The legacy of Soviet revisionism: the view from Russia today.

Written by: (Contributed) on 13 May 2024

Above: Anti-Putin protester dragged away by Moscow cops. Photo: www.reaction.life 

Our Party has good relations with several groups of comrades in Russia. We won’t identify the source of the following description of conditions in Russia because of the danger its authors are in under the rule of the Russian imperialist bourgeosie and Putin’s government. Unfortunately, there are some on the Left in Australia who praise Putin for his rivalry with US imperialism and the NATO bloc. There are no grounds fordoing so. All imperialism is bad and must be overthrown – eds

The legacy of Soviet revisionism and social-imperialism, which completely permeates society and bourgeois power, causes great harm to party building in our country. On the one hand, this completely discredits the ideas of communism in society, equating them with Soviet capitalism. On the other hand, the bourgeois government and the bourgeois “opposition” demagogically use images of the Soviet past for chauvinist propaganda. 

Many people in our country know about Mao Zedong from the fascist tales that were promoted by Soviet propaganda and which are enshrined in official academic discourse in books and the Internet. All this complicates the work of Marxists-Leninists in Russia. Moreover, after the strengthening of the fascist regime and the start of the genocidal war against the Ukrainian people, great-power chauvinism, racism and spy mania dominate in society. 

There is information that about 116 thousand people were subjected to Putin’s repressions. There are many neo-Nazis in the FSB and the police who torture people, and after a recent terrorist attack, neo-Nazis in police uniform festooned with swastikas publicly cut off the ear of one of the suspects on camera and forced him to eat his ear. 

Instructions from the police and army on how to properly torture people with electric shock are being actively distributed online. 

Police and Nazis organize attacks on migrants in factories and commercial establishments, inducing them to go to war. In this way, the Russian army is replenished and at the same time terror is waged against the non-Russian workers remaining at the enterprises. 

Moreover, after the failure of the military opposition in June 2023 and after Putin’s victory in the elections, the fascist regime began to fight with redoubled force against political opponents. Our organization suffers greatly from these repressions. At the same time, all street protests are now prohibited in our country and any unflattering word about the war and the Russian army faces criminal liability, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly have been destroyed. 

In our country, trade unions are subordinate to the ruling far-right United Russia party, on which President Putin relies. Because of this, the economic struggle in our country is seriously complicated.

The left forces in our country are poisoned by Soviet revisionism. The majority of Russian "communists" support Putin, the fascist war against Ukraine and external expansion into European countries. Chauvinist Russian idealist philosophers and various bourgeois concepts, such as the “civilizational approach” or “world-system analysis,” are highly respected among them. Almost all Russian communists and social democrats are sexists and homophobes, supporters of traditional family values and the death penalty.

At the moment, Russian imperialism is merging in foreign policy with revisionist regimes. First of all, with social-imperialist China and the DPRK, which most pseudo-communists perceive as a socialist turn and “anti-imperialism.”

Russian imperialists are attacking feminism, women's right to abortion, and any protection against domestic violence. We are trying to fight this by developing a feminist movement in Russia. LGBT people in Russia are recognized as terrorists, as are Jehovah's Witnesses and many other religious and social forces. Many oppositionists are labeled as “foreign agents”, after which they are deprived of economic and remaining political rights.

May 2024

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