Hatchet man for Wall Street looters

Downplays role of USSR in defeating Hitler 60 years ago

By Fred Goldstein

President George W. Bush has used the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the defeat of Hitler’s fascist armies in Europe to launch an aggressive campaign of reactionary propaganda and diplomacy aimed at reinforcing Washington’s growing encirclement of Russia.

It is significant that Bush, on his way to attend the anniversary celebrations in Moscow, began his foray in Riga, Latvia. Bush chose to address a gathering there of the presidents of the three Baltic states: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

The Baltic ruling classes were pawns and dependencies of U.S. imperialism during the entire Cold War, which they spent in exile. They returned after the collapse of the USSR. Their anti-communism carried over into the post-Soviet period, making them a pliant anti-Russian tool in the hands of Western imperialism.

Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are on the borders of Russia and Belarus. After the collapse of the USSR, the three countries rushed straight into the arms of U.S. and European imperialism. They begged to join the European Union and NATO. Both these things were accomplished in 2004. All three countries are part of the “coalition of the willing” and have contingents in Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting alongside their master.

The Bush visit to this outpost of imperialism comes in the wake of the pro-U.S. reactionary takeovers in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan—each on or near the Russian border. Bush also plans to visit puppet President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia after the Moscow ceremonies.

The U.S. and Georgian governments are also talking about Georgian membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But Georgia is not north or anywhere near the Atlantic. It is on the Black Sea and would, like Turkey, be another Black Sea NATO member, a military and economic base for Washington directed against Russia and the peoples of the Middle East.

What Bush means by ‘free’

At a press conference before the ceremonies in Riga, Bush said, “We had a really good discussion today about Belarus. We talked about the Ukraine and Georgia and Moldova. We talked about Russia … .” Bush continued, “These three nations … who are free have a responsibility to help others be free outside of our neighborhoods.”

Bush called Belarus “the last dictatorship in Europe.” Washington has recently, and unsuccessfully, tried to engineer a Georgian-style overthrow of the president of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko. Washington is not giving up and has enlisted border states in the Baltic in the effort. Including Moldova and Georgia in the mix is meant to cordon off Russia.

And Bush included Russia itself in the list of countries that need to be “free.”

Bush expanded on his definition of “free” during the brief question period when asked by an Estonian reporter how relations with Estonia rank for the U.S.

Bush replied: “I praise Estonia for being an open market economy that is a free society. And therefore, if you’re a free society that embraces market economies, you’ll rank very high with me and the United States.”

Later on, during his formal address, Bush praised the new, pro-Washington puppet president of Ukraine, Victor Yushchenko—who recently addressed a joint session of the U.S. House and Senate—as someone “who works to strengthen the rule of law and open Ukraine’s economy.”

Thus Bush has concisely stated the program of U.S. imperialism for the post-Soviet period in Russia and the former Soviet republics.

For decades of the Cold War, Wash ington threw all its might into destroying the economic and social foundations of socialism in the USSR. Now that private property and the profit system, capitalist exploitation and wage slavery have been successfully restored, the follow-up stage is for all the former regions of the USSR, Russia included, to open themselves up to Wall Street and the U.S. transnational monopolies.

Washington and the Pentagon did not strive merely to overturn the socialist base and then see the industrial foundation, the economic infrastructure, the scientific establishment and all the achievements of the socialist era be utilized by an upstart ruling class to rival U.S. big business. The ultimate goal of the Cold War was to reopen one-sixth of the earth’s surface to U.S. capitalist penetration—to return Russia and the republics to the colonial and semi-colonial conditions that existed during the times of the czar, before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Washington wants the oil, the gold, the uranium, the diamonds and the labor power of the former Soviet Union to feed its insatiable lust for profit. Each renegade, counter-revolutionary leader—whether it be Mikhail Gorbachev or Boris Yeltsin in Russia, Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia, or Victor Yanukovich, the recently ousted bourgeois prime minister of Ukraine—is regarded as a tool to further the ends of Washington. When they have been used up in the process of U.S. political and economic subversion, or if they become an obstacle in that process, they are put on the list of “enemies of freedom.”

Imperialist wolf at the door

Gratitude does not exist in the sentiment of imperialism. Even though Russian Premier Vladimir Putin backed Bush after Sept. 11, 2001, and allowed the Pentagon to put bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and spread its agents all over the Caspian region, Washington and Wall Street plotted with ExxonMobil and Chevron to take over the largest oil company in Russia—Yukos.

When Putin realized that the wolf was at the door, he broke up the cabal and threw the president of Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in jail for tax evasion. Khodorkovsky was the richest man in Russia and one of the several dozen “oligarchs” who enriched themselves during the wholesale robbery of socialist property under Yeltsin.

Bourgeois state banditry was the form that the primitive accumulation of capital took during the counter-revolution that overturned the former USSR. These capitalist oligarchs turned out to be dealing with imperialism and also wreaking lawless havoc on the economy.

Putin, in order to save Russian capitalism and protect it from the aggressive incursions by Washington, has used authori tarian methods to put a halt to these disintegrative processes.

Russian capitalism needs influence, allies and money. To that end it has given aid to Iran in its nuclear industry.

It does not matter that Putin publicly endorsed Bush in the 2004 election campaign. It is of little consequence that he is playing the game of U.S. imperialism against North Korea in the so-called six-party talks. Putin is nevertheless being branded as against “freedom” by Con doleezza Rice and the White House. They are trying to discipline him.

Ironically, Bush is using anti-Soviet and anti-communist rhetoric of the Cold War to undermine the position of Putin, who represents the counter-revolutionary Russian bourgeoisie that overturned the Soviet Union in the first place.

During the commemorations in Russia of the defeat of the Nazis at the end of
Wor ld War II, one of Bush’s political tasks was to counter any tendency for pro-Soviet, pro-socialist sentiment to surface. After all, it was the Soviet Red Army that had inflicted the greatest defeats on Hitler’s armies, and also took 90 percent of the casualties. It was the USSR which suffered 25 million killed, including 8.6 million soldiers and 16.9 million civilians. (http://www.secondworldwar.co.uk/casualty.html)

The USSR survived the 900-day Nazi siege of Leningrad and fought the battles of Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin—turning points in the war. The Red Army and the Soviet people destroyed most of Hitler’s divisions. The socialist republic, still underdeveloped, defeated the fascist armies of industrially advanced German imperialism, which had marched through continental Europe with barely any resistance from the capitalist regimes.

The greatest resistance to the German and Italian fascists came from the communist-led Italian partisans and the French maquis, also organized by the communists. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower said of the French resistance that is was equal to five divisions.

Although the U.S., by contrast, suffered 291,000 combat casualties on all fronts and the war never touched U.S. soil, Bush’s rendition of the victory over Hitler, as given in his speech in Amsterdam (he did not speak in Moscow), attributed the victory over Nazism to the “forces of freedom” without mentioning the Soviet Red Army or the Soviet Union.

In his speech Bush repeated an attack by the Baltic leaders, who condemn the period in which their republics were part of the Soviet Union. For example, Presi dent Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia said, “For Latvia the beginning of the end of the Second World War arrived many decades later, on May the 4th, 1990, along with the collapse of the USSR.”

Revival of Nazism in Latvia

Vike-Freiberga tried to sound even-handed between the Nazis and Soviet socialism. But the recent record of “free” Latvia in the revival of Nazism has become an incendiary point with Russia, the Jewish community and all progressives. It has received little publicity in the imperialist world.

After the Nazis overthrew the Latvian Socialist Republic in 1941 and occupied the country, nearly 80,000 of the 93,000 Jews living there were exterminated, many of them by the Latvian Waffen SS divisions formed by the Nazis.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which specializes in fighting neo-Nazism, issued a protest in March of this year against a march in Latvia of the Waffen SS. The Latvian police arrested protesters, including city officials, a former mayoral candidate and the head of a human rights organization in Latvia. (RIA Novosti, March 17, dispatch from Tel Aviv)

Last April the United Nations Human Rights Commission, in a 36-16 vote, approved a resolution introduced by Russia and directed particularly at Latvia. The resolution expressed deep concern over the building of memorials to the military section of the dreaded Nazi Schutz staffel. (The Jerusalem Post, April 20, 2004)

The U.S. voted against the resolution, along with the European and Japanese imperialists.

The UN resolution was a reaction to the erection of an SS memorial in the Latvian town of Lestene. “The event was attended by the country’s government, religious and military officials. Three military orchestras of the Latvian Defense Ministry provided musical background” for pro-fascist songs. During the war “the 15th SS Latvian Division was the most decorated foreign volunteer division of the SS….” After the Soviet Army pushed into Latvia, the remnants of this division surrendered to the U.S. forces. (http://www.aeronautics.ru/archive/wwii/baltic_nazis/latvia )

Waffen SS families and survivors now get government pensions and enjoy the full weight of government support, but there has been no attempt to revive working-class organizations or progressive organizations of any kind by the ruling class in Latvia.

The same general climate exists in Lithuania and Estonia, although not quite as blatantly or with such open government support. While this shows the character of the bourgeois forces being mobilized in the Baltic, and also in Ukraine, by U.S. imperialism, it is not the local Nazis that constitute the gravest danger to the people of the region.

The real danger is from Wall Street, the White House and the Pentagon. They are being frustrated every day in Iraq and Afghanistan, are losing their grip on Latin America, Asia and the Middle East, and are desperate for new imperialist conquest.

---