Dietmar Bartsch of Germany’s Die Linke, commenting upon the government’s decision to send heavy weapons to Ukraine, said that the move would only succeed in prolonging the war. A group of prominent German intellectuals and artists demanded that Chancellor Olaf Scholz suspend heavy weapons deliveries because “even legitimate resistance against an aggressor is at some point an intolerable disproportion.” Kateřina Konečná, chairperson of the Czech Republic’s Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, expressed her disappointment that Russia had “sunken to the level of the USA and NATO.” Leftist voices similarly call for a total ban on arms shipments to Ukraine, making detached claims that a worker’s revolution is the only way to stop the war, and that the war is a vessel for US and NATO imperialism to bring Ukraine into its sphere of influence. The moral claims equivocating, for example, the US-led invasion of Iraq with the Russian invasion of Ukraine have already been invalidated in Michael Zürn’s recent piece, arguing that this moral equivalency ignores the critical consideration of the character of the regimes involved. While the invasion of Iraq is rightfully criticized on many avenues, it ultimately removed a violent authoritarian from power, whereas the Russian invasion seeks to erase a culture and identity along with its institutions of democratic government.

The populations of donor countries overwhelmingly support arms shipments to Ukraine. It is the combination of weapons deliveries, the incompetence of the Russian military, and the tenacious resistance of the Ukrainian people that are keeping the Ukrainian nation from collapsing under the Russian assault. Arms shipments enable the Ukrainian defenders to exploit the poor decisions and logistics of the invaders, and the delivery of offensive weapons will eventually, barring major escalations from Russia or withdrawals by NATO allies, bring about a Ukrainian victory. Let us be clear: the invasion is a mismatched contest in every way. Economically and militarily, Russia far outmatches Ukraine, making every tank and every rocket sent to the hands of the Ukrainian forces a matter of strategic and tactical importance. Stopping arms shipments out of a desire to deescalate, essentially as a means to stop the profits of arms manufacturers, is a misplaced expression of morality with, as argued below, historically dubious origins.

What explains the left’s tendency to establish moral equivalency between Putin and NATO and to demand peace without conditions? In spite of its supposed moral justification surrounding the understandable and very human aversion to violence, the reasoning behind elements of the international left’s discourse of peace can trace its roots to the Soviet pro-peace discourse of the post-World War II era. While appearing outwardly simplistic in its demands for an end to wars, the Soviet peace discourse applied only to the geopolitical forces that it opposed, namely NATO and the United States, while it justified its own acts of aggression as actions taken to defend peace.

Drushba – Freundschaft!

The alliance between post-communist left movements and the Russian Federation is born out of a stubborn recurrence of the Cold War discourse of Russia as a friend to workers and progressive political forces, and a false identification with Russia as a counterbalance to NATO. Throughout the Cold War era, left-oriented parties both inside and outside the Eastern Bloc constructed images of the Soviet Union as a bulwark of peace in opposition to the capitalist-imperialist alliance of NATO. Compulsory Russian language courses, mass organizations, and popular songs promoted a servile dependence based not on cooperation as equals, but an admiration based in the Soviet imperialist worldview of a great Russia enlightening and guiding other nations. Concurrently, the demonization of the United States and NATO as warmongers threatening world peace with nuclear weapons was omnipresent. In considering the sincerity of the pro-peace movement, it is worth mentioning the Soviet Union’s own dubious record on war and peace during the period of its rhetorical opposition to the United States and NATO. The bloody crushing of a popular revolt against the Soviet-backed government in Budapest in 1956, an active policy of arms shipments to aid anti-imperialist movements around the world, the invasion to stop the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia’s pro-socialist reform program in 1968 (condemned as reactionary and hostile by the Brezhnev administration), and the war in Afghanistan that cost 10 years and millions of Soviet and Afghan lives with the goal of supporting a friendly government. This tapestry of military aggression and adventurism shows that the commitment to peace was therefore not a commitment to peace at any cost, as Bartsch, Konečná, and the Trotskyites at Left Voice would argue, but a device to cloak realist foreign policy goals in moral outrage as a means of ideologically orienting the Soviet domestic audience and helping to sway other communist and non-aligned countries. In the absence of the Soviet Union’s omnipresent ideology that linked working class solidarity to peace and friendship with the USSR, elements of the international political left appear to have failed to update their discourse to reflect these new realities. Support for the Russian Federation is not support for the Soviet Union. The government of Vladimir Putin dispenses with even the flimsiest pretext of fighting for workers, being a shameless kleptocracy of crony capitalists; the very asset stripping oligarchs who picked clean the corpse of the USSR throughout the 1990s. The regime Putin built does not benefit the working people in Russia or anywhere else in the world: it exists only to enrich itself at the expense of its people and neighbors. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend, and working class solidarity has no place in the Russkiy Mir.

Prioritization is Key

Opposing exploitation and opposing Russian war crimes are not mutually exclusive goals, but they are goals that require a certain clarification. The exploitation the left fears is happening at the barrel of Russian guns. Russian soldiers are, as a matter of course, committing rape, abduction, forced deportation and torture against the population as tools of repression and terror.

Stopping the war and preventing the genocide can be accomplished only through the material support of the Ukrainian military and state. Ukraine before the war was a state with deep economic and political problems.[1] Considering the model of dependent capitalism that has taken root in much of Central and Eastern Europe since the transition began in 1989, worries over the exploitation and degradation of Ukrainians for the financial interests of Western corporations are well-grounded. As Ukraine seeks increasing integration with the EU, steps will need to be taken, both by European leaders and their Ukrainian counterparts, to protect the population from becoming a new source of cheap, expendable labor and the national infrastructure becoming cheap economic assets for sale to foreign investors. This can be accomplished in part, for example, by cancelling Ukraine’s foreign debt. These problems, however, are the problems of tomorrow. Opposing “NATO interference” and promoting peace by opposing Ukrainians’ ability to defend themselves is as self-defeating as saying a fire department should not extinguish a burning house because the water from the hose is as destructive as the fire. The priority now is to guarantee the continuing right to exist of the Ukrainian people, and that is best accomplished with the delivery of offensive heavy weaponry, a step that NATO members seem increasingly willing to take. All other questions can wait until after the guns fall silent.

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[1] The linked piece provides an effective summary of Ukraine’s economic woes. The author opposes Ukraine’s conversion into a dependent capitalist production platform: an economic outcome which as he discusses in his dissertation, will only compound and prolong the population’s political and economic misery.

Last edits for this blog entry were on 03 May 2022, 1:33 p.m. (CEST).

Keith Prushankin is a doctoral researcher at the Berlin Graduate School for Global and Transregional Studies (BGTS) at SCRIPTS. In his PhD project, he focuses on challenges to dependent capitalism in the Visegrad countries. Before joining SCRIPTS, he worked at the International Monetary Fund and in the area of defense consultancy. He holds an M.A. International Relations from Charles University in Prague.