Russia's recent annexation of Crimea exposes sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry, which can no longer be managed with diplomacy or even economic pressure.  Imperialists can rely only on military force in their struggles to re-divide the world.  (See last issue of Red Flag). 

Don't expect this "new Cold War" between the US and Russia to stay cold.  It's no accident that mainstream commentators are writing about the sequence of events that triggered World War I a century ago. 

It's US imperialism, not Russia, that's increasingly isolated in this fight over strategic energy resources.  The powerful Chinese and German imperialists both have strategic relations with their Russian counterparts.

Many around the world hate US imperialism so much that they are cheering Russia's corrupt capitalist butcher Putin.  This is a deadly mistake for the working class.  It's just not true that "the enemy of your enemy is your friend." 

Ask the steelworkers, aluminum smelters, and truck assemblers of Sverdlovsk, Russia – once Putin's stronghold -- who turned against Putin and went on hunger strikes in 2012 over unpaid wages.  "Maybe we're tired of how we're living," one said.

The only path to a better life is to mobilize the masses for communism.  We must take this message to our workplaces, to our schools, and to the streets on May Day, the international holiday of the international working class.

Nationalism, Imperialism, and Hypocrisy

The US government supported Texas slave owners' declaration of independence from Mexico in 1836, annexing it in 1845.  In 1893, US citizens in Hawaii overthrew Queen Lili'uokalani and reconstituted Hawaii as a republic – which the US annexed five years later.

Their squeals about Russia's annexation of Crimea – part of Russia for centuries – are pure hypocrisy. However, Russian rulers are no better. They protested the secession of Kosovo from Serbia and waged a genocidal war against separatists in Chechnya, but supported the secession of South Ossetia from Georgia.

Capitalists' and imperialists' appeals to "a nation's right to self-determination" camouflage their scheming to control the markets, resources, and labor power of some strategic area.

The fight over Crimea and the Ukraine illustrate vividly the impossibility for the masses to move forward without decisively rejecting nationalism and mobilizing for communism.

Nationalism, Imperialism, and Racism

Rising Ukrainian nationalism traced its origins to a 17th-century Cossack uprising against Poland. The Cossacks massacred Poles and half the Jewish population. Ever since, virulent racism has been part of Ukrainian nationalism. Russian nationalism, meanwhile, bolstered the Tsarist empire, often called a "prison-house of nations."

On the eve of World War I, the territory of present-day Ukraine was divided between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian imperialists, who saw it as key in the coming fight over the Balkans.

French, Belgian, and British imperialists had already invested heavily in mines and factories there. During the war, Austro-German imperialists moved in, trying in vain to crush workers' and peasants' organizations.

The Ukrainian masses joined with Russian workers, soldiers and sailors to build workers' power out of the rubble of World War I. They were decisive in the Red Army's victory, between 1917 and 1920, over the imperialist invaders and their anti-communist "White Army".

"We are internationalists," Lenin wrote to the Ukrainian masses in 1920.  "We stand for the close union and the complete amalgamation of the workers and peasants of all nations in a single world Soviet republic." 

But the Bolshevik line was deeply contradictory:  "The right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations."  And they did not build communism, but socialism whose economic core was capitalism. Inevitably nationalism defeated proletarian internationalism.

By the 1930s, Soviet workers were urged to "defend the motherland."  Sergei Eisenstein's patriotic film "Alexander Nevsky" celebrated a 13th-century victory of a Russian Prince of Kiev (in today's Ukraine) over German invaders.

Ukraine was so thoroughly integrated into the Soviet Union that, in 1954, Khruschev turned control over Russian Crimea to Ukrainian authorities.

Communism Will Create One Human Family

The capitalists see nationalism as natural and necessary for their system. Doug Bandow recently wrote for Forbes magazine ("The Capitalist Tool") that "in principle, there is nothing wrong with wanting to live with others who share family, religious, historical, and cultural ties. But …once ethnic division begins, the process usually leaves newly dissatisfied ethnic minorities. … There is no obvious end, with ever smaller groups successively attempting to secede from each new territory."

We must wage a relentless political struggle to make it obvious to the masses that only by destroying capitalism everywhere can we put an end to deadly nationalism and imperialist war. Communism will eliminate private property, wage slavery and the money system. This will create the material basis to wipe out borders, nations, and nationalism.

The seeds of communism are growing today in the International Communist Workers' Party as groups of workers join us from San Salvador to South Africa.

Against the bourgeois "right of nations to self-determination," we proclaim the need of workers everywhere to mobilize for communism across and against capitalism's borders.

Who's Russian?  Who's Ukrainian?  Who Cares?

People have lived in the area now called Ukraine for almost 7000 years, since the Neolithic era. For long periods, many distinct cultures coexisted. Archaeological evidence shows both nomadic and sedentary cultures, hunting, gathering, fishing, agriculture, and the domestication of the horse. Some settlements had thousands of inhabitants and left no signs of social class divisions.

According to legend, Kiev was founded in the 5th century. The "Ukrainian" and "Russian" languages evolved from the "Old East Slavic" spoken in the 9th century state of Kievan Rus'.  Then, most people still lived in family- and clan-based villages and worked the land as communes. Their society did not have the class institutions typical of Western European feudalism, whose Christian crusaders (along with Mongol invasions from the east) destroyed Kievan Rus' around the 12th century.

The idea of being "Russian" or "Ukrainian" or "Polish" took hold much later, in the 1830s and 1840s. The very idea of "nationalities" (cultural groups tied to particular territories) is firmly rooted in capitalism.

There are national bosses but just one international working class. Nationalism or patriotism of any sort divides and weakens our class. It sets us up to be used as cannon-fodder in the bosses' imperialist wars.

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