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Lenin's "The Defeat of One's Own Government in the Imperialist War" | GZD Reading Group | Week 12, 2024
(lemmygrad.ml)
We're starting off with a very short one for the first week. This text was published in 1915, two years before the October revolution, and is sadly still highly relevant in the imperial core.
This reading group is meant to educate, and people from any instances federated with Lemmygrad are welcome. Any comments not engaging in good faith will be removed (don't respond to hostile comments, just report them).
You can post questions or share your thoughts at any time. We'll be moving on to a new text next week, but this thread won't be locked.
You can read the text here.
Continuing from my other reply to this comment, I would add a few more minor things:
I don't entirely agree with this generalization. Odessa is clearly a very Russian city but it is West of the Dnieper, whereas some parts of northern Ukraine close to the Belarus border, around Chernigov and even Poltava, at least according to voting patterns and language maps, appear to align more toward the West.
The only region here that sticks out from the general "more Russian-speaking = more pro-Russian" trend is Kiev itself where the population is naturally more cosmopolitan and Western oriented.
I understand where you are coming from. I don't think anyone who supports Russia wanted this war either. But what choice exactly did Russia have? Would you have had them throw the people of the DPR and LPR to the wolves? What was the alternative once it became clear that the Minsk agreements were never going to be fulfilled by Ukraine, and that the situation was quickly reaching a point of no-return? What would the domestic consequences be for Russia to have millions of refugees from the Donbass pour over the border? How many in Russia would blame the government for having abandoned these fellow Russians?
And on the subject of NATO, membership or no Ukraine was quickly becoming a de-facto member. NATO was already beginning to move into Ukraine, train its troops, transfer equipment, preparing to establish bases... Should Russia have waited until NATO had fully and irreversibly sunk its claws into Ukraine? Should they wait until the security situation became so critical that it would mean they were forced to start a war with all of NATO?
The Kiev regime was not going to stop at just the Donbass. Since 2014 they never stopped declaring their intention to retake Crimea, which i think you will agree is clearly Russian and voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia. What if a NATO Ukraine started a war to retake Crimea and NATO spun it to make Russia look like the aggressor? How could a sovereign Russia even continue to exist if NATO nuclear missiles were placed in Ukraine, at any time minutes away from a decapitation strike on Moscow? Would the fanatical Ukrainian nationalists stop at Crimea even or would they continue to push further, into places like Rostov-on-Don or Kuban which the Banderites also claim as "historically Ukrainian"?
What do you think Russia could or should have done, after eight years of being fooled with the Minsk sham, after their offer for a diplomatic settlement of the security situation in 2021 was decisively rejected and as it became clear that the Kiev regime was becoming increasingly intent on and prepared for a purely military "final solution" to the Donbass problem?
Russia is not waging war on Ukraine, it is at war with NATO and its proxies, with the fascist Kiev regime. At what point does it become morally unacceptable to abandon a brotherly nation to imperialism and fascism?