THE Russian government and armed forces have turned the tables on the imperialist powers and their surrogates who launched the vicious surprise attack on South Ossetia, using troops, who were well equipped by all of the NATO states, and well trained by US and Israeli instructors.
The attacking force acted with great ruthlessness killing up to 2000 people in the storming of the South Ossetian capital. Among the dead were Russian peace keeping troops.
They were aping the methods of the US ruling class, seen in the shock and awe campaign in Iraq, and also the conduct of the Israeli soldiery in the Palestinian occupied territories.
However, they did take the Russian leadership by surprise with President Medvedev on holiday and Premier Putin in Beijing for the Olympic Games.
In the weeks before, there had already been much speculation, in counter-revolutionary circles in the US and the UK, that it would be possible to split President Medvedev away from Premier Putin at the best, and at the worst the Russian leadership would reveal itself to be paralysed, and have feet of clay, at a moment of acute crisis.
The US officers and politicians who gave the go ahead to Saakashvili to attack the South Ossetian capital, must have thought that the Russian military and leadership would be shocked by the boldness of their stroke.
However the Russian armed forces hit back straight away.
They proved for all to see, who are capable of seeing, that the revolutionary essence of the Russian Revolution, of the struggle against Hitlerite fascism, of the struggle of the masses who defeated Yeltsin’s ‘shock therapists’ who intended to restore capitalism in Russia in just 100 days of shock and awe, and of the anti-capitalist and anti-Nato masses of the Ukraine is definitely alive and well in the Caucasus.
So the struggle that began with the South Ossetian capital burning, ended with the Georgian military in full retreat, panic-stricken fleeing from Gori ‘to defend’ their capital against the ‘Russian hordes’, who had already made it clear that they had no intention of attempting to take the Georgian capital.
It has also seen BP shut down its oil and gas pipeline that stretches from Central Asia through Azerbaijan, into Georgia to the Black Sea.
The imperialists have lost the first round of their crisis-driven struggle to detach sections of the Caucasus from the Russian Federation and dominate the oil and gas resources of Central Asia.
They are being driven forward by the greatest crisis of the capitalist system since the 1930’s depression.
Their world-wide system is being driven forward into slump, and imperialist war to grab resource rich areas of the world, and into civil wars at home to force ‘their own’ working classes to accept the full burden of the economic crisis and the financing of imperialist wars.
We are living in the period of the death agony of capitalism, of wars and revolutions, specifically socialist revolutions and the struggle to complete the world socialist revolution.
The business that began with the Iraq war and is continuing with the imperialist attack on the Caucasus, and the projected attack on Iran cannot be settled just by the military preparedness of the Soviet Republics or of the oppressed nations.
It can only be settled by smashing capitalism and imperialist rule in its centres, in London, Washington, Paris and Berlin.
In all of the major capitalist countries the class struggle is being sharpened to the point of revolution by the developing world crisis.
This crisis places the oppressed nations, the workers of deformed and degenerated workers states, and the working class of the major capitalist states in the same trench, and in the same struggle against capitalism and imperialism.
The key issue is the building of the Fourth International in every country to lead the world socialist revolution to its victory.
