Putin-Medvedev Plan to Replace Post- Soviet State with a Federal Arrangement

Amid Wrecking Efforts of the U.S. and the EU in Ukraine
Putin-Medvedev Plan to Replace Post- Soviet State with a Federal Arrangement
Nathan J. Freeman

On April 15 came the long-awaited military response by the Kyiv putschist government to mass disaffection expressed across eastern Ukraine over the previous week, focusing on the province of Donetsk. There were many casualties -- half of them killed -- reported among Donetsk civilians/local militia and Kyiv armed forces. Other outrages have followed, most notably the mass murder of scores of pro-Russian citizens of Odessa by a fascist Right Sector mob on Tuesday, May 6.

Is this the test at last of that curious faith -- apparently widespread throughout Donetsk province, especially since the Crimean "success" in March -- in the idea that Moscow ultimately not only would in words, but could in deeds, and with minimal harm to the Russian-speaking population, guarantee the autonomy if not the full-blown independence of Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine?

There are a number of issues to sort out here, but let us start with the notion of Soviet power as the guarantor of Ukrainian autonomy as well as independence.

Soviet power was laid in history's grave 23 years ago. Has post-Soviet Russian state power shown itself capable of accomplishing anything like what Soviet power could accomplish for Ukraine?

In the Soviet era, the right of the Ukrainian nation to self-determination operated and existed with a guarantee. This guarantee took the form of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as one of 15 constituent republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It possessed all the appropriate collective national rights up to and including the right to secede.

In the federal system that is gradually emerging under the leadership of the Putin-Medvedev team as the new post-Soviet constitution of Soviet-era Russian territories, however, not a word is uttered about the right to secede, much less about the full list of genuine rights of any and all national collectives inhabiting these territories. At the same time, there is no suggestion of any limits being placed on the freedom of action enjoyed by oligarchs that accept the overarching authority of the central power of the government in Moscow.

What the Putin-Medvedev team has discovered is something else that the leading monopoly capitalist groups and cartels of North America and Europe have long understood. Federal systems historically have provided the most stable and secure state arrangements for protecting the economic role and powers of super-sized agglomerations of private capital.

Looking at this matter with Canadian eyes: when it comes to U.S. federalism, it must be acknowledged that the U.S. system has been able to annex large portions of Canadian political and economic space relatively painlessly and with little effective public muss or fuss.

Looking at western and post-Soviet eastern Europe with North American eyes, similarly domineering success on the part of the largest agglomerations of private capital is also evident in relation to the "federal" institutions of the European Union.

None of this apparent security and stability remained immune, however, to the spread of the chronic crisis of the capitalist system into the key central banking institutions -- those that underwrite all the various forms of credit generated and sustained within such systems in the post-Soviet period.

Furthermore, the apparent "division of powers" in all those same federal systems so beloved of today's commercial-financial oligarchs, East and West, have provided no protection from the effects of the wider crisis. By 2007, the ordinary intermonopoly contradictions of these systems became increasingly unmanageable as the principal commercial and industrial antagonists took each other on in the banking-financial sector. Various knockout blows were delivered: Lehman Bros. was liquidated, the U.S.-based global insurance giant AIG declared bankruptcy, and the U.S. federal government itself became mired in massive bailout funding for the largest banks that were still vulnerable on their balance sheets.

Until recently, however, the oligarchs of the former Soviet-bloc regions, who are no less capitalistic and predatory than their western counterparts, were spared the worst consequences of these multiple financial crises. This consequence follows from the fact that the U.S. dollar operated in their economic relations mainly as the reserve currency in which to settle international trade balances. That is to say: the U.S. dollar was for them not a significant store of value. Indeed as long as the rate at which U.S. dollars would exchange for their own currencies remained relatively stable over the long term, there appeared to be no immediate or other urgent need to convert these dollar balances into local currencies.

Since 2008, meanwhile, the indebtedness of Western governments and multinationals -- for whom the dollar is primarily a store of value -- has grown tremendously. In turn, the printing of more currency to cover this growing indebtedness has cheapened the U.S. dollar's value as the world's sole reserve currency for resolving international trade balances. This entire turn of events now threatens the liquidity of those international players in global oil, gas and other mineral development -- especially from the Russian bloc -- for whom the U.S. dollar has been a store of value as well as the currency in which international trade and investment balances are maintained and settled.

As has been extensively documented in the international financial press[1], part of Russia's response to the debasement of the dollar's value has been to physically stockpile unprecedentedly large quantities of actual, physical gold bullion.

Another much less-commented on part of the reaction to these developments, meanwhile, has been Moscow's drive to expand its home market. This is where Putin, Medvedev and company caught the U.S. and its partners completely by surprise. They are increasing the physical territory of the Russian home market by expanding the application of the federal principle to pro-Russian areas contiguous or near-contiguous to existing Russian territory, such as the eastern provinces of Ukraine.

Moscow's widely-observed apparent preparedness -- several moves ahead of the western bloc -- to apply mostly stabilizing and non-antagonizing responses to any predictable attempt by local tools of the U.S. and EU to inflame matters would seem to represent the outward expression of this inner "federalizing" logic.

Conclusion

The above-described Russian federalizing game has many possible moves left to play out. At the moment a full-scale U.S.-Russia war is one possible outcome but not necessarily the only outcome or necessarily the most likely. The peoples especially in the Americas and Europe need to heighten their vigilance mainly against efforts led by the U.S. camp to embroil them in any kind of anti-Russian crusade. Meanwhile in Russia, in the short term, the Putin-Medvedev federalization solution has attracted the support of some peoples, e.g. the Russian speaking regions of eastern Ukraine, as a more sustainable alternative than the status quo.

At the same time, however, the chaotic "freedom" exploited by various oligarchic clans contending for supremacy in their particular Russian base areas seems bound to destabilize further as the chronic capitalist crisis broadens and deepens. Following the giant May 9 annual commemorations of the Soviet victory over Nazi fascism, political evidence of this deepening crisis appeared unexpectedly in Moscow, when President Putin promised neither to reject nor interfere in the Kyiv-sponsored "Ukrainian" elections scheduled for May 25. For weeks preceding this point, the Russian government had presented itself as the greatest supporter of rejectionist elements throughout eastern Ukraine.

The working class and people in Canada and other countries can make a contribution to advancing the position of the working class and people of Ukraine by renewing and broadening a firm stand against the war-embroiling schemes of the U.S. imperialists and their foreign enablers like the Harper dictatorship. The ranks of the progressive forces in Canada include the best representatives from almost 200 immigrant national minorities plus a large number of indigenous First Nations. CPC(M-L) has advanced the program of the Canadian working class declaring itself the nation and vesting sovereignty in the people. To the U.S. imperialists and their tools in the Harper government, we declare:

Hands Off Ukraine!

Note

1. Probably "leading the band" on this issue is The Max Keiser Report, a three-times-a week online half hour review of current problems in global finance produced from the financial centre of the City of London for broadcast on Russian Television (rt.com)

(TML Daily 2014, May 12, 2014)