Dave Crouch

The winds of cold war

From Socialist Review, No. 174, April 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

Are we seeing the outbreak of a new cold war? Spycatching scandals and rifts between Russia and the US suggest that the old superpower rivalry is far from over. Dave Crouch in Moscow examines the motives behind Yeltsin’s latest outburst of nationalist rhetoric

The chill winds of Cold War have begun to whistle across the Atlantic once again. The revealing of a Russian spy, Richard Ames, in the CIA at the end of February was timed to destroy any political capital the Russians may have made from stalling Nato military intervention in Yugoslavia. Russia swiftly answered by expelling top US and German spies.

Suddenly all the talk of Russo-American friendship has been revealed to be a sham. Behind the hand shaking and smiles each side has carried on exactly as before – bugging, burgling and bumping people off in ruthless pursuit of its own ‘national interests’.

In February and March Yeltsin took a series of foreign policy initiatives to show the US that Russia is still a nuclear superpower which resents interference in its sphere of influence.

A new agreement between Yeltsin and Eduard Shevardnadze allows for Russian troops to be permanently based in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The announcement that Byelorus was planning monetary union with Russia – called off because of the restrictions on political independence demanded by Moscow – was welcomed by the main Nazi paper Zavtra (formerly Dyen) with the front page headline ‘Minsk is ours again!’ and a picture of a Soviet tank.

Foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev has been rapidly transformed from the bogeyman of the far right to a tub thumping Russian nationalist, loudly proclaiming that the republics of the former USSR and Eastern Europe belong to ‘Russia’s sphere of interests’. One Western diplomat in Moscow remarked that he can no longer distinguish Kozyrev from Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist Party leader and secretary of the far right National Salvation Front.

This shift towards imperialist sabre rattling by the Yeltsin government has been under way for some time. The crackdown on immigrants after the October coup was followed by the playing of the Russian nationalist card during the election campaign in November in an attempt to steal votes from the fascist Zhirinovsky. Meanwhile construction of atomic submarines has been renewed and there has been a crackdown on draft dodging from the army.

But it would be a grave mistake to see these developments as a major change in direction; there is considerable continuity and the nationalist rhetoric has merely been cranked up another notch.

Yeltsin made it clear from the start that he would continue to pursue Russia’s imperialist interests after the collapse of the USSR. Russian troops have intervened bloodily in Chechnya, Georgia, Moldova and Tadjikistan. Russia still has troops in the Baltic states and used them recently to pressure the Baltic leaderships.

Far from marking the end of the arms race and reconciliation between the superpowers, the triumphant summit meetings between Bush, Clinton and Yeltsin and the talk of a new ‘Marshall Plan’ for Russia were a charade.

Both sides badly needed the summit rhetoric for propaganda purposes – Yeltsin in order to sell his population the pain of restructuring the Russian economy along market lines, and Clinton to check hostility to the results of market economics in the US. He has constantly told Americans that the Russians are suffering to have the market, so they should just shut up and be thankful for what they’ve got.

Meanwhile fierce competition has continued between both powers, especially for weapons sales. Russia has been arming China and the US Taiwan in a rapid escalation of tension between these two countries. US aid to Russia was always a joke – it was pitiful and came with huge strings attached. Foreign investment in Russia is pathetic: by autumn 1993 it totalled a mere $7 billion, only 5 percent of which was from the US.

In short, the issue that has hitherto divided Yeltsin from Rutskoi and the leaders of the red-browns is not whether or not to ‘give in to American imperialism’, but the degree to which open military force could be used to defend Russia’s interests without provoking further disintegration. Previous attempts – notably the invasions of Tbilisi, Baku and the Baltics and the 1991 coup – only accelerated the break up of the Soviet empire.

But as the economic situation has worsened and nationalist feelings grown, the Russian leadership has been increasingly tempted to play the nationalist card, just as it has been everywhere else in Eastern Europe.

When at the end of February the new parliament announced an amnesty freeing the leaders of the October coup attempt, Yeltsin again revealed how little separates him and his faction of the bureaucracy from the people they exchanged shots with in October. His state of the nation address dropped all but passing references to the free market and called for state direction of the economy. Lipitsky, number two in the party of rebel vice president Alexander Rutskoi, was not alone among the parliamentary opposition in rejoicing that Yeltsin was now saying what they had been arguing for three years.

As Kommersant, the Moscow stockbrokers’ journal, perceptively remarked, the speech merely removed the two year old discrepancy between the government’s rhetoric and its actions. In January when the ‘monetarists’ Gaidar and Fyodorov left the government amid panic over ‘the end of market reforms’, the magazine predicted that nothing much would change in practice. It was right.

Secondly, Yeltsin joined in the chorus of appeals for ‘national reconciliation’ saying that it was time to bury the hatchet with those who had been prepared to use Nazi thugs to storm the Kremlin in October and announced yet another ‘round table’ to ‘achieve stability and bring Russia out of the economic crisis’.

These moves once again confirm that the recurrent crises at the top of Russian society over the last three years have been a grubby struggle for power, very far from a principled battle between democracy and Communism.

Russia is experiencing a growing strike wave. The rock bottom ratings of all political figures, Yeltsin and Zhirinovsky included, point to workers’ alienation from the political system. And they have begun to fight back in large numbers, the one day strike by 500,000 miners on 1 March being just one example. Prime minister Chernomydrin is quoted as being ‘extremely worried’ by the demands of the Vorkuta miners for the resignation of the government and new presidential elections.

The ruling class is running scared. Its internal power struggle brought the country to the brink of civil war and its support among the population has been destroyed. Says Rutskoi: ‘Without national reconciliation the country will not overcome economic, political and social chaos.’ Zyuganov says the same: ‘We are on the verge of mass strikes. So the task now is to take steps to national reconciliation.’

When a power struggle came to a head in the Ukrainian leadership in spring 1993 they took a similar course, opting for a truce to avoid provoking social unrest. The ruling class of any country is always prepared to unite against the workers, whatever its internal disagreements.

But the mammoth Ukrainian miners’ strike nonetheless took place in June.

No one in Russia takes the talk of national reconciliation seriously. The spectacle of Yeltsin sanctioning the freeing of Rutskoi, the 1991 putschists and the Nazis from jail is just too much to stomach – all that blood spilt and it’s as though no one was to blame, as if nothing has changed. As the presenter of Itogi, Russia’s equivalent of Newsnight, put it: ‘How can you have national reconciliation when the country is split in two between rich and poor?’

The signs are that Russia is heading for large scale class confrontations that could cut through the nationalism and see the end of both Yeltsin and his parliamentary opponents. On the other hand, the extreme weakness of working class leadership means that an attempt at military rule is still on the cards. The divisions that have rent the bureaucracy in recent years could break out again at any minute.

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