Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 5 – Ninety-five
years ago this week, after suffering a crushing defeat in its invasion of
Poland, Moscow “turned to the east” by convening the Fist Congress of Peoples
of the East in Baku, but that meeting, as important as it was for many of the participants,
didn’t work out the way the Soviet rulers hoped.
But that is a lesson that Vladimir
Putin and his foreign policy advisors do not appear to have learned as they
make their current much-ballyhooed turn away from the West and toward the East
at the present time, according to Kasparov,ru commentator Kyamran Agayev (http://www.kasparov.ru/material.php?id=55E734CFA8F99).
That failure is especially
noteworthy because one of the Soviet participants at the meeting, Nikolay
Bukharin, told Vladimir Lenin on his return from the meeting that “we have
awakened a monster,” implicitly suggesting that the East Lenin hoped to
revolutionize for Moscow’s benefit could easily turn against the Soviet
project.
The Baku meeting took place in the
Azerbaijani capital September 1-8, 1920. It attracted more than 2,000 delegates
representing 44 different nationalities, ethnic and religious groups. Slightly
over half were communists. Among the most prominent were Bela Kun, Ho Chi Min,
and Mustafa Subhi. Bukharin, Karl Radek and Grigory Zinovyev represented
Moscow.
As Agayev notes, the meeting devoted
itself to two main themes: “the struggle with exploitation and the capital of
bourgeois countries” and “questions of the relationship of religion and
especially Islam, and the communist movement in the countries of the East.” Each of these had consequences.
The Congress adopted a document
entitled “The Shariat Project” which listed 15 ways in which shariat law
corresponds to communist doctrine, a follow on to the declaration by Joseph
Stalin that “communism and shariat law do not contradict one another.” Thus, communists
and Muslims should work together against “the bourgeois West and above all the
Anglo-Saxons.”
Agayev argues that “the Congress of
Peoples of the East organized by Russian Bolsheviks 95 years ago remains
significant not only from a historical point of view but above all from a
methodological one.” That is because it “laid the foundations of the division
of the world into two ideological hemispheres,” dividing the West and East “not
in a geographic but in social-political and worldview ways.”
“In other words,” the Kasparov.ru
commentator says, “a delayed action mine was laid which decades later along
with the cold war led to the catastrophic collapse of the colonial system with
shocking economic and humanitarian consequences,” one of which was “the
unprecedented politicization of Islam and its transformation into a contradictory
instrument of struggle both against the capitalist West and the communist East
in the form of the USSR.”
“The classic example of this was the
war in Afghanistan against the ‘infidel’ Soviets and the present events in the
Near East where after ‘the Arab Spring’ have appeared medieval monsters in the
form of ISIS,” Agayev writes.
Thus, “before accusing the West and
above all the US as being behind what is now taking place in the Arab East, it
would not be a bad idea to look deeper into history, to [the Baku congress] of
95 years ago.”
“What Putin and his camarilla now
are doing is nothing other than a banal repetition of Bolshevism with its
eastern policy and search for the chief enemy in the bourgeois West,” something
that makes Putinism “a confrontational, retrograde and reaction movement which
leads only to the rejection of European values in favor of eastern despotism.”
That is a path “the communists
already pursued … and how it ended is well known.”
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