Editorial
December 1999

Russia's war on Chechnya shadows 1989 anniversary

On Nov. 9, the very day Western rulers gathered in Berlin on the 10th anniversary of the breaking down of the Berlin Wall, Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin thumbed his nose at the West's ability to withhold credits to Russia's crippled economy and drew a new line in the sand: "Our territory from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea."

Putin was referring to a new siege of a whole population in Chechnya where hundreds of civilians have been killed, thousands were wounded and over 200,000 have fled the country to the neighboring republic of Ingushetia, creating scenes reminiscent of Kosova but without the same level of world indignation. Relying on bombs and rockets to shatter Chechen towns from afar and strictly controlling the flow of news from the front, the Russian rulers have learned from Milosevic's methods in Bosnia and Kosova.

The Russian army had already destroyed most of Chechnya when it lost the 1994-96 war in Chechnya which then gained de facto independence in 1997. The Russian army returned to the region this summer first to put down an attack by a small group of Chechen Muslim extremists in the neighboring republic of Dagestan. When terrorists then bombed apartment buildings inside Russia, killing 300 civilians, Putin, without proof, blamed Chechens and proceeded to reinvade Chechnya.

Now over 100,000 Russian troops outside the Chechen capital of Grozny have instituted a blockade against the whole civilian population who, in any case, are innocent. The real stake in this new line in the sand is, according to Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev, whether Russia will be squeezed out of the oil-rich Caspian Sea region.

NATO has not only expanded in Eastern Europe but has received calls for military cooperation from a new regional security group, GUAM, composed of Georgia, Urkraine and Azerbaijan. GUAM wants to provide security for a new proposed pipeline which bypasses Russia and is to be built running from Baku in Azerbaijan through Georgia and to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.

Because of the terrorist bombings inside Russia, opposition within Russia to the new Chechen war has been slower to emerge than the 1994-96 war. However, new revelations about mass dislocations caused by civilian bombardment made even the liberal Yabloko party call for a halt to the mass bombings and talks with Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov.

The West agrees with Russia that the military campaign in Chechnya is an "internal" Russian affair. Their protests are even more muted than they were in Bosnia and Kosova before they came to the so-called "rescue," only after years of killing, when mass dislocations threatened regional stability. The difference is that Russia still has a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons even though it is an economic cripple whose population is suffering through a Great Depression. The supposed end of the Cold War now means that whole populations are pawns in the ongoing capitalist game of big power economic and military competition in a region rife with neo-fascism and severly depressed economies.

This was not the result that masses in Eastern Europe fought for over several decades, beginning with the 1953 East German workers' revolt that demanded "Bread and Freedom" and culminating ten years ago with the pulling down of the Berlin Wall. Today's new Eastern European leaders who embrace market capitalism say their greatest contribution was coming to power, not through a revolution, but through a "negotiated transfer of power." Their biggest crime is that in their arrogance they left the masses and their aspirations for freedom out in the cold.

What unites all rulers, even as they compete militarily or economically and draw new lines in the sand, is their opposition to the aspirations for freedom of great masses in motion. Anna Walentynowicz, a crane operator whose firing sparked the 1980 Solidarity movement in Gdansk, recently said that in the 1980s workers were looking for a "Third Way," a true socialism, not "mass poverty, homelessness, [and] self-styled capitalists selling off our plants and pocketing the money."

Though the Solidarity movement did set the ground for the overthrow of the old regimes, the intellectuals never responded with the needed articulation of the freedom idea to help workers realize their reach for a true socialism. Instead what passed for new theory was constant preaching to the workers, telling them to limit their revolution in order to avoid Soviet tanks. Reflecting on the 1989 East German New Forum movement of which he was a cofounder, Jens Reich now offers a self-critical view of the movement. "Politically," says Reich, "there is much I regret. We dreamed about a somewhat different society. But I wouldn't accuse only the 'colonialists' from the West for pushing us aside. We were ready to give away what we had seized."

Marxist-Humanism, which has based itself on the history of the East European freedom struggles, from the Hungarian Workers' Councils in 1956 to Socialism with a Human Face in Czechoslovakia in 1968, poses the need to confront the impasse in the mass movements' striving for freedom. Today's retrospectives on the 10th anniversary of tearing down the Berlin Wall show that the question that needs to be addressed NOW for the future is "what happens after the conquest of power?" A political/organizational expression of Marx's original humanism and its freedom idea was never more urgently needed. History continues to prove that Marx's idea of freedom is a standard which comprehends the new in terms of its unfolding in the self-active reason of the masses.

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