‘IT is of utmost importance for us to establish good relations with the West,’ said President Lukashenka of Belarus on Tuesday.
This statement is a massive turn-around, since the EU has spent an enormous amount of time and money trying to engineer the overthrow of Lukashenka, in order to restore capitalism to Belarus.
It has constantly complained that nothing has changed in Belarus. The hammer and sickle is still flying, the KGB is in charge and the whole of the working class is at work in state-owned industries, with no capitalist oligarchs in sight. The EU is in the fore of the world bourgeoisie in demanding that this disgraceful state of affairs be brought to an end by another ‘Orange’ revolution.
Indeed Lukashenka’s position is that the KGB in Russia should have done its duty and arrested Gorbachev and Yeltsin when the latter decreed the end of the USSR.
Lukashenka has consistently urged the reconstitution of the USSR, starting with the re-establishment of the union between Belarus and Russia.
Yesterday he said Belarus can no longer ‘rush headlong’ into Russia, as this meets the resistance of the Russian leadership, and that Belarus has been experiencing a massive onslaught on the part of Russia for the last several years. ‘What country can stand two two-fold gas hikes within the space of two years?’ Lukashenka said.
Russian president Vladimir Putin is a Stalinist and is carrying forward the counter-revolutionary tradition of Stalinism.
At the end of the Second World war Stalin took action to overthrow Tito, and pushed him towards the West, in his determination not to allow an alternative communist centre to Moscow to be established in Belgrade. Through this action imperialism was greatly strengthened.
In today’s Russia, where the drive of the Stalinist bureaucracy to restore capitalism has met massive resistance from the Russian workers, the Stalinists in the Kremlin around Putin, and their allies, the new capitalist oligarchs, are determined to bring Belarus to heel, no matter what.
They no longer want a union state. They demand that Belarus joins the Russian Federation.
The Stalinist bureaucracy, with its original theory of socialism in a single country, has always had a nationalist basis.
In the case of Stalin, it was the notion that it was possible to have socialism and even communism in Russia while there was capitalism in the US and throughout Europe.
Gorbachev and Yeltsin gave up the struggle to build communism in a single country and went over to supporting capitalism, taking the major section of the Stalinist bureaucracy with them.
These bureaucrats grabbed sections of the nationalised economy, privatised them and transformed themselves overnight into billionaires.
Putin has been forced to strengthen the state ownership of the strategic basic industries, while he has cultivated those oligarchs who are willing to leave politics to the bureaucracy, while jailing and exiling the others.
Now Putin is demanding that Belarus subordinates itself to Russia, by accepting massive increases in gas and oil prices, and by selling off valuable state assets to the pro-Kremlin section of the new Russian bourgeoisie.
The fact that a turn by Lukashenka towards the EU will bring huge danger to Russia, since it will breach its air and land defences, at a time when NATO is putting missile bases into Poland, does not appear to worry the Putin Stalinists, who are drunk with the revenues that the state’s oil and gas resources are providing.
The Russian, Ukrainian and Georgian workers must support the workers of Belarus against the reactionary machinations of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
They must form soviets to defend the gains of the working class established by the October 1917 revolution.
They must build up the Trotskyist leadership to organise the Soviet political revolution. This will overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and its bourgeois allies, and restore the USSR through revolutionary means, making for a huge advance of the world socialist revolution.
