President Vladimir Putin: An Enigma

Winston Churchill once described the Soviet Union as a ‘puzzle wrapped inside an enigma’. The same could be said for Russian President Vladimir Putin today. From the intricate and sometimes unpredictable diplomatic maneuvers of his foreign policy to his contradictory and sometimes ambiguous pronouncements on the legacy of the USSR, enigmatic is perhaps one of the most apposite words to describe him. This enigma is particularly evident in his approach to the politics of the Middle East and Israel in particular.
A further complication in the notion of a contemporary Russian bourgeois state representing some form of ‘anti-imperialist’ resistance is the Kremlin’s Middle East policy.  In spite of Russia’s support for the Syrian Arab Republic against Zionist-led aggression, Vladimir Putin has openly and repeatedly expressed his support for Israel.
This has led to conflicts with many actors in Russia’s foreign policy elite who are said to be more pro-Palestinian. It is likely that Putin’s support for the existence of the Jewish state goes back to the USSR’s initial support for the creation of Israel in 1948, where the Soviet government believed a socially orientated, Soviet friendly, inclusive state in Palestine would be in the USSR’s best interests, also perhaps divesting the Soviet hierarchy of the problem of Jewish ‘over-representation’, the source of much suspicion and hatred among Russia’s ethnic slaves, many of whom believed communism was a ‘Jewish conspiracy’.
Putin’s pro-Israeli stance is said to have been copper fastened through his alleged close relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Before falling ill, Sharon made the following astonishing statement in front of a visibly irate Benjamin Netanyahu:

That we cannot continue holding under occupation… and it is occupation, you might not like this word, but it’s really an occupation – to hold 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation, is, in my opinion, a very bad thing. It cannot continue for ever. Do you want to remain, for ever, in Jenin, in Nablus, in Ramallah, in Bethlehem, for ever?

While Putin’s ambiguous relationship with Israel contradicts the Kremlin’s policy of supporting the Syrian Arab Republic’s resistance to Zionist genocide, there may be deeper, more complex and hitherto undisclosed reasons for this ostensibly contradictory policy. Still, class antagonism in contemporary Russia is further aggravated among Russians by the widespread perception that an ethnic minority holds the levers of economic power in the country. A recent study by Lenta.Ru website revealed that almost a quarter of Russian oligarchs are Jewish.
While the report was criticized for ethnicizing class conflict, it nevertheless attests to the deep ambiguity of Russia’s relationship to Zionism, given the fact that so many Jewish oligarchs in Russia hold Israeli passports.
The massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few Jewish oligarchs in Russia contrasts markedly with the relative poverty of so many Jews in the Zionist colony in Palestine.
This shows once again that the only salvation for Jews, as Marx argued, is the abandonment of Judaism, or rather in this case Zionism, and the embrace of communism. The Zionist entity is not only an enemy of all non-Jews, it is forcing millions of its own ‘chosen people’ to live in relative poverty, proving once again, contrary to Talmudists, the Marxist thesis that the real problem in the world is not race but class struggle and exploitation of man by man..
I have already mentioned the facinorous influence of the Chabad Loubavitch sect in promoting Jewish supremacy and talmudic dictatorship. During the 1930s the Loubavitch sect was expelled from the USSR as it was considered a racist and fascist movement. However, since the rise of Gorbachev in the 1980s, the Chabad Loubavitch movement has gained considerable influence in Russia. In fact, under President Putin, Berel Lazar, the leader of the Russian Chabad Loubavitch movement, was made Chief Rabbi of Russia. Lazar has also been given many honours and decorations by the Russian state, this in spite of the fact that he belongs to a sect that openly promotes the idea among Jews that they are a master race and that all other races are sub-human. However, the Russian state has thus far managed to bring the Zionist movement under state control. This contrasts markedly with the Zionist movement in the United States and Europe, where national parliaments have become ‘Israeli occupied territories’.
Anti-communist lies about religion
Putin has done much to restore Russian pride and patriotism. But the Russian president has repeatedly perpetuated lies about Russia’s communist past that harm all Russians and dishonours the heroic achievements of the Red Army in liberating Europe and the world from fascism. For example, during his visit to Poland in 2010, the Russian president made an official apology for the so-called Katyn Massacre of Polish soldiers by the Red Army in Soviet occupied Poland during the Second World War.
This is a big lie, one which is fueling neo-Nazi gangs today in Zionist occupied Ukraine. Russian and American historians have proven that the crime was carried out by Nazis and blamed on the USSR.
The perpetuation of anti-communist lies and myths constitute the only obstacles between Russia’s emergence as the world’s leading super-power and mediocrity. It seems there is a deep tension in the attitude of Putin and his generation, misinformed for years by Soviet revisionism, regarding this issue. In spite of trading Russian pride for politically correct anti-Soviet lies with the purpose of gaining diplomatic advantages, Putin has, on the contrary, actively supported the highlighting of the achievements of the USSR in Russian school history books. This is a highly positive development.
Putin openly proclaims his Orthodox Faith. This has given him much credibility among those who value the cultural and spiritual importance of Russian Orthodox Christianity in shaping Russian identity. However, the Russian President has falsely claimed that the USSR persecuted Orthodox Christians. Article 124 of the 1936 Soviet Constitution states:

In order to ensure to citizens freedom of conscience, the church in the U.S.S.R. is separated from the state, and the school from the church. Freedom of religious worship and freedom of antireligious propaganda is recognized for all citizens.

There were many well researched books published in the 1930s debunking claims by the pro-Fascist press in the West on the persecution of religious orders in the Soviet Union.
In fact, some religious authorities who were critical of the Soviet System were awarded the highest honours of the state. For example, the Russian Orthodox priest and surgeon Archbishop Luka Voyno Yasnetsky was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1946 for his achievements in medicine. If religious personalities in the USSR were ‘persecuted’, it was due to their political counter-revolutionary activities in violation of Soviet law, and not their legally constituted right to worship nor their freedom of expression and assembly guaranteed by article 125 of the Soviet Constitution of 1936.
And, it must be said that Soviet Law was far more progressive than laws in capitalist countries. For example, the USSR became the first country in history to abolish the death penalty in 1946. The law was only later abrogated due to the capitalist decision to declare a ‘Cold War’ on the USSR.
Putin’s Orthodox piety was severely tarnished when the obscene wealth of Patriarch Kirill was discovered by Russian media. The Patriarch is not only wealthy. He is allegedly a billionaire who appears in photos with watches worth over 30,000 Euro, more money than most working class Russians can ever hope to earn in a year. How can someone with such a disgusting lust for money and luxury be considered a ‘spiritual’ leader?
The question of immigration
I have already shown that views on race, nationality and identity in the context of immigration differ in former popular democracies and the former USSR. The Soviet Union and the Eastern Block were not subject to political correctness or ‘Cultural Marxism’ that prevailed in the bourgeois democracies of the West. This forthright, non-complex view of identity was recently expressed by Czech president Milos Zeman when he pointed out that the Czechoslovak Republic had no problem welcoming and assimilating refuges from war-torn Vietnam in accordance with the country’s anti-racist and internationalist policy.
Notwithstanding Zeman’s Islamophobia, he makes a crucial point about the importance of understanding the historical position of ‘social-democracy’ vis-a-vis immigration, a position obscured by political correctness and the racist demagoguery of the far right.
Zeman has described the current mass movement of migrants to Europe as a conspiracy of the Muslim Brotherhood to wage war on Europe’s national cultures.
One should clarify here that national cultures in the Marxist-Leninist definition are usually composed of many races. Stalin, in his essay ‘Marxism and The National Question’ defined the nation thus:

A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.

There are no doubt elements of this Weltanshauung in the Russian government’s approach to the question of immigration and national identity. In a recent press conference with Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, Putin was asked if he shared Orban’s view of migration and national identity. The Russian president replied that their views were quite similar.
In 2012, Putin said the following about immigration:

The melting pot of assimilation is highly volatile – pushed to its limits by the ever-increasing migration flow. In politics this has found reflection in a “multiculturalism” which denies integration through assimilation. Although it makes the “minorities right to be distinct” absolute, it does little to balance this with public, behavioural or cultural commitments to the population and society as a whole. Closed ethnic-religious communities that form in many countries refuse not only to assimilate but even to adapt.
There are neighbourhoods and whole towns where generations of new arrivals live on benefits and do not speak the language of the country in which they live. The growth of xenophobia among the population and harsh attempts to protect their interests, jobs and social benefits from “immigrant rivals” is the response seen in this behavioural model. People, shocked by what they perceive as aggressive pressure on their traditions or way of life, feel a genuine fear of losing their national identity.

Here we see expression of a bourgeois, patriotic view of immigration, which prioritises social cohesion over the anarchy of the market, whose vulture capitalists promote infinite mass immigration in order to drive down the price of labour. Yet Marxists in the West tend to support the self same policies of these oligarchs when it comes to immigration, calling for ‘open borders’. This petty bourgeois Marxism tends to emphasise the merits of multiculturalism rather than what Marx and Engels described as a form of class warfare whereby the ruling class crushes national organised labour through the influx of desperately poor migrants. Engels in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England describes how the immigration of brutalised Irish paupers to England sabotaged English working class militancy and was a key component of class divide and rule. The difference between Engels’ view of this problem, however, and the racist views of Carlyle whom he quotes, is that Engels’ shows the class function of immigration and the necessity for workers to understand that the ruling class and not the migrants are to blame.
In 1870 Marx wrote:

Introducing into the local labour market foreign labour lowers wages and alonside that the material, moral and cultural position of the indigenous working class.

If one reads the minutes of the General Council of the First International 1866-1888, one of the problems discussed was the importation by the bosses of Belgian workers into England who were prepared to work for lower rates. Here we can read that the ‘General Council committed itself to use its influence to prevent the importation of any more Belgian workers at reduced prices.’ Marx repeatedly warned about, and denounced the weaponization of, foreign workers against domestic labour. Marx also pointed out that foreign workers resident in the country would suffer most from coercive engineered migration. When tailors in Britain formed unions in 1865, the capitalists immediately attempted to crush the unions by importing cheap labour from Germany. Denouncing this policy Marx wrote:

No one would suffer more than the German workers themselves, who constitute in Great Britain a larger number than the workers of all the other Continental nations. And the newly-imported workers, being completely helpless in a strange land, would soon sink to the level of pariahs.

Marx described these migrants as ‘obedient mercenaries of capital in its struggle against labour’. It was important, he insisted, to explain this policy of weaponising migration to both domestic and migrant workers, so that either migrants would be discouraged from coming or would demand equal wages to indigenous workers upon arrival in their country of settlement.1
Liberal leftists and Trotskyite ‘Marxists’ approach the problem of migration through bourgeois categories. They, therefore, frenziedly accuse anyone who disagrees with their phony ‘internationalism’ as ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’, playing into the hands of international finance capitalists and oligarchs such as George Soros and the Zionist mafia. This superficial and spurious utopianism has nothing to do with scientific socialist thought, which requires concrete, historical and dialectical analysis of all phenomena. It is therefore correct for a Marxist to concur on the question of immigration with some of the views of bourgeois, patriotic leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban. Protecting nation states from coercive engineered migration is in the interest of workers everywhere.
Putin’s position on immigration is also an example of the country’s resistance to Zionist oligarch’s such as George Soros, who are promoting ‘open borders’ for their ‘open markets’.
The problem of Nazism and historiography
Putin has repeatedly warned about the recrudescence of Nazi ideology in Eastern Europe, which is spreading with the full complicity of the European Union and the United States. The Nazis who took power in Kiev in the US backed Putsch of 2014 are a case in point. Nazi commemoration ceremonies are now commonplace in the Baltic States, while Bosniak Waffen SS Hamzar Division parades have taken place in the predominantly Muslim populated Sanzhak region of Serbia.
The rise of neo-Nazism in Eastern Europe and the EU’s complicity in promoting and abetting anti-Russian jingoism is well documented and represents a grave threat to the national security of the Russian Federation. No country suffered more during the Second World War than the USSR. Over 27 million soviet citizens died. Many of them were Jews. However, the Russian government’s attempt to ban questioning of any aspect of the Nazi persecution of Jews during the Second World War is bad policy and will only fuel neo-Nazism rather than contain it. It is also a further indication that Russia is, to a certain extent ,under the pervasive influence of Zionism. All historical facts are open to question and revision. Historical ‘truth’ should be argued among historians,not subject to juridical decrees.
Conclusion: Aggressive and defensive empires
My criticism in this series of articles of the Russian and Chinese governments in no way implies that such countries are to be considered on the same par with NATO. While both countries are defending their imperial interests, neither Russia nor China are responsible for the current fomentation of international terrorism and war, which are products of NATO and the Western Zionist axis. It is therefore coherent to support Russia and China in their defense of world order and international law when the choice is between that and total destruction of the planet under NATO hegemony.
While a unipolar world is the worst of all scenarios, a multipolar world will not prevent war in the long term either. World War I broke out in a world divided between several empires. While the Western imperial alliance is plagued by internal dissensions such as the rivalry between the United States and Europe and inter-European rivalry between Germany, France and the United Kingdom, the oriental imperial alliance is also fraught with internal rivalries and contradictions.
But there is another, equally important difference between the oriental and occidental imperial blocks; namely, the predominance of Zionism in shaping the foreign policy of the latter.
Marxists would therefore be wrong to put Russia and China on an equal footing with NATO. In all of the wars we have seen since the dissolution of the USSR, NATO and not Russia or China has been the aggressor. An instructive historical example of how Russian imperialism could be conceptualised today is provided by an article written by Josef Stalin in 1934. In the article Stalin criticises Frederich Engels exaggerated condemnation of Tzarist Russian imperialism thus:

Characterising the predatory policy of Russian Tsarism and correctly showing the abominable nature of this policy, Engels explained it not so much by the “need” of the military-feudal-mercantile upper circles of Russia for outlets to the sea, sea-ports, for extending foreign trade and dominating strategic points, as by the circumstance that there stood at the head of Russia’s foreign policy, an all-powerful and very talented band of foreign adventurers, who succeeded everywhere and in everything, who, in wonderful fashion managed to overcome each and every obstacle in the way of their adventurist purpose, who deceived with astonishing cleverness, all the Governments of Europe, and finally brought it about that Russia became a most powerful state, from the point of military strength.

Against Engels, Stalin correctly pointed out that the struggle for colonies by Britain, France and European powers, coupled with capitalism’s drive for new markets, were the principal causes of the First World War. The Soviet leader showed that Engels’ exaggeration of Russian imperialism was used as the justification by Social Democrats in Germany for their chauvinist pro-war policy. Such an analysis is relevant to our attitude to the imperialist wars of today.
While one must not ignore the fact that Russia is an imperial power with ambiguous links to the Zionist entity, we must never overlook the fact that it is the foreign policy establishment of the NATO countries who are, to paraphrase Engels, operating like a ‘secret Jesuit order’ against the security of mankind. In this sense, we must fully support Russia’s intervention in Syria as a legitimate act of self-defense perfectly in accordance with international law and the maintenance of stability, as stability, rule of law and peace are in the best interests of Russian, Syrian and all the world’s workers.
Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine

  1. Classic Marxist Texts On Immigration- The New World Order and the Politics of Mass Immigration. VN Gelis, S Lawrence.