Workers' Liberty

“United Russia” (UR) — the political party which backs Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin — won an easy victory in the elections held on 1 December for the Duma (the lower chamber of the Russian parliament). At the time of writing, early results indicate that UR won 63% of votes cast.

By Stan Crooke

Russia’s President Putin has threatened to target Russian nuclear missiles at European countries in response to American plans to deploy interceptor rockets in Poland and a radar base in the Czech Republic.

By Amina Saddiq

The British government is under pressure from Russian president Vladimir Putin to extradite dissident businessman Boris Berezovsky after the latter publicly called for the violent overthrow of Putin’s increasingly anti-democratic regime.

By Sean Matgamna

“The revolution... made its first steps toward victory under the belly of a Cossack’s horse”, wrote Leon Trotsky, describing the start of the Russian Revolution of February 1917.

By Amina Saddiq

The British government is under pressure from Russian president Vladimir Putin to extradite dissident businessman Boris Berezovsky after the latter publicly called for the violent overthrow of Putin's increasingly anti-democratic regime.

By Stan Crooke

Last weekend’s police attacks on anti-Putin demonstrators in Moscow and St. Petersburg underlined the extent to which the Kremlin is prepared to go in snuffing out all manifestations of opposition in the run-up to this year’s parliamentary elections and next year’s presidential elections.

Last weekend’s demonstrations in Moscow and St. Petersburg which were attacked by the police had been organised by “The Other Russia” (TOR), initiated by Garry Kasparov in 2005 and formally launched in 2006.

Political repression in Russia
Whose "other Russia"?
Protests against Pakistan's dictatorship
Activist left makes impact on French poll
Irish nurses' action
Why does the USA breed violence?

By Dale Street

Widespread disillusionment with the results of market reforms and privatisation is now rife throughout the Russian Federation. This has combined with conflicts between different sections of the old Soviet elite to lay the groundwork for a resurgence of Russian nationalism.

The Bureaucratic Collectivist/State Capitalist theory says that a new ruling class emerged in the Soviet Union. This class ruled not by ownership, but by control of the meansof production. If this theory were true then by the time the USSR collapsed such a class should have consolidated itself like all such classes and castes by passing on this control to its children. If true then the Godfather of this class should have been the child of some high ranking bureuacrat. What in fact was Mikhail Gorbachev's background.

BY Vicki Morris

FRESH from his PR appearance on the BBC, President Vladimir Putin of Russia is preparing to host the leaders of the new free world at the G8 summit at St Petersburg (15-17 July).

Fresh from his PR appearance on the BBC, President Vladimir Putin of Russia is preparing to host the leaders of the new free world at the G8 summit at St Petersburg (15-17 July). A counter-summit and the second Russian Social Forum have been organised, but, as was feared, they are meeting with sinister repression. A report from French journalist Carine Clément was sent to the email lists of the European Social Forum. Here is a translated extract:

By Peter Tatchell

Russian gays have won an important moral and political victory. Yuri Luzhkov said a gay pride parade would never happen while he was Mayor of Moscow. But Moscow Pride did happen, on 27 May, despite the Mayor’s ban, police arrests, and violence from neo-fascists, right-wing nationalists and Orthodox Christian fundamentalists.

While George Bush hypocritically rails against nuclear proliferation in Iran, the US and Europe are colluding in extending nuclear energy in the countries affected by the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. This survey — we have edited it slightly for reasons of space — was published recently on the Schnews website.

By Dale Street

Aslan Maskhadov, a long-standing Chechen separatist leader and one-time president of Chechnya, was killed by Russian forces on 8 March in the south-Chechen settlement of Tolstoy-Yurt.

A wave of hunger strikes by workers protesting over wage arrears has swept across the Urals in Russia.

By Chris Reynolds

At least 338 people have died since gunmen claiming to champion Chechen national rights seized a school in North Ossetia (a territory neighbouring Chechnya) on 1 September and took pupils, teachers and some parents hostage.

By Dale Street

The series of “reforms” announced by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in the aftermath of the Beslan school massacre have nothing to do with fighting terrorism. They are another stage in the evolution of Putin’s authoritarian and semi-dictatorial regime.

Nearly 370 people have died since gunmen claiming to champion Chechen national rights seized a school in North Ossetia (a territory neighbouring Chechnya) on Wednesday 1 September and took the children hostage.

By Dale Street

The only surprise about the assassination on 9 May of Ahmad Kadyrov, the Russian-imposed President of the Chechen Republic, was that it had not happened sooner. Kadyrov was one of the most reviled men in Chechnya, and deservedly so.

by Anna Politkovskaya

This is not a weighty political analysis of the conflict in Chechnya, but a collection of newspaper articles by Politkovskaya in which the focus is on the "inhumane empirical detail".

The Russian presidential elections take place on 14 March. None of the candidates are even remotely on the left. Vladimir Putin, the current president, will win. The other six candidates may gather 25% of the votes between them. Who are these people?

In 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev was forced by the political and economic condition of the dying 'Soviet Union' to withdraw Russian troops from the Warsaw Pact countries. These Stalinist satellite states rapidly collapsed, the regimes overthrown by their own people. The collapse of the 'independent' Stalinist states of Yugoslavia and Albania, and the USSR followed. It was a demonstration of the power of workers and ordinary people to change history.

A conversation between Bob Arnot and Kirill Buketov in Moscow, July/August 1997. Kirill Buketov is the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the trade union newspaper Solidarnost and the producer of a trade union radio programme on Russian radio. Bob Arnot is a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Critique.