A special report from Russia, by ALEXANDER BUZGALIN, a professor and a Council member of the Party of Labour, and ANDREI KOLGANOV, also a professor, and a member of the Organising Committee of the Union of Internationalists. DURING the time we take to write this article, several dozen more people will almost certainly be killed or maimed in the North Caucasus.
Dozens of mothers with cry out their unending grief; no-one can give them back their sons or daughters.
Dozens of wives will have become widows, and their children, orphans.
At one pole in this conflict are several thousand fighters and hundreds of thousands of peaceful civilians. At the other are several divisions of Russian troops, together with hundreds of tanks, aircraft and armoured personnel carriers.
Almost a month of senseless bloodshed ... this is terrifying and amoral, monstrous and disgraceful.
Human beings need to do more than simply to show indignation and compassion. They have to understand what can and must be done, and by whom, in order to stop the slaughter, to prevent the renewal and spread of fratricidal conflicts.
The causes of this senseless war on Russia's southern border, a war which has now become the epicentre of pain and anguish for our homeland, unfortunately run very deep.
Russia for a long time has been proceeding along the road of bloodshed and official arbitrariness. The Yeltsin government started with mass beatings of demonaratore on the cheete nt Mocrow in 1993.
But it finally abandoned all restraint in October of the same year, trampling on the constitution and not only dispersing its own parliament, but also opening fire on it with tank artillery and machine guns.
The people behind that episode were the same Yeltsin, Grachev, Yerin and co. who are now directing the carnage in Chechnya. At that time, however, they still had with them a number of people who now seem to have regained their powers of sight - people like Yegor Gaidar and Gleb Yakunin.
Even Sergei Kovalyov, now showing genuine heroism defending human rights in Chechnya, looked on passively in October 1993 as hundreds of defenceless Moscow citizens were murdered, as deputies were arrested and beaten, and as police savagely beat their fellow citizens.
Both then and now, the violence was no accident. The authorities in Russia have been implementing policies which cannot possibly be put into practice through peaceful, democratic methods.
These are the strategies of 'shock without therapy', which have resulted in a steep decline of output, disorganisation of the economy, government corruption, legal arbitrariness and a terrifying incrence in crme Can a president and a government who are incapable of enforcing a minimal degree of order in their own home 'restore order' in Chechnya or anywhere else?
Is it any surprise that the peoples of Russia should want to take a different road from the one of inflation, decline and disorganisation that is typical of Yeltsin's Russia?
And what about the impoverishment of the majority of working people as social inequalities increase?
Yes, we are now seeing a rise in average real incomes following their collapse in 1992. But this 'normalisation' is like quoting a 'normal' average body temperature of patients in a hospital. One may have already died while the other is tossing about in a fever, but their average could be 'normal'!
So it is in our country. The "new rich' in Russia are bloated with wealth, and have become living legends among the big spenders on the international scene. Meanwhile the 'new poor', who include almost half the population, pine nostalgically for the Brezhnev era - which only a short time ago was condemned as a time of low living standards.
How could the policies of the present regime fail to provoke citizens to indignation, and the authorities to violence?
Sovereignty
And what of the government's policy on the national question? When Yeltsin still needed to oust Gorbachev, he told the republics of the Russian Federation: "Take as much sovereignty as you can handle!" Then when he came to power the screws were tightened, and any attempt at independent behaviour was met by the rattle of automatic weapons.
How are the nationalities and ethnic groups of Russia supposed to see this?
These questions have a rhetorical character, because power in Russia today lies with socio-political forces that benefit from instability, disorganisation, unjust methods of rule, and violence.
Those who make up these forces are the "new Russians' who, unlike 'normal' Western entrepreneurs, do not aim at stable profits of 10 to 20 percent, but at rapid enrichment.
Their goal is profit rates of hundreds of percent a year, the super-concentration and centralisation of capital through extra- economic means - speculation, corruption and violence.
(There is, to be sure, a sector of Russian private business today, in which the 'primitive accumulation of capital' has already been carried out. In this sector a point in the concentration of wealth has been reached at which stability is more important than rapid enrichment. This explains the fact that some of the rightwing parties which at first gave their silent assent to a 'police action' against Chechnya, later came out against an escalation of the war.)
Another sector of these forces is made up of corrupt bureaucrats who can only receive their privileges and bribes in a general context of lawlessness and institutional chaos.
The scale of these illicit gains beggars the imagination. Boris Fedorov, sometime finance minister of the Gaidar govemment, let slip at one point that the market value of the dachas, hunting lodges and other properties at the disposal of the President is close to a billion dollars - that is the total loan funds prom•ised to us by the world community!
The cost of the fence that was erected
recently round the House of Government is equal to the price for which a large Siberian oil and gas complex was sold at about the same time.
Unfortunately, very similar processes are under way in the autonomous republies and regions of Russia. The power wielded by Dudayev is a small piece of mirror glass in which our general problems are reflected.
In Chechnya we see the same low level of legitimacy (three years ago, Dudayev, with support from Moscow, dissolved his own parliament). We see the same massive disorganisation of economic and social life, the same domination by all-powerful mafia clans, the same inability and unwillingness to solve the differences between ruling groups and oppositions through democratic methods.
Yes, we now have a ruling layer which finds incessant armed conflicts unavoidable. The more savagely the Yeltsinite centre behaves, the greater will be the wave of local separatism. The stronger the nationalism in the Russian borderlands, the more powerful will be the outbursts of gical power Russian chauvinism at the centre, and the more real will be the danger of an authoritarian, semi-fascist regime in our country.
So who are the people supporting Yeltsin today?
Expansionist
Zhirinovsky, notorious for advocating a 'push to the south' (an expansionist policy aimed at creating a 'Greater Russia'), and Barkashov, the leader of the semi-fascist organisation Russian National Unity.
In addition there are a few jingoist patriots, as well as former members of Yeltsin's administration and government. And that's all. Even Gaidar and his colleagues have turned their backs on the President.
This is no accident. Four years ago we were shouting at the top of our voices: "Yeltsin is not an alternative, simply a pedestal for Zhirinovsky and co. to climb up on!"
Then a year ago, after the bloody events of October, the President began openly trying on the cloak of Russian chauvinism, borrowing the vocabulary and slogans of the Prokhanovs and Zhirinovskys.
It remained only to be seen when Yeltsin would try his own 'push to the south', or begin struggling against a non-existent 'Jewish-masonic conspiracy'.
The first outburst came in Chechnya. But Russia and its army were in decay, so instead of the hammer blow of a great power, what we saw was the clumsy groping of fat, blindly-spread fingers.
The result was the corpses of our young men, in Russian and Chechen uniforms, and the bodies of Chechen and Russian children and old people.
To give them their due, the majority of Russian political organisations criticised the conflict, although in different ways, almost as soon as it began.
For Gaidar and his associates from the Russia's Choice party, until recently the President's best-known supporters, denouncing the war served as no more than a means of distancing themselves from an obviously disastrous campaign by their hero of earlier times.
Having supported the use of tanks to pacify Muscovites in the autumn of 1993, Gaidar and his colleagues spoke out against using tanks in Grozny in the winter of 1994-5.
The centrists (Yavlinsky and his colleagues) adopted a much firmer position, struggling consistently both against the war and against the high-handedness of the President and his administration.
The majority of human rights organisations, including the Movement for Democracy and Human Rights in Russia, Memorial and others took a similar stand. Among the most active individuals was Sergei Kovalyov, the President's commissioner for human rights. After spending several weeks in Grozny, Kovalyov returned to Moscow, and did a great deal to tell the truth about Chechnya to the citizens of Russia and the whole Social democratic parties took a somewhat ambiguous stand on the conflict, on the one hand calling for the integrity of Russia to be maintained, and on the other pleading the necessity for the defence of human rights.
By contrast the Communist Party of the Russian Federation forgot (thank goodness!) its usual great-power rhetoric, bluntly condemning the war and the authorities responsible for the destruction and casualties.
The relatively small democratic soAccording to reports in the leading Moscow newspaper Izvestia, the order to storm Grozny was given by Defence Minister Pavel Grachev in the midst of a heavy drinking bout. Grachev and vice prime minister Oleg Soskovets hit the bottle to celebrate Grachev's birthday on New Year's Eve. Hours later the army's Caucasus command received orders by phone to take the Chechen Presidential palace, triggering the attack. Grachev has since been relieved of command of the Chechnya operation.
tion' the cialist tendencies such as the Union of Internationalists, the Party of Labour and the Russian Party of Communists were extremely active. We organised something like a dozen pickets, rallies and round-table discussions, as well as issuing press statements and collaborating with defenders of human rights.
So practically all the major political forces in the country lined up on one side of the barricades: on the other was a bloc of Yeltsin, Zhirinovsky and Barkshov.
Disagreements Although all the anti-war forces were in favour of a halt to the bombing and military action, and called for negotiations to be opened up, beyond this point disagreements began to appear.
The Gaidarites were opposed on princiSOCIALIST OUTLOOK No.76. 21 January 1995, Page 9 Left: campaigning against the war in Moscow. Below: victim of Russianchauvinist assault of Grozny, ple to calling on Yeltsin to resign, and many social democrats 'forgot' this demand.
Democratic leftists were demanding the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya, and for the Russian government to respect the right of the peoples of Chechnya to decide independently and on a democratic basis whether they would remain in the Russian Federation and if so, with what degree of autonomy.
However this demand received only feeble support. Many rightists argued that a rapid and professional 'police acin Chechnya was desirable, and condemned not so much the 'big stick' as 'unprofessionalism' of the army wielding it.
There is reason to fear that if the war had been organised professionally', only the democratic left and a few human rights defenders would have spoken out against it.
But the struggle against the war is continuing. Citizens of Russia are more and more beginning to understand that the slaughter in Chechnya is a crime whose consequences will remain for a long time to come. It will weigh on human souls, sowing still more seeds of inter-ethnic hatred, nationalism and separatism.
It has strengthened the authority of Dudayev and his supporters, and is strengthening separatist tendencies throughout Russia.
And it is an economic crime. Billions upon billions of roubles have been spent on senseless slaughter.
Already high inflation is edging up still further. Budgets for health care and culture are being cut to pay for military spending. The 'realistic' 1995 budget will have to be recalculated, drawing still tighter the already suffocating noose of inflation and economic collapse.
It is necessary to say "No!" to the war and to the authorities which have unleashed it. This must be done by military personnel refusing to carry out illegal orders, by civilians participating in acts of protest in their neighbourhoods, their villages, their workplaces.
If we can stop this slaughter, if we can learn to struggle together at least against such obvious crimes of the authorities -if this can be achieved, then at least to some extent the sufferings and sacrifices of this winter in Chechnya will not have been in vain.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No.76. 21 January 1995, Page 10