In recent weeks across Russia, tens of thousands of workers in over 100 cities have taken to the streets. Many have risked beatings and jailing to protest the bosses’ oppression and the arrest and imminent imprisonment of Alexei Navalny, the racist, arch-nationalist misleader who is challenging the fascist regime of President Vladimir Putin.
Workers united in militant solidarity can grind the bosses’ profit system to a halt. But when that passion is misdirected in defense of capitalist reformists like Navalny, workers cannot win. There are no good bosses! Though their strategies and tactics may differ, all capitalist rulers rely on racism, sexism, and the exploitation of the working class. They are driven by one principle: maximum profit.
While we don’t know for sure which capitalist forces have orchestrated the latest wave of protests in Russia, we do know that workers there have ample cause for rage: economic stagnation, gaping inequality, repressive security laws, and a deadly bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic. Each day they watch the bosses cheat the working class while ramping up the military for the next inter-imperialist war.
The only solution to capitalist state terror is the total destruction of the profit system:  international communist revolution. Choosing one oppressor over another will never liberate our class. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) calls on workers and students in Russia and worldwide to reject all bosses and build for communism and workers’ power.
New nationalist on the block
Navalny has emerged as a symbol of defiance against Putin’s 21-year rule. He first surfaced in the late 2000s with a blog that attacked corruption within the Russian leadership. Despite his blunt criticism of the status quo, Navalny has shown himself to be even more openly racist than Putin’s crew. In a video post from 2007, he compared immigrant Muslim workers from the Caucasus to “cockroaches” that need to be exterminated with “a pistol” (Salon, 4/2/17).
In 2014, after Russia seized Crimea, Navalny applauded the annexation: "The reality is that Crimea is now part of Russia… Crimea is ours” (BBC, 1/23). Russia’s imperialist land grab set off a conflict in Eastern Ukraine between U.S.-backed nationalists and Russian-backed separatists. It has killed at least 10,000 and displaced many more (The Balance, 8/21/20).
With shrewd public relations moves and backing from liberal media, Navalny has rebranded himself as a freedom fighter in front of a small but growing mass movement. In reality, however, his vision for Russia is for a new set of bloodsucking bosses to cash in. Although Navalny has faced assassination attempts as well as legal sanctions, he’s succeeded in securing political office for allies in Siberia, Novosibirsk, and Tomsk (Guardian, 9/13/20).
A weakening of Russia’s dominant bosses
Much like the Donald Trump phenomenon in the U.S., the inroads made by a worm-like Navalny reflect a weakening of the country’s dominant bosses and Putin’s once-iron grip on state affairs. As the contradictions within Russia grow even sharper, we can expect more intense infighting between ruling-class cliques and ramped-up attacks on workers.
In the second half of 2020, Covid-19 lockdowns caused Russia’s GDP to contract by close to 10 percent (Reuters, 7/17/20). According to government sources, unemployment is up at least 30 percent since last spring (Moscow Times, 5/20/20). Even before the pandemic, Putin’s approval ratings took a hit when his government raised the retirement pension age, which brought out thousands to protest (NBC News, 9/10/18).
Seeing the writing on the wall, Putin’s group has pushed through more openly fascist legislation to protect their control over the state apparatus. One law allows Putin to remain in power until 2036 and grants him life immunity from prosecution, while others make it easier to brand dissidents as “foreign agents” and clamp down on social media (Washington Post, 12/27/20).
Russian, U.S. imperialists on a collision course
Putin and his thieving gang understand the need for a unified ruling class, both to challenge their imperialist rivals and to contain worker fightback. While the isolationist Trump mostly deferred to Putin, new U.S. Imperialist in Chief Joe Biden, represents finance capital, the main wing of the U.S. ruling class. As such, he’ll seek to re-establish U.S. dominance around the globe. The U.S. and Russia are on a collision course.
In his first official phone call as president, Biden warned Putin that the U.S. “will act firmly in defense of its national interests in response to actions by Russia that harm us or our allies” (Wall Street Journal, 1/26). Beyond Crimea, Russian expansionism is evident in proxy conflicts in Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Libya, and Venezuela. U.S. finance capital was alarmed by Russia’s massive SolarWinds cyberattack last December and repeated hacks into the U.S. election apparatus.
As Washington’s arms modernization efforts lag behind Moscow’s, main-wing mouthpieces are clamoring for Biden to renegotiate a Russia treaty that would limit further proliferation of nuclear weapons (Foreign Affairs, 1/19). The finance capital bosses are also troubled by expanded joint military exercises between China and Russia that hint at a potential future alliance (AP News, 12/22/20). For the main-wing U.S. rulers, Navalny is a useful lightning rod—and a possible pretext for imperialist countermoves. On February 2, after Navalny was sentenced to more than two years in prison for trumped-up parole violations, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for his immediate release and said the U.S. “would coordinate closely with allies about how to hold Russia accountable” (Reuters, 2/2).
Although we cannot predict when or where the next global conflict will begin, the laws of capitalist development tell us that imperialist contradictions are never resolved peacefully. As Putin himself acknowledged at the World Economic Forum, “[T]here is a possibility that we may experience an actual collapse of global development that might result in a fight of all against all” (CNBC, 1/27).
The revolutionary communist tradition
When the international working class takes to the streets, we need to be clear about what we’re fighting for. To support bosses like Navalny or Biden serves to strengthen the brutal hand of the capitalist bosses. Only by marching under the red banner of communism and workers’ power can we advance our class struggle for liberation from the capitalist parasites.
The one future worth fighting for is international communist revolution, led by the Progressive Labor Party. Over a century ago, workers and soldiers in Russia helped point the way to that future. They seized state power from the bosses amid the carnage of imperialist war and established the first workers’ state. Learning from both their triumphs and their errors, we can and will take power again. Workers of the world, unite! Join PLP!