A little more  than twenty two years ago, the Soviet Union was dismembered from the top in a complex, far reaching counter-revolution

  This  achieved  what had been the great and unifying goal of the capitalist world since the Soviet revolution, a goal which led major capitalist forces and nations  to  directly and indirectly aid fascist movements and states in the 1920s and 1930s in the name of anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism.

  The result  of those policies eventually was  WWII, the greatest war in human history. After that of course came  a  post war “cold war” nuclear arms races which led almost to a nuclear WWIII,  that would have destroyed much of humanity.

 All of that was  conveniently forgotten after 1991 and all the miseries of the world, conveniently blamed as “totalitiarnism,” Communism, Stalinism,” would now cease as, if one believed the spokesmen for capitalism,  would history itself  in a Hollywood happy ending of “free market capitalism.”  Of course, since all of this was based on distortions and lies, it didn’t exactly work out that way.

                “New Russia,” led by cliques of former “second economy” Black Marketers and former Soviet Bureaucrats with dreams of living the life of the  capitalist rich and famous, was  and is no longer a revolutionary threat to anyone, neither revered nor feared, nor respected as the Soviet Union had been.

Now  it was and is for Russia   back to square one, as powerful transnational  capitalist syndicates covet its natural resources and the natural resources of former Soviet Republics in the east, its army, which had saved humanity from Hitler Fascist domination in WWII  now fights  Chechen terrorists, and its people  fall into life under capitalism, with all of its insecurities and inequalities where, to paraphrase a line from the U.S. playwright Clifford Odets, at the time a member of t he CPUSA, the meaning of life is written on dollar bills(or in the case of “new Russia”, Ruble bills).

                Ukraine has little that the  trsnsnational capitalists covet, but it had been the second largest of the Soviet Republics  And it had a history which meant  nothing to capitalists, except as a means to divide people and strengthen their rule.

 Its western territories had been taken over by Polish nationalist  Josef Pilsudski, who established a large Polish State incorporating the Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia  with the  help of Britian and France after WWI  The Soviet Union briefly received the Western Ukraine and other former Czarist Russian territories  back as part of the Molotov Ribbentrop non aggression pact, which anti-Communist called the “Hitler-Stalin Pact,” and used then and ever after to discredit everything associated with the Soviet Union.

 But the non aggression pact was from the Soviet side a desperate attempt to play for time to build up its depleted military forces and to gain control of territories that traditionally had been corridors for the invasion of Russia.

                While Ukraine was conquered rapidly by Hitler’s armies and treated as conquered territory, the Nazis recruited rightwing nationalists to fight against the Soviet Union (and against the anti-fascist Ukrainians who fought heroically as both partisans and soldiers in the Red Army).  Many of these Ukrainians fled with the retreating German armies and ended up in Germany, Canada, and the U.S., continuing their nationalist activities until the dismembering from above of the Soviet Union gave them a new lease on life.

During and after these events the major capitalist powers and media, led by the U,S,  encouraged and sanitized all anti-Soviet groups everywhere in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Republics, regardless of their policies and their history.  Just as Hitler had declared his Japanese allies “honorary Aryans,” so all sorts of adventurers, swindlers, national chauvinists, and would be warlords became “honorary democrats” after 1991, starting of course with Boris Yeltsin.

                It is of no real purpose to discuss  in any depth the politics of the Ukraine over the last 22 years. It has in general been subject to the  petty authoritarianism  and  social insecurities of Russia itself and all of the former Soviet Republics, some of whom In the East now have U.S. military bases. But,  it is this history, not the continued scapegoating of the former Soviet Union,  that is the background to the present crisis

 One can say that the divisions between the Eastern Ukraine, which has large numbers of ethnic Russians  suspicious for good reasons of Ukrainian national chauvinism and the Western Ukraine, suspicious of Russian chauvinism and domination have greatly increased. 

Those who mock the old Soviet ideal of a family of peoples, living in equality and with cultural linguistic rights, all working together to build socialism, should look at Ukraine today, its urban mobs screaming ant-Russian slogans, the influence of groups which identify directly with the pro Nazi Ukrainians of WWII and engage in revived Hitlerite anti-Semitic propaganda and attacks on  visible Jewish people(reports of assaults on Hebrew teachers, men wearing Jewish Yarmulkes) understand what  the long-term effects of the political counter-revolution which destroyed the Soviet Union and dismembered its Republics  has been.

                But why, one may ask, have the U.S. and its allies,  encouraged if not unleashed these forces?

  I doubt that they want groups like the Sloboda(“freedom’) party with its crude nationalism and anti-Semitism to come to power or even have a major share of power.  But Britian, France and the U.S. in the 1920s  and early  1930s did not want Hitler to come to power either.

 Rather they wanted to use him first in Germany against Communists and Socialists and then in Europe against the Soviet Union.  Today, the European Union states and the U.S. NAT0 bloc hope to use Ukraine, the other former Soviet Republics, and tne former  East Eiuropean  Soviet Bloc states against potential Russian business competitors

                 Ukraine under the collapsing  present government has been something like a “protectorate”/satellite of the Putin Russian regime, which doesn’t want Ukraine to join the European Union, where it would  be part of an economic bloc that Russia sees as against its interests  and  under the direct influence of the U.S. NAT0  military bloc, which would if it could reduce Russia to the status of protectorate/satellite

 Why is that important if one sees nothing positive in Putin’s Russia?  First, “containment”/ encirclement of the Soviet Union didn’t begin with the post WWII cold war.  It began immediately after WWI with what was called the “cordon sanitaire” or quarantine of “Soviet Russia” led by the British and French empires, a policy which meant  supporting authoritarian  rightist governments in  Poland, Rumania, Hungary, the Baltic States, and using them as “frontline states” against the Soviets. 

That all of these states advanced national chauvinist policies against various minorities, especially anti-Semitic policies, was of no importance to the major European capitalist states.  To these states, figures like Pilsudski in Poland and his successors, Antonescu in Romania, Horthy in Hungary, Metaxas in Greece, were “our sons of bitches”  to borrow a phrase Franklin Roosevelt used about a contemptible Caribbean tyrant in the 1930s.

 Unfortunately forBritain and France and  the U.S., which was not a direct party to these developments,   most of the East European “sons of bitches” that they supported to encircle the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s became Hitler’s “sons of bitches” when WWII began. Today, there is no major European power seeking to resolve the capitalist world crisis with fascist solutions, “unifying” Europe around overt racist  imperialist policies.  But the European Union austerity policies and the weakness of the European left  provide fertile soil for such movements.

  And this policy, one might say, had its roots in attempts to Britain and France to limit semi-feudal Czarist Russia from expanding its influence in Eastern Europe and other regions, so as to prevent it from becoming a rival to British, French, German and other more advanced capitalist states and also to keep it weak in all things except military power so as to “open up” its resources to loans and foreign investment

                Today, the forces major capitalist media have been  cheering on are a club to be used against Russia, as there counterparts in power where nine decades ago.

 The European Union nations and the U.S. have been playing with political fire by supporting these forces, operating under the assumption, as in the past, that these countries are too small and backward r to threaten them.

  There are many dire possibilities to which capitalist media is blind, ranging from Russian military intervention to rightist elements launching a campaign of terror against their political enemies and scapegoats. 

There is also the possibility of the conflict escalating into central and Eastern Europe.And even of blowback against Western Europe, the UK, and the U.S,

Today t hat seems very remote.  But, if we go back to the 1980s, when capitalist media and many on the self-proclaimed “anti-Stalinist left” were cheering on both Polish Solidarity and similar groups in Eastern European along with the anti-Soviet “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan,  no one who looked at the ideology and polices of Al Queda and the Talban and suggested that they would if they could attack Western Europe and the U.S. would have been taken seriously.

                The role of the left here I think is to learn from history .  First, rather than say nothing, which given the forces in conflict may be tempting , the broad  left  should be to expose both the national chauvinist elements that are struggling for power in the Ukraine , to look to and seek to identify with pro socialist/communist forces throughout Ukraine, to point to the larger dangers to peace  and to call for what has been the invisible institution in these events, the United Nations, which was created to prevent conflicts like this from escalating into war, to serve as both an international mediator and possible multi-national peace keeper.

  Even in major capitalist media, there has not been the nonsense propaganda of the recent past, referring to these events as a “springtime” of the people or some Orange or other color revolution, a realization perhaps of the larger dangers implicit in the situation .

What there has been though is the assertion that the crisis “goes back” to troubles in “Soviet times.”  Actually, these events go back to the divisions and distractions that followed the downfall of the Soviet Union, the social and economic insecurity and inequality which advanced everywhere and the petty national chauvinisms that made large numbers of former Soviet citizens be treated as foreigners in their own country

This is a preliminary analysis only and like all Marxist analysis, will respond to changing situations