International Correspondence - March 31, 2023
The Ukranian question
Message from the JRCL-RMF of Japan
Comrades of the FLTI!
We are sending our warmest message of solidarity to you all, present at this meeting with indignation renewed at the Russian aggression against Ukraine.
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Comrades! It's four hundred days since the Russian army invaded Ukraine. At this very moment, Ukrainian working people are dauntlessly combating at the risk of their lives to defeat detestable Putin's invading army: some as members of the Armed Forces or Territorial Defence Forces, and some as partisan fighters. By this brave, fearless resistance of Ukrainians, Putin's offensive to 'conquer the whole of Donbas by the end of March' has been shattered completely.
In solidarity with those Ukrainian people in combat, we the JRCL have been fighting with all our might to build up mass struggles to crush Putin's war. From February 24th to 26th, a year after the start of the invasion, we rose in protest action; together with Zengakuren and Antiwar Youth Committees, we marched on the Russian Embassy in Tokyo and Russian Consulates in other cities in Japan. We staged those actions as part of the global actions organized in solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance in many cities, including Berlin, Paris, London, Geneva and Barcelona. We carried out our fights in the van of those actions.
Comrades of the FLTI! Let us fight arm in arm to create a tremendous upsurge of struggles of working people all over the world to crush Putin's war!
'Ukraine is historically an inseparable part of Russia.' With this arrogant declaration, Putin is frantically carrying on the war to seize the territory of Ukraine by force, to exterminate the Ukrainian nation and state altogether.
This Great Russian chauvinist insists, with a bitter grudge, that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was 'the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century' (as Russian territories were stolen) that was caused by the 'West'. But the fact is that Ukraine and other constituent republics seceded from the USSR one after another because the deep-seated indignation of the toiling people in those nations finally erupted against the terrible oppression, mass murder, plunders, poverty, famines and everything else that had been imposed by the cruel assimilation policies enforced by Stalin and his successors.
Notwithstanding that, Putin ascribes the collapse of the Soviet Union to the fact that Lenin granted the 'right of secession' to nations at the start of the Union. Impermissibly, he even screams out that 'Lenin planted a time bomb for the collapse of the Union'! On the other hand, he praised Stalin for having trampled Lenin's policies on nations and ethnicities, for imposing 'Russianization' on other ethnicities, and for geographically expanding the Soviet sphere. Comrades, remember! It is Iosif Stalin who promoted Great Russian chauvinism on the basis of his ideology of 'socialism in one country'. Vladimir Putin, who praises Stalin as such as a 'genuine patriot' and is assaulting Ukrainian people with ruthless brutality, is none other than a 'scion of Stalin'!
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Despite the fact that this brutal, atrocious war by Putin has actually been carried on for more than a year, so-called 'leftist' and 'antiwar' movements in the world, which ought to prevent it, are revealing a critical state of affairs. Among those who style themselves as 'leftists', not a few are raising the banner 'Peace now' and demanding an 'immediate ceasefire' even of Ukraine. This means that they (DIE LINKE in Germany, for instance) are pressing Ukrainians to lay down their arms, while leaving Russia's occupation as it is. For over a year, those 'leftists' have been spreading such nonsensical arguments: 'It is NATO that is to blame because it has cornered Putin' and 'Both Putin and Zelensky are to blame'. They do not have an iota of indignation against Putin, the very perpetrator who is plunging Ukrainian working people into a sea of blood. Neither do they have any sympathy and solidarity with Ukrainians who are putting up resistance at the risk of their lives. Those self-styled 'leftists' are already dead as leftists.
The reason why they effectively defend Putin's war, aimed to revive Russia as a 'superpower', lies in that they think that the ruler of Russia, which used to be the Soviet Union and belongs to the 'East', is preferable to imperialist state rulers of the 'West'. Fundamentally, this is because they have neglected confronting Stalinism.
We the anti-Stalinist revolutionary Left in Japan have long been revealing that the self-proclaimed 'socialist Soviet Union', which imposed so many hardships on Ukrainian people, was nothing but false socialism and that it was an autocratic state under the Stalinist bureaucracy formed after Stalin's usurpation of revolutionary Russia. Definitely we fight together with Ukrainian working people who are combating with their indignation flared up against the brutalities of Putin's Russia by superimposing them on the past atrocities of the Stalin-led USSR.
At the same time, we fight in solidarity with Russian working people who are suffering from violent repression by the Putin-led FSB-helmed authoritarian state. Now is the time to revive the spirit of the soviet-based Russian-Ukrainian revolutions that Russian and Ukrainian toiling people achieved by battling in concert. Revive the spirit of the great proletarian revolution that has been trampled down by Stalinists. Fight arm in arm against the brutalities of the Putin regime! - Thus we revolutionary Marxists appeal to Ukrainian and Russian working people.
We call on fighting leftists and combative working people all over the world to powerfully create a mass struggle to crush Putin's war in solidarity with Ukrainian and Russian people.
Comrades of the FLTI! Let us fight together under the banner of proletarian internationalism!
Let us fight together to break through the crisis of a global nuclear war mounting amid the clash between the US and China with Russia!
SK
Japan Revolutionary Communist League (Revolutionary Marxist Faction)
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