Over a million people dead, over 10 millions displaced, Ukraine is destroyed, the debt will surpass the GDP this year, state assets sold off to foreign capital for chicken feed

You are right about the devastating impact of this proxy war on Ukraine. Sadly this is what happens when the West manages to turn you into a proxy. They will use you and destroy you. But to blame this devastation on Russia is to completely ignore reality, the fact that the war was started not by Russia but by the US and the Europeans when they orchestrated the Maidan coup. Russia tried for eight years to resolve this diplomatically. Even when the SMO had started, Russia still offered a way out with the Istanbul negotiations. All of the destruction that came afterwards is solely on the US and its European puppets who went and told the Ukrainian side to renege on the peace agreement they were about to sign and promised them a blank check for military and financial support. Moreover the selling off of Ukraine and the destruction of its public sector had already begun long before the SMO. That was always going to happen after the West successfully engineered a color revolution.

But the opposite is happening, US has achieved its goals in this war. This war has accelerated the European descent into fascism, it made Europe dependent on the US energy, it triggered European countries to join NATO and to raise their defense budgets by billions.

You are wrong in saying that the US has achieved all its goals in this war. It has achieved some goals as you correctly stated with the impact this has had on Europe. But if you think that they didn’t go into this originally hoping, intending and to a large extent even believing that they would defeat Russia, militarily or via sanctions and overthrow the Russian government, you have not paid attention to just how much they invested in this. And they certainly didn’t and don’t plan on losing Ukraine, which they very well may if the entire post-Maidan Kiev regime ends up collapsing as a result of the Russian victory. Blackrock and other Western corporations have not invested so much into owning Ukraine only to lose it to the Russians.

If Ukraine is lost to them then everything that happens in Europe is nothing more than a consolation prize. They have achieved a short term victory in subjugating Europe but in doing so they have severely destabilized it and further undermined their own global hegemony. Russia’s victory is a victory for anti-imperialism. It is doubtful whether the increase of the European defense budgets is sustainable or even feasible at the levels proposed. Especially with the deindustrialization that is occurring. And it comes at the cost of the gutting of European welfare states which does not in the long run stabilize the imperialist position but rather has the opposite effect. Is is also not clear how long NATO as an entity will still survive after this defeat and the splits that are emerging in the imperialist camp.

The question is whether this text by Lenin suggests that Russian communists should desire the defeat of Russia in this war so that they can turn it into a civil war, a revolution. The answer is yes, unambiguously.

The defeat of Russia would not turn into a revolutionary civil war. If you think that then you have no understanding of the real conditions and political situation in Russia. Russian communists have no ability presently to do what you are fantasizing about here. And i’m sorry to be so blunt but that’s what this is, a fantasy completely detached from the reality on the ground. If a civil war does take place it will be more akin to what happened to Yugoslavia with ethno-religious hatred and separatism breaking out, reactionary nationalist forces taking over and Russia being balkanized into Western neo-colonies and NATO fiefdoms just as the Balkans have been. Is the socialist revolution any closer in any of the countries that NATO has destroyed and plunged into internal conflicts? Is it any closer in Iraq? Libya? Syria?

I need to repeat this because this cannot be stressed enough: the geopolitical conditions of today are not the same as those in Lenin’s time. You cannot blindly take a text which was written in a specific context and under specific historical conditions and apply it over a century later in totally different context without a proper analysis of the real conditions. This is un-scientific and anti-Marxist. There is no inter-imperialist rivalry today (at most there may be emerging splits in the imperialist camp). The working class is disorganized and the communist movement is not in the position it was at the time that the First World War broke out. The US’s unipolar hegemony which suppresses not only socialist revolutionary movements but any kind of sovereignty and de-colonization across the world would only be strengthened by the defeat of Russia.

Gaining access to Russia’s resources would greatly alleviate the problems that Western capitalism is now facing as a result of the mounting contradictions of neoliberalism and of the emerging multi-polar world in which it is much harder to extract neo-colonial plunder from the global south when they are developing and have alternative centers of power to look to. It would be akin to the infusion of life that the global capitalist system, which by the 1970s had begun to run into serious issues, received after the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the USSR. Such a renewed age of rampant plunder would delay the potential for socialist revolutions not just in the West but the world over by many decades, maybe longer. It would place even the Chinese revolution under an existential threat.

And ultimately neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians would benefit from it. In fact at the moment the best hope the Ukrainians have is a total Russian victory that would liberate them from not only their own fascist regime but from the total enslavement by the IMF, Blackrock & co. that they are looking at today.