking parts of the companies while the semicolonial countries such as Brazil, or Russia, an independent capitalist country, control the majority of the shares. This allows those states to make the largest investments in research and exploration (the most expensive when it comes to gas and oil), whereas the imperialists clip coupons and share profits. With the stock purchase of these large companies, the transnationals also increase the value of their own stocks in the markets.
Just to give an example, there’s a shareholders group that was set up for the construction of Nordstream 2, the gas pipeline that will allow taking Russian gas to Germany without having to go through Ukraine. The president of that shareholders group is Schroeder, former German chancellor and personal friend of Putin's. Gazprom is the main shareholder. This means that his Russian company, and the Russian state as owner of 50% of the stocks, will be the ones to pay for the investment in the building of this gas pipeline. Nordstream 1 pipeline, which goes through the bottom of the Baltic sea to avoid Ukranian territory, and with a length of 1,224 km, started operating in November 2011. A year later, its second thread started operations. The shares of this operator company of this gas pipeline belong as follows: 51% to the Russian group Gazprom; to German companies E.ON and BASFWintershall (15.5% each); Dutch company Gasunie and French company GDF/Suez (9% each). In 2017, Gazprom board will be expanded from 9 members to 11. Putin himself, as president of Russia, as the state is the major shareholder, proposed his friend Schroeder for the position.
Russia is a capitalist country that depends on capitalism and the world economy to develop its production into entire branches of the industry in Russia. But it is still not a colony or a semi-colony, since from the political point of view it still has a relative independence from the imperialist powers with which it is negotiating its position as guardian of the property of all the imperialist powers in Eurasia, and it also takes advantage of the industrial military apparatus of the old Soviet industry.

Putin, the gendarme of Eurasia

As we defined in the introduction to this work, the world bourgeoisie, in order to guarantee itself the business deals in that unending raw material and workforce source called Eurasia, needed an intermediary to guarantee the control of the region. This is because each time it tried to control the region directly (as in every invasion to Russia), it failed big time. So, until the victory of the Russian revolution in 1917, Germany, France and England developed their business deals in the region with the Czarist authocracy as a partner.  Trotsky in his "History of the Russian Revolution" states that “the introduction of certain elements of Western technique and training, above all military and industrial, under Peter I, led to a strengthening of serfdom as the fundamental form of labour organisation. European armament and European loans – both indubitable products of a higher culture – led to a strengthening of tzarism, which delayed in its turn the development of the country."  And later, in the same work: “The participation (in the war, N. Ed.) of Russia falls somewhere halfway between the participation of France and that of China. Russia paid in this way for her right to be an ally of advanced countries, to import capital and pay interest on it – that is, essentially, for her right to be a privileged colony of her allies – but at the same time for her right to oppress and rob Turkey, Persia, Galicia, and in general the countries weaker and more backward than herself. The twofold imperialism of the Russian bourgeoisie had basically the character of an agency for other mightier world powers.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch01.htm and https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch02.htm

Already in 1910, Lenin identified the Czarist Russia as a “prison of peoples”, including the Baltic states (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia), Ukraine, Belarus, part of Poland (Tsardom of Poland), Moldavia, Romania, the Caucasus countries (Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan), Finland, most of central Asia (Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan) and a part of Turkey (Turkish Armenian territories). Trotsky used to say in the History of the Russian revolution…: "Russia stood not only geographically, but also socially and historically, between Europe and Asia. She was marked off from the European West, but also from the Asiatic East, approaching at different periods and in different features now one, now the other. The East gave her the Tartar yoke, which entered as an important element into the structure of the Russian state. The West was a still more threatening foe – but at the same time a teacher. Russia was unable to settle in the forms of the East because she was continually having to adapt herself to military and economic pressure from the West." https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch01.htm

The Russian revolution 1917, of which we commemorate now its first centenary, tore down the medieval rotting and in only a few months took the working class to power, led by the Bolshevik Party. The revolution swept away the Czarist yoke, proclaiming the right to self-determination of the peoples that took part in the USSR, to which the peoples of Ukraine, Moldavia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Abkhazia, Georgia, Northern Ossetia, Chechnya, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, among others, federated willingly.
Stalinism, with its counterrevolutionary action, turned the USSR into a prison of subjugated nations, this time under the jackboot of the Stalinist gendarme. After that bureaucracy, turned into a restorationist agent, handed over the workers’ states to imperialism, it appointed the former Stalinist bureaucrats (nowadays oligarch and bourgeois) to the role of imposing discipline, subjugating and crushing the masses of the former workers’ states. In Chechnya, it exterminated everyone older than 10 years old for the sole “crime” of rising up for the right of national self-determination. It invaded Georgia, Northern and Southern Ossetia, populated all the soviet republics that got independence from Russia, such as Moldavia, Southern Ossetia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and Ukraine with military bases. All this to guarantee the business deals of imperialism and its cut in them.

So we insist in denouncing this murderer of the former KGB, i.e. Putin, and a large share of the treacherous left, Stalinism in particular, who are making efforts to present him as a “friend” of the exploited of the world, when he is no other than a henchmen of imperialism. The role of Putin consists in being the guardian of the transnational companies and the finance capital in the Caucasus, in Eurasia, doing the dirty work of massacring the exploited on behalf of imperialism when they dare to rise. We saw his deeds in Syria, from the base in Tartus inherited from Stalinism, to drop his bombs against civil population, and today with the redoubled and bloody massacre against women and children who fled to seek shelter in the cynically called “safe zones”.

Putin's role as gendarme and hitman of imperialism is to be the guardian of transnationals and financial capital in the Caucasus, in Eurasia and Central Asia. And when Zionism failed to do the same in the Maghreb and the Middle East and the 2011 revolutions out broke, and the control devices of imperialism in the region were broken, imperialism turned to Putin so that, from his military base in Tartus in Syria, he could support al-Assad who was about to fall in Damascus surrounded by the advance of the revolution in that country in 2015. The Russian air force, together with al-Assad's, massacred and destroyed the most important cities in Syria. The butcher Putin had already proved himself to be a good policeman for the Muslim nations of the former USSR, in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, etc. with the rigor of bayonets, together with the new national oligarchies allied to the "Great Russian" bourgeoisie; but all of them are now disciplined by the 150,000 marines that the US has in Afghanistan, to control not only that country, but the entire Opium Road in the region and especially the Muslim masses.
Putin's clique not only plays that role of gendarme and assassin in the region. First of all, he and his counterrevolutionary Bonapartist government are the guardians, at gun point, of the succulent businesses of Franco-German and US imperialisms in Russia. In the world politics and economy controlled by the imperialist powers, the Moscow gangs can only act as gendarmes and guardians of the interests of international finance capital. Only then they are allowed to get their share of business. Putin is nothing but the junior partner of the imperialist powers. And above all, he is the jailer of the former Soviet Russian working class that led the greatest revolution in history in October 1917, defeating capitalism. Putin for now is the "NATO’s first shield" (although he has great contradictions with it and with imperialism) to crush the Russian masses if they even dare to set up the soviets and councils of workers, soldiers and peasants, a hundred years later.

The greatest fear imperialism and the counterrevolutionary gangs in Russia share is that the Soviet and revolutionary masses could occupy the Winter Palace once again. That is why even imperialism will seek in the first place to disarm its henchman of all nuclear weapons, not out of fear of Putin, who would not even dare to light a firework against imperialism, but out of fear that the masses would seize power and keep it. Imperialism knows that it must control the Russian industrial-military apparatus directly, via patents from transnational corporations or through its generals. They cannot allow such military power to fall into the hands of a new Red Army.

Putin uses the military power inherited from the former USSR to negotiate his place and share of the business with imperialism. But in the long run and historically, imperialism needs to disarm him. That is why NATO's advance in Ukraine and imperialism set up missile shields and military bases throughout the region surrounding Russia. That is why in the distribution of Syria, like in the Balkans, Putin is not allowed to keep even an inch of territory. The destiny of Putin's Russia is to follow the Balkans’s path; “Great Russia’s future is the same one of the countries it oppresses, because that is how it will end up thanks to imperialism.
Meanwhile, the role that the world politics and economy of imperialism reserves for the Moscow gangs is to be the gendarme and massacre in all the territories of the former USSR, but not to keep even one centimeter of land abroad or spheres of influence. That is how it has been. Thus, Putin also intervened as a gendarme in Ukraine, posing as being "against imperialism" when he was the supporter of the pro-US government of Yanukovych, as we develop below.

Putin, presented as a "friend" of the peoples by the treacherous leaderships, is the assassin of the Syrian masses and the betrayer of the Ukrainian revolution

The traitorous Left and particularly Stalinism are making enormous efforts to present imperialism’s hitman, Putin, as a "friend" of the exploited of Donbass. However, these fallacies are far from the reality that has shown that Putin plays a key role in the siege and surrender of the workers of eastern Ukraine. Far from being an "ally", he has always been on the barricade against the revolution.
The same White Russia that drowns the starving and surrounded Syrian masses in a bloodbath, fled cowardly as soon as Kerry set foot in Ukraine in 2014. They are a soft kitten of imperialism for whom they do the "dirty work" of massacring the Syrian masses and submitting, together with the pro-Russian bourgeoisie of the east, the rebellious masses of the Ukrainian Donbass to the Minsk Agreements, which, as we saw in the second chapter, are the agreements of Obama, Merkel, Putin and Poroshenko to defeat the revolution, dividing and disarming the Ukrainian masses.
And if this were not enough, he is ready to intervene from Crimea with his counterrevolutionary army in the Ukrainian east, as he did in Georgia and Chechnya. Putin is being tested, once again, as a hitman of imperialism in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and also in the Middle East, as we see in Syria. Today we see that Putin, who emerged victorious and unscathed from his massacre against the tormented Syrian masses, has been strengthened as Gurkha gendarme against his own people and in the region.

As we described in Chapter I, in mid-2014, Putin withdrew his troops from Russia's border with Ukraine, leaving the heroic Donbass miners isolated and surrounded. The reason is privates were going to fight alongside their siblings, putting the businesses of the Ukrainian and Russian bourgeoisie at risk. This vile coward Putin is more afraid of the revolution that would question his power than he is of imperialism surrounding his borders. The fight of the Donbass workers in defense of their salaries and jobs would easily converge with their Russian siblings because they face a ferocious devaluation that liquidates their salaries. This unity would pose at the top of the agenda, the need to attack and destroy all the businesses of the Russian bourgeoisie and oligarchy not only in Ukraine, but also in Russia. This perspective, which the Donbass workers illustrated under the slogan “May the USSR come back” –a program for the Ukrainian, Russian and Western European workers to overcome the catastrophe– makes a chill run down the spines of the entire world bourgeoisie. Armed workers questioning private property is Putin's nightmare, even more so than NATO tanks on his border.

A few months later, the Kiev government launched a "famine siege" operation against the Donbass workers -during which they did not buy the coal produced in the region, in order to defeat the miners, as we saw in the previous chapter-. The one in charge of supplying gas and electricity to Kiev without the need for advance payments and at a very good price, was the so called "ally" Putin. The Russian bourgeoisie, emerged from the bowels of the CP and the Stalinist bureaucracy, has mastered the way to divide and betray the struggle of the exploited. In the 1980s, in the midst of the heroic strike of the miners in England, against the government of Margaret Thatcher, the Stalinist bureaucracy from Poland sold coal to the imperialist pirates in England.

Between September 2014 and February 2015, the mining militias were advancing from the east and with the support of their siblings in Kiev who refused to join the army, they delivered it a hard blow. In the meantime, Putin and the pro-Russian bourgeoisie of the east of Ukraine signed -with US imperialism behind the scenes- the Minsk counterrevolutionary agreements by which they advanced in the partition of Ukraine, gave the control of the borders back to Kiev by deepening the siege against the masses, and undertook the task to disorganize from within and disarm the masses, being together with Stalinism the guarantors that the masses abide by these pacts.

Putin's "attitude" shocked nobody (the politicians of the reformist left will have to explain why they presented him as an ally of the masses, when he really is their enemy), because, we repeat, like all lackey local bourgeoisies, he is more afraid of the mobilization and revolutionary struggle of the masses than of imperialism itself, with which it is tied by thousands of businesses and political, economic and military agreements

The facts that we mention show that, beyond Putin's talk and demagoguery, he has chosen to side  with the bourgeoisie and imperialism –of which he is nothing more than a hitman and manager– and against the Donbass miners. Imperialism is extracting every last drop of juice from him for its counterrevolutionary offensive, and when they can no longer take advantage of him, they will get rid of him like a squeezed lemon.

Thus they have used him in Syria to do the dirty work of massacring the masses with massive bombings to destroy every last village of the resistance and crush this great revolution. Assad's genocidal forces commanded by imperialism unleashed a true massacre operation against the masses, even bombing the rubble. This is the future they are preparing for Ukraine, where the masses of the Don regions are already facing the same hardships.

Putin was able to play this role just because, so far, the Russian proletariat have been crushed and dominated under his boot with a regime of terror. Contrary to what the Stalinists and renegades of Trotskyism say, there is no hint of democracy in Russia, much less of anti-imperialism

The Russian workers must rise up. Putin, who emerged victorious from the carnage against the Syrian people, strengthened himself as a gendarme in the region, both in Ukraine and in Eastern Europe, and also against his own people who are beginning to confront him today. The Annex II of this work is devoted to this issue.