Ukraine: The Endgame of Leninism?

As the tankies pile in with Musk and Trump, what theory is driving them?

[These are my speaking notes for a meeting tonight at Queen Mary University London, entitled The British Left and Ukraine. I probably veered wildly away from this script, but I’m sharing it because it represents my latest thinking on why parts of the far left are collapsing towards a strategic collaboration with totalitarianism in Russia and the far right in the USA].

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Ukraine is fighting a war of existential survival. Vladimir Putin’s essay, written in July 2021 makes that clear: for Great Russian fascism, Ukraine can have no separate existence other than as a sub-set of the Russian dominated reality. Its language is inferior; its territorial borders to be ripped up at will; its sovereign right to orient to the EU, or ally with NATO, to be overridden by Moscow.

For that reason alone anyone who calls themselves socialist or left-wing should support Ukraine’s resistance.

Added to that, our society too is under threat. Every few days a Russian TV host fantasises about exploding a nuclear device in the Irish Sea, creating a tsunami that will wipe out Glasgow, Liverpool and Belfast. Russian ships are dredging up our internet cables. And Russian political proxies are at work both on the far right of British politics and the far left.

So the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, whose third anniversary we mark this month, was a watershed moment for the left. As a Labour Party member I am proud that the party immediately recognised Ukraine’s resistance as a just war, sided with Ukraine, armed and sent aid to Ukraine.

The far left did the opposite. By the far left I mean not only the Trotskyist groups, the Morning Star newspaper and the Communist Party of Great Britain; but the wider milieu around them composed of radical students and academics and single-issue campaigners, and those they influence in the trade unions.

Stop The War mounted a grand total of one demonstration at the start of the war, consisting of 5,000 people, at which there were almost no Ukrainians and no Ukrainian flags. They made no joint actions with the Ukrainian community and, from the very start, campaigned to prevent Western governments’ support for Ukraine, stop the supply of arms.

In May 2022 I went to Madrid to take part in a so-called “Peace” conference, at which Jeremy Corbyn, together with the luminaries of Podemos and what is now the Sarah Wagenknecht Movement in Germany, called for a Europe wide ban on arms supplies to Ukraine. While I was there, my friend – a left wing academic who joined the Ukranian army on the first day of the war – sent me a picture of the machine gun their unit had been issued.

It was a Maxim gun from the Second World War – the kind that runs on wheels and has a little iron shield, and you have to urinate into the barrel to keep it cool. [Here’s a picture of one]

Though most of the people we’re going to talk about say that the Russian invasion was a bad thing, and accept that Putin is an oligarch - by their actions they have aided it. For much of 2022, for example, it was the explicit strategy of the Morning Star to link protests against the cost of living crisis, mobilised in the Enough is Enough campaign, with opposition to support for Ukraine.

Why this matters should be obvious. We’re probably only weeks away from the formation of a new left party in Britain, to support Jeremy Corbyn and the four Muslim independent MPs elected last July. So as Trump moves to push Ukraine into a compromise with Putin, and the British far right questions our commitment to support Ukraine, they’ll have at least five “left” MPs prepared to back them.

So what I am going to talk about is theory. What are the theoretical sources of pro-Russian leftism, and how do we pull people back from the brink?