The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought devastation to the country, high casualties of Ukrainian civilians, soldiers killed on both sides, and has changed global politics. As the war enters its fourth week, the world now faces the possibility of direct military conflict between major powers for the first time since WWII. But the current crisis did not begin on February 24th 2022. In this analysis Tomáš Tengely-Evans, who reported from Ukraine in 2015, looks at the long roots of the conflict in post-Soviet era Russia.*
Image: Graphic by Veronika Merkova, background image by Steve Eason
A convoy of Russian tanks, artillery and soldiers is rounding down on the capital city to lay siege. Missiles and bombs are raining down on civilians while shells pound desperate defenders. Thousands of people have already been displaced, triggering a refugee crisis. President Vladimir Putin is determined to stamp his authority on the country in a brute assertion of Russian imperial interests.
However, the country isn’t Ukraine. The year isn’t 2022. It’s Chechnya in 1999-2000—and Western leaders are backing Putin.
British Labour prime minister Tony Blair flew to St. Petersburg to justify his action on “terrorism”. As Chechnya’s capital Grozny, the “most destroyed city on earth”, smouldered, the Blairs and Putins enjoyed some time together in an old Tsarist palace and spent a night at the opera—Prokofiev’s War and Peace. US secretary of state Madeline Albright had already praised Putin as a “problem-solving patriot” with a “candid approach”.
How could a seeming partner of the West turn into its main adversary in Europe? And what triggered Putin to launch this brutal invasion of Ukraine?
There are the mainstream explanations which go something like this: After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, liberals claim, new Russian president Boris Yeltsin brought in a brief period of democracy and free market capitalism. Then along came the KGB hard-man Putin, who abandoned the progress made in the 1990s. At home, he built an authoritarian regime and stamped on free enterprise, while abroad he undermines Western democracy.
These narratives try to explain Russia’s foreign policy by psychologising Putin. It’s his state of mind, or his past as a Soviet KGB spook that explain invasions of Georgia in 2008 or Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. This latest aggression proves, in the words of Joe Biden, that Putin wants to “reestablish the former Soviet Union”.
The reality is very different to such blue-tick fantasies. Instead, it’s necessary to understand how Russia rebuilt its influence within global imperialism—a system of rival capitalist states where economic and geopolitical competition combine—after the collapse of the Soviet Union into 15 independent republics.
Yeltsin worked with the US to bring about the transition from state capitalism to free market capitalism. His finance minister Anatoly Chubais pushed through the biggest privatisation programme in history, under the tutelage of Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
As Russia’s new rulers worked with Washington, some believed that Russia could become part of the global capitalist system as a junior partner of US imperialism. Even under Putin in 2000, Russia asked to join Nato and supported the invasion of Afghanistan in exchange for US support for its war on Chechnya.
But such hopes didn’t mean Russia had any intention of relinquishing “near abroad”, the former Soviet republics, as part of its sphere of influence. No sooner had the Soviet Union collapsed, it sought to maintain control despite its internal crisis.
Privatisation concentrated wealth in the hands of a few “oligarchs”—super-rich, politically-connected businessmen, often former Soviet bureaucrats. But the free market shock therapy unleashed a deep social crisis, weakened the state and reduced the military industrial complex to a shadow of its former self. So the Yeltsin regime relied on fermented ethnic division, civil wars and separatist conflicts in the early 1990s, resulting in 170,000 people dead and 1.5 million turned into refugees.
The Caucasus—an energy-rich region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea—became an imperial battleground. Russia’s deputy minister for federation and nationality issues, former general Kim Tsagolov, made clear, “Russia is participating in this confrontation between world powers in disadvantageous conditions. But, in spite of this, we must defend our position on the Caucasian bridgehead.”
When Chechnya’s democratically-elected president Dzhokhar Dudayev declared independence in 1992, Russia couldn’t afford to lose control. Chechnya was a major industrial centre located at the heart of the Caucuses. Yelstin ordered the paramilitary Internal Troops to subdue the republic. But mass opposition, with hundreds of thousands turning out on the streets of Grozny, forced Russia to retreat.
Two years later, Yeltsin hoped to make an example of Chechnya to send a signal across the “near abroad”. Russian general Pavel Grachev had boasted he could seize Grozny “in a couple of hours with a single airborne regiment”. But the forces that entered the destroyed city were confronted by fierce resistance.
After 18 months, Russia was forced into a “peace” negotiation that gave Chechnya de facto independence. This humiliation wasn’t just the product of powerful Chechen resistance. Inside Russia itself, fury at free market shock therapy and the war had combined. Striking miners carried signs that read, “Yeltsin—killer of Chechens and miners.”
In the 1996 presidential election Yelstin faced defeat at the hands of a Stalinist challenger, Gennady Zyuganov. The West and rival oligarchs united to defend his presidency. The IMF swiftly gave a £10 billion loan, allowing some workers’ wages to be paid for the first time in months.
While Yelstin won, his inebriated ineptitude soon meant the West and the oligarchs saw him as a liability. He suddenly resigned on 31 October 1999 and appointed Putin as acting president. Putin had worked his way up the ranks of the presidential administration through a slavish loyalty to the Yeltsin regime.
Putin gained support from a powerful group of oligarchs to win the presidential election in 1999. He has built on Yeltsin regime’s authoritarianism and imperialism, and remained committed to the model of profit-making brought in during the 1990s.
From this position of strength, he launched a brutal offensive on Chechnya in 1999, learning the lessons of Russia’s past blunders. The victory in Chechnya, combined with the spike in oil prices in the 2000s, underpinned the regime’s popularity and allowed it to flex its muscles in the “near abroad” and further afield.
The US had come out of the Cold War as the world’s only superpower and Washington policy-makers thought they could set the agenda without any interference. The reality was more complicated. Serial US war criminal Henry Kissinger warned it was still in “no better position to dictate the global agenda unilaterally than it was at the beginning of the Cold War”. He said the US “will face economic competition of a kind it has never experienced” from rising powers such as China.
The US sought to overcome its relative economic decline through a brute assertion of military might. In the 1990s Nato, a vehicle for projecting US imperialism, intervened in the bloody civil wars in the former Yugoslavia. The US broke a verbal promise to the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that Nato wouldn’t expand into eastern Europe. And after 2001 it tried to gain control of the Middle East’s vast oil reserves—partly to choke off China—though the “Project for the New American Century” and “War on Terror”.
The “near abroad” became a site of growing imperialist competition between the West and Russia. In the 1990s, the US didn’t want Russia to gain dominance in the Caucuses. But it understood that a victory for the Chechen resistance would be a blow against imperialism, and potentially become a beacon for other movements challenging “great powers” like itself. And it wanted to carve up Russia’s oil fields and other industries.
This didn’t stop the US trying to pull the former Soviet republics into its sphere of influence. One example is the GUAM Organisation for Democracy and Economic Development, a Nato-backed outfit set up in 1997, made up of Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova.
Some US officials—including outgoing president Bill Clinton in 2000—had entertained the idea of Russian membership of Nato. But, ultimately, the admission of a relatively strong military power would have destabilised the US-dominated alliance when Washington’s overriding concern was asserting its hegemony.
The first confrontation came in Georgia in 2008—in many ways, a dry run for Ukraine. At Nato’s Bucharest Summit in 2008, it had agreed an action plan for membership of Georgia and Ukraine. The Russian army stepped into the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, preventing Georgia’s from joining Nato. “Unresolved external territorial disputes” are usually a barrier to membership.
As well as Nato, there is an economic dimension to the competition in the “near abroad”. The US wasn’t the only player in the area—the European Union (EU), a wannabe imperialism, had been muscling in.
Speaking during the Ukraine crisis of 2014, former British ambassador to Latvia Ian Bond laid out Western thinking on the “near abroad”. He complained that Putin is “trying to shut us out of an area that is just as much our backyard as his backyard”. “If somebody is competing with you, if they are thwarting things that you think are in your interest, you have to do more to try to protect your interests as you see them,” he said.
Meanwhile, Putin had set up the Eurasian Customs Union (ECU), with Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, to compete with the EU. Ukraine, as one of the most industrially developed former Soviet republics, was vital to making it a serious bloc.
The Ukraine crisis in 2014 was never about democracy or the right to self-determination, it was always about which rival bloc it would be part of. Facing a financial crisis, Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovich had a choice between aligning with one mutually-exclusive bloc or the other—the EU or the ECU.
After Yanukovich chose Russia, protests erupted in favour of signing an EU association agreement. They grew rapidly, but now also in response to brutal police repression, and latched anger against the oligarchs, inequality and corruption onto joining the EU.
Yanukovich was overthrown and replaced by a pro-Western government. Russia, sensing that Ukraine would pivot to the Western camp, annexed the Crimea to protect its military interests in the Black Sea. Appealing to Greater Russian Chauvinism at home, it supported a separatist insurgency in Donetsk and Luhansk in the south east to destabilise the country and stop it joining the EU and Nato.
“Peace negotiations”, known as the Minsk Agreement, froze the conflict, but it began flaring up in autumn of last year. That’s because Ukraine sits at the centre of a much bigger fault line of imperialist rivalry. Beginning in the north at Russia’s border with the Baltic states—Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia—it cuts down into Ukraine, through the Caucuses and into central Asia.
Imperialist tensions have been growing right across it in the wake of the US’s defeats in the 2000s. The war on terror was supposed to send a signal to the US’s competitors that it was still top dog in the world. But its failures in the Middle East signalled to weaker powers, such as Russia, that it was possible to assert their imperial interests even in opposition to US wishes.
These growing inter imperialist rivalries are the background to the war. What triggered a full-scale invasion? Putin has relied more on Greater Russian Chauvinism to hold on to a popular base and has used it to justify the invasion of Ukraine. Far from wanting to “re-establish the Soviet Union”, Putin harks back to Tsarist Russia.
Others emphasise that decision-making lies with Putin and the “siloviki” (strong men)—generals, cops and spooks who run the “power ministries”. These factors are an important part of the picture. But I don’t believe Russia would have launched a full-scale invasion without significant sections of the state being in favour of it.
Broadly speaking, there are two underlying reasons. First, the scale of the competitive pressures on Russia was growing. It has been able to reassert its dominance in the “near abroad” and further afield—for example, in Syria and Libya. Certainly, it can throw its weight around as an exporter of oil and gas and some other raw materials—and this is far from negligible. But its economic weight compared to the US and EU is small, and it lacks a real competitive advantage.
Second, Russia’s “near abroad” has seen a series of major revolts in the last two years—Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The dynamics of these popular revolts for democratic rights and social justice are often shaped by inter-imperialist rivalry, with the US and EU hoping to gain from the fall of a Moscow-aligned regime.
By 2021, it was becoming clear to Moscow that it was losing the battle over Ukraine in the face of the West’s superior weight. It has sought to overcome this with a brute assertion of force in the hope of sending a signal across the “near abroad”.
What should we do? As shells pulverised Grozny in 2000, who was it that stood against Russia’s naked aggression? It was the anti-imperialist, international left—the same left that is now being smeared as “Putin apologists”.
Today, our opposition to war in Ukraine has to be based on understanding it as an inter-imperialist conflict between the West and Russia that’s tearing the country apart. That means standing against the Russian invasion, but also refusing to be cajoled and bullied into dropping our opposition to the West and Nato which offer no solution.
*Tomáš Tengely-Evans is a Welsh Slovak Marxist and online editor at Socialist Worker. He reported from Ukraine in 2015.
