FOR some time the Blair government has been bringing in draconian anti-terrorist legislation, such as the Terrorism Act 2000.
It has been boldly ‘identifying’ terrorism as a product of a perversion of Islam, carried out by Muslim terrorists, and vowing that it would not hold back in the use of the Act.
This has seen Muslims, who enjoyed the right of asylum in Britain, being found guilty of encouraging terrorist actions against their home governments, and being returned.
Boris Berezovskiy, a Russian billionaire who made his billions out of looting the state owned economy of the USSR during the period of rule of Boris Yeltsin, also enjoys the right of asylum in the UK.
He has just told the world that he is organising a revolution, in fact a coup d’etat, in Russia to overthrow President Putin, and that he is already financing a faction within the Kremlin to carry out the job.
Berezovskiy is supremely confident, that such is his warm relationship with the British government, and such is its antagonism to the renationalisation of British oil and gas interests within Russia, that this law is indeed for Muslims only and will never be applied to him.
He believes that the British government and the British ruling class are in fact supporting his drive for a coup to carry out regime change in Russia, so that its oil and gas resources can be handed over to the Western capitalists.
He can point to the advance of NATO right up to Russia’s borders, and the plan to sight US radar and missiles in the Baltic states as clear evidence that he is not alone in planning terrorist actions against Russia.
We are also confident that he will not be sent back to Russia, and that this whole episode will expose the fact that the anti-terror laws will not be used against those who plan terrorist actions against regimes that the British ruling class consider to be enemies. Berezovskiy is to be immune from prosecution.
In fact, the period since the Stalinist bureaucracy completely caved into imperialism, and gave up all ideas of having socialism in a single country, and opted to restore capitalism under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, has seen the Russian working class fight like tigers to defend the gains of the October revolution.
It also proved that the new capitalist class, spawned out of the ranks of the Stalinists, were agents of US imperialism, who were prepared to dismember Russia for the imperialists.
It was the massive concentrated hatred felt by the Russian working class for the oligarchs that forced Yeltsin’s successor, Putin, who was partly chosen by Berezovskiy, to jail some of these oligarchs and renationalise the oil and gas industries as the foundation of the state.
Today the hatred for the oligarchs is so great that any attempt by Berezovskiy to launch a coup to reprivatise Russia’s wealth would see a workers uprising and a new revolution.
Putin acts as a Bonaparte. He has one foot on the patriotic section of the new bourgeoisie (which has pledged to leave politics to the Kremlin) and the other on the working class.
Balancing on these contradictory forces he seeks to defend Russian interests from the imperialist predators.
This balance is however precarious. Whither Russia is still the question that has to be definitively answered, whether forward to a political revolution that will expropriate the new bourgeoisie and reimpose rule through Soviets, as part of the world revolution, or a return back to capitalism through imperialist intervention and treachery by the oligarchs.
Berezovskiy and the British ruling class sense that their opportunity may come when Putin has to decide whether to change the constitution to serve a third term, or hand over to a successor.
The working class is beginning to understand that it must refound the soviets all over the USSR, from the Ukraine to Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, to impose the power of the working class and carry through a political revolution and the revolutionary reconstitution of the USSR.
This requires the building of the Trotskyist movement all over the USSR to provide the necessary revolutionary leadership.
