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By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News, 1/22/24

Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s steady, able, intellectually quick foreign minister, last week held one of those wide-ranging press conferences he and his boss favor. Lavrov’s remarks are subtly delivered but of a significance we must not miss.

Tass published a useful summary of them on Jan. 18.

Here are a few of Lavrov’s pithier remarks. The first of these appeared under the subhead, “On friends of Russia.” I take the liberty of minorly cleaning up the English translation:

“Relations between Russia and China currently experience the best period of their centuries-long history.

Their relations are firmer, more reliable, and more advanced than a military union as we understood these in the previous Cold War-era.

In all cases, the interests of Russia and China reach a common denominator after negotiation, and this is an example for resolution of any issues by any other participants in global communication.

Relations of particularly privileged cooperation with India develop gradually. Russia also takes relations with African states to a truly strategic level. It develops relations with the Latin American continent. Russia’s close circle also includes Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Qatar.”

Here is Lavrov on the BRICS–Plus group, which expanded last year from its original members, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa:

“About 30 states are interested in rapprochement with BRICS. This association has a great future. Being a superregional global structure, BRICS symbolizes the diversity of a multipolar world.”

At one point Lavrov turned, inevitably, to the conflict in Ukraine:

“It is not up to Ukraine to decide when to stop and when to talk seriously about realistic preconditions for the end of this conflict. It is necessary to talk with the West about it.

The West wants no constructive resolution that would take Russia’s legitimate concerns into account. This is indicated by incitement and coercion of Kiev for increasingly aggressive use of long-range weapons to strike Crimea, in order to make it unsuitable for life, as well as deep into Russian territory, and not only incitement, but the handover of corresponding weapons as well.”

Three practical questions as Russia’s top diplomat interpreted them in a review of “Russia’s diplomatic work in 2023,” as TASS put it. This is fine as it is, but Lavrov’s comments are a case of the subtext being vastly larger than the text. Russia’s objective in 2024 — this is TASS again — is “to remove any dependence on the West.”

I am sure you know the old adage, derived from an 18th century Christian hymn, “God moves in mysterious ways.” So does history. Let us, then, consider this history in brief. Lavrov’s press conference brims with implied references to it.

Notions of Progress

Red Square, Moscow, 2015. (Misha Sokolnikov, Flickr,CC BY-ND 2.0)

Russia is considered among the scholars what is called “a late developer.” Such nations are so named because they were a century or more behind the West as it entered the age of scientific and industrial advances and then — regrettably enough, I would say — on to the Age of Materialism. Railroads, telegraph lines, steamships, photography, Bessemer steel, and all the rest: Late developers, lagging in these technologies, looked Westward with envy well-mixed with a felt inferiority.

The premier case of late development is Japan. Among Russians as among the Japanese, the condition of being “behind” produced profound confusion as to identity and their place in the modern world. This confusion is still easily detected.  At its core lie two very consequential misunderstandings.

One, there is the fraudulent Western notion of “progress” as this became an orthodoxy from the mid–19th century onward. I say “fraudulent” because history does not advance in anything like a straight line, and progress is measured in the West strictly according to material advances. In matters of ethos, humaneness, equality, environmental stewardship, the settling of conflicts — of the human spirit altogether — the West remains more primitive than many “primitive” societies.

Two, and the larger point here, from the 19th century onward, there was only one way to modernize. All colonized people who chose the capitalist road understood the imperative this way: modernization = Westernization. All of a sudden, to advance, to make a future in the modern world, meant to repudiate who one was and imitate being someone else.

How hard is it to imagine the deep disturbances and distortions — at bottom psychological but also political, social, economic, and cultural — that arose in consequence of this misapprehension? I count the equation of modernizing with Westernizing, as measured by the extravagant damage it did, among the gravest errors of the late 19th century and all through the 20th to our time.

Russia has spent nearly three centuries in this state of turmoil and — maybe not too strong a term — disorientation. Periods of orthodox conservatism have been followed by cycles of Westward-looking liberalization, this followed by a return to previously abandoned traditions, which have included over many years a return to reaction and a new valorization of one or another kind of nativism and nationalism.

A New Course  

U.A.E. welcoming ceremony for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Abu Dhabi, Dec. 6, 2023. (President of Russia)

There is another factor to consider. From the 1830s onward to NATO’s post–Cold War expansions, the horrific U.S.–led program to turn the Russian Federation into a capitalist greedfest after the Soviet Union’s collapse, and now the conflict in Ukraine, Russia’s struggle to understand itself has been accompanied by more or less incessant Western efforts decisively to reshape Russia in the West’s image.

We cannot understand Lavrov’s press conference, or many, many of the things Vladimir Putin has said these past few years, without this historical context. In so many words, all of them well-chosen, the foreign minister and the president have announced that Russia will no longer look Westward as it advances into the 21st century. Modernization will no longer mean Westernization.

It would be altogether impossible to overstate the historical magnitude of what Russia has set as its new course. We live in the most interesting times, to put this point another way — even if most of us, mesmerized by the propaganda of eternal Western superiority, cannot see five feet in front of us as the most significant events of our time unfold.

Many things will now fall into place. Lavrov, in enumerating the members of Russia’s “close circle,” describes, a couple of years on, the “new world order” the Chinese frequently reference.

The 5,000–word charter Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping made public two years ago next month, “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development,” can be understood now as what your columnist called it at the time: the most important political document to be issued so far in the 21st century.

Gordon Hahn, the accomplished scholar of Russia and Eurasia, last week offered a superb history of Russia’s relations with the West during an appearance last week on The Duran, the daily web program produced by Alexander Mercouris and (in this case) Glenn Diesen. In the course of this long, rich interview Hahn notes, “Putin, as he has stated over and over again now recently, the [Russian] elites routinely demonstrate that they do not trust anyone in the West anymore.” He elaborates:

“For Russia, it looks now, the West is no longer its ‘Other.’… Russia has always identified itself, motivated itself, driven itself in relation to Europe. Now Putin is turning away from that. He said that we are no longer to define ourselves, look at ourselves, through the European prism. For now, we will put all our eggs in one basket, and that is Eurasia…. This close bilateral relationship, of Europe as Russia’s Other, is ending, and therefore the cycle [from conservatism to Westernization and back] is probably ending.”

This moment has been a long time coming. A shallow peruse of the past brings us back to 1990–91, when Michail Gorbachev accepted Washington’s assurance — without a signed document, imprudently — that NATO would not expand eastward from the reunified Germany.

As is well-known, 30 years of betrayals and diplomatic dishonesty followed as Moscow sought a new security architecture that would provide the Russian Federation a place in that “common European home” for which Gorbachev longed.

“I am extremely pessimistic,” Hahn says of the outlook for U.S.–Russian relations. “I can’t see that, even with an agreement between Russia and Ukraine, the West will cease trying to expand NATO. They will try to repeat the same scenario unless something changes in the West itself, in Washington.”

The world turns, even as the West declines or is incapable of turning with it. The teaser on The Duran’s segment with Gordon Hahn reads, “Russia ends 300 years of west-centric foreign policy.” This is big. It rarely gets bigger. History’s mysterious ways lie before us.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.

By Robert Parry, Consortium News, 2/7/24

Robert Parry was in the forefront of questioning official narratives about the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in Ukrainian airspace on July 17, 2014, which Western officials immediately, and inquiries later, blamed on Russia.

But the International Court of Justice in The Hague on Jan. 31 refused to assign responsibility to Moscow and rejected Ukraine’s 2017 request that it order Russia to pay compensation. 

The ruling vindicated Parry who came under heavy criticism from Bellingcat and the Australian version of the 60 Minutes program for his reporting questioning the official Western story.

Parry wrote numerous articles on the affair, including: 

Jan. 19, 2015: The Danger of an MH-17 ‘Cold Case;

May 18, 2015:  Fake Evidence Blaming Russia for MH-17?;

May 20, 2015:  You Be the Judge;

Oct. 20, 2015:  MH-17 Case: ‘Old’ Journalism vs. ‘New’;

July 3, 2016:  MH-17 Probe’s Torture-Implicated Ally

July 19, 2016: Fraud Alleged in NYT’s MH-17 Report;

Sept. 29, 2016: The Official and Implausible MH-17 Scenario,

The following is the republication of one of these articles: 

The Ever-Curiouser MH-17 Case

March 16, 2016

Exclusive: The shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine has served as a potent propaganda club against Russia but the U.S. government is hiding key evidence that could solve the mystery, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry
Special to Consortium News

The curious mystery surrounding the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, gets more and more curious as the U.S. government and Dutch investigators balk at giving straightforward answers to the simplest of questions even when asked by the families of the victims.

Adding to the mystery Dutch investigators have indicated that the Dutch Safety Board did not request radar information from the United States, even though Secretary of State John Kerry indicated just three days after the crash that the U.S. government possessed data that pinpointed the location of the suspected missile launch that allegedly downed the airliner, killing all 298 people onboard.

Although Kerry claimed that the U.S. government knew the location almost immediately, Dutch investigators now say they hope to identify the spot sometime “in the second half of the year,” meaning that something as basic as the missile-launch site might remain unknown to the public more than two years after the tragedy.

The families of the Dutch victims, including the father of a Dutch-American citizen, have been pressing for an explanation about the slow pace of the investigation and the apparent failure to obtain relevant data from the U.S. and other governments.

I spent time with the family members in early February at the Dutch parliament in The Hague as opposition parliamentarians, led by Christian Democrat Pieter Omtzigt, unsuccessfully sought answers from the government about the absence of radar data and other basic facts.

When answers have been provided to the families and the public, they are often hard to understand, as if to obfuscate what information the investigation possesses or doesn’t possess. For instance, when I asked the U.S. State Department whether the U.S. government had supplied the Dutch with radar data and satellite images, I received the following response, attributable to “a State Department spokesperson”: “While I won’t go into the details of our law enforcement cooperation in the investigation, I would note that Dutch officials said March 8 that all information asked of the United States has been shared.”

I wrote back thanking the spokesperson for the response, but adding:

“I must say it seems unnecessarily fuzzy. Why can’t you just say that the U.S. government has provided the radar data cited by Secretary Kerry immediately after the tragedy? Or the U.S. government has provided satellite imagery before and after the shootdown? Why the indirect and imprecise phrasing? …

I’ve spent time with the Dutch families of the victims, including the father of a U.S.-Dutch citizen, and I can tell you that they are quite disturbed by what they regard as double-talk and stalling. I would like to tell them that my government has provided all relevant data in a cooperative and timely fashion. But all I get is this indirect and imprecise word-smithing.”

The State Department spokesperson wrote back, “I understand your questions, and also the importance of the view of these families so devastated by this tragedy. However, I am going to have to leave our comments as below.”

Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-2H6-ER (9M-MRD) at the international terminal at Perth Airport. This aircraft crashed over Ukraine on 17 July 2014. (Darren Koch/Wikimedia Commons)

Propaganda Value

This lack of transparency, of course, has a propaganda value since it leaves in place the widespread public impression that ethnic Russian rebels and Russian President Vladimir Putin were responsible for the 298 deaths, a rush to judgment that Secretary Kerry and other senior U.S. officials (and the Western news media) encouraged in July 2014.

Once that impression took hold there has been little interest in Official Washington to clarify the mystery especially as evidence has emerged implicating elements of the Ukrainian military. For instance, Dutch intelligence has reported (and U.S. intelligence has implicitly confirmed) that the only operational Buk anti-aircraft missile systems in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, were under the control of the Ukrainian military.

In a Dutch report released last October, the Netherlands’ Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) reported that the only anti-aircraft weapons in eastern Ukraine capable of bringing down MH-17 at 33,000 feet belonged to the Ukrainian government.

MIVD made that assessment in the context of explaining why commercial aircraft continued to fly over the eastern Ukrainian battle zone in summer 2014. MIVD said that based on “state secret” information, it was known that Ukraine possessed some older but “powerful anti-aircraft systems” and “a number of these systems were located in the eastern part of the country.”

The intelligence agency added that the rebels lacked that capability: “Prior to the crash, the MIVD knew that, in addition to light aircraft artillery, the Separatists also possessed short-range portable air defence systems (man-portable air-defence systems; MANPADS) and that they possibly possessed short-range vehicle-borne air-defence systems. Both types of systems are considered surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). Due to their limited range they do not constitute a danger to civil aviation at cruising altitude.”

One could infer a similar finding by reading a U.S. “Government Assessment” released by the Director of National Intelligence on July 22, 2014, five days after the crash, seeking to cast suspicion on the ethnic Russian rebels and Putin by noting military equipment that Moscow had provided the rebels. But most tellingly the list did not include Buk anti-aircraft missiles. In other words, in the context of trying to blame the rebels and Putin, U.S. intelligence could not put an operational Buk system in the rebels’ hands.

So, perhaps the most logical suspicion would be that the Ukrainian military, then engaged in an offensive in the east and fearing a possible Russian invasion, moved its Buk missile systems up to the front and an undisciplined crew fired a missile at a suspected Russian aircraft, bringing down MH-17 by accident.

That was essentially what I was told by a source who had been briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts in July and August 2014. [See, for instance, Consortiumnews.com’s “Flight 17 Shoot-Down Scenario Shifts” and “The Danger of an MH-17 Cold Case.”]

Kerry meeting Putin in Moscow, Sept. 5, 2016 (Press Service President of Russia/Wikimedia Commons)

But Ukraine is a principal participant in the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT), which has been probing the MH-17 case, and thus the investigation suffers from a possible conflict of interest since Ukraine would prefer that the world’s public perception of the MH-17 case continue to blame Putin. Under the JIT’s terms, any of the five key participants (The Netherlands, Ukraine, Australia, Belgium and Malaysia) can block release of information.

The interest in keeping Putin on the propaganda defensive is shared by the Obama administration which used the furor over the MH-17 deaths to spur the European Union into imposing economic sanctions on Russia.

In contrast, clearing the Russians and blaming the Ukrainians would destroy a carefully constructed propaganda narrative which has stuck black hats on Putin and the ethnic Russian rebels and white hats on the U.S.-backed government of Ukraine, which seized power after a putsch that overthrew elected pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014.

Accusations against Russia have also been fanned by propaganda outlets, such as the British-based Bellingcat site, which has collaborated with Western mainstream media to continue pointing the finger of blame at Moscow and Putin – as the Dutch investigators drag their heels and refuse to divulge any information that would clarify the case.

Letter to the Families

Perhaps the most detailed – although still hazy – status report on the investigation came in a recent letter from JIT chief prosecutor Fred Westerbeke to the Dutch family members. The letter acknowledged that the investigators lacked “primary raw radar images” which could have revealed a missile or a military aircraft in the vicinity of MH-17.

Ukrainian authorities said all their primary radar facilities were shut down for maintenance and only secondary radar, which would show commercial aircraft, was available.

The Buk missile system 9K37M “Buk-M1” (SA-11). (Ukrainian Air Force Museum in Vinnitsa.)

Russian officials have said their radar data suggest that a Ukrainian warplane might have fired on MH-17 with an air-to-air missile, a possibility that is difficult to rule out without examining primary radar which has so far not been available. Primary radar data also might have picked up a ground-fired missile, Westerbeke wrote.

“Raw primary radar data could provide information on the rocket trajectory,” Westerbeke’s letter said. “The JIT does not have that information yet. JIT has questioned a member of the Ukrainian air traffic control and a Ukrainian radar specialist. They explained why no primary radar images were saved in Ukraine.” Westerbeke said investigators are also asking Russia about its data.

Westerbeke added that the JIT had “no video or film of the launch or the trajectory of the rocket.” Nor, he said, do the investigators have satellite photos of the rocket launch.

“The clouds on the part of the day of the downing of MH17 prevented usable pictures of the launch site from being available,” he wrote. “There are pictures from just before and just after July 17^th and they are an asset in the investigation.” According to intelligence sources, the satellite photos show several Ukrainian military Buk missile systems in the area.

Why the investigation’s data is so uncertain has become a secondary mystery in the MH-17 whodunit. During an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press on July 20, 2014, three days after the crash, Secretary Kerry declared,

“We picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing. And it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar.”

But this U.S. data has never been made public. In the letter, Westerbeke wrote, “The American authorities have data, that come from their own secret services, which could provide information on the trajectory of the rocket. This information was shared in secret with the [Dutch] MIVD.”

Westerbeke added that the information may be made available as proof in a criminal case as an amtsbericht or “official statement.”

Quinn Schansman, a dual U.S.-Dutch citizen killed aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. (Facebook)

Yet, despite the U.S. data, Westerbeke said the location of the launch site remains uncertain. Last October, the Dutch Safety Board placed the likely firing location within a 320-square-kilometer area that covered territory both under government and rebel control. (The safety board did not seek to identify which side fired the fateful missile.)

By contrast, Almaz-Antey, the Russian arms manufacturer of the Buk systems, conducted its own experiments to determine the likely firing location and placed it in a much smaller area near the village of Zaroshchenskoye, about 20 kilometers west of the Dutch Safety Board’s zone and in an area under Ukrainian government control.

Westerbeke wrote,

“Raw primary radar data and the American secret information are only two sources of information for the determination of the launch site. There is more. JIT collects evidence on the basis of telephone taps, locations of telephones, pictures, witness statements and technical calculations of the trajectory of the rocket.

The calculations are made by the national air and space laboratory on the basis of the location of MH17, the damage pattern on the wreckage and the special characteristics of the rockets. JIT does extra research on top of the [Dutch Safety Board] research. On the basis of these sources, JIT gets ever more clarity on the exact launch site. In the second half of the year we expect exact results.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to stonewall a request from Thomas J. Schansman, the father of Quinn Schansman, the only American citizen to die aboard MH-17, to Secretary Kerry to release the U.S. data that Kerry has publicly cited.

Quinn Schansman, who had dual U.S.-Dutch citizenship, boarded MH-17 along with 297 other people for a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014. The 19-year-old was planning to join his family for a vacation in Indonesia.

In a letter to Kerry dated Jan. 5, 2016, Thomas J. Schansman noted Kerry’s remarks at a press conference on Aug. 12, 2014, when the Secretary of State said about the Buk anti-aircraft missile suspected of downing the plane:

“We saw the take-off. We saw the trajectory. We saw the hit. We saw this aeroplane disappear from the radar screens. So there is really no mystery about where it came from and where these weapons have come from.”

Although U.S. consular officials in the Netherlands indicated that Kerry would respond personally to the request, Schansman told me this week that he had not yet received a reply from Kerry.

The late investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.  In 1995 he founded this website for a consortium of journalists to publish work that was being suppressed by their mainstream editors.

By Prof. Paul Robinson, Canadian Dimension, 1/22/24

“Ленин жил. Ленин жив. Ленин будет жить.” “Lenin lived. Lenin lives. Lenin will keep on living.” This popular slogan reflected the central role in Soviet ideology of the Soviet Union’s first leader, Vladimir Lenin, who died one hundred years ago yesterday (January 21). As a Marxist, Lenin was committed to a theory that stressed the impersonal forces of history. Yet his own life proved how a single individual can redirect those forces in a new direction. Lenin did not cause the Russian Revolutions of 1917. But by the force of his own will, he turned them onto a new path, with enormous consequences both for Russia and the world.

Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1870 in the town of Simbirsk on the Volga River, Lenin was the son of a mid-ranking educational official whose position gave him the status of minor nobility. A turning point in Lenin’s life came in 1886, when his brother Alexander was executed for his role in a plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. This possibly induced a hatred of the imperial authorities that drove Lenin’s later behaviour. Before long, he too was involved in revolutionary activities, and by the early 1900s he was a committed Marxist, joining the predecessor of the Communist Party, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).

The primary revolutionary organization in Russia at this point was the Social Revolutionary Party (SRs), which looked to the peasantry (which made up 80 percent of the country’s population) to overthrow the Tsarist regime. The SRs were influenced by populist philosophy, which imagined that Russia could bypass the capitalist mode of development and build a stable socialist society on the model of the peasant commune.

By contrast, the RSDLP followed Marx in believing that capitalist industrial development was inevitable. This would create an urban working class (the proletariat), and it would be this proletariat, not the peasantry, that would lead the revolution, overthrow the Tsar, and establish a communist order in which the workers themselves would control the means of production.

It is here that we begin to confront the paradox of Lenin’s life. In principle, since the proletarian revolution is inevitable, one doesn’t have to do anything. It will happen of its own accord. Russian revolutionaries were never content to wait, however. As one of the first Russian Marxists, Georgy Plekhanov, argued, it was precisely the knowledge of where history was heading that made it possible for revolutionaries to accelerate change in that direction. “I am a worm, says the idealist. I am a worm when I am ignorant, retorts the dialectical materialist; but I am a God when I know,” wrote Plekhanov.

Lenin and his fellow Marxist revolutionaries knew with absolute certainty where history was heading and took upon themselves the role of God in bringing the end of history into being. At the heart of Lenin’s worldview, therefore, was a rigid ideological dogmatism that brooked no opposition. At the same time, he differed from many of his colleagues in being tactically flexible to the point that it could appear that he had no principles at all apart from a relentless desire to seize power. The ends so justified the means, that almost any tactics were permissible, even if they appeared to contradict Marxist theory and even if they were diametrically opposed to whatever Lenin had been proposing earlier.

This can be seen in Lenin’s 1917 book The State and Revolution. The first half was written between April and July 1917, when Lenin was hoping to take power by taking control of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils (Soviets). The second half was written after an abortive coup in July 1917, at a time when Lenin was on the run and his party’s prospects of gaining control of the Soviets briefly seemed quite weak. The book reflects these twists and turns. The first half talks of “All power to the Soviets.” The second half abandons that talk, and instead talks of “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” In short, slogans such as “All power to the Soviets” were just tactical ploys, to be promoted or discarded according to their temporary usefulness. What Lenin really wanted was all power to his own party.

This was a product of his unique way of thinking about the revolution. According to orthodox Marxist theory, the revolution takes place after the contradictions of capitalism have become acute and a large working class has come into existence. But capitalism was still quite young in Russia and the working class was very small. According to Marxist theory, therefore, Russia wasn’t ripe for revolution.

This fact helped cause a split in the RSDLP between two factions—the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks—the latter of which was led by Lenin. The Mensheviks believed that communism would have to wait until Russia had passed through a long period of capitalism, and that in the meantime communists needed to build up support by means of a mass party open to all sympathizers. Lenin, in contrast, argued that Russia could have a communist revolution immediately, but in the absence of a large proletariat it would need a highly disciplined elite organization to lead the revolutionary movement. And thus was born the idea of the party as the centre of loyalty, and with that the idea that the interests of the party took precedence over all else. This had very little, if anything, to do with Marxism, but became the core of Marxism-Leninism.

In 1917, Lenin got his chance to put his ideas into action. The legitimacy of the Russian state was so connected to the person of the Tsar that once Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, Russia began to fall apart. The question remained of who would pick up the pieces.

Lenin was determined that it should be the Bolsheviks, but on returning to Russia in April 1917 from exile in Switzerland, he found that most of his party disagreed. Bolshevik leaders in Russia were more in line with the Mensheviks. They felt that Russia would have to pass through the bourgeois revolution before it would be ready for communism. In the meantime, communists would have to support the bourgeois Provisional Government and protect the revolution by continuing the war against Germany. Lenin disagreed and made his case in his famous “April Theses.” The war was a “predatory imperialist” war, he said, and must be ended. Meanwhile, communists should not support the bourgeois revolution, but seek its immediate overthrow. Lenin’s fellow Bolsheviks were aghast. Lenin, they felt, had spent too long in exile abroad. He didn’t understand the reality of life in Russia. The April Theses were a mistake, they thought.

But such was Lenin’s personal authority within the tightly knit party he had built that before long he had won the doubters round to his point of view. It was at this point that one sees the importance of individuals in human history. Lenin didn’t create the conditions that led to growing chaos in Russia in 1917. These were indeed largely the product of impersonal forces. But Lenin moved these forces in a direction that another individual would not have. Had the Germans not given him the means to return to Russia from his exile in Switzerland, somebody else would have directed Bolshevik party policy in Russia, and history would have moved in a very different direction.

Lenin was interested in more than just overthrowing the Provisional Government. He wanted to ensure that the Bolsheviks dominated whatever system was created to replace it. And here once again, he ran into opposition from his colleagues. By late October 1917, it was clear power was falling from the Provisional Government’s grasp. It was just a matter of who picked it up. The majority of Lenin’s colleagues supported the idea of an armed insurrection, but argued that to give it legitimacy the overthrow of the government and the transfer of power to the Soviets should be announced by the forthcoming All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Once that announcement had taken place, the Soviet forces could then seize control.

Lenin disagreed. If the revolution followed that model, power would belong to the organization that declared the revolution, meaning the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The result would be a coalition government appointed by the Congress, of which the Bolsheviks would be just one small part. That was unacceptable.

Lenin insisted on a different model. First, the Bolshevik-controlled Military Revolutionary Committee should forcibly overthrow the existing authorities and announce the formation of a new government, led by the Bolsheviks. The Committee would then present this to the Congress of Soviets as a fait accompli. This would ensure that the Bolsheviks would be in charge.

Once again, many of Lenin’s Bolshevik colleagues protested. Cutting the SRs and Mensheviks out of power would be bound to cause a reaction, they argued, and probably result in civil war. Lenin, though, was unconcerned. His plan would have the effect of making people choose sides—for the revolution or against—and identifying the revolution with the Bolsheviks would mean that anybody opposing the Bolsheviks would de facto be against revolution.

Lenin won the day. The Military Revolutionary Committee seized power and transferred it to the Bolshevik party. The SRs and Mensheviks protested, but to no avail. And so began 70 years of communist domination of Russia. This was not inevitable. Even many of Lenin’s Bolshevik colleagues at first didn’t want to go down that path. That they did was largely due to Lenin himself.

In this sense, the cult of personality that the Soviet authorities built around Lenin after his death was fully justified. The revolution of November 1917 really was Lenin’s revolution, and the communist system that ruled the Soviet Union for the next 70 years really was Lenin’s creation. Great impersonal forces matter. But so too does individual agency. The life of Vladimir Lenin proves the point. For good or evil, he changed the path of history.

Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.

By Stephen Bryen, Asia Times, 2/5/24

The Biden administration wants the Ukraine war to continue at least until after US presidential elections in November but there is a lurking danger that won’t be possible, especially if Russia mounts a really big offensive. For that reason, there is a new emerging plan, one that is not in writing but seen in politics.

An example: When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky decided to fire armed forces commander Valerii Zaluzhny, US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who is directly responsible for US and NATO Ukraine policy, rushed to Kiev.

There are no photo ops with Nuland and Zelensky. She briefed the press standing outside in front of a hastily assembled table with some microphones on it.

Why did Nuland run to Kiev? Almost certainly the White House told her to get herself over there immediately in case things went south in Kiev. There was apparently real worry that Zaluzhny might turn the army around and use it to go after Zelensky.

So far, Zaluzhny has not made a move. He still can, of course, so one supposes that Nuland was in Kiev to talk more to Zaluzhny than to Zelensky. There is no public record of any meeting but it would seem that her job was to calm Zaluzhny down and offer him incentives to behave.

Washington is saying nothing officially about the changing of the military guard in Kiev. The White House says it is an “internal Ukrainian” issue, not one Washington would have anything to say about.

Certainly, this is pure nonsense. Washington has been manipulating Ukraine’s internal politics since before 2014, and Nuland was the sparkplug to get what Washington wanted.

Nor was there any surprise about cashiering Zaluzhny. Someone has to take the blame for the failure of Kiev’s so-called counteroffensive and the waste of billions of dollars in US equipment and supplies.

It also isn’t a surprise that things are getting worse now, as Ukraine will soon face the loss of Avdiivka and the Russian army, newly refurbished, will push toward the Dnieper River, aiming at Kiev.

As has been noted now ad nauseum, Kiev’s manpower situation is dire and its lack of weapons means it is limited in what it can hope to do. But the real kicker is that Kiev’s mounting casualties, more than 1,000 per week, are hitting hard on the public perception that the war has gone wrong.

To pull men and women into the army Kiev resorts to rough, unpopular measures, including threats and intimidation. Going to the front untrained is seen more and more as a certain death sentence (which it is).

Zelensky won’t negotiate with Russia because Washington is opposed to any negotiation, seeing it as a potential defeat for NATO. The result would be unnerving NATO and truncating Washington’s leadership of the alliance.

Politically, Zelensky is more and more aligned with Kraken and other military formations who are extremely anti-Russian (and anti a lot of other things). The Russians regard them as fascists and Nazis.

But how can Kiev hold on if Russia actually mounts a major new military action in Ukraine?

An offensive is likely mostly because Putin needs one to cement his next term as president. Elections are scheduled for March 17, and Putin’s reelection is likely because he has suppressed any real opposition. But even so, Putin needs a boost from the Russian public and a celebratory election would count for a lot.

This puts Kiev in a terrible bind. Once there is a real Russian breakthrough across the current line of contact, sending Ukrainian forces reeling backward, it will be nearly impossible for the Zelensky government to survive in Kiev.

Under such circumstances, there are already indications of planning to move the Ukrainian government westward, probably to Lviv (Lvov), which is near the Polish border. The Poles are already saying they might use their nearby air defenses to protect Lviv.

Why would they say this? The reason is that they are preparing a plan to hold off the Russians by use of Polish Patriot and other air defenses, and even to send Polish brigades reinforced by other NATO assets. The British are already preparing public opinion and openly talking about sending their Special Forces to Ukraine’s rescue.

Anyone who looks at a map must realize that the only way NATO can “invade” or “support” a Zelensky government is if it is done close to the border with Poland.

That’s far enough away from Russian missiles that it will be difficult for Russia to deal with that area, unless of course there is either a de facto or de jure breakup of Ukraine in which the western part stays somewhat independent while the rest is subject to whatever arrangements the Russians decide to impose.

Nothing will happen if the Russians stay with the plodding, slow grind-up of Ukraine’s army. But, as noted above, the Ukraine war is reaching an inflection point for both military and political reasons.

Shifting the Ukraine government to Lviv and gaining support from Poland and the UK (no others are likely to contribute anything) would buy time for Biden, although the end result either will be a war in part of Europe (Poland, the Baltic states) or a stalemate that Russia and NATO accept.

Biden gets off the hook for the time being if this scenario plays out but even in the medium term it is a strategic disaster. Biden, of course, is mindful he does not need and cannot survive another Afghanistan-like disaster.

British enthusiasm for war owes to pressure from Washington. It is well to remember that the British military is an unholy, underfunded and undermanned mess. The British forces lack materials, lift and cover to do much of anything, and it is foolish to think the Russians won’t retaliate.

That leaves the impression that British enthusiasm for war is simply fake news, intended to scare the Russians somehow. Most of Washington’s Ukraine policy has been based on the exaggeration of the value of American weapons and coordination capabilities, and on wishful thinking that Russia would back out of the conflict.

Any look at Russian history, dating back to Napoleon, should have suggested that Russia wasn’t going to back down. Moreover, taking into account British bombast, one is reminded of the outcome of the charge of the Light Brigade. Will we see another Balaclava in Ukraine?

Nuland has created a disaster with the full backing of the Biden-Obama team. As, so far, there is no counterweight in the United States or among the NATO states, the disaster will roll on. Washington will continue to risk a war in Europe, even a nuclear war, to try and salvage the disaster of its own making.

Washington and Nuland are effectively trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.