The IMT has just released a recording of a ‘lead-off’ given by one of its chief analysts on the Ukraine crisis, Jorge Martin. It is half an hour of propaganda and distortion, which I will aim to debunk in this post.
First of all, Martin speaks contemptuously of the ‘imperialist propaganda’ to which Russia is being subjected. He scoffs at the notion that Russian troops have failed in their objectives – despite all of the evidence we have from American intelligence and leaks from their own side that show that they have made far less progress than they expected to make in the past week. He insists that the IMT opposes Russian imperialism, yet insists on spinning for the Kremlin by downplaying just how badly Russian troops are doing at the hands of the Ukrainian forces, because the IMT can’t take the fact that a bourgeois government in Kiev, backed by ‘Western imperialism’, is holding its own against superior numbers. He ridicules the concern shown by Western leaders for ‘international law’. Hypocrisy, Martin says. After all, NATO bombed Yugoslavia and the U.S. invaded Iraq. He equates the justifications provided by NATO for its bombing of Yugoslavia with Putin’s own justifications for invading Iraq. NATO claimed it was intervening to stop genocide against Bosnian Muslims, and Putin claims to be intervening to save the Russian speakers from genocide at the hands of Kiev. ‘These are both lies,’ Martin asserts. Unfortunately for Martin, the Bosnian genocide actually did happen and was a legitimate reason for intervention in Yugoslavia. He falsely asserts that the division of Yugoslavia was some sort of imperialist plot, when the different nations themselves chose to divide up the country because they no longer wanted to be under a federal state. Without Tito’s strong hand, there was less reason for the country to stay together. Yet the IMT, following the line of Ted Grant, believes that the division of Yugoslavia was some sort of capitalist conspiracy. Contrary to Martin’s false equation of the two, NATO’s claims were justified and Putin’s are based on sand. As for the invasion of Iraq, this involved a coalition of liberal democracies deposing a murderous fascist dictator. The invasion of Ukraine, a liberal democracy, by a fascist dictatorship, could not be more different.
Seven minutes into the video, Martin asserts that the West gave the USSR written guarantees that there would be no expansion of NATO to the east. This is a lie, and has been denied by none other than Gorbachev. This is a myth Putin’s regime likes to promote because it justifies Russian imperialism. He repeats nonsense about the ‘encirclement’ of Russia by NATO, when only 6% of its land border abuts NATO countries, and when the conquest of Ukraine will simply add to its land border with NATO. Moreover, Putin has actually driven more countries to the side of NATO by his idiotic invasion, so if the plan was to avoid NATO encirclement, he has totally blown it. The idea that what NATO did in Yugoslavia, or Libya, would be repeated in Russia, is total stupidity, and is a transparent excuse for Putin’s war of conquest.
Shortly after that, Martin falsely claims that in the 1990s, foreign multinationals were part of the plundering of Russian assets that had been part of the planned economy. In fact, foreign multinationals were banned from bidding for the large state enterprises that were sold at knockdown prices by Yeltsin’s government, and foreign direct investment in Russia was minuscule. As Stephen Kotkin explains in his book Armageddon Averted:
Foreign consultants on the privatization staff sought a very high profile, rendering the process vulnerable to charges of being a “Western plot,” but foreign investors were excluded from the bidding, in a supposed bow to nationalists who decried the sale of Russia’s “patrimony.” That exclusion robbed Russia of a critical lever for assessing, and perhaps raising the worth of, its patrimony. The AvtoVAZ carmaker, for example, was purchased at voucher auction for $45 million, whereas in 1991 Fiat had offered $2 billion–and been turned away. Between 1992 and 1996, according to an investigation of hundreds of companies, on average factory management admitted paying about forty times less than their companies were supposedly worth. The investigators noted that the voucher value of all Russian industry–including some of the world’s richest deposits of natural resources–came to about $12 billion, less than the value at the time of Anheuser-Busch. Russian state property was given away for small beer, to make privatization an “irreversible” political reality.
…Over the course of the 1990s in Russia, total direct foreign investment amounted to just several billion dollars per year, less than in tiny Hungary (which if somehow picked up and dropped from above into Russia could not be found again).-pp.131-132, p.138
As part of his scheme to make us feel sorry for Russia and make us softer on Putin’s thuggery, he continues to recount the evils of Western imperialism in 1990s Russia, going over the evils of shock therapy as recommended by the IMF, and the misery this meant for ordinary Russian people. Alas, Martin does not understand that the failure of his beloved socialist planned economy meant that there was no other means of transitioning Russia to normality.
Numerous analysts blamed the supposedly dogmatic monetarist reforms, which were derided as “Thatcherism” and “market Bolshevism”. But these critics neglected to demonstrate that Russia underwent ruthless neo-liberal reforms. It did not. Nor could it have. The same goes for pie-in-the-sky alternatives. Critics of Russia’s rhetorical neo-liberalism failed to specify who was supposed to have implemented their suggest state-led “gradualist” policies–the millions of officials who had betrayed the Soviet state and enriched themselves in the bargain? No Russian leadership, rising to power by virtue of the spiraling collapse of central (Soviet) state institutions, could have prevented the ensuing total appropriation of bank accounts and property that the state owned on paper, but that were in the hands of unrestrained actors. Of course, members of the Yeltsin inner circle and his appointed government unable to halt the mass expropriations, did not even try to do so. Far from it–top officials pumped out decrees and orders that brought them lucre. But so did their subordinates, and their subordinates’ subordinates, while factory directors reclassified profitable operations inside “their” factories and pocketed the proceeds, a legalization and enlargement of long-standing black-market practices.
…Nothing revealed the bankruptcy of the late Soviet Union more than the bankruptcy of post-Soviet Russia. The country’s predicament was, therefore, not some supposed “cultural” lack or peculiarity, or an excess of bad foreign advice, or a small band of thieving “oligarchs.” It was a problem of institutions, as the story of Russia’s economic “reforms” in this chapter demonstrates, and as the story of Russia’s mishmash political order in the next chapter sums up. The Soviet collapse continued throughout the 1990s, and much of what appeared under the guise of reform involved a cannibalization of the Soviet era.-pp.116-117
Despite Martin’s rhetoric about the evil IMF destroying Russia’s economy, Kotkin explains how this denies the Russian government all agency and how Russia’s unique situation called for something like shock therapy in any case:
…the idea of destatization and painful belt tightening as the path from socialism to the market derived not from foreign models but from Russia’s dire circumstances and Soviet-era conceptions about the market being the opposite of the planned economy. Gaidar, in any case, violated shock therapy, conceding that some prices, such as those for bread and milk, would remain regulated, to protect the population. Others in government insisted that liberalization of energy and fuel prices by “delayed”, to “protect” Russian industry and enable the country to survive the winter, and Gaidar acceded to the pressure.
On January 1992 Russia ended most but far from all Soviet-era administered prices in what was dubbed “a singular leap across the abyss.” Overnight, private trade ceased to be the crime of “speculation,”…People who bought what turned out to be unusable goods had no recourse, but shop queues disappeared and the goods famine was overcome.-pp.119-120
Kotkin then explains why Gaidar’s shock therapy failed to curb inflation. The break-up of the USSR saw the creation of fifteen different republic Central Banks, who all had the right to issue currency in rubles. This, admittedly, was a blunder by the IMF and Russian officials, and helped lead to inflation. However, the Soviet-era industries weren’t much better in this respect. The old state enterprises lobbied against the market reforms, forcing Gaidar to violate his policy and to grant them more credits. It didn’t help that these enterprises were heavily indebted to each other, and therefore, their collapse would send ripples throughout the economy. They would never have attained this monopoly status without the existence of the Soviet planned economy and its centralisation of economic power in the hands of large enterprises who were safe from market competition. Freed from the strictures of the planned economy, they accumulated gigantic debts and paid for their needs on credit. Using their economic leverage, they bullied Gaidar into pulling back on monetary reform:
Trapped, Gaidar caved in to new outlays, and between July and September credits to industry blew giant holes in his tight money policy. Inflation, which, despite the CIS banking fiasco and Yeltsin’s largesse, had been reduced to around 7-9 percent per month in July 1992, jumped by the autumn to 25 percent a month. So much for implementing dogmatic monetarism!
…Bosses of the tens of thosuands of large enterprises built in the Soviet period, explains one Gaidar associate, “possessing material, labour, and financial resources, and being better organized than anyone else,” emerged as a dominant political force in policymaking. Gaidar had galvanized them, first by setting managers free from the remaining controls of the planning bureaucracy, then by seeking to cut them off from state credits. When they fought back, the would-be shock therapist sought to co-opt them with inflationary credits, but they turned against him anyway. After leaving government, Gaidar admitted having acquired in office “an infinitely better idea of how real power works.”
…Chernomyrdin ended up, despite vacillations and occasional reversals, implementing a more rigorous anti-inflationary course than Gaidar had. This apparent mystery is readily explained. First, in July 1993, Russia finally managed to achieve what Gaidar had demanded: it cut the other former Soviet republics off from issuing ruble credits, and replaced the Soviet ruble with a new Russian ruble. Secondly, Chernomyrdin hit a brick wall. Myriad opponents of shock therapy who claimed that Gaidar should have tried a gradual reform approach, directing credits to priority industries, overlooked the fact that his successor attempted to do just that–and failed. Chernomyrdin discovered that neither the government nor the Central Bank had sufficient authority to enforce investment priorities at the level of enterprises. He also came to understand that free-flowing state credits–“the opiate of industry”–caused harmful inflation. And so with the assistance of the finance minister, the personification of the industrial lobbies embraced a policy of tighter credits and fiscal stabilization.
Russia achieved a gradual monetary stabilization. Inflation declined from 2,250 percent in 1992, to 840 percent in 1993, to 224 percent in 1994, and by September 1996 to an annualized rate near zero, thereafter for the most part remaining low.
…There was little else that the central government could effectively do. For Russia, which struggled just to gain full control over its money supply, carrying out comprehensive economic “reform” was an illusion. And therefore, Western advice, whether misguided or sensible, was largely inconsequential. Russia’s was not, and could not have been, an engineered transition to the market. It was a chaotic, insider, mass plundering of the Soviet era, which substantial roots prior to 1991, and ramifications stretching far into the future.-pp.121-124
The very ‘workers’ state’ that Martin and his cult supported for decades is responsible for the chaotic nature of Russia’s transition back to a market economy after the failures of the planned economy had become apparent. As Kotkin explains on page 140:
In any event, all post-Communist countries, whether subjected to state-led graudalism or elements of shock therapy, saw GDP fall off a cliff. Ukraine held off price liberalization and its privatization was less far-reaching than Russia’s, but its inflation and asset stripping were arguably worse, despite free ride from not paying Russia for gas supplies. Certainly Russian policymakers can be blamed for not seeking to end the ruble zone immediately, for not removing controls on energy prices, and for trying to build political support with free state credits to industry. Certainly faking auctions to hand insiders strategic industries, just like facilitating foreign trade scams and using the gas industry as a private reserve, was unpardonable. But the underlying cause of Russia’s difficulties was not policy. Rather, the fundamental factor was the Soviet bequeathal, one side of which was a socioeconomic landscape dominated by white elephants that consumed labor, energy, and raw materials with little regard for costs or output quality. The other side, remarkably, was even more ruinous: unfettered state officials whose larceny helped cashier the Soviet, and whose bloated ranks swelled with many grasping newcomers.
Martin also repeats the misleading statistic that Russian GDP decreased by 40 percent in these years. Kotkin corrects this:
Russian GDP, in a mere half decade, did shrink an eye-popping 40 percent, according to official measurements. But Soviet economic output had been wildly over-reported to “meet” plan targets. In post-Soviet Russia, it was under-reported to avoid taxes. No one knew the scope of post-1991 unregistered economic activity, which may have been equal to half the size, or more, of the measured economy.-p.135
Martin then recounts the revival of Russian imperialist power under Putin and its re-writing of the post-Cold War order, before returning to the situation in Ukraine. At 14:55, he begins repeating the lie that the Maidan movement was dominated by the far-right. He even claims that the shooting of protesters by the Berkut security forces may well have been an opposition false flag that they could use to discredit the government. A civilian investigation has since strengthened the case that the shots were in fact fired by Yanukovych’s thugs.
He then recounts events since 2014, with the Russian annexation of Crimea and its support for the separatists in Donbass. To his credit, Martin admits to the reactionary nature of some of the Russian separatists, but praises others for their ‘progressive’ attitudes. As I showed in my last post, there was nothing progressive about this movement. Even the Communists and leftists in the movement spouted reactionary bullshit about the evils of gay marriage and racial diversity. He blows the role of the far-right in the Maidan coalition out of all proportion, failing to mention that they were only briefly in government and crashed in popular support in subsequent elections. He doesn’t even bother to mention that the current President is a Russian-speaking Jew from Eastern Ukraine. It doesn’t go with his narrative of Kiev-based far-right nationalism oppressing the heroic Eastern Ukrainians.
Commenting on Putin’s infamous speech of 21 February, in which he denied Ukrainian nationhood, Martin whitewashes the real history of Ukraine’s absorption into the Soviet Union. He gives the false impression that Soviet Ukraine was an independent republic that voluntarily chose to be part of the USSR. In fact, it was conquered by the Red Army, and a Russian-speaking administration was imposed upon it. Most of the Ukrainian-speaking population were peasants, and as such, their national identity was regarded as a sign of backwardness, to be rooted out and replaced with Russian Marxism. Christian Rakovsky, a Russian speaker, was Lenin’s satrap in Ukraine. As Louis Proyect explains:
To start with, it must be understood that Ukrainians never voted to become part of the USSR. Leaving aside the dubious circumstances in which Crimea became part of Russia in 2014, there never was a referendum offered to Ukrainians in 1918. The country became a Soviet republic as a result of the Soviet Union’s ability to dictate the facts on the ground. Despite the pleas of the Ukrainian left to be allowed to create their own socialist republic that would have had the support of its impoverished peasantry and working class, Lenin and the Bolsheviks saw the forced assimilation of Ukraine as a revolutionary act.
The Communists incriminated themselves in the way they spoke about their role in Ukraine. Kamenev, who served on the central committee, stated in October 1918: “We must clearly and unequivocally state that in the course of the development of the proletarian revolution in Russia the slogan of national self-determination [for Ukraine] turns into a tool of bourgeois counter-revolution against Soviet Russia.” Yakov Yakolev, a Ukrainian Communist loyal to Russia, explained in November 1919: “Without the Red Army not only can we not count on the success of the revolution in Ukraine, but we cannot count even on its emergence.” After his troops had taken Kyiv in 1917, Red Army colonel Mikhail Muraviev declared that “we brought this [Soviet] power from the far north on the points of our bayonets.” The analogies with Napoleon’s army could not be clearer.
But nobody spoke with more authority about Ukraine than Christian Rakovsky, who Lenin had assigned to be the Kremlin’s representative and whose word was law. Like Muraviev, he saw things in Napoleonic terms in a letter to Lenin: “I handed the government [that I] installed with bayonets to Ukraine’s Soviet.”
Perhaps if Soviet rule could have provided material benefits, it might have compensated for the linguistic and cultural deprivations ordinary Ukrainians had to endure. After all, weren’t relations between Ukraine and Russia based on socialist principles? As you might expect, Ukrainian socialists were as adept as their Russian counterparts in identifying economic inequality. In 1919, leftist economists compiled statistics that illustrated Ukraine’s colonial status within the new Soviet state. The data revealed that Ukraine exported 10,922 railway wagons of supplies to Russia (not including army requisitions) in the first six months of that year and imported 1,737 wagons of goods. Their studies also showed that only 50 to 65 per cent of recorded Ukrainian exports were foodstuffs as Bolshevik gangs literally stripped everything they could from Ukraine. As has been the case historically, countries relying on agricultural exports always suffer in trade with industrialized countries. The USSR might have been backward but it was far more industrialized than Ukraine.
No matter how much the Ukrainian left implored their comrades to allow their country to determine its own destiny, the Kremlin kept a tight grip on the country’s cultural and economic life. Therefore, a rival Communist Party emerged that challenged the one that took its marching orders from Christian Rakovsky.
The idea that the national question was ‘solved’ under Lenin is a sick joke. Not only was it not solved, but Stalinist repression succeeded in further undermining the Ukrainian nation by slaughtering millions of its citizens in the Holodomor and in the deportations of the Crimean Tatars. The south and east were re-populated with Russians. The investment from the state created a Russian-speaking labour aristocracy which was bitter over losing its privileges after the USSR collapsed (even though most of them voted for independence in 1991). Compare this to how a privileged labour aristocracy formed in Northern Ireland among Protestant workers, with Catholics subjected to horrific discrimination. I can hardly imagine Lenin or Trotsky giving even ‘critical support’ to Edward Carson’s Ulster Volunteers as an ‘antifascist resistance’ against Irish nationalism, or Militant defending Ian Paisley’s Orange Order on the same grounds, yet that is the position the IMT took towards Ukraine in 2014. Martin insists throughout the video that the national question is ‘complicated’ and we cannot support either Ukrainian nationalism or Russian nationalism, but that both sides are somehow equally reactionary. That is nonsensical. Ukrainians are a traditionally oppressed nation. They endured monstrous oppression from Russia during Soviet times. There is no equivalence between Ukrainian nationalism and Russian nationalism. Martin laments that Marxists cannot support the Russian invasion because it will strengthen reaction on both sides. Martin seems convinced that the millions of Ukrainians rallying to the banner to save their country from Russian imperialism and genocidal fascism are just as bad as Putin and his thugs. Even the Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine, who looked to Russia with admiration and resented the government in Kiev, have been so disgusted with Putin’s invasion that they have now disavowed Russia and are rallying to the government. The national question has been unwittingly ‘solved’ by Putin – he has helped to strengthen Ukrainian national identity and unite Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking Ukrainians against him. Polls show that Zelensky has a 91% approval rating.
Martin claims that Western imperialism bears the primary responsibility for the crisis. He claims that Putin was trying to do a deal with the West, and that only Western stubbornness ‘forced’ Putin to invade. This shows both monstrous ignorance and contempt for the sovereign rights of the Ukrainian people. Why should Ukraine’s future be decided by squabbling foreign powers? Why shouldn’t Ukrainians be able to dictate their own destiny? Besides, there is no reason to believe that Putin would have respected any deal. He wants the full conquest of Ukraine, not its ‘neutrality’. This monstrous inversion of the facts is necessary for him to create the narrative that this war is the fault of America and its allies, who, according to Martin, are the biggest imperialists on the planet. He even criticises the Stop the War coalition for being too soft on the West! Imagine that. The Stop the War coalition is known for its incessant anti-West, pro-Russia propaganda over many years. The rest of the video is a rant against British politicians and their hypocrisy. He even denounces those honourable leftists who make clear their opposition to Russian imperialism and support for Ukrainian sovereignty, because they are lining up with ‘reactionary Ukrainian nationalism’ and ‘Western imperialism’. So every single leftist who supports the heroic Ukrainian resistance is actually a traitor to socialism according to Martin. I think the opposite is true – that it is his disreputable cult which has betrayed the Ukrainian working-class and wishes them to deliver themselves up to Russian conquest. In an inspiring example of proletarian solidarity, some Kent dockers refused to unload tankers carrying Russian oil and gas. They obviously failed to heed the IMT’s argument that the main enemy is British and Western imperialism, instead rushing to show their support for their fellow workers in Ukraine who are now battling genocidal, fascist Russian imperialism. A good thing too. In this ‘spontaneous’ action they showed more socialist consciousness than the Putin apologists in the IMT! They are heeding the words of Trotsky when he raised the hypothetical example of Fascist Italy supporting a nationalist rebellion in French Algeria:
Let us assume that rebellion breaks out tomorrow in the French colony of Algeria under the banner of national independence and that the Italian government, motivated by its own imperialist interests, prepares to send weapons to the rebels. What should the attitude of the Italian workers be in this case? I have purposely taken an example of rebellion against a democratic imperialism with intervention on the side of the rebels from a fascist imperialism. Should the Italian workers prevent the shipping of arms to the Algerians? Let any ultra-leftists dare answer this question in the affirmative. Every revolutionist, together with the Italian workers and the rebellious Algerians, would spurn such an answer with indignation. Even if a general maritime strike broke out in fascist Italy at the same time, even in this case the strikers should make an exception in favor of those ships carrying aid to the colonial slaves in revolt; otherwise they would be no more than wretched trade unionists – not proletarian revolutionists.
At the same time, the French maritime workers, even though not faced with any strike whatsoever, would be compelled to exert every effort to block the shipment of ammunition intended for use against the rebels. Only such a policy on the part of the Italian and French workers constitutes the policy of revolutionary internationalism.
Ukraine is Algeria, and Britain is Fascist Italy in this scenario, whilst Russia is France. Why should British workers not do all they can to send aid to their brethren in Ukraine, in spite of the cynical policies of their bourgeois government? Because they will invoke the sectarian disapproval of Martin and his confederates in the irrelevant sect that is Socialist Appeal? In the entire lead-off, there is no mention of how Russian fascists are bombing and killing innocent Ukrainian civilians as we speak, or how Putin sent one of his neo-Nazi militiamen, Dmitry Uskin, to kill Zelensky. And yet we are told that it is the Ukrainians who are the Nazis!
This ridiculous 36-minute ‘lead-off’ is a terrible explanation of events in Ukraine, and a wonderful example of how the IMT miseducates its membership. The seal-like clapping at the end is utterly depressing, and so stage-managed, a classic example of what the cult expert Robert Jay Lifton called ‘planned spontaneity’. Simply because an esteemed full-time employee of the sect gave the lead-off, the attendees feel obliged to applaud and demonstrate their enthusiastic assent with the drivel they have just heard, whatever they may privately think. Let us hope that some of them find this article, in which I cut Martin’s absurd claims to size and expose the IMT’s position on Ukraine for the bankrupt, pro-Russian propaganda it really is.