Translated by Cristopher Vallecillo Gómez

We are republishing this, our first in-depth article on the war in Ukraine, which has guided our political stance on this conflict that has shaped global dynamics for years. Shortly: the war in Ukraine is two conflicts in one, and has been since 2022. On the one hand, it is an inter-imperialist conflict for the conquest of zones of influence between Russia and classic capitalist powers such as the United States. But there is one aspect of this war that is too often overlooked by «analysts» of all kinds: the fight for the Ukrainian people’s right to self-determination. We, the International Movement Socialism or Barbarism, reject both imperialist camps and emphasize that the future of an entire people is at stake.

This article in english is translated from «Sobre el carácter de la guerra en Ucrania«, march 6th, 2022.

We are also publishing the most recent statements by Roberto Sáenz regarding Trump’s bluster about submitting Ukraine to Putin and the division of the world orchestrated by the Yankee government.

Vergüenza mundial !! La Asamblea General de la ONU vota una resolución condenando la invasión de Putin a Ucrania y los Estados Unidos de Trump votan en contra! Esto desnuda toda la chachara de que la guerra en Ucrania fuera solo una guerra próxi entre potencias imperialistas:…

— Roberto Saenz (@RobertoSaenzSoB) February 24, 2025

“Global Shame! The UN General Assembly votes on a resolution condemning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — and Trump’s United States votes against it! This lays bare all the empty talk about the war in Ukraine being merely a proxy war between imperialist powers: from the very beginning, it has also been a war of national defense for Ukraine. Zelensky, a pro-NATO neoliberal, has likewise been exposed for his unconditional alignment with Western imperialism. Our international current, Socialism or Barbarism, stands in defense of the Ukrainian national cause from an independent, anti-capitalist perspective. Out with Putin and NATO from Ukraine!”

Trump acaba de intentar humillar en vivo en el salón Oval a Zelensky, presidente de Ucrania. Lo que se aprecia, amén del garrote de Trump, es que aun bajo Zelensky, neoliberal convicto y confeso, es que la cuestión nacional ucraniana es legítima y real !! Zelensky no podría…

— Roberto Saenz (@RobertoSaenzSoB) February 28, 2025

“Trump just tried to publicly humiliate Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, live from the Oval Office. What becomes clear — beyond Trump’s big stick — is that even under Zelensky, a self-proclaimed neoliberal, the Ukrainian national question remains legitimate and undeniable! Zelensky wouldn’t find it so difficult to surrender to the Trump-Putin tandem if this weren’t the case. We do not support a ceasefire that means surrendering Ukraine’s legitimate national rights; we stand for Ukrainian territorial integrity — something that can only be achieved with a complete 180-degree shift in Ukraine’s own politics: enough austerity and neoliberalism! For an independent, socialist, and working-class Ukraine! For a just peace with no annexations!”

Few events in recent years have been as politically and analytically complex as the current war in Ukraine. Its complexity is evident not only due to the uniqueness of the phenomenon but also because this conflict reveals multiple dimensions and forces a reevaluation of definitions that may not have been tested before [1].

Two conflicts in one

This characterization and these definitions stem from the very nature of the Ukrainian conflict, which is essentially two overlapping conflicts. On one hand, it’s undeniable that we are witnessing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a blatant violation of its right to national self-determination. Putin himself has laid out a narrative in which an independent Ukraine has no right to exist — justifying the invasion by claiming that Ukraine, the land of the «Little Russians,» is nothing more than a «creation of Lenin,» in his own words.

From this perspective, despite the immense contradictions — Ukraine has always been a complex puzzle — the Ukrainian resistance is waging a just war against the invader. It’s a resistance that must be supported, even without giving an ounce of political backing to its pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist leadership (Zelensky’s program, after all, revolves around Ukraine’s entry into the EU and NATO [2]).

However, and secondly, it cannot be overlooked that the Ukrainian conflict is largely shaped by a broader clash between imperialist powers. None of the key geopolitical players — Putin, Biden, or NATO — are acting in Ukraine out of concern for the Ukrainian people’s right to self-determination. Instead, they are maneuvering for control over geopolitical spheres of influence, with Ukraine as the current battleground. This is the logic of inter-state politics: decisions are made over the heads of ordinary people, with no regard for their well-being. Lenin’s classic call to turn imperialist war into civil war was precisely about breaking this dynamic, shifting the conflict onto the terrain of class struggle.

In reality, the striking novelty of this conflict lies — perhaps exaggeratedly stated to make the point clear — in this second aspect: this is no longer just a proxy war where powers vie for influence through third-party actors. Instead, for the first time since the end of the so-called «Cold War,» there is the possibility of a direct military confrontation between imperialist powers. While such a clash hasn’t erupted yet — with Biden and NATO treading carefully to avoid the catastrophic consequences it would bring [3] — the conflict already bears the hallmarks of an inter-imperialist conflict. This is evident in the cycle of action and retaliation: economic and political sanctions against Russia, the deployment of NATO troops to Eastern European countries, and the unprecedented military aid flowing from the West to Ukraine (something unheard of in previous confrontations with Russia [4]).

Here, something paradoxical emerges: the «war scenario,» so to speak, revolves around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Ukraine’s resistance to the invader — a progressive defense, as we’ve noted, despite the significant contradictions that characterize Ukraine. (For instance, the Donbas region, with its Russian-speaking population, should have the right to autonomy within Ukraine — a right that has been denied [5]).

However, without diminishing for a moment the significance of this struggle against the Russian invader, the radical novelty of the juncture lies in the fact that it has brought to the forefront the possibility of an inter-imperialist conflict — and even a nuclear confrontation as an unintended consequence! [6] This is something unseen in decades (In fact, the post war conflict between East and West wasn’t strictly inter-imperialist, since the former USSR, despite being bureaucratized, was still a non-capitalist state [7]).

A conflict that, take note, is potentially even more dangerous because it lacks clear guidelines, unlike the so-called “regulated conflict” between the United States and the former Soviet Union that followed World War II. In fact, during the international conferences of the Allies (Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill) in the cities of Yalta and Potsdam, they divided the world into spheres of influence — in a counterrevolutionary manner — which were respected by all actors. It is well known how Churchill presented Stalin with a handwritten note in 1944 or 1945, dividing Eastern Europe in just a few minutes [8].

Much of what came afterward followed this blueprint. That’s why the communist parties openly betrayed revolutionary processes and/or declared revolutions in Italy, France, and Greece [9], or why the United States and NATO didn’t lift a finger during the Russian invasions to silence anti-bureaucratic revolutions.

However, a radical novelty of the conflict in Ukraine is precisely what we’ve been pointing out: the rules of the conflict are not defined. Putin’s invasion, on the contrary, reveals his willingness to upend the board of a certain «international order», especially the European one, that was shaped in practice after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and which clearly does not benefit Russia.

An Inter-Imperialist Conflict

Let’s first look at the background of the conflict. We could say it stems from two dominant factors or elements. On the one hand, the pressure exerted by the United States and NATO on Eastern Europe has become evident [10]. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the former USSR, it is well known that Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush agreed that, except for unified Germany, no other country from the former Iron Curtain would join NATO. However, over the years, almost all the countries that were part of the Warsaw Pact have joined NATO. This is the case for Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and even the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) — which, in reality, were directly annexed to the USSR by Stalin during World War II. As far as we recall, the former Yugoslav countries are not NATO members, nor are Ukraine, Georgia, or Belarus — whose government, led by the aging bureaucrat Aleksandr Lukashenko, maintains a firm alliance with Putin. Neither do the former Soviet Asian countries (like Kazakhstan, recently subjected to a Russian military incursion, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, etc.).

In other words, we need to distinguish between two different sets of countries. The first includes the former Warsaw Pact countries, which fell into the Soviet sphere after World War II but were not formally part of the USSR. The second group consists of the now “independent” countries (though in reality, dependent on Russia) that were part of the USSR and, before that, directly part of the Tsarist empire: «a prison of peoples,» as Lenin defined it, only to be imprisoned again under Stalin [11].

It is quite evident that the Western escalation to incorporate into NATO countries that are now ‘independent’ but were previously part of the former USSR could only be seen as a ‘provocation’ from Putin’s perspective and his projects to reestablish Russia as a power.

If this is one of the tendencies at play, the counter-tendency comes from Russia (and hence the clash of interests we are witnessing): It’s the logic of an empire on the rise, built on military and territorial foundations, where, through the nationalist, national-imperialist narrative of restoring the “Great Mother Russia,” Putin seeks to return to the international geopolitical stage.

As we can see, this is a trend that runs counter to NATO’s dynamic: the goal is to bring Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, and even other countries from the former sphere of influence of Tsarist or Stalinist Russia back as vassal states under the sphere of influence of Putin’s Russia (This even includes threats to Sweden and Finland, warning them not to abandon their neutrality — though, of course, we reject their incorporation into NATO as well).

Moreover, the limited Eurasian framework is not enough to fully grasp this aspect of the Ukrainian conflict. What’s at stake points to a dramatic international hegemonic crisis, one of the driving factors shaping 21st-century capitalism. Alongside the distinct crises of our time — the ecological crisis, the pandemic, the partially unresolved economic collapse of 2008, the return of the nuclear question (a major issue to which we’ll return) — there’s an ongoing geopolitical fracture, an intensifying competition for global dominance and market control.

This crisis refers precisely to Lenin’s classic theory of imperialism, where a world that had already been divided among imperialist powers under old terms now seeks to be redistributed — including here China’s claims over Taiwan and its expansion with the new Silk Road [12] — under new terms.

And since, in the end, this cannot be done in a friendly way because there are conflicting interests, it ends up being enforced through bloodshed and military means, as in the Ukrainian case. The analysis by the late Marxist geographer Giovanni Arrighi on China’s rise as a power in Adam Smith in Beijing: Origens e fundamentos do século XXI contains many suggestive elements, but it is astonishingly naive: “The central principle of the doctrine is that China can avoid, and will avoid, the path of aggression and expansion followed by previous powers at the moment of their rise (…) ‘China will not follow the path of Germany in World War I, nor of Germany and Japan in World War II, using violence to seize resources and seek global hegemony (…) On the contrary (…) ‘China seeks to grow and advance without disrupting the existing order”, Boitempo Editorial, São Paulo, 2008, pp. 299 [13].

What we have, then, is a return of the —eventually military— inter-imperialist conflict, which many authors, including Marxists, had prematurely assumed would be «off the stage» in a world of capitalist globalization (even thinkers like Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, in their work Imperium, went so far as to theorize the disappearance of nation-states themselves).

But it turns out that this is not the case: capitalism is not just competing capitals but also a «system of competing states.» In other words, imperialism as a structure precisely expresses this combination of economy and dominant nation-states, where both dimensions reinforce each other and create a hierarchy of nations. Dominant imperialist states, semi-colonial or dependent countries, a range of in-between sub-imperialist regional powers, and even the existence of independent countries (such as bureaucratic non-capitalist states, with Cuba being one of the few remaining examples today [14]).

What we have in Ukraine, then, as the backdrop to the visible conflict over national self-determination, is a conflict — not yet an all-out war — between imperialist or imperial powers (we’ll come back to these definitions) that shapes an unprecedented scenario in this 21st century. And this could still escalate drastically — qualitatively — if it shifted to a direct military confrontation, if China were to get involved, or if the conflict took on a nuclear dimension (something unlikely but not unthinkable, as horrifying as that prospect is from a human standpoint [15]).

The Unconditional Defense of the Right to Self-Determination

Let us now address the struggle for Ukraine’s self-determination. It is undeniable that it must be upheld—evidently—since there is nothing that justifies Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This aspect of the discussion also aligns with Lenin’s basic theory of imperialism, as he not only analyzed inter-imperialist conflicts over the division of the world but also emphasized the duty of revolutionaries to unconditionally defend the right of oppressed nations to self-determination.

We uphold this defense in real time, demanding the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine, regardless of any other considerations—whether Zelensky’s pro-Western capitalist policies or anything else. It is the Ukrainian masses who must decide on their national rights, not Putin, Biden, or NATO (In this struggle, we advocate—despite its immense complexity—for a workers’, popular, and peasant Ukraine, a socialist Ukraine unified while guaranteeing the autonomy, language, and culture of regions like Donbas.)

Before our eyes, a just national defense struggle is unfolding on Ukrainian soil against the Great Russian proto-imperialist invader. This resistance has proven to be more steadfast and heroic than many might have expected—Putin’s political calculations have failed entirely, inadvertently giving Western imperialism a renewed legitimacy. It is a legitimate national conflict despite its immense contradictions. While its broader backdrop is an inter-imperialist confrontation, it would be a sectarian mistake to reduce it solely to that (at the same time, the opposite error would be to ignore the overarching imperialist conflict when analyzing the ongoing national struggle [16]).

Here, we can refer to Lenin’s own sensitivity regarding the national question. In a debate with Rosa Luxemburg—whose position on the issue was considered sectarian—Lenin argued that it was a mistake to assume that every national conflict in the imperialist era was merely a proxy war in which great powers maneuvered for relative influence over national territories. He pointed out that between 1910 and 1914, and likely again after the world war, genuine national conflicts would re-emerge with full force. Indeed, this prediction proved correct both after the First and the Second World Wars.

«The history of the 20th century, the century of ‘unbridled imperialism,’ is filled with colonial wars. However, what we Europeans—imperialist oppressors of most of the world’s peoples, with the repugnant European chauvinism that is peculiar to us—call ‘colonial wars’ are often national wars or national uprisings of these oppressed peoples. One of the essential characteristics of imperialism is precisely that it accelerates the development of capitalism in the more backward countries, expanding and intensifying the struggle against national oppression. This is a fact. And from it, it inevitably follows that, in many cases, imperialism must give rise to national wars. Junius [Rosa Luxemburg], who defends the above-mentioned ‘theses’ in one of her pamphlets, argues that in the imperialist era, every national war against one of the great imperialist powers leads to the intervention of another great power, also imperialist, that competes with the first, and that, in this way, every national war becomes an imperialist war. But this argument is also false. That may happen, but it does not always happen. Many colonial wars between 1900 and 1914 did not follow that path. And it would be simply ridiculous to say that, for example, after the current war, if it ends due to the extreme exhaustion of the belligerent countries, there ‘cannot’ be ‘any’ national, progressive, revolutionary war (…) against the great powers.»

«The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution,» September 1916, MIA

And indeed, when analyzing the situation on the ground in the Ukrainian war, it is crucial to clearly define and determine its current stage. One must never lose sight of the fact that Western imperialism is actively intervening in the conflict through military aid, troop deployments in NATO countries in Eastern Europe, and sanctions against Putin, his entourage, and the oligarchs, many of which primarily impact the Russian people (we reject these sanctions, such as excluding Russia from the World Cup and similar measures). However, dissolving the legitimate national conflict in Ukraine against the Russian occupation—despite the country’s dramatic internal contradictions, the significant presence of far-right formations, etc.—would be a complete mistake (such an approach would ultimately serve the interests of the Great Russian aggression).

And this does not make us forget that Ukraine is a complex mosaic, that the legacy of Stalinism has made a progressive, working-class, and socialist outcome extremely difficult for the country, and that it is clear that Zelensky and his government are politically oriented toward unconditionally aligning with the EU and NATO—points to which we will return later.

An Imperialism under Reconstruction

One of the central discussions raised by the current conflict is the social character of Russia as a power: we believe that Russia is a kind of imperialism or «empire» under reconstruction (the differentiation between imperialism and «empire» will be addressed shortly).

It is true—as some on the left argue—that the great oligarchs who dominate the country may not have major global «brands» like the characteristic companies of Western or Chinese imperialism, which dominate entire branches of production internationally (Apple, Amazon, Alibaba, the major U.S., Japanese, or German automakers, U.S. oil companies, major U.S. and Chinese banks, or others—however, we should not forget that Gazprom is the world’s largest producer of gas and is owned by Russian public-private capital, among other examples).

However, this factor, which could be likened to the idea of large cartels and the export of capital in Lenin’s era, is not the only or exclusive element that defines an imperialist nation (it would be a crude schematic approach to see it that way!). In the case of Russia, what we observe is rather the traits of an «empire» in the old-fashioned sense (as per Traverso), where one of its dominant factors is direct territorial domination alongside military power (“Russia: An Imperialism Under Reconstruction?” Claudio Testa, Izquierda Web).

We have heard some so-called «Marxist» authors claim that Lenin did not characterize Tsarist Russia as an imperialist power. This is sheer nonsense because, if that were the case, he would have had to support the position of Plekhanov, who became a social-chauvinist during the First World War. On the contrary, Lenin, who was well aware of the uneven and combined development of Tsarist Russia (as Testa points out), explicitly characterized Russia as a barbaric imperialism. He used this exact term, implying a form of imperialism that was, in some ways, more backward or heterogeneous compared to Western imperialist powers. Yet, it was still an imperialist nation—one that he repeatedly described as a «prison of peoples.» Furthermore, along with Trotsky, he also acknowledged Russia’s advanced aspects, such as having the world’s largest factories at the time, and today, its nuclear power, ranking first or second globally.

On the other hand, it is evident that the uneven development of present-day Russia—its paradoxical situation of having an economy that is only 12% the size of the U.S. economy, among other factors—combines with the fact that it is now incomparably more urbanized than it was a hundred years ago. Additionally, many other elements contribute to this dynamic. However, what remains crucial, as we have repeatedly emphasized, is that Russia is still the world’s second-largest military power (an aspect that it would be dramatically foolish to overlook [17]).

In previous analyses from our tendency, we pointed out that, by the late 1990s, it was possible to think that Russia, under Yeltsin, might be transformed into a semi-colonized country. However, this is not what happened. Instead, what took place was the establishment—under Putin and what we might call «Putinism»—of a proto-imperialist state capitalism that reclaimed its position. This system disciplined many of the oligarchs who had hyper-privatized the economy as if it were a plundered treasure (a direct and open theft of state property). The country largely stabilized—through repression and bonapartist methods, so to speak—while also becoming one of the world’s leading arms producers and the top global exporter of gas and oil.

It is true that neither the quality nor the quantity of its production makes Russia a first-rate economic power. However, it would be an absurd economistic reductionism to conclude from this significant weakness that Russia lacks an imperial (or imperialist) status, so to speak. It would also be a mistake to overlook the fact that Putin’s government has been leveraging its comparative advantages in other areas—first and foremost, the military—to assert itself on the international stage.

Also, we insist, it would be an act of monumental blindness to ignore how Putin’s Russia is reclaiming—or attempting to reclaim—the traits of Great Russian oppression, resembling the «prison of peoples» that Lenin used to describe the Tsarist state. In this sense, there is a kind of «full-circle return» to the historical features of the Tsarist state, and it would be both criminal and blind, we repeat, to overlook this.

«In Russia, modern capitalist imperialism has fully manifested itself in the Tsarist policy towards Persia, Manchuria, and Mongolia; however, what generally prevails in Russia is military and feudal imperialism. Nowhere in the world is the majority of the population as oppressed as in Russia: Great Russians make up only 43% of the population, meaning less than half, and the rest of the inhabitants, by not being Russian, are deprived of rights. Of Russia’s 170 million inhabitants, nearly 100 million are oppressed and denied rights. Tsarism wages war to seize Galicia and definitively suppress Ukrainian freedom; to take over Armenia, Constantinople, etc.»

Lenin, Socialism and War (The Position of the RSDLP on the War), July/August 1915

There are analysts who argue that capitalism has not yet been restored in Russia… This is ridiculous. The bulk of formerly state-owned property has been privatized, even if these privatizations coexist with massive state-private conglomerates such as Gazprom, the world’s largest gas-producing company. For these reasons, Russia is specifically, in addition to being an imperialism under construction, a state capitalism [18].

Moreover, among some sectors, a fetishized idea of state-owned property prevails, hypostasizing it (giving it an absolute reality) and making it seem as though it inherently possesses a «worker» character. However, not only was this not the case after a certain qualitative moment—the 1930s—of the bureaucratization of the Russian Revolution, but it would also be an extraordinary anachronism to continue thinking this way in the 21st century, denying the most concrete and empirically real aspects of Russia’s present-day reality [19].

Other analyses romanticize Russia in a different way: they portray the country as an «independent nation» which, even if it no longer has any «worker» characteristics (though there are many nuances among the sectors that support this type of analysis [20]), would supposedly lack any national oppression over other countries…

Let’s first examine what is considered an independent nation. Generally, these are countries where capitalism has not been expropriated (although workers’ states and even anti-capitalist bureaucratic states have also been — in typology — independent states), but that have emerged from revolutionary anti-imperialist independence processes. Or, even if they did not recently emerge from such processes, they are at least the byproduct of a progressive movement of this kind (cases like Algeria at the time, Iran to this day despite the Ayatollahs, Venezuela despite the degradation of Chavismo, Nicaragua despite the massive decay under Ortega, etc., countries that won their independence through revolutionary processes [21]).

It’s true that the USSR, now turned into Putin’s Russia, went through a long historical decline. It’s also true that the Russian Revolution of 1917 achieved immense historical conquests, which were progressively eroded by the Stalinist counterrevolution. However, for example, that counterrevolution did not eliminate state-owned property (even if, in our view, it was no longer “workers’ property” after the working class lost political power to the bureaucracy). Nor did it end the country’s independence — at least not in the post-World War II period, when, in fact, that independence was reaffirmed, albeit immediately turning into the oppression of other countries through the Warsaw Pact.

Now then: the imperialist character of a nation and its independent status are not mutually exclusive attributes (the key issue is which trait is dominant). Imperialist powers generally — though with nuances, as in the European case — have independent traits. But what distinguishes these imperialist powers, like the traditional ones (the United States, of course, but also Britain, France, Germany, Japan) or Russia’s rising imperialism, is that they are not inspirational examples for national liberation or self-determination struggles — quite the opposite: they are nations that oppress peoples (confusing one thing for the other is pretty absurd).

This becomes very obvious when we see Russia invading Ukraine, invading Georgia, invading Chechnya, invading Kazakhstan, supporting Lukashenko in Belarus, Assad in Syria, and a long etcetera. It is absolutely correct to affirm that Cuba, Venezuela, even the degraded Nicaragua, or the equally degraded North Korea, are countries independent of imperialism… But it is far-fetched (and embellishing) to place Russia in this category, and not as what it truly is: a new rising imperialist power, leaving behind any attempt by traditional imperialism to induce its fragmentation (a phenomenon that is also real but today is subordinate to the former).

A new rising imperialist and oppressive power that, at the same time, fights to be a hegemonic actor in its own right on the international stage, much like China. Although Russia and China are different in many respects. China is an imperialism in the making that, however — as Au Loong-Yu points out — still has unresolved national tasks (it would be worth considering whether Taiwan falls into this category or not. Au Loong-Yu says it no longer does; our tendency has not yet taken a position on this matter [22]).

The Dramatic History of Ukraine Under Stalinism

Let’s now look at another side of the matter. It’s about Ukraine’s painful history and, above all, its subjugation under Stalinist rule. Our movement treats Ukraine’s tragic history in the 20th century as, in a way, “our history”; we feel a certain responsibility for the fact that Stalinism was the bureaucratization of our revolution, and, therefore, we cannot approach the Ukrainian question with the detachment of something that “has nothing to do with us.”

We are not going to write an academic history of Ukraine here. It is enough for us to start from the fact that Lenin and Trotsky recognized Ukraine’s national right to self-determination, and that throughout the 1920s, after the civil war (during which it was evidently impossible to avoid the methods of civil war [23]), Ukraine effectively enjoyed some attributes of nationhood with elements of autonomy and self-determination within the federation or union of Soviet Republics. Considering historical experience, perhaps it would have been better if the former USSR had maintained the status of a federation rather than a union — the federated status, without excluding essential elements of centralization, might have made certain things clearer. But this is a topic we cannot address here and have not studied sufficiently. On this, see Lenin’s Last Struggle by Moshe Lewin [24].

In short: Lenin, Trotsky, and Rakovsky recognized Ukrainian nationality as a fact — its right to its own language, its culture, and all those attributes which, while not class-based, clearly define a people with distinctive characteristics. (This understanding came through hard lessons on the ground because, with the formation of the first Soviet government in Ukraine in early 1919, amid the civil war, and being forced to implement grain confiscations without enough sensitivity to the national question, this first Bolshevik government, always led by Rakovsky, found itself isolated. This changed by the end of the same year when Rakovsky returned with a much greater awareness of the need to give space to the peasants and to recognize Ukraine’s right to self-determination [25]).

At the turn of the 1930s, Stalinism not only eliminated every real element of national self-determination (purging the ranks of all Trotskyist oppositionists as well as the Borotbists — a form of communist party with Ukrainian national roots that Lenin and Rakovsky had managed to integrate, though not without difficulties), but the forced collectivization of agriculture led to the catastrophe of the Holodomor in 1932–33 — the extermination by starvation.

Many analysts point out that there was no explicit intent to cause the famine. However, the blind, administrative methods — anti-economic and anti-humanist — with which collectivization was carried out, methods that, as we’ve said, showed complete disregard for the fate of the peasant population (it’s important to note that collectivization was an attack on the peasantry as a whole, across all its layers, and not just the «liquidation of the kulaks — rich peasants — as a class,» as Stalin claimed [26]), were precisely what led to this historic famine. This, in turn, paved the way for the shift toward the right and far right in the decades that followed — a shift that, in many ways, persists in western Ukraine to this day.

The bureaucratic methods with which it was carried out, the lack of any technical foundation for collectivization, and the absence of any consent from the peasantry for this bureaucratic operation ultimately led to the well-known collapse of agricultural production, eventually resulting in the dramatic famine in the Ukrainian countryside that claimed six million lives.

If anything else was needed to fuel the growing hatred of a significant part of the Ukrainian population towards the «Soviet» government — a hatred often rooted in petty-bourgeois and small-property interests, or in the exploitation of national sentiment by right-wing and even antisemitic forces (Ukraine was the site of some of the largest pogroms in Russian history, driven by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois layers, including those of White Russia) — this only completed the process, paving the way for a shift to the right and far-right among large segments of the non-working-class population.

Hence, at the start of Operation Barbarossa — Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941 — many Ukrainians, especially in the west, initially welcomed Hitler’s troops as “liberators,” only to later turn against Nazi Germany when the massacres and pogroms began. And yet, figures like Stepan Bandera, an ultranationalist who had both agreements and fallouts with the Nazis and was even involved in the Babi Yar massacre in Kyiv — where 30,000 Jews were killed in just a few days in September 1941 — have been considered “national heroes” by the previous far-right Ukrainian government of Petro Poroshenko, a product of the Maidan Square uprising.

And yet, the way to resolve this tragic history — now greatly complicated by the disasters of Stalinism and Putin’s unjustifiable invasion — lies in clarifying and addressing the Ukrainian national question, just as Leon Trotsky himself argued in the late 1930s. He called for an independent Soviet Ukraine as a way to prevent the country from falling into Nazi hands while also freeing it from Stalin’s bureaucratic impositions.

Ukraine is a mosaic that calls for an independent socialist struggle for self-determination, but it is also a nation carrying all its contradictions — contradictions that can only be resolved through an authentic socialist revolution in the 21st century, leaving behind the burdens of Stalinism. The Ukraine that emerged after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk presents a board of complications, confusions, and political and ethnic subdivisions indescribable in just a few lines — a true pandemonium of antagonistic parties, rival organizations, groupings and subgroups fueled by national passions, political hatreds, social demands, religious fervor, and more. There are Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Russians and Ukrainians, right and left Socialist Revolutionaries, Borotbists, Zionists, Federalists, anarchists of various tendencies, nationalists, Cadets, Cossack formations, and Centurionegrists [ultra-right-wing, fascist Tsarist formations]. Lenin had to end this quickly, to make use of his skill in recognizing talent and placing the right person in the right position. He needed someone for Ukraine who was neither Russian nor Ukrainian, neither Bolshevik nor Menshevik, neither Socialist Revolutionary nor Borotbist, neither Maximalist nor Bundist, neither Zionist nor Federalist, neither this nor that. That man existed: it was Rakovsky. This beautiful quote from Boris Souvarine, cited by Broué (ibid; 142), despite the historical distance, seems to paint a picture of today´s Ukraine [27].

[1] For example, the debates about the nature of China and Russia that have been ongoing for years within the Marxist left.

[2] “Our efforts must be directed at exposing this unforgivable imperialist invasion of Ukraine by Russia, for which NATO’s aggressive expansion and the post-Maidan Ukrainian regime have also paved the way. With a revolutionary spirit and in solidarity with the peoples of Ukraine, Russia, and the region, we say: No! To Moscow today and No! To the false choice between Moscow and NATO in the future. We call for an immediate ceasefire and a return to the negotiating table. The interests of global capital and its military-industrial complex are not worth shedding another drop of the peoples’ blood. Peace, land, and bread!” (statement from the Eastern European revolutionary Marxist website of the same name: Lefteast, izquierdaweb).

[3] It is interesting that, so far, NATO has refused to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine, as this would lead to a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia.

[4] Later, we will explain that the same did not happen with the invasions of East Berlin, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia by the former USSR in the post-war period. Likewise, the former USSR did not intervene—at least not directly—in the areas of U.S. influence after the war, except for the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), which was resolved with the «Soviet» withdrawal of the missiles.

[5] The Donbas has traditionally been a more industrialized region, more «aligned,» so to speak, with Russia even since the time of revolutionary Bolshevism. Naturally, these elements have been reinterpreted through a national-imperialist lens by Putin. Moreover, some analysts point out that, today, the pro-Russian sentiment in the region is driven more by economic reasons than anything else («Escalation in the Donbass risks a disastrous war,» an interview with Gerardo Toal and David Broder, Jacobin.com).

[6] The return of the nuclear issue is another radical novelty of this conflict, which we will address further below.

[7] It is absolutely clear that the transformations of the last 30 years have brought about a radical change in the nature of the conflict between both “blocks.” Even with the bureaucratic counterrevolution of the 1930s, the Nazi aggression against the former USSR constituted a counterrevolutionary war in which it was appropriate to take a defensist stance. During the postwar period, we unconditionally rejected the “Soviet” invasions against anti-bureaucratic revolutions in the GDR (Berlin, 1953), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968)—counterrevolutionary attacks in which the imperialist West did not intervene. However, had a conflict erupted between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, it would not have been an inter-imperialist conflict, because the role of the Stalinist USSR was one of national oppression in the Pact countries, but socially, it was not strictly an imperialist country. Similarly, during the Korean War (early 1950s), it was necessary to defend North Korea’s rights against South Korea, even though the partition of the country (like that of Germany, which was much more severe, of course) was a national defeat and also a reactionary division of their respective working classes (once again, Germany’s division was a historical tragedy for the German proletariat—one of the strongest and most promising at the beginning of the last century). Today, things are evidently completely different: Russia is an imperialist power or an empire in the making (we will examine this shortly), and the nature of the ongoing potential conflagration is inter-imperialist. We advocate for transforming this war—generically speaking—into a civil war (as Lenin proposed), rather than supporting the defensism of either NATO or Russia.

[8] The circumstances under which they divided among themselves countries and percentages of Eastern European nations are well known, and it would be too lengthy to repeat them here.

[9] In Italy and France, the communist resistance was ordered to surrender their weapons and merge with the bourgeois repressive institutions. In Greece, the civil war that broke out in the second half of the 1940s following the end of World War II was openly betrayed (considering that the communist resistance had practically taken control of the country after the German withdrawal).

[10] Some analysts are now suggesting that this pressure was a mistake, but that it would already be «too late» to remedy it.

[11] Lenin’s last struggle was around the right of nations to self-determination, and more precisely around the question of Georgia, Stalin’s nationality of origin, which he, along with his lieutenants, crushed as the Great Russian he was.

[12] In analyzing the conflict in Ukraine, the China factor cannot be overlooked for even a second, even if, for now, it remains in the background.

[13] Arrighi had—or rather, used to have—hope for a bloodless rise, which clashes with any materialist analysis of power relations and spheres of influence. He considered China to be a non-capitalist country—though not socialist either—and despite these definitions, which we view as mistaken, he provided analytical insights into the role of the extraterritorial Chinese bourgeoisie from Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the plans for a return to capitalism, which we find thought-provoking. For a broader and more educational discussion on the material basis of inter-imperialist conflicts, see “Conflict in Ukraine: War and Revolution in the 21st Century.”

[14] North Korea is a socially peculiar entity that is difficult to define and one we have never studied.

[15] We will return to this later, but we hasten to point out that the destructive capacities of capitalism in the 21st century—on multiple fronts—have multiplied exponentially, so to speak.

[16] Practical examples of this: One cannot march only to the Russian embassy without also marching to the U.S. embassy. The demonstration in Berlin against Putin and the aggression in Ukraine is extraordinary, but its slogans must also include opposition to the rearmament of imperialist Germany, and so on (as we have pointed out, this is a battle on two fronts).

[17] The military-industrial complex is highly advanced by international standards—a contradictory legacy of Stalinism.

[18] Claudio Katz, with whom we disagree on many aspects—including his characterization of China—nevertheless presents a perspective on Russia that we find more accurate: «Russia plays a completely different role than Europe. It maintains an intense conflict with the United States, which contrasts with the prevailing alliance among transatlantic powers (…) With the same great-power geopolitics, Putin has preserved excellent relations with Israel (…) It is worth remembering that Russia actively participates in the global arms market as the second-largest supplier of deadly weaponry (…) Russia’s conduct in the Middle East confirms the profile of an empire in formation (…) This conduct aligns with Russia’s capitalist status. That system was swiftly restored after the USSR’s collapse through the rapid auctioning off of public property. From that transformation emerged an oligarchy of millionaires originating from the upper bureaucracy of the previous regime. The same personnel changed their attire while retaining control of the state for different purposes. However, the chaos brought by the banditry of the Yeltsin era forced a shift under Putin to contain the country’s disintegration. From that leadership emerged the current political model, which curtailed the power of the wealthy without altering Russia’s capitalist status» («Three Different Profiles of Dominant Imperialism,» Jacobinlat).

[19] Such an analysis can be observed in some «Trotskyist» groups in Argentina.

[20] The sectors we are referring to consider that China still retains working-class or non-capitalist traits… another complete anachronism in our view.

[21] In this regard, an old article by Nahuel Moreno, an Argentine Trotskyist leader, is instructive: “A propósito de los gobiernos nacionalistas burgueses. Países independientes: ¿Naciones aliadas?” (1986, Aporrea).

[22] In any case, what is interesting here is that the uneven and combined development of their rise to imperialist nations combines elements of progress and backwardness. For example, in the case of China, there are still unresolved national tasks, which, however, do not call into question its general character as an imperialism in the making. This is due to multiple reasons, including the fact that it establishes traditional relationships of economic subordination with underdeveloped and/or dependent countries—relationships that are not emancipatory in any sense of the word.

[23] Above all, the military requisitioning of agricultural production, among other repressive measures.

[24] In this area, it is significant that, at the state level, the criterion of revolutionary Marxism can only be that of a centralized state. However, at the level of relations between nationalities, the criterion is federalist: the federalist element better accounts for the fact that the union is voluntary.

[25] Elements taken from Pierre Broué, Rakovsky ou la Révolution dans tous les pays, FAYARD, France, a magnificent work on the Romanian revolutionary.

[26] Only through successive approximations did Trotsky become aware of the true nature of agricultural collectivization. Rakovsky had a clearer understanding from the beginning, pointing out that the so-called «collective farms» were nothing more than «pseudo-collectives» where the peasantry was exploited by the bureaucracy. Bukharin, from the right and already in disgrace, would offer a similar definition.

[27] A very instructive note on the Ukrainian question, which we cannot elaborate on further here, is «Ukraine on the Tightrope: War Drums Sound from the East», Tino Burgos, Viento Sur, Izquierda Web.