Russia-Ukraine war: imperialism by force of arms fuels the nationalism of every country 

(From ”Il comunista”; no. 172 ; March 2022)

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An article titled “Pacifismo e comunismo” from the series “Sul filo del tempo” of 1949 begins with these words:

“Firmly rooted in the tradition of revolutionary Marxists is the opposition to nationalism and militarism, to any warmongering based on the solidarity of the workers with the bourgeois state, which is at war for three well-known fraudulent reasons: defence against the aggressor – liberation of peoples from the subjugation of states of a different nationality – defence of the liberal and democratic form of society.

But no less firmly rooted in the tradition of Marxist doctrine and Marxist struggle is the opposition to pacifism, a difficult-to-define idea or programme which, if it is not a hypocritical cover for those who are preparing for war, takes the form of a foolish illusion, that, to the detriment of making social contradictions and class struggles emerge and develop, it is necessary to bring the opposite poles of class opinion and forces into mutual agreement on the objective of the ‘abolition of war’ and of the ‘universal peace’” (1).

In the Russian-Ukrainian war, all these deceptive motives are present, including the pacifist claim for the abolition of wars and peace between peoples.

Defence against the aggressor: for the very bourgeois Ukraine and the Euro-American imperialists, the aggressor today is Putin's Russia because with its tanks, it has crossed the border separating the two countries and invaded the calm, peaceful and democratic Ukraine. For this reason alone, for the government in Kyiv and the Western imperialist governments, the “defensive war” is more than justifiable and its support is a duty of the free world, the democratic world, the world that wants “universal peace”. Therefore, in the imperialist epoch, the question of war is simply reduced to the question of “aggression” and “defence”. From the bourgeois and imperialist point of view that is, from the bourgeoisies' perspective, which from the very beginning of their existence have always fought and warred with each other – formulating the question in these terms is logical; it is part of the propaganda of the bourgeoisies concerned. On the one hand, on the Russian side, for example, the aggression is justified by the oppression of the Russian-speaking minority living mainly in the Crimea and the Donbas by the government in Kyiv (linguistic, cultural, administrative and political oppression); therefore, this “aggression” (called “special military operation”) is supposed to be merely a military reaction “in defence” of the Russian-speaking minority, which the Ukrainian government has attacked with its army and local militias. From the Ukrainian side, the “defensive war” is justified because the aim is to defend the territorial integrity of the nation, its “independence” declared after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, its democratic orientation and its “freedom to choose” with whom to ally itself: in this case, economically and politically with the European Union and militarily with NATO. It is clear that this “choice” is to the benefit of the imperialist interests of the countries of Western Europe, the United States and the bourgeois factions that have been projected into the governments of Poroshenko and Zelenskyy, and goes directly against the imperialist interests of Russia (whether Putin or anyone else is in government does not change the essence).

Defence of liberal and democratic civilisation: for the very bourgeois Ukraine, liberal and democratic civilisation is nothing more than an ideology in which the interests of national capitalism are clad; an ideology and interests that form the basis of Ukrainian nationalism in opposition to Russian nationalism, both of which are based on the economic, political and social capitalist system, with all that that entails in defending the interests of the two opposing national capitalisms on the economic and military level, in treaties and international alliances. Democratic civilisation (which definitively lost its “liberal” aspect after the Second World War) is nothing other than the civilisation of capitalism in the epoch of imperialism, which implies an intrinsic drive to seize economic territories, areas of influence, to annex, even to clash militarily with foreign bourgeoisies in an attempt to secure a power capable of defending and further developing outlets for its capital and commodities and, of course, of exploiting the subjugated and dominated national proletariat.

Nationalism in the historical era of the formation of nation-states, when national revolutionary movements were overthrowing former feudal and aristocratic power, was an expression of historical progress on both political and economic levels. The quest for political independence from the imperial-feudal powers of the 19th century (read Prussia, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Japan) was the main objective of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations, and the revolutionary wars to overthrow these powers were legitimate wars in terms of historical progress. Opposed to the warmongers who want to win the support of the workers' movement and its parties in the imperialist countries for the bourgeois state and its war – as the quotation with which this article begins reminds us – are those who justify war, or rather who support and promote the war of national liberation, and who consider that through such a war they advance history a step forward. Both these groups want, seek and demand the support of the proletariat with every kind of propaganda and every manifestation of force, even though the two types of wars cannot be compared. In the long historical stage of the development of the new capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois class, the war waged against the feudal powers was not in any way “defensive”, it was clearly offensive; it was a revolutionary war in which the proletariat was also interested, not only because it was tormented by exploitation and repression, but also to free itself from the thousand personal bonds that oppressed it. Besides, every revolution has an offensive character, otherwise it would not be a revolution. The wars that bourgeois states wage against each other to divide the markets are not, however, revolutionary wars, not those of aggression, nor those of defence: they are precisely a continuation of the policy of conquering the markets, a policy pursued by other means, and precisely by military means on both sides of the warring parties.

Liberation of peoples ruled by states of another nationality: a people ruled by a state of another nationality will not be liberated except by revolution; it will never succeed in achieving an end to oppression through progressive democratisation, referendum, peaceful negotiations to reach a “diplomatic solution” as promoted by the bourgeois, nor through armed guerrilla warfare waged in accordance with the interests of clans and social groupings that share scraps of local power in the context of the larger exploitation of natural resources and labour power. Nor will this be achieved through a war waged by other bourgeois states waving the banner of “freedom of the oppressed people” against the state which rules and oppresses it, and which for the sake of the course of such a war presses its proletariat for a “national unity” which only serves to strengthen bourgeois power and keep the capitalist economic system alive, and therefore to oppress the proletarians and weaker peoples. As already mentioned in the previous point, since the end of the second imperialist war opened another front, that of the national revolutionary revolt of the colonial peoples, the oppressed peoples had only one way out of colonial oppression, that of revolution, in which the masses of bourgeois, peasants and proletarians had a common historical interest: overthrow of the power of the colonial states, conquest of political independence and development of the capitalist economy of the country, which, as Marxism demonstrated, provides the basis for the struggle for socialism. The socialist revolutionary perspective remains absolutely intact: the proletariat in the colonies has a class-historical task that goes beyond bourgeois political independence and bourgeois economy, for which the path it must take inevitably diverges from that of the bourgeois national revolution: it is precisely the path of proletarian, anti-bourgeois revolution, a path which excludes oppression of other peoples, annexation of territories of other peoples, and therefore also alliance with any bourgeois state, imperialist or otherwise. The only ally of the proletariat of a nation is the proletariat of all the other countries since this alliance is based on class interests, which are international, since the proletariat in each country is the only class that has no reserves, no country.

The economic, financial, political and military power with which national capitalisms compete with each other is measured on the markets; in the imperialist phase in which we have been living for more than a century, the determining forces are the great industrial and financial powers, the great monopolies and the great states that defend their interests throughout the world. In the clash of these conflicting imperialist interests, the small nations, the regional semi-powers, tend – but do not always succeed – to adopt a strategy of the least tension in an attempt to survive as long as possible in the role of second to the world's major powers and to enjoy advantages they did not have before, precisely thanks to the positions they have adopted. In the case of the federative republics that were part of the USSR, with the crisis of 1989, which lasted until its collapse in 1991, most of the Eastern European countries, except Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine, were drawn into the sphere of influence of the European Union between 1999 and 2004 and, through it, into the sphere of influence of NATO and, consequently, of the United States. In 1991, not only did the USSR and its system of satellite countries collapse, but inevitably so did the Warsaw Pact military alliance, which had been formed in 1955 in opposition to NATO's advance in Europe.

Within a few years, Russia has inevitably found itself on its western border in the neighbourhood of NATO member states: directly with the Baltic States and indirectly because Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova lie between them, with Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. The only country that is closely linked to Moscow economically and politically is Belarus; indeed, it has fully supported Russian military initiatives since the 2014 annexation of Crimea and in the current war in Ukraine.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the annexation of “East Germany” by “West Germany” (the so-called “unification of Germany”), the collapse of the USSR in 1991 brought the same consequences in Russia as a lost war. But Moscow, as the great military power it has always been, and a great nuclear power in addition, was never going to sit idly by and wait for Euro-American imperialists to strangle it. In addition to nuclear power, Moscow has vast quantities of oil, coal and gas, which constitute the bulk of its exports, both to China and to Western Europe via a series of pipelines that run through the Baltic Sea, Belarus and Ukraine. Belarus and Ukraine are therefore important not only because of their geographical location and their mining and agricultural production – Belarus is based on an advanced technology industry, while Ukraine is a major grain exporter and, like Russia, has advanced expertise in nuclear technology – but also because they can provide Moscow with an important buffer ring of territory on its western and south-western sides towards Western Europe. Historical events have not allowed Russia to conquer the Dardanelles Strait, and thus directly control the trade and military flows between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean; the annexation of the Crimea, with a strip of territorial continuity as far as the Donbass, the subject of the most devastating clashes of this month of war, and with relative control of the Sea of Azov, would, however, allow it to considerably strengthen its position in its relations with Turkey and the Middle East, and consequently with all other imperialist states.

Russia's imperialist motivation is certainly clear, whatever clique of oligarchs is in power; Ukraine's motivation, on the other hand, is much less clear, especially given the fact that no EU country or the United States, although they generously declare political, economic and even military support, is interested in instigating a war with Russia over Ukraine. Evidently, this is not a local war between two states for control of a piece of land, however important that piece of land may be. It is a locally fought war, but one that has grave international implications because it is set in a geopolitical arena – Europe – in which two previous world imperialist wars took place; and because Russia is a major exporter of energy raw materials of huge importance to European countries, whose supplies are not easily and quickly replaceable.

Neither Berlin nor Paris, nor London nor Washington nor Rome, let alone Moscow or Peking, are today interested in instigating a world war; none of them is prepared to bear it either economically or militarily. It is certain that, in the world chaos that followed the collapse of the USSR, the various imperialist powers try to test the strength of old alliances and the possibility of new war alliances. All of them are ready to carry out exercises, manoeuvres, military operations simulating attacks, landings, during which they test the most modern weapons and various military tactics, on land, at sea or in the air; and this is precisely what they have been doing so far in the most diverse battlefields of local wars (from the wars in the former Yugoslavia to Afghanistan, from Libya to Iraq and Syria, from Chechnya to Chad and Sudan, from Congo to Uganda, from Burundi to Yemen).

The fact that the conflict between the imperialist powers is waged through local wars does not detract from the fact that they are imperialist wars, albeit they are not global in the sense that the conflict between imperialist powers seeking to partition the world into well-defined zones of influence has not yet reached the point of direct warfare.

The closer the war conflict gets to Europe and permeates it, as was already the case with the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the more the propaganda for the defence of the fatherland gains in intensity. In the case of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the defence of the fatherland is the watchword of both belligerent countries: Russia “defends” itself against the advance of the Western military alliance, NATO, and “defends” the Russian-speaking population living in Ukraine against the political and cultural oppression and repression practised for years by the governments in Kyiv; Ukraine is “defending” its existing “territorial integrity” (which, moreover, was not won at all through a French-style bourgeois revolution against Tsarism) from the incursion of Russian tanks, after having put itself at the service of rival, Western imperialism. Who launched the first attack, or who first started the war, is of no decisive importance to revolutionary communists; it does not change their viewpoint and tactics. In this context, among Lenin's many texts on war, we would like to mention a little-known but very clear one. It is a resolution written by Lenin and adopted at the conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLS) groups abroad, held in Bern between February and March 1915 (2).

After a brief description of the real character of the ongoing imperialist war, Lenin goes on to outline the content of the Marxist critique that is valid for all imperialist wars:

“The entire economic and diplomatic history of the last few decades shows that both groups of belligerent nations were systematically preparing the very kind of war such as the present. The question of which group dealt the first military blow or first declared war is immaterial in any determination of the tactics of socialists. Both sides’ phrases on the defence of the fatherland, resistance to enemy invasion, a war of defence, etc., are nothing but deception of the people.”

In fact, Marxist critique has long since placed the national wars in their historical context, that is, those that took place in Europe between 1789 and 1871; “at the bottom” of these, Lenin writes, “was a long process of mass national movements, of a struggle against absolutism and feudalism, the overthrow of national oppression, and the formation of states on a national basis, as a prerequisite of capitalist development”. As for national ideology, i.e. nationalism, here are Lenin's words: “The national ideology created by that epoch left a deep impress on the mass of the petty bourgeoisie and a section of the proletariat. This is now being utilised in a totally different and imperialist epoch by the sophists of the bourgeoisie, and by the traitors to socialism who are following in their wake, so as to split the workers, and divert them from their class aims and from the revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie”.

There can be no doubt that the sophists of the bourgeoisie – meaning its intellectuals, propagandists and its henchmen – and the traitors to socialism and communism continue their work to divert the proletarian masses from the struggle for their class interests, both on the immediate and more general terrain, and all the more so in the face of the crises of war. The proletarian movement at the international level was hit very hard by the bourgeois counter-revolution, which effectively threw it back more than a century under the guise of “building socialism in one country”, so dear to Stalinism and its disciples, so much so that it has completely destroyed even the memory of the revolutionary struggles in which it was a main protagonist in the first decades of the twentieth century and which led to its victory in October 1917 in Russia, albeit a capitalistically backward country.

Lenin's words, like those repeated thousands of times in organic continuity with him by the Communist Left of Italy, seem today to be words in the wind, as if they had no bearing on the concrete reality before the eyes of the proletariat. Those deep traces of the national ideology recalled by Lenin, and which Stalinism further entrenched in ever wider ranks of the proletariat, are, in fact, still working in favour of the defence of the bourgeois state, the bourgeois fatherland and the capitalist economic system. Since the class movement of the international proletariat and its class party have been destroyed, today's proletarian generations have not received the lessons of what the proletarians of the 1920s experienced first-hand. The counter-revolutionary forces of social preservation have so far succeeded in erasing these experiences, these lessons, from the memory of the proletariat. In this war of robbery, we see, on the one hand, Russian imperialism conquering the economic territory lost thirty years ago and on the other hand, Ukrainian national capitalism, supported by Moscow's Western imperialist adversaries, playing the role of an outpost of Euro-American imperialism, which is interested in expanding the economic territories already won after the collapse of the USSR in 1991; then Chinese imperialism, which acts as a backstage actor in the partitioning of the zones of influence currently concentrated in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. This shows that Europe is once again becoming one of the world's most inflamed zones of friction.

Already in 2014, at the time of the annexation of Crimea, Russia, seeking a foothold in Western Europe, made a proposal to Poland, Romania and Hungary for the partition of Ukraine. Russia wanted not only Crimea for itself, but also the southern and eastern regions (Odessa, the entire Donbass and the Kharkiv region), while Poland was to get the five western regions (Lviv Oblast, Volyn Oblast, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Ternopil Oblast and Rivne Oblast), Romania the Chernivtsi Oblast and Hungary the Zakarpattia Oblast, which would reduce Ukraine's territory to less than half of what it was after the collapse of the USSR (3). Obviously, this had no further sequel, as these three countries were members of NATO and the document was revealed, which evidently should have remained secret. However, even then, Russia had moved up to 100,000 troops to the border with Ukraine, ready to invade the country… Today's Russia-Ukraine war actually had its basis in 2014.

The course of the current war, more than a month after it began, shows how wrong both sides were in their predictions. Putin's Russia most likely thought that it could carry out a blitzkrieg war and within a few weeks achieve that Kyiv would be forced to capitulate in the face of Moscow's demands (recognise the annexation of Crimea and the autonomous republics of Donbass, cut off relations with NATO, as Finland once did, and proceed to “demilitarisation”, i.e. not having heavy and nuclear weapons). Russia, on the other hand, did not expect such a rapid pulling together of the European countries and the United States, which led to the imposition of severe economic and financial sanctions that have put it in serious difficulties, the consequences of which will inexorably affect the living conditions of the Russian proletarians. Zelenskyy's Ukraine most likely believed that it could draw European countries and the United States into the affair militarily and leverage their interest in containing, even by force, Russia within the newly established borders after the collapse of the USSR. It is certain that the European Union is interested in incorporating a country such as Ukraine (48 million inhabitants, not counting Crimea and Sevastopol, which number about three million) into its structure for various reasons: for the market it represents, for the development of industry (steel, chemical, nuclear, high-tech, etc.), for the development of agriculture (it is a strong exporter of cereals). There are also obvious reasons for the United States, for whom Ukraine would represent another NATO outpost from which it could keep a closer eye on the Russian Black Sea fleet, which is based in Sevastopol. However, the resistance not only of the Ukrainian army, but also of its own population, which from one week to the next has been transformed into guerrilla militias, has partly surprised Russian strategists who, as various reporters have reported, have sent very young and inexperienced soldiers to the war. So, cannon fodder on both fronts, for what purpose? To maintain a bourgeois power in Kyiv that would completely submit to the demands of Euro-American imperialism, or conversely to the imperialist demands of Moscow in the style of the Yanukovych government.

In these eight years of the Russian-Ukrainian war, which has turned from a “low intensity” war with its 20,000 dead into a war of the highest intensity, the most dramatic testimony is the destruction of cities, the systematic massacre of the population and the flight of 8–10 million people from the devastated towns and villages, half of whom have already taken refuge in neighbouring countries, Poland, Slovakia, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, while the other half are wandering within the country from one region to another, looking for a place to feed and survive. However, as in the previous wars in Syria, Iraq, Libya, the devastation of war will be followed by a situation of permanent insecurity, of never-resolved tensions, of “armed peace”, which will be the harbinger of new military conflicts.

The “negotiations” will not bring any definitive resolution because the inter-imperialist contradictions cannot be obliterated, and only temporarily at that, except by acts of force on both sides. It has happened all too often in the history of the development of European capitalism that a country crucial to the balance (and imbalance) between European powers, such as Poland once was and Ukraine in recent decades, suffers the consequences of war between stronger powers: it is invaded, partitioned, reunified, used as an exchange object in negotiations for purposes that have nothing to do with the interests of the nation in question. All the more so because Polish nationalism, as well as Ukrainian nationalism, like all nationalism today, has only one meaning: to deceive the proletarian masses, to subject them to demands that are exclusively bourgeois and capitalist, to divert the impulses to the classist struggle of the proletarians concerned to the struggle in defence of the fatherland, of the national economy, in defence of a political and economic system which is built exclusively on the most rampant exploitation of the proletarian labour power, on their massacre and blood.

The Russian and Ukrainian proletarians who are directly involved in this war are completely disarmed in respect of their class interests. Constantly deceived about the ability of the capitalist economic system to reform itself to meet the needs of the masses, after decades of being duped by socialism, which has never been realised, and which is similar to capitalism like two peas in a pod, they are being dragged into the war like cattle to the slaughter, whether convinced or not, on both sides of the front, that they must “defend the fatherland”. And the European and American proletarians, bombarded with the insistent war propaganda against Putin, the villainous aggressor, the criminal, the terrorist of the time, are also being drawn into operations for national unity serving the bourgeois powers both in the immediate sense – for economic recovery after the pandemic crisis – and for future war conflicts.

The proletarians of every country who are being prepared for imperialist war have and will have only one way out: the path of the class revolution, the path indicated by Marxism and trodden by the French proletarians during the Paris Commune in 1871, by the Russian proletarians in 1905 and again, much more vigorously, in 1917, by the German, Hungarian, Italian, Serbian proletarians during and immediately after the first world imperialist war, by the Chinese proletarians during the uprisings in Shanghai and Canton in 1927: European, Russian and Chinese proletariats shook the governmental palaces of the whole world during sixty years with a revolutionary movement whose objective was not changes of government, the establishment of bourgeois-democratic regimes, let alone false socialisms, but the revolutionary transformation of the whole world society from top to bottom. The objective of the proletarian revolution is enormous, just as is the enormous bourgeois oppression of the whole of humanity.

Against bourgeois war, against imperialist war, pacifism has demonstrated its utter failure: firstly, because the armed force of the bourgeois class can only be stopped and defeated by the armed force of the proletarian class; and secondly because every pacifist movement subsequently turns itself, in terms of the “defence of the fatherland”, into a justifier of war and actively participates in war operations.

Lenin clearly says in the above text (4), “Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class. Under capitalism, particularly in its imperialist stage, wars are inevitable”. Peace propaganda before and after the imperialist war sows only illusions, corrupts the proletariat making it “believe that the bourgeoisie is humane, and turns it into a plaything in the hands of the secret diplomacy of the belligerent countries”. What is really going on in the meetings of Russian and Ukrainian diplomacy while the two warring nations are bombing each other? They put the weight of slaughtered proletarians, of lost and regained cities, together on the negotiating scales, and call as witnesses of their “will for peace”, while simultaneously waging war, one mediator or the other, who, as it happens, is none other than the representative of bourgeois interests, whether one or the other of the warring parties emerges “victorious” from the war. Mediators who are, moreover, representatives of the states which massacre colonised peoples and proletariats and which have armed themselves and are arming themselves to the teeth precisely anticipating the wars in which they are or will be directly involved. The cases of Israel, massacring the Palestinians since 1948, of Turkey, repressing and massacring the Kurds since 1980, are proof that bourgeois and imperialist interests do not make the difference between the mass murderers of yesterday and those of today: what is important is that the eventual situation does not upset the plans of the great powers because in the end it is they who determine the new world order. Unless, of course, before, during or immediately after the world imperialist war, it is the proletarian revolution that upsets the plans of the imperialist powers, as happened during the first world imperialist war. For revolutionary communists, this is the only perspective for which it remains necessary to keep Marxist theory intact and to fight against all forms of opportunism and the politics of class collaboration, so that the proletariat can reconquer the terrain of the class struggle, meet again its class party, its revolutionary leadership, hence the ability to complete the great historical task of definitively burying the society of private property, private appropriation of all the wealth created by human labour, commodification of every human activity and every human emotion, exploitation of man by man, so that society can take the path of the constant development of the productive forces in accordance with the laws of nature.

Therefore, the slogan which in Lenin's time became the slogan of all the proletarians of the world – the transformation of imperialist war into civil war – will have to become again the slogan of tomorrow. “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” must no longer be a phrase inscribed on pacifist or falsely communist banners waved to deceive the proletarians, but must become the call to arms, the call of the proletarians of the whole world to revolutionary struggle, to the installation of the class dictatorship of the proletariat, the only means of definitively defeating bourgeois counter-revolution and of leading world society towards socialism.

Today, this perspective seems like a fantasy, divorced from reality, if not completely defeated by history, which announced the collapse of the USSR and the end of “communism”. This is what the propaganda of bourgeois sophists and traitors to the proletarian cause claims. But the bourgeoisie knows, because it too has learned from the proletarian revolutions of the past, that its real historical enemy, the most dangerous enemy of all, is the proletariat, assuming it is revived as class for itself and completely overcomes the status of class for capital. The proletarian class is not a dead and buried enemy, for capitalism only functions under the condition of the exploitation of wage labour, and the development of capitalism is at the same time the development of the proletarian masses. However defeated it may be, subjugated to the needs of capital, deviated from its real class interests, however much its “recent memory” has been erased, which from a historical point of view may be a hundred or two hundred years old, it is the very contradictions of capitalism that will restore to the proletariat the class memory, the memory of the past that never dies in the dialectic of human social development, the memory of its historical course determined by the material conditions that caused it to be born, to develop as wage-earning class and to struggle for the overcoming of every class-divided society, for the burial of all social classes in the development of society, which Engels called the prehistory of human society (made up precisely of societies divided into classes), for the final commencement of its history.

 

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(1) Cf. “Pacifismo e comunismo”, an article from the series entitled “Sul filo del tempo”, published in No. 13 of 1949 in the then party newspaper “Battaglia comunista”. (2) The series, which was mainly concerned with criticism of all aspects of the attack of opportunism and its most insidious version, Stalinism, on revolutionary communism and its glorious tradition (from Marx and Engels to Lenin, the Third International of 1919–1921 and the Communist Left of Italy), comprises at least 136 articles from 1949–1955. They can be found and eventually downloaded from the party's website, www.pcint.org.

(2) Lenin V. I., The Conference of the R.S.D.L.P.

Groups Abroad, in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 21, p. 159, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974. This conference was held in Bern from 27 February to 4 March 1915. It was attended by representatives of the Bolsheviks from the foreign sections in Paris, Zurich, Geneva, Bern and Lausanne, while Lenin represented the Central Committee and the party's central organ, the Sotsial-Demokrat. He makes a report on the central item of the conference: “The War and the Tasks of the Party”.

(3) Cf. “La Russia propone alla Polonia ‘Spartiamoci insieme l’Ucraina’”, l'Unità, 24 March 2014; also in “La Russia propone a Polonia, Romania e Ungheria la spartizione dell’Ucraina”, 24 March 2014, wikipedia; report by the Polish TV channel TVP, also on 24 March, announcing a document sent by the Deputy Speaker of the Russian Duma Zhirinovsky, accompanied by a map: Mapa uwzględniająca propozycję Żyrinowskiego (fot.TVP), https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BjeTDjfCUAANRFX.jpg:large.

(4) Cf. The Conference of the R.S.D.L.P.

Groups Abroad, op. cit.

 

 

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