THE Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has accused the US Secretary of State, Clinton, of giving the Russian right wing – many of them part of the shock therapy brigade who pledged to restore capitalism in 100 days by looting the USSR in the 1990’s – the signal to take to the streets.
Putin said Clinton ‘gave them a signal, they heard this signal and started active work’.
The signal was her declaration that the Russian elections had been rigged and that they should be re-run, a call that has been taken up by Mikhail Gorbachev. He used to be Thatcher and Reagan’s favourite Stalinist poodle.
In the US, her administration is bankrupt, ruling over a broken country, with millions of unemployed and with the police gassing, shooting, peppering and tasering workers and youth that are attempting to exercise their democratic rights. Abroad, it killed millions in Iran and Afghanistan and is now planning new wars.
Such a regime that represents the interests of the one per cent and rejects the needs of the 99 per cent, is in no position to lecture a viable debt-free country about democracy.
The western bourgeoisie’s hero of the hour, as far as the demonstrations in Moscow are concerned, is Boris Nemtsov. He has a history too. In March 1997 Nemtsov was appointed First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, under Yeltsin, with special responsibility for privatising the gas and oil industries.
He was part of the Chubais-Yegor Gaidar team that were dedicated to destroying the Soviet planned economy regardless of the cost to the working class, which justly hated and despised them.
The end result of the policy was an industrial, banking and stock market collapse which brought millions onto the streets and threatened a political revolution. Nemtsov had to resign along with the rest of the shock therapy crew.
Putin then emerged after Yeltsin’s retirement as the leader of the bureaucracy.
Internally, he sought to balance between the working class and the sections of the Stalinist bureaucracy that had become capitalists, but were willing to leave politics to the Kremlin.
Putin positioned himself as a ‘supporter’ of the USSR and, while seeking to maintain his balancing act, exiled the section of the ‘new bourgeoisie’ that were open western stooges, such as Boris Berezovskiy.
However, the world crisis of the capitalist system is now so severe that all of Putin’s attempts to have a ‘partnership’ with the US are breaking down, as the imperialists are driven forward to seek to redivide the world and grab its resources.
US radars and missiles are to be on Russia’s western borders. The US is seeking more influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia with its gas and oil resources. Now, after the Libyan intervention which ‘partner’ Putin voted to allow through the UN, he has been shaken to discover that Syria is next on the list and Russia is not that far behind.
Clinton, who was seen publicly laughing and leering over the murder of Gadaffi, is planning the same fate for both Assad and Putin, as well as the Russian workers, so as to add Russian gas and oil to the Libyan resources that the US now counts as its own.
The world crisis is now developing at a record pace.
The situation is therefore changing with huge leaps ahead.
The News Line stands for the defence of Russia and China as degenerated and deformed workers states that the imperialist powers are being driven to destroy.
We therefore support Russia, led by Putin, against the US attempts to intervene.
However, the same Stalinist Putin who voted to allow NATO to intervene in Libya cannot defend Russia and certainly cannot restore the USSR or some Eurasian version of it. The deepening world crisis has made Putin’s balancing act between the working class and the oligarchs, and also the imperialist powers, all the more precarious. It cannot last for long.
The future of Russia rests with the victory of the world socialist revolution. A vital part of this will be the political revolution of the Russian workers to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and restore the USSR and rule through workers’ soviets.
Therefore, while we support Putin against attempts to remove him from the right, we are for the working class removing him from the left to restore Soviet power as part of the world socialist revolution.
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