We’re starting off with a very short one for the first week. This text was published in 1915, two years before the October revolution, and is sadly still highly relevant in the imperial core.
This reading group is meant to educate, and people from any instances federated with Lemmygrad are welcome. Any comments not engaging in good faith will be removed (don’t respond to hostile comments, just report them).
You can post questions or share your thoughts at any time. We’ll be moving on to a new text next week, but this thread won’t be locked.
You can read the text here.
I think it is important in the context to see Ukraine as just a vassal of usa/nato and Russia as a 3rd party standing up for the LPR and DPR’s right to self determination. In a war for self determination against neo-imperialism we side with the anti-imperialists.
LPR and DRP are joining Russia as a practical response to the fact that they will never be allowed to be independent as long as usa and nato exist. Better to live as equals in a capitalists state than be an oppressed people under outright fascist imperialists.
It breaks down the nuance a bit further.
LPR/DPR have nothing to do with self determination because they are not nations. Russia and Ukraine are nations, both have their states, neither is fighting for self determination.
Donbass was not colonised by Ukraine, it’s a region of Ukraine with significant Russian population which is not unusual along borders.
This is a border dispute, of course people living there are affected, but that doesn’t make it a war for self-determination, otherwise all wars fought over territory would be wars of self determination.
Not nations? says who? regardless of your arbitrary (and incorrect) definition of “nation” they were autonomous and self governing for nearly a decade berfore the smo.
Whether they were colonized or not is irrelevant. The people of the LPR and DPR have the right to self determination. They have a right to fight for their freedom and they did that for 9 years. Russia started the SMO with the intention of assisting the LPR and DPR in defending from attacks by ukraine. The Russian offer to join was only extended after the zelensky government abandoned peace talks.
Calling it a border dispute is ahistorical.
Lenin, Stalin, and Marxist-Leninist theory in general.
Not any more than people of Hong Kong or Taiwan. Because they are not nations.
Lenin and stalin never said shit about the LPR or DPR because they didn’t exist. Stop pretending you speak for them.
How does that not apply to the Donbass republics?
The people of hong kong and taiwan are nations and have self determination. They haven’t used their self determination to secede from china because it isn’t the majority position. They aren’t independent states but they are nations, just like Tibet is.
It was Stalin who wrote Marxism and the National Question.
Yeah… sure did. I guess I need that re-read even more than I thought.
There is no nation of Hong Kong, they are Han Chinese. There is no nation of Donbass, they are Russians and Ukrainians. The way you’re trying to read that quote from Lenin, every single town, every village, every district is a nation. That’s not at all what Lenin said.
Tibet does have it’s own language, territory, and culture, and so it is indeed a nation.
Saying it again doesn’t make it true. “nuh uh” is not a valid argument.
I think you need to (re?)read Marxism and the National Question. (I probably will) You seem to be crossing ethnicity and nationality. Ethnicity has nothing to do with national identity so I don’t know why you bring it up.
The entire ukraine conflict is because there were 2 national groups within the state of ukraine and one of those nations wished to eliminate the other. The banderites illegalized the Russian language because they wanted a single national identity within the borders of ukraine. That is what all nationalists want. That is why nationalism is dangerous because it leads to the subjugation and elimination of minority nations by forced assimilation, first by legislation then by violence.
Its impossible to say whether Lenin would have supported Russia in this war but he would have stood with the Donbas republics pre 2022. I imagine he would have frowned on them inviting Russia to annex them but if the alternative was pogroms (it was) I think he would understand.
We can look at the writing of past marxists but they didn’t write on the possibility of a capitalist state fighting an expansionist war against a mono-polar capitalist imperialist order. Dialectical materialism is not a religion it is a practice. You have to analyse each situation as it arises you cant just accept written words as dogma.
There are several Socialist Nations who have clearly chosen the side of Russia. The DPRK don’t fucking miss a beat and they side with Russia. China is usually pretty quiet about international politics that don’t involve them but they are clearly siding with Russia. Cuba also puts the blame on usa and nato expansionism.
Do you doubt the judgement of the professional Marxist academic theorist in the Communist Party of Cuba CPC and WPK to all be wrong? That’s a bold line to take.
As for the national character of hong kong and tiawan, its irrelevant to this discussion because they are nothing like the DPR and LPR were because they haven’t declared independence from China.
I disagree. The Donbass is a territory unique from others in the region. This can been seen in the major political ideological divide and is the very thing that the USA took advantage of in order to instigate this proxy war. I also believe that when two cultures come together, Russian and Ukrainian for example, that this creates a unique culture where traditions from both become mixed together. At least when the people live together harmoniously which they did for some time.
Doesn’t make it a nation.
Sure, this is basically what Cossacks were, with some influence from nations of Caucasus; there were even some calls for independence.
However this is not what happened in Donbass, ask anyone in Donbass what is their nationality and they will either say Russian or Ukrainian.
The people living in the DPR and LPR disagree with you. For many of them this is about self-determination. It is about protection from a fascist regime that was seeking to exterminate them, their language, their culture and their religion. This is not a border dispute, that is completely ignorant of the reality of the situation and of how this started.
Go try and ask a person living in Donetsk what they think about the prospect of being left unprotected at the mercy of the Ukrainian Nazi regime that has been shelling them for a decade. All this started because the people there rose up against an illegal coup that brought to power a regime that declared everything Russian as anathema. The entire reason why there was a civil war for eight years in Ukraine is because of people fighting for self-determination. For autonomy or independence from a state that they felt no longer represented them and had become outright hostile to them. For them this is a war of national liberation.
This is not about a few people of another nationality living in a border area, these are entire regions, most of Eastern and Southern Ukraine in fact, that are and have been for centuries historically Russian, linguistically and culturally.
It is quite apparent that you don’t understand Ukraine, its national-ethnic composition or its history.(Edit: I should not have said that, i made unjustified assumptions about where you were coming from on this issue)The Banderite Ukrainian nationalist project, even if you wanted to ignore its deeply fascist character and roots, is a colonial one, in the sense that it seeks to establish a mono-linguistic ethnostate and erase the linguistic, cultural and ethnic diversity of Ukraine by forcibly imposing the language, culture and historical national conception of a minority in the far west of Ukraine.
There is a continuum of culture and language in Ukraine going from East to West. The distinction between Ukrainian and Russian national identity is not at all as clear as you make it out to be. No, the DPR and LPR are not nations, they never claimed that, they (now) consider themselves part of the Russian nation, as did much of Ukraine to some degree before the Ukrainian nationalist re-education project began post 1991 and accelerating after 2014 to aggressively promote the idea that the entire territory of Ukraine should view itself as “Ukrainian” according to a strictly Western Ukrainian conception of that term that is explicitly and aggressively anti-Russian.
OK this is laughable. I was raised in Ukraine and I don’t need a Westerner to tell me I don’t understand it, especially one who seems to think Ukrainians are “a minority in the far West of Ukraine”.
I’m aware, thanks. The way I’ve been taught, Dnipro marks the border between Eastern Ukraine, which was always under Russian influence, and Western Ukraine, which had significant Polish influence and cultural ties. But the same goes for Russia. Ukrainian language was spoken all the way to the Don, the Cossack dialect has strong Ukrainian influence, and really entire Southern Russia is a mixture of Ukrainian, Georgian, Abkhasian, Ingush, Circassian, and other influences. Where exactly is the “ethnically and historically correct” border between Ukraine and Russia? I have no idea, maybe it’s along Dnipro, maybe it’s along Don, or anywhere in between.
Where is the legally correct border between Ukraine and Russia? That’s much easier, that was peacefully agreed in 1991. Should Ukraine pursue a return to those borders? Fuck no, that ship has sailed and it’s time for Ukraine to cut its losses and accept whatever peace it can have.
Your post with date-by-date history of the lead up to this conflict is spot on and I’m aware of those events. They still don’t justify invading a brotherly nation. Again, having been raised in the USSR I can’t support Russia’s wars on its neighbours, even if the fault lies mostly with the West.
Look at China, it manages to maintain sovereignty without killing large numbers of people in Hong Kong or Taiwan, and without waging wars on internal separatists like in Xinjiang.
Again, having grown up in Ukraine in the 80s, I can assure you people living there considered themselves Ukrainian, even Russian speakers like me.
Continuing from my other reply to this comment, I would add a few more minor things:
I don’t entirely agree with this generalization. Odessa is clearly a very Russian city but it is West of the Dnieper, whereas some parts of northern Ukraine close to the Belarus border, around Chernigov and even Poltava, at least according to voting patterns and language maps, appear to align more toward the West.
The only region here that sticks out from the general “more Russian-speaking = more pro-Russian” trend is Kiev itself where the population is naturally more cosmopolitan and Western oriented.
I understand where you are coming from. I don’t think anyone who supports Russia wanted this war either. But what choice exactly did Russia have? Would you have had them throw the people of the DPR and LPR to the wolves? What was the alternative once it became clear that the Minsk agreements were never going to be fulfilled by Ukraine, and that the situation was quickly reaching a point of no-return? What would the domestic consequences be for Russia to have millions of refugees from the Donbass pour over the border? How many in Russia would blame the government for having abandoned these fellow Russians?
And on the subject of NATO, membership or no Ukraine was quickly becoming a de-facto member. NATO was already beginning to move into Ukraine, train its troops, transfer equipment, preparing to establish bases… Should Russia have waited until NATO had fully and irreversibly sunk its claws into Ukraine? Should they wait until the security situation became so critical that it would mean they were forced to start a war with all of NATO?
The Kiev regime was not going to stop at just the Donbass. Since 2014 they never stopped declaring their intention to retake Crimea, which i think you will agree is clearly Russian and voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia. What if a NATO Ukraine started a war to retake Crimea and NATO spun it to make Russia look like the aggressor? How could a sovereign Russia even continue to exist if NATO nuclear missiles were placed in Ukraine, at any time minutes away from a decapitation strike on Moscow? Would the fanatical Ukrainian nationalists stop at Crimea even or would they continue to push further, into places like Rostov-on-Don or Kuban which the Banderites also claim as “historically Ukrainian”?
What do you think Russia could or should have done, after eight years of being fooled with the Minsk sham, after their offer for a diplomatic settlement of the security situation in 2021 was decisively rejected and as it became clear that the Kiev regime was becoming increasingly intent on and prepared for a purely military “final solution” to the Donbass problem?
Russia is not waging war on Ukraine, it is at war with NATO and its proxies, with the fascist Kiev regime. At what point does it become morally unacceptable to abandon a brotherly nation to imperialism and fascism?
That’s not what i said. I said that this particular conception of Ukrainian national identity (as it began to be popularized after 1991 and has been forcefully imposed since 2014) is one which came from Western Ukraine. You may disagree but from my understanding of history this specific conception of what it means to be Ukrainian is clearly rooted in the Bandera-Shukhevych Ukrainian nationalist movement.
And Russian language was spoken all the way to Lvov. This is not an argument. The question is what is the majority language and culture, and that is not so easy to answer because it depends on where you draw a line that is to a degree somewhat arbitrary. Is Surzhik a Russian or a Ukrainian dialect? What distinguishes Ukrainian from Russian culture? Some people even argue that Ukrainian is (or started out as) a dialect of Russian: https://en.topwar.ru/193115-ukrainskij-jazyk-narechie-russkogo-jazyka.html That’s probably going too far but again, where exactly do you draw the line? I prefer not to get into these sorts of linguistic debates, my point is merely that there is a lot of ambiguity here.
And why was it necessary for post-Maidan Ukraine to begin such a harsh repression of the use of Russian language, suppression of Russian books and other media, etc. if it was an insignificant minority? https://softpanorama.org/Skeptics/Political_skeptic/Nationalism/Ukranian_nationalism/supression_of_russian_language_in_ukraine.shtml
I don’t doubt it. At that time the definition of Ukrainian was different, it was not yet the fanatically anti-Russian identity that is now promoted by Ukrainian nationalism. At that time it was still possible to identify as Ukrainian in the sense that you live on the territory of Ukraine, and still speak Russian, identify in part with Russian culture and history, belong to the traditional Ukrainian Orthodox Church (not the fake one invented by the nationalists) which is now banned etc.
The situation is not comparable. Hong Kong and Taiwan are officially part of China. Russia does not consider Ukraine part of its territory. And if Taiwan did attempt to officially declare independence China would almost certainly respond very forcefully.
The closest comparison would be if China didn’t consider Taiwan as part of China but had good relations with it until the US one day replaced Taiwan’s government in a coup, Taiwan started to heavily persecute its ethnic Chinese population (unrealistic because they are a vast majority but let’s say for the sake of argument they weren’t), suppressed the use of Mandarin Chinese, waged an open war on a part of its own population while building up an enormous army, and openly declared intentions to join a US led military alliance that refused to rule out the placing of nuclear capable missiles on the territory of Taiwan. In what world would China just sit by and do nothing?
I’m not sure I follow, what is so specific to Galicia in the current Ukrainian national identity? How is it different from Ukrainian identity of the UkrSSR?
It seems to me Ukrainian Nazis did the same thing Nazis do everywhere - take a national identity and slap some hatred on top. In this case, Bandera cult and russophobia. Remove that and you’re back to just… Regular Ukrainians. Am I missing something?
For one thing the anti-Russian hate. Another is the insistence on linguistic homogeneity. The Ukrainian SSR never enforced the Ukrainian language on those who didn’t want to speak it.
Exactly. That’s the point. The problem is that now the Ukrainian national identity that began to be built (with western backed NGOs, CIA funded activists and Ukrainian diaspora groups with roots in the OUN and other Nazi collaborators who fled the USSR driving this process) after 1991 relied heavily on anti-Russian historical narratives, on the “holodomor” myth and other narratives of victimization by Russia, and on exaggerating the differences and the historical animosity between Ukrainians and Russians.
The problem is that at this point, it has become very hard to separate the Bandera cult and the russophobia from Ukrainian identity. Not because this is what Russia or Russian people think (i think even now the vast majority of Russians today, with the exception of a very small minority of extreme nationalists, want to believe that Ukrainians are still the same brotherly people and can return to what they used to be, the “regular Ukrainians” as you said) but because this is what the current Ukrainian state and Ukrainian nationalists insist on and what they have been teaching Ukrainian children in schools for decades to believe, which has resulted in a population that to a significant degree now shares this view.
And those who didn’t buy into this “new” post-Soviet conception of Ukrainian identity, the people living in Eastern Ukraine, as a result began to view themselves less and less as Ukrainian if being Ukrainian meant having to hate everything Russian. The “Russian Spring” in the Donbass was a direct result of the Maidan coup, but its roots lay in this longer process of polarization of Ukrainian society. It is tragic but no surprise that this ended up in a civil war and then eventually a Russian intervention when all diplomatic attempts to end that civil war failed.
That’s just Great-Russian chauvinism. Sorry but you’re parroting the most reactionary Russian propaganda, like this piece which openly states de-nazification of Ukraine is necessarily also de-Ukrainization: https://ria.ru/20220403/ukraina-1781469605.html
I can’t agree with that. Even Nazi Germany didn’t need to be de-Germanized after the WW2, you only had to change the system and you got DDR.
Please read the rest of the paragraph. I explicitly say that this is not the view of the majority of Russians (and obviously it’s not my idea of what being Ukrainian should mean either). This is what the current Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian nationalist (Banderite) movement have been insisting on telling the Ukrainian people. It is they who have turned the notion of being Ukrainian into the antithesis of everything Russian, when this clearly didn’t need to be the case and wasn’t the case in the USSR. It is they who insist that you are not Ukrainian if you don’t embrace Bandera worship, that you are Russian and thereby an enemy of Ukraine if you have a positive view of Ukraine’s Soviet past, if you want to be a part of “the Russian world” instead of (or even in addition to) “Europe” and the West.
And i don’t agree with that. I think history shows that that is not the case. But there does need to take place a rethinking in certain segments of Ukrainian society of what it means to be Ukrainian, a kind of return back to how it was viewed in the USSR as something more broad and heterogenous that could include people of various languages and diverse cultures, away from the almost all-consuming obsession with linguistic homogenization and from this self-destructive Russophobia that has led Ukraine into catastrophe. A culture cannot define itself purely by what it hates and what it isn’t. That is neither healthy nor sustainable. It actually makes for a very poor foundation for building a national identity.
Ironically, it is precisely this kind of negative and exclusionary definition of national identity that, far from saving the Ukrainian nation as Ukrainian nationalists think it does, risks destroying it.