Russia

Whatever Putin does in Ukraine, the Morning Star will support him

None of us knows whether Putin is going to invade Ukraine. His demands upon NATO and the west prior to the talks with the US and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe were almost certainly drafted to be rejected, creating a pretext for a further invasion (following the 2014 “annexation” of Crimea). Or it may be that Putin will stop short of a full-scale invasion and seize enclaves or establish a land-bridge to Crimea. What can be predicted with certainty is that the Morning Star will support Putin. We know this because ever since a mass uprising ousted the pro-Russian...

Russian troops out of Kazakhstan! For democracy and workers’ rights!

The price of Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG), a cheap alternative to petrol used by car drivers in Kazakhstan, was hiked on New Year’s Day. The cost of a litre of LPG had been 50 tenge (about 10 pence) for most of 2021, jumping to 120 tenge on 1 January. Drivers began to protest. In Zhanaozen, an oil producing town of 160,000 in the country’s west, roads were blocked. The regime is particularly wary of actions by the oil workers in Zhanaozen, where a massacre of strikers took place in December 2011. There were more officially registered strikes in Kazakhstan in the first half of 2021 (39) than the...

Self-determination for Ukraine!

Marko Bojcun spoke to Sacha Ismail about the threat of conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Marko is an independent writer and former academic; his books include The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine: 1897-1918 and Towards a Political Economy of Ukraine . He is a supporter of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign . Marko will be speaking at our meeting on Ukraine-Russia on Wednesday 12 January: see Eventbrite and Facebook event . The current crisis can be looked at from various perspectives, immediate and longer term. The war in Ukraine has been going on for eight years now...

Free Igor Kuznetsov! Stop the repression of socialists in Russia!

The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign has drawn our attention to this appeal. We will be raising it in the British labour movement and left. Dear comrades! We ask you to launch an international campaign in their support, to cover this case in the press, to hold solidarity actions and to send appeals to the Russian embassies demanding the release of Igor Kuznetsov and his comrades. Group of comrades of the Russian Federation and Ukraine December 9, 2021 Appeal to Left-Wing and Trade Union Organisations of the World Our comrade Igor Kuznetsov, a trade union leader and journalist, was arrested on...

Putin’s hands off Ukraine!

In 2014 Russia seized the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine, which was a Russian colony until 1991. Since then it has waged a proxy war against Ukraine through right-wing Russian-nationalist forces in the east of the country. Since the start of November maybe 175,000 Russian troops have massed within striking distance of the Ukrainian border. Russia is moving weapons and equipment to the area. There seems little doubt that the Ukrainian government has committed human rights abuses in the eastern conflict zones. So have the Russian-nationalist rebels. To give a sense of the scale, the Office of...

Thirty years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed

Quite what TV audiences in the Soviet Union were expecting on 25 Dec 1991 when news was released of a special broadcast by Mikhail Gorbachev is hard to gauge. It is probably safe to say that most viewers did not expect him to resign or that the state of which he was head would cease to exist. Nevertheless, after a brief speech, the flag of the Soviet Union, which had flown over the Kremlin since 1922, was taken down. He didn’t have much choice, four of the 15 Republics of the USSR had already broken away, he was President of a state that didn’t even exist on paper. After his short speech he...

Moscow: the truth can't be hidden forever

Last week, more than thirty masked young men broke into a public meeting at the human rights NGO “Memorial” in Moscow. They shouted “Scum!”, “Fascists!” “Get out of Russia!”, and “There’s no room for foreign agents!” They ordered members of the audience to lie down on the floor. They were there to stop the showing of a film, “Mr. Jones”. The 2019 film tells the story of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who stumbled upon the story of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine in which millions died. At the time, the Soviet regime denied there was a famine and they were assisted in this by New York Times...

Free Darya Polyudova

Russian socialist Darya Polyudova has been sent to a prison colony for six years for campaigning against the Putin regime’s imperialism. The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign reports that Polyudova has faced persecution since her organisation, Left Resistance, opposed Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2014. She was previously jailed, in 2015, for two years. John McDonnell MP has initiated a parliamentary Early Day Motion ( EDM 207 ) to protest about Polyudova’s imprisonment and demand her release. Please ask your MP to sign.

An easy excuse for anti-leftist clampdown in Russia

“This whole story feels as if suddenly, a truck drove into you on the street,” said Svetlana Gordienko, a resident of Russia’s far-eastern Khabarovsk. “Except imagine if it turned out that having a truck driven into you was something totally normal, and legal.” The situation Svetlana is now in began in May 2021, when a squad of 11 officials swarmed her apartment, where she lives with her partner Maksim Smolnikov, and her two children. “They had already started to break down the door, but I managed to open it,” Svetlana recalled. “The riot policemen burst into the house and pushed Max up...

"Ukraine is the victim of Russian aggression"

Peter Duncan is a professor at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies at University College London. He spoke to Chris Ford of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign . Many thanks to the campaign for allowing us to publish this interview, which we have abridged and tidied up slightly. We have seen a build up of Russian Federation armed forces on Ukraine’s borders and in Crimea. There has been an escalation in East Ukraine since January. What is behind this? There are 100,000 troops now surrounding Ukraine. The aim is to intimidate Ukraine, to try to persuade it, and the EU and NATO, to...

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