On May 8 and 9, the peoples of Eurasia celebrate the victory over Nazism. Nazism embodied a war of conquest, destruction, and racist barbarism. Nazism is identified with the bombing of cities, the blockade of Leningrad, concentration camps, and the genocide of “inferior” peoples. Today the Putin regime’s invasion of Ukraine is a repugnant replica of Nazi barbarism. And as a cruel irony, in Moscow, Putin commemorates that historic victory against Hitler. Putin is thus trying to cover up his atrocities against the Ukrainian people, falsifying once again before the Russian people and other countries the true motives and objectives of his aggression against Ukraine: to subjugate a country and enslave a sovereign people.
By Iván Razin and Pavel Polska
77 years later, we see again the barbarism imposed by Nazism on the territory of Ukraine. In its attempt to destroy Ukraine – which Putin denies as a nation – the invading Russian army is shelling cities all over the country: factories, power plants, water systems, food warehouses and oil depots, hospitals, schools, people’s homes… destroying everything indispensable for people’s lives. In the occupied territories it terrorizes the population, burns corpses in mobile crematoria to hide its atrocious crimes, concentrates and filters the survivors and deports them en masse to remote regions of Russia. In short, we are witnessing an ethnic cleansing of the territory. Unable to take the cities, the Russian army subjects them to starvation blockades and bombardments. Russian soldiers plunder the local population. Russia is carrying out organized looting of the occupied territories, exporting the spoils of food and grain crops to other countries.
Hitler did similar things on the territory of the USSR under the banner of the “German world.” Putin does this in the name of the “Russian world.” The goal of “de-Ukrainization,” i.e. the destruction of Ukraine, was officially declared by the principal Kremlin news agency. This is called Nazi methods.
Read more | Russia under Putin
Putin imitates and surpasses Stalinist counterfeiting
Putin calls the invasion of Ukraine a “forced measure” and a “liberation.” To this hypocrisy, he adds “the fight against Nazism.” He cynically congratulated the Ukrainians this May 9! And he staged a grotesque and pathetic show on Red Square. He is creating a new falsification around the Second World War, pushing the lie to the limit. The Stalinist historiography of World War II itself was a great falsification.
Stalinism called itself a “fighter against Nazism.” However, in reality, it collaborated with it. In 1939, Stalin signed a pact with Hitler on the division of Europe, according to which, among other things, he provided Nazism with enormous resources to wage war. For this, Trotsky rightly called Stalin “Hitler’s butler.” In 1940, Molotov sent a congratulatory telegram to Ribbentrop in connection with the “brilliantly conducted campaign” for the occupation of France. In 1941, Stalin reprimanded defectors who reported the exact date of Hitler’s attack on the USSR.
When Nazism, which united all the military and economic potential of Europe with the help of Stalinism, on June 22, 1941, threw its entire war machine on the unsuspecting USSR, Stalin continued to believe in his agreement with Hitler for many hours after the attack. This policy cost the Red Army enormous military catastrophes in the first period of the war, the rapid advance of German troops, and many millions of additional Soviet lives.
After the end of World War II, Stalinist historians called it the “Great Patriotic War.” Thus he replaced the international victory over Nazism with a “Russified” national victory of the USSR over Germany. The “Great Patriotic War”… and “from Moscow to Berlin”, on the one hand, belittled the fundamental contribution to the victory over Nazism of the Soviet and East European peoples and nationalities, who were assigned the passive role of “liberated by the Russian soldier.” On the other hand, Stalin ideologically crushed under a Great Russian “Fatherland” the peoples of the USSR, who remained under the yoke of the Moscow Kremlin. As a symbol of this victory, Stalin chose nothing less than the ultra-reactionary ribbon of the “St. George’s Cross,” the highest decoration of the Tsarist Empire.
20 years after the victory, when the first generation that did not see the war grew up, Stalinism began to celebrate May 9 with military parades, turning this day into a militaristic holiday. Under the slogan of “suppression of fascism,” the Stalinist tanks crushed the workers and popular uprisings in Berlin in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968…
The revolutionary processes in Eastern Europe and the USSR at the end of the 1980s, as a response of the masses to the transmutation of the Stalinist regime of the CPSU with the restoration of Perestroika and the collapse of the USSR itself after the failure of the military coup of 1991, dealt a heavy blow to these falsifications. At the state level, the pact with Hitler was condemned, the crimes of the partition of Poland and the executions in Katyn and Tver of Poles who fought against Hitler were recognized. The invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia were officially condemned. The degree of militarism on May 9 was significantly reduced.
However, the return to government of the heirs of the GPU-NKVD-KGB, headed by Putin on the basis of genocidal repression of the Chechen resistance and the establishment of the FSB regime brought back all the falsifications in the most aggressive manner. And they were especially sharpened to justify the aggression against Ukraine after the Maidan revolution in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and Donbas.
They again revised history, with the justification of the Stalinist pact with Hitler, the denial of the execution of Poles who fought against Nazism to incite hatred towards Poland, and the artful slander against the people of Ukraine. The repression of the uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia again began to be justified. The monarchist-Stalinist St. George ribbon has become an obligatory attribute of the dress uniform of military men and officers and a symbol of support for aggression against Ukraine. The red “Victory Flag” raised over the Reichstag, which was a valuable museum exhibit of the Soviet era, in the present reality was turned into an antiquarian piece. Militarism has reached a supreme exaltation, expressed in the phrase “we can repeat.” Thus, what was a “tearful human celebration,” as felt by the Soviet people, May 9 has turned today into an aggressive frenzy with foam at the mouth, singing a “victory” without glory.
Above all this, Putin regenerated a national chauvinist religion. With this religion and these symbols, which include the tsarist flag (black, yellow, and white) and squadrons like the Sparta, which emulates the tsarist black centuries, Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014, annexed Crimea, and proclaimed autonomous republics in the Donbas. Underpinning that mythology he launched a full-scale war in February 2022. He uses his version of “victory over Nazism” in the service of his Nazi methods in Ukraine.
Read more | Ukraine resists Putin’s advance
Today to commemorate the victory over Nazism is to fight for the Ukrainian victory against Putin’s invasion.
After the restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucrats, the heirs of those executioners, renaming the KGB the FSB, restored all their falsifications. Putin’s bourgeois Stalinism turned that victory over Nazism into its opposite. Commemorating that flag raised over the Reichstag in May 1945, the Russian army is today committing Nazi crimes in Ukraine.
Nazism was defeated by all the peoples of the U.S.S.R. And today Putin is sending Chechens, Dagestanis, Buryatians, and Tivans to kill the Ukrainian people! Impossible to imagine a greater perversity. Still, Putin only managed to temporarily impose this counterfeit on a considerable part of the Russian people, poisoned by the Great Russian chauvinist ideology. However, even Putin’s friendly dictatorships, such as Kazakhstan, under pressure from the peoples of their countries, officially sided with Ukraine.
Seventy-seven years ago, the progressive way out for the working and oppressed peoples of the region was mainly through the defeat of Hitler. The Nazi regime of terror against the workers and peoples was overthrown in its lair: Berlin. The people of the USSR inflicted decisive defeats on it near Moscow in 1941, Stalingrad in 1942-1943, and Kursk in 1943. Today, the resistance of the Ukrainian working class and working people has already inflicted major defeats on Putin. But that invasion must be crushed completely, and that will encourage the revolt of the people of the Russian Federation all the way to the Kremlin.
And we must combat any illusory confusion that for this victory to be possible, intervention by the imperialist powers, NATO or the EU, is necessary. On the contrary, these vultures are more afraid of the revolutionary upsurge beginning in Ukraine and the arming of the Ukrainian working masses than of the Kremlin dictator. They only make hypocritical statements and rub their hands together, doing colonizing business at the expense of the blood of the Ukrainian people and indebting the country for long decades. These imperialists are shocked today at the atrocities committed by Putin when they have all committed them in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan and continue to commit them in every corner of the planet.
They are not at all for the independence of Ukraine, they are just taking advantage of the Ukrainian war to arm themselves to the teeth for future disputes between powers for the world’s plunder. An example of this hypocrisy is that on May 8 and 9: Berlin City Hall shamefully banned Ukrainian symbols at demonstrations and seized the Ukrainian flag from demonstrators!
The defeat of the invader Putin and the occupation of Ukraine is today the main task of the workers and oppressed peoples of the former Russian Empire, Eastern Europe, and all of Europe and the whole world. It is today the main class battle of the planet.
For the defeat of Putin in Ukraine! Weapons and anything necessary for the victory of the Ukrainian resistance!
Overthrow the Putin regime!
Total rejection of US and US imperialist interference!
Originally published in Spanish here
