War of Ukraine - May 22, 2022

Statement of the Japan Revolutionary Communist League (Revolutionary Marxist Faction) (JRCL-RMF)

Together with Ukrainian People!

The leftists of the world must fight adamantly against Putin’s war. This war is aimed at destroying the state of Ukraine, liquidating its nation and seizing its land, thereby incorporating it into Russia. This is the brutality of the century symbolizing the ‘dark 21st century’. However, many of the ‘leftists’ in Japan, and in the world, are revealing an appalling inability to respond to this brutality. They have revealed themselves as anti-Marxist, anti-Leninist.

 I. The degeneration of the self-styled ‘leftists’

 (1) The degeneration of the JCP bureaucrats

The bureaucrats of the Japanese Communist Party, a neo-Stalinist party in Japan, condemn Russia’s aggression against Ukraine as ‘violation of international law’, and feebly murmur that the world should unite to voice, ‘Observe the UN Charter’. They are thus noising about ‘using the UN Charter as a criterion’ despite the fact that the so-called UN’s malfunction and incompetence are clear to everyone. Instead of calling and organizing antiwar struggles against Putin’s brutal war of aggression, they only count on the rulers of UN member states, thus spreading illusions about them.

JCP Chairman Kazuo Shii unbashfully says, ‘If one takes a broad view of the present world situation, one will see that the tide of peace is steadily rising’. At this very moment when genocide is being perpetrated in reality in Ukraine by Russian troops and even the danger of a third world war is growing, this man gives an emphasis to a ‘rising tide of peace’!

Has he ever thought of how many Ukrainian workers and people have been killed and injured so far by the Russian invading troops? And, as he knows well, the criminals who dissolved the ‘socialist’ (in fact, Stalinist) Soviet Union and restored ‘capitalist Russia’ thereby usurping state properties were the rulers themselves of the former Stalinist Soviet Union. Moreover, Putin is a former Soviet intelligence agent and now reigns over Russia as the ‘czar’ of the ‘ruinous country’ by establishing an authoritarian ruling system made up of 500,000 FSB officers. Notwithstanding this, those JCP bureaucrats, converted Stalinists, harbour not an iota of working-class hatred towards this Russian ruler, a descendant of Stalinists; neither can they hear the screams and groans of workers and toiling people.

JCP bureaucrats have been frantic to explain that the ‘collapsed regime [of the Soviet Union] was a hegemonistic, autocratic regime which originally had nothing to do with socialism’ and that the JCP is a ‘party that has consistently been opposed to hegemonism since the days of the former Soviet Union’.

They are thus desperate to draw a distinction between themselves and the former Soviet Union and, in the end, resort to an emphasis on their so-called ‘tide of peace’. This is because they are impelled by their self-protective fear that, if they lose the forthcoming Upper House election, there is ‘no future in the party’. Those bureaucrats fear being labelled ‘the crime of Putin = the former Soviet Union = the communist party’, and so are hell-bent on making a distinction between them and Putin.

(2) The suicide of so-called liberal intellectuals)

Many of the ‘liberal’ and ‘leftist’ intellectuals in Japan have also revealed their inability to address the incident of the century.

The first tendency is represented by the contention that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is ‘not the only thing to blame’ and that ‘fundamentally, the problem lies in NATO’s eastward expansion’. Some even developed an argument that the West has failed in building a relationship of confidence with Russia and that, for this reason, they were unable to prevent the war — an argument that is no difference from Putin’s address delivered on Russia’s ‘victory day’.

Many of them never express any anger at Putin the aggressor. With a complacent look, they are commenting or voicing their views, for instance, on the ‘world situation’ or on ‘Russian history’.

The second tendency is to express naked disagreement or opposition to the ‘armed resistance of Ukrainians’.

They contend that Volodymyr Zelensky is ‘calling on the people to take up arms and fight to defend the country’ and that this means that ‘the state is coercing its people to sacrifice their lives’. By making today’s Ukraine overlap Japanese militarism of 77 years ago, they argue that ‘the president’s command to make Molotov cocktails and rise in all-out resistance’ is ‘very similar to the Japanese military’s desperate order to take up bamboo-spears to defeat American troops in the last phase of the Pacific War’. Some even say, ‘If Ukraine had capitulated to the Russian forces without firing a shot, not so many towns might have been destroyed, and not so many people might have been killed’, thus making an exhortation to ‘surrender’.

Since the start of invasion, Russian forces have been launching missile attacks on schools, hospitals, apartment houses, and even on shelters. They have been perpetrating terrible carnage everywhere, including the killings of residents in Bucha. Those ‘liberal intellectuals’ are well aware of all these, and yet they dare to say ‘They’d better be nonresistant’! Do they mean that Ukrainians should be killed submissively, without offering the slightest resistance? Their true feeling is that they do not want to see any horrific war scene. The important thing for them is, in conclusion, to secure comfortable lives of them as petty bourgeois citizens.

Among some members of established ‘leftist’ or ‘liberal’ parties as well as trade union activists in Japan (e.g. the Sakisaka faction, Japan’s unique social democrats sympathetic to the former Soviet Union), there are those who, in collusion with the above-mentioned intellectuals, declare that the Russian government has already disavowed its responsibility for the crimes and that the ‘atrocities in Bucha’ is a fake story forged by Ukrainians. Those fellows merely parrot back the lies of Putin, a former KGB officer who talks black into white about everything as if to say ‘a lie becomes true when told a hundred times’. Like Putin, they must be called inhuman.

(3) The decay of ‘left-wing’ tendencies in the world

It is not only the self-styled leftists in Japan who have laid bare their confusion and degeneration when faced with Russia’s war on Ukraine. Almost all the ‘leftists’ in Russia, the very aggressor nation, whose origins lie in the erstwhile Stalinist party, now support Putin’s military aggression, thus degrading themselves as assistants in his war.

The Gennadii Zyuganov-led Communist Party of the Russian Federation is today letting out a fanatic screech: ‘Bring together patriotic forces!’ ‘Oust enemy collaborators!’ The Russian Communist Workers’ Party, too, now openly supports the war. At the beginning of March, when the Russian army’s hard fight started to be reported, this party completely changed its previous indecisive attitude, by screaming that ‘the battle against the fascist regime of Ukraine is justifiable’. Faced with the aggravation of Russia’s military, political and economic crisis, a crucial juncture that threatens the very survival of the nation of Russia, these remnants of Stalinists have been driven by their desire for the ‘restoration’ of the ‘great USSR’ as in the days of the US-Soviet confrontation in the latter 20th century, thereby being caught up in Putin’s Great Russian Chauvinism.

On the other hand, many of the so-called Trotskyist tendencies in the world, which up to now must have been opposed somehow to Stalinism, have also exposed their own degeneration and confusion.

The Socialist Workers’ Party of Britain, an organization of revisionist Trotskyism formerly led by Tony Cliff and holding the view that the Soviet Union was red imperialism, is promoting a campaign today under the slogan ‘Against the war in Ukraine’. As is shown in the expression ‘in …’, their slogan is deliberately made vague about ‘who is committing aggression against whom’.

This is not all. They set forth a view that ‘the war in Ukraine’ is a ‘war between imperialist states’. This is utterly an idealist interpretation. These former Trotskyists regard today’s Russia and China as ‘imperialism’ merely on the grounds that they are both bent on expanding their respective territories and spheres of influence. But Russia’s economic power is — even though capitalism has been restored there — almost the same level as that of developing countries due to the remnants of the bureaucratic systems of the period of the Soviet Union as well as the usurpation of state property by Stalinist bureaucrats. China, on the other hand, is a country where a neo-Stalinist party called the Communist Party of China rules the toiling masses. On top of such an idealistic interpretation, they argue it is the expansion of NATO that is to blame. This is an undisguised defence of Putin. What serious degeneration those descendents of Trotsky have undergone!

It must be noted, however, that there appear Trotskyists in the world who are inspired by the JRCL’s call on the toiling masses in Russia as well as those in Ukraine. Some of them issue denunciations of Putin based on Lenin’s and Trotsky’s criticisms of Stalin concerning national questions (Lambertists), while some have made their position clear by hoisting the slogan ‘In support of Ukrainians’ armed resistance’ (Mandelites). But it is a fact that these still constitute the minority. We must strengthen and spread our calls to the world.

II. The ideological grounds for the degradation

Why is it that such serious confusion and degeneration of the self-styled ‘left’ tendencies have been brought about?

The absence of the standpoint of living together and suffering together with workers and people

What must be said first is the fact that those ‘liberals’ and ‘leftists’, who always profess themselves to be standing by the side of workers and toiling people, are in reality not basing themselves on the standpoint of living together and suffering together with Ukrainian workers and toiling people who are actually suffering from and fighting against the Russian aggression. This is a crucial problem to be discussed first.

The Russian troops sent by Putin are attacking schools, hospitals and shelters while torturing and shooting to death Ukrainian workers and people, assaulting and committing rape against women, and plundering Ukrainians of their valuables as well as farm products. At the time of their withdrawals, too, they are perpetrating all kinds of brutal, inhuman acts. Those who are made to suffer from this war of aggression conducted by Putin are workers and the toiling masses of Ukraine. It is none other than these Ukrainian workers and the toiling masses who have taken up arms to resist the aggressors. All the self-styled ‘leftists’, intellectuals and trade union leaderships should grapple with the question of the Ukrainian war by basing themselves on the standpoint of living together with these workers and the toiling masses.

If they were in Ukraine, would they still mean to tell their comrades, family or friends, who are about to meet the enemy, that they should lay down their arms? Saying that that may save people’s life is too idealistic an argument, is it not?

Many of those Japanese intellectuals must have been plunged into a petty bourgeois position of resting on the status quo, or being satisfied to live in sham ‘peace’ here in Japan where the flames of war have not yet flared up and so ‘safety’ seems to be ensured.

Although they say ‘human lives are important’, yet here is no humanism. Nor is there absolute pacifism, much less any bit of proletarian, real humanism.

Who is invading whom!

Second is that, if one fails to grasp who is invading and who is invaded and trampled on, or if one does not premise one’s argument on the question of the substances constituting this opposition, the argument will inevitably fall into a fallacy.

Among intellectuals who know a little bit about Marx and Lenin, there are some who say ‘Ukrainian workers should surrender’ even by referring to Lenin’s ‘revolutionary defeatism’. But preaching ‘revolutionary defeatism’ to Ukrainian working people, who are suffering from aggression, is nothing but a fallacy; it only shows the idealistic and reactionary nature of intellectuals, which is often laid bare in the middle of an extreme situation, such as the outbreak of war.

What Lenin said is this: ‘A revolutionary class cannot but wish for the defeat of its government in a reactionary war.’ Czarist Russia participated in the First World War with the aim of expanding its territories and mobilized Russian workers and peasants in the name of ‘the defence of the fatherland’. It is this war that Lenin referred to as a ‘reactionary war’, not a ‘war for the defence of the fatherland’, and that he ‘wishes for the defeat’.

On the other hand, Lenin made it clear that, as to a country that is invaded, things are completely different.

‘… For example, if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be “just,” “defensive” wars, irrespective of who attacked first; and every Socialist would sympathise with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slaveowning, predatory “great” powers (Lenin, ‘Socialism 5 and War’, Chapter I). [The italics are the present writer’s.]

Ukraine is now invaded by Russia, and workers and people in this land are resolutely fighting a war against Russia. This is exactly a ‘just war’, in the words of Lenin.

The working class in an invaded, oppressed and subordinated country or nation must fight in the van of the people. If there exists an anti-Stalinist revolutionary leftwing, it will form a united front, while expelling puppet elements and comprador bourgeoisie that collaborate with invaders, and fight in its forefront. If the revolutionary wing has yet to exist, we must make a call from Japan to encourage an anti-Stalinist proletarian party to germinate through the battle and from within the battle against the invaders. For this purpose, we the JRCL has been calling on Ukrainian workers and people to ‘fight in solidarity with Russian working people who are fighting against Putin’s war, to awake to the falsehood of Stalinism and to advance towards the reconstruction of a genuine Soviet republic, for which Lenin fought in reality.’

We the anti-Stalinist revolutionary Left in Japan are the only organization that has been consistently carrying out the aforementioned pursuit amid the situation where the self-styled ‘leftists’ in the world have revealed their confusion and inability to respond to the developments.

Why are we able to do so?

(1) In 1970s, when we the JRCL strived to overcome a tendency that simply says ‘Antiwar struggles in Japan must be fought as part of the world-wide struggle to kick out American imperialists’, we at the same time clarified our theory on the struggle for the liberation of Vietnam. That is to say, we made it clear that we must put ourselves in the shoes of Vietnamese people, thereby basing ourselves on the standpoint of resolutely repelling the foreign imperialist aggression. Then we posited the Stalinists-initiated national liberation war as an object for us to transcend, or overcome, and clarified the structure of transcending it from within.

(2) In Tahiti in 1995, when the Front for the Liberation of Polynesia elevated their mass struggle of ‘denouncing the French nuclear testing’ into a decisive struggle against the state power to win ‘the independence of Tahiti, the liberation of Polynesia’, the delegation of Zengakuren and militant workers waged a death-defying battle to occupy the international airport in unity with Maohi people. They carried out the battle, inspired by suggestions from Comrade Kan’ichi Kuroda, the founder of the JRCL: ‘Such an opportunity can rarely be experienced. Fight it out under the command of the FLP!’

(3) In 2002, Israeli forces launched a large-scale invasion in Palestine, and US imperialism as the sole superpower pushed forward preparations for attacking Iraq. Against those, Muslim people across the Arab world were seething with anti-American, anti-Zionist sentiments, but sectarian and tribal conflicts were intensifying among them. In the middle of such a situation, we issued a call: Muslims of all countries, organize struggles for the independence of a Palestinian state, based on Islamic inter–nationalism [Islamic transnationalism]!

In our discussion for the abovementioned three struggles, we consistently thought that communists must always be with oppressed workers and people and must fight together with them. In and through these discussions, together with Comrade Kuroda, we have clarified how we should fight on the basis of the logic of immanence-qua-transcendence, by putting ourselves in the shoes of those workers and people who are invaded and trampled down.

In this connection, some Japanese intellectuals superimpose the present war of aggression in Ukraine onto the Battle of Okinawa during the last days of the Pacific War and say, ‘We are opposed to both Russian and Ukrainian power-holders’ because ‘innocent common people are being killed by armed forces’. It’s certainly a fact that, in the Battle of Okinawa, one of every four Okinawans was killed by not only American landing forces but also Japanese imperial troops. However, in Ukraine at present, Armed Forces, together with Territorial Defence Forces and self-organizations of local armed residents, are battling in unity against the Russian invading army. We cannot superimpose Ukraine upon Okinawa, by neglecting the question of ‘whose troops are killing whom’, or the question of the substances. We should not be vague about the fact, in the first place, that Japan was an invader in the Second World War. We must denounce the military Bonapartist power of Japanese militarism based on the Emperor system for mobilizing the toiling masses in the war of aggression in East Asia by whipping up Japanese nationalism under the banner of ‘Hakko Ichiu [the whole world under one roof]’.

Gross ignorance of Marxism

Third is the fallacy of giving ‘grounds’ to the foregoing arguments by introducing superficial knowledge of Marx’s or Lenin’s passages and simply applying it to their interpretation of the situation.

For instance, some say: ‘In Ukraine there are bourgeoisie and proletariat; in Russia there are bourgeoisie and proletariat’, so ‘national unity is nonsense’. Others refer to Marx’s words in the Communist Manifest ‘Workers have no fatherland’, and simply emphasize ‘internationalism’ (as is often seen among so-called Trotskyists). They are only brandishing the thesis that ‘Workers have no fatherland’, which is an essence theory concerning proletarian existence, and simply project this essence theory onto the actual issue of the aggressive war in Ukraine. Here the question of how Marxists should wrestle with national questions is put beyond the scope of consideration.

Lenin said: ‘For centuries the indignation and distrust of the non-sovereign and dependent nations towards the dominant and oppressor nations have been accumulating, of nations such as the Ukrainian towards nations such as the Great-Russian.’ ‘… we must be very cautious and patient, and make concessions to the survival of national distrust.’ (Letter to the Workers and Peasants of Ukraine Apropos of the Victories Over Denikin).

Spontaneous national sentiments that Ukrainian working people have in their mind cannot be negated immediately. Because of numerous persecutions by Stalinists, the national consciousness of Ukrainians has been accumulated as a deep resentment against the USSR and Russia. We must take this fact seriously and fully consider it. It’s no use brandishing the principle of ‘internationalism’ without giving consideration to this.

Here in Japan, while we are resolutely promoting the Ukraine antiwar struggle; at the same time, from the standpoint of achieving an ‘anti-imperialist, anti-Stalinist’ world revolution, we have been calling on Russian working people to rise in a fight to ‘oppose the aggression in Ukraine and overthrow the Putin government’, and to awake to the ‘falsity of Stalinism as false Marxism’.

And to Ukrainian working people, we have been expressing our warmest solidarity with their death-defying battle to crush Putin’s war, while calling on them to awake to the fact that ‘the USSR-type “communism” is false Marxism, i.e. Stalinism’, and to ‘revive that revolutionary spirit with which you joined in the past in the Russian revolution in the form of the ‘Socialist Soviet Republic of Ukraine’.

Staying aloof from this proletarian solidarity, self-styled ‘leftists’ simply enumerate clichés, such as ‘There are bourgeoisie and proletariat in each country, so we are against national unity’ and ‘against the defence-of-the-fatherland position’. They are simply playing with Marx’s and Lenin’s words in the world of ideas and must therefore be called ‘idealistic leftists’. In reality, they will only serve to help Putin’s war.

Neglect of confrontation with Stalinism

The fourth issue to be discussed is their neglect to confront Stalinism, which is the fundamental problem.

Self-styled leftists and progressives are spreading opinions that effectively defend Putin. We venture to say that this is because they have a sentiment or feeling that the ruler of Russia, which was formerly the Soviet Union and belongs to the ‘East’, is preferable to those of Western imperialist states.

Putin justifies Russia’s aggression against Ukraine as an act of recovering its lost territory, on the basis of his perception that the collapse of the USSR in 1991 was ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century’. Self-styled leftists are unable to criticize such a self-justification by Putin for the brutality of the century. This is because they cannot grasp the meaning of the collapse of the USSR. The USSR was destroyed by the very hands of the Kremlin bureaucrats. Self-styled leftists cannot comprehend this self-destruction of the USSR and the subsequent restoration of capitalist Russia as the nodal point in the contemporary history where revolutionary Russia was finally buried, as the ‘reversal of the history’. Fundamentally, this is attributable to their utter neglect of confronting Stalinism.

However, because of the terrible oppression by the Stalinist bureaucracy of the ‘socialist’ Soviet Union, the toiling masses in the former constituent republics of the USSR, as well as those in ‘people’s democracies’ in Eastern Europe, yearned for and were dazzled by ‘freedom, human rights and democracy’ that capitalist countries in Western Europe held up, so that they rushed into the so-called ‘West’ like an avalanche. The satellite states of Eastern Europe thus broke down, and so did the USSR.

Since then, US imperialism was intent on expanding ‘globalization’, i.e. Americanization, over to the Eurasian continent with the aim of surviving its economic difficulties, while keeping a wary eye on rising China. There occurred the ‘rose revolution’ in Georgia (2003), the ‘orange revolution’ in Ukraine (2004), the ‘tulip revolution’ in Kyrgyz (2005), and the ‘Maidan revolution’ in Ukraine (2014) (when the ‘dictator’ Yanukovych, surrounded by mass protest actions, fled to Russia; Putin thereafter started to step up his moves to annex Crimea to Russia and promote the independence of Donbas). Behind these convulsions, there were certainly some maneuvers of US imperialism.

Desde entonces, el imperialismo estadounidense tenía la intención de expandir la "globalización", es decir, la americanización, sobre el  continente euroasiático con el objetivo de sobrevivir a sus dificultades económicas, manteniendo una cauteloso ojo en el ascenso de China. Se produjo la 'revolución rosa' en Georgia (2003), la 'revolución naranja' en Ucrania (2004), la 'revolución de los tulipanes' en Kirguistán (2005) y la 'revolución de Maidan' en Ucrania (2014) (cuando el ‘dictador’ Yanukovych, rodeado de acciones de protesta masivas, huyó a Rusia; Putin a partir de entonces comenzó a intensificar sus movimientos para anexar Crimea a Rusia y promover la independencia de Donbás). Detrás de estas convulsiones, ciertamente hubo algunas maniobras del imperialismo estadounidense.

It is also a fact that imperialist powers of Western Europe, including Germany and France, incorporated former East European countries and former constituent republics of the USSR in the European Union and NATO, thereby forcing workers of these countries to work with no rights and at extremely low wages, one third or one fourth of those in their own countries.

However, in the said political convulsions called ‘revolutions’, those who were driven by the indignant masses to resign or flee to Russia were the rulers who used to be Stalinist bureaucrats in the Soviet era and, after the collapse of the USSR, transformed into ‘dictators’. Putin’s remarks ascribing everything to conspiracies and manoeuvres schemed by the West can only betray his nature as a former intelligence agent.

As the EU and NATO expanded eastward, Putin has accumulated hatred for the encroachment on the Russian ‘sphere’. And now this ‘czar’ of the FSB-controlled Russian state is attempting to incorporate the whole of Ukraine into Russia by forcibly overturning the status quo, the independence of USSR republics, which was produced by former Kremlin bureaucrats including Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

Putin condemns Lenin, saying that Lenin ‘elated Ukrainian nationalists’ by granting the rights of national self-determination to Ukraine during the times of Russian revolution according to his idea of ‘separation then federation’. He even boasts that ‘Russia, Belarus and Ukraine were historically one’. This man is now hell-bent on inspiring great Russian patriotism; for this purpose he is using the Russian Orthodox Church. He is also forcing the people to wave the red flag of the Soviet Union used in Stalin’s age in order to evoke nostalgia for the ‘great USSR’.

By insulting the Russian revolution, Putin is burying revolutionary Russia again, following those counterrevolutionary criminals, Gorbachev and Yeltsin. All those who claim to be leftists in the world should direct their eyes to this crime.

They should also think over why Russia is still made to suffer miseries of a ‘ruined country’.

Under Yeltsin’s presidency after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Russia was mired in a terrible confusion and chaos coupled with the bankrupt economy. In this ‘ruinous Russia’, ex-KGB officer Putin took the reins of power by showing himself off as a ‘strong leader’, even by resorting to conspiracies to sink Chechens in seas of blood. Since then, he has usurped state properties by dirty tricks, sent his relatives, Siloviks and his henchmen to state-run enterprises, newspaper companies, etc., and built up an authoritarian ruling system helmed by the FSB. Dissidents and journalists who tried to reveal even a bit of his conspiracies against Chechens or his frauds in obtaining state properties were assassinated one after another by this brute.

‘Acquitting himself of his own past filled with crimes, an authoritarian ruling system Putin established.’ (A Kan’ichi Kuroda’s poem, included in his ‘Calling on Japan’, published by Kobushi Shobo)

We must never tolerate Putin’s war. The evilness and criminality of NATO, which used to be an anti-Soviet’ military alliance, as well as that of imperialist powers led by American imperialism, is obvious for us. After the collapse of the USSR, imperialist America as the ‘sole superpower’ perpetrated the wanton acts of state terrorism and extreme brutalities — the bombardments of Yugoslavia, aggression in Afghanistan, armed invasion of Iraq and so forth — as Putin is doing today. Against those brutalities, we have been resolutely fighting.

We have foreseen the militarist empire of America’s world dominance and its decline as the ‘sole superpower’ after the collapse of the Stalinist USSR, the rise of neo-Stalinist China and the coming of the age of US-China confrontation, and the intensification of the new East-West cold war between the US and China with Russia. Since last autumn, before the rest of the world, we have been sounding an alarm to Russia’s moves to invade Ukraine. Self-styled ‘leftists’ are now belatedly surprised at Putin’s war and are taking upon themselves the role of Putin’s defender by making nonsensical remarks, ‘This is an inter-imperialist war,’ ‘The blame lies with the US and NATO, which have cornered Putin’, and so on. We must denounce the totally corrupted ‘leftists’ and fight resolutely to crush the evil ambition of Putin, ‘today’s Hitler’!

III Crush Putin’s war!

Putin the invader and his regime are now in a serious predicament in all respects, militarily, politically and economically. Suffering from a resounding defeat in the operations to conquer the capital Kyiv and an impending defeat in battles to control the Donbas, Russia has lost one third of its war potential (troops and weapons). Soaring war expenditure, reportedly more than two trillion yen per day, is causing grave damage to the Russian economy and bringing it into a crisis. The stock of missiles has nearly run out. No more tanks can be produced due to the shortage of semiconductors and other factors (semiconductors for refrigerators and other consumer electronics are being used as a makeshift). Putin, however, cannot end this war without ‘fruits’, for the collapse of the government would mean a jail to him because of his accumulated, countless crimes.

For this reason, he will probably be frantic to keep the military control over Russian-occupied regions facing the Black Sea, following a tentative seizure of Maryupol (i.e. a ‘defensive battle’ so to speak). He will also be hell-bent on ‘Russianizing’ southern regions of Ukraine, as well as eastern regions.

Until now, the Russian forces have been hailing shells from tanks and missiles onto Ukrainian towns and villages, reducing them to ashes, murdering innocent people indiscriminately, and destroying essential lifelines for water, electric and gas supplies. After having driven residents into the conditions where they cannot subsist without depending on Russia for water and food supplies, they are now attempting to ‘Russianize’ their occupied areas. They are ‘filtering’ all the residents, detaining and torturing many workers and people, and executing defiant people as ‘neo-Nazis’ or otherwise taking them away to Russian territories. An enormous number of Ukrainians have been forcibly deported to and worked in Siberia, the Far East and Sakhalin. This is Putin’s war.

The Russian forces are now frantic to seize Sievierodonetsk (in Luhansk Oblast), a strategic city presently controlled by Ukrainian forces. They are also intent on promoting the ‘Russianization’ of Kherson Oblast and other regions, while attempting to destroy Odesa as a ‘next target’. If Russia seize the Black Sea coast, the Ukrainian state as a whole will inevitably be weakened, eventually leading to the collapse of the pro-Western government —— this is the plot Putin is brewing in the current conditions where he has been forced to prepare for a ‘prolonged war’ or a ‘war of attrition’ since he was basically defeated in the three-month-long war of aggression.

He is making another calculation: The more the war will be prolonged, the more seriously the world will suffer from energy, food and other crises, the deepening of which would undermine the unity of US and European powers while, on the contrary, that of BRICS headed by China and Russia will be strengthened. This devilish ‘czar’ has thus prevented foodstuffs from being exported from Ukrainian ports in disregard of the fact that this blockade is to drive millions of people into starvation around the world.

This is not all. If Ukrainian forces launch an attack on Russian occupied areas, Russia will resort to a counterattack using nuclear weapons by regarding it as an attack on Russia itself — Putin is brewing such an evil plot.

Faced with such a strategic change of Putin, American and European imperialist powers, who have been involved in this war for their respective national interests, have become unsettled. Terrified by Russia’s invasion, they have thus far imposed economic sanctions on Russia and supplied weapons to Ukraine in order to prevent ‘today’s Hitler’ from revenging upon them (from marching westward). But now, they are beginning to fear Ukraine’s ‘excessive victory’, so to speak.

For the Biden administration of imperialist America, the highest priority is to win in the US-China confrontation. It is obliged to somehow prevent Russia, a nuclear big power collaborating with China, from gaining greater strength, as is evident in its words, ‘to weaken Russia’; however, even though it may have achieved a temporal ‘unity of NATO’ by taking advantage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China is more and more accelerating its ‘external expansion’ in East Asia. The Biden administration therefore has to mobilize the military and economic powers of Japan as its ‘vassal state’ in order to cope with China. Moreover, the approval rating for this administration is as low as 40%, so that, in the coming midterm elections in autumn, its defeat to the Republicans in both the upper and lower houses is becoming unavoidable.

EU and NATO member states, on the other hand, are also revealing disarray: with Britain hit by historic inflation; Germany in confusion over its purchase of Russian natural gas, with conflicts coming to the fore within the political elite as well as pressure from monopoly capitalists; Turkey’s opposition to Finland’s and Sweden’s applications for participating in NATO; and so forth.

The more the war of aggression in Ukraine is prolonged, the more American and European power holders will be inclined to leave Ukrainians to their fate.

We must therefore fight now to crush Putin’s war with the united strength of workers and people across the world in solidarity with Ukrainian people in brave battle. By encircling the czar of the FSB-controlled state with the worldwide spreading flame of the struggle to crush Putin’s war, Russian people’s ‘moderate antiwar protests’ will eventually develop into a decisive struggle against the state power under the banner of ‘Bring down Putin!’

Putin is now desperate to maintain his authoritarian ruling system under the FSB by propagandizing the story that the ‘great Soviet Union’ under Stalin’s leadership defeated Nazi Germany in the Second World War in spite of a heavy toll of lives more than twenty million people. However, the way for the Russian working people to take to break through their miserable socio-economic situation after the collapse of the USSR does not lie in a revival of a ‘great power headed by a strong leader’ like the Stalinist USSR. The only way forward lies in that they realize the Russian proletarian revolution of 1917 again at the present time, by awaking to the anti-proletarian nature of Stalinism as false Marxism, which betrayed the world’s workers and toiling masses and usurped ‘revolutionary Russia’, and by denouncing the counterrevolutionary nature of the Gorbachev-perpetrated destruction of the Soviet Union.

Ukrainian workers and people in a resolute battle to defeat the Putin-mobilized invading army must build solidarity with conscientious Russian people and, march arm in arm with them in the direction towards the construction of Soviet republics in both Ukraine and Russia as they did in Lenin’s days.

Thus we the anti-Stalinist revolutionary Left in Japan appeal to Russian working people and Ukrainian working people. In solidarity with them, we will keep fighting to advance the Ukraine antiwar struggle.

(May 22nd, 2022)