Russian Left Today Defends Policies and Crimes Even CPSU Condemned, Druz Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 24 – Igor Druz, a Donbass activist and Russian political commentator, says that the left in Russia today is defending Soviet politics and crimes that even the CPSU condemned, sometimes by ignoring them altogether, sometimes by whitewashing them, and sometimes by outright falsification.

            This has left the Russia left today “more red than the Reds,” he says – or to use the frequently invoked expression in English “more Catholic than the pope,” he argues, raising questions about what the Russian left today is about and whether, having so distorted the past, it can have any future (stoletie.ru/vzglyad/krasneje_krasnyh_577.htm).

            On the one hand, what the left is doing in Russia today is part and parcel of the single stream of Russian history that Vladimir Putin and his regime have been promoting. But on the other, it goes even further than the Kremlin has. And that in turn, Druz says, means that the current Russian left’s arguments should be addressed as absurd.

            The Russian left says that the Bolsheviks never played any role in overthrowing the monarchy in 1917, while the CPSU always made them central players. It says that the Reds had nothing to do with the start of the Russian Civil War while the CPSU always said that the Reds were heavily involved in that “war of liberation.”

            The Russian left denies the deaths from collectivization and the mistakes in fighting World War II, while the CPSU acknowledged both and denounced Stalin for both. And the left insists that there was no discrimination in Soviet times, while even the CPSU was forced to acknowledge that there was.

            But perhaps the most offensive claim by the left today is that the Communists supported the Russians. In fact, Druz argues, it was the Bolsheviks who promoted the non-Russians and even discriminated against the ethnic Russians; and it was the CPSU but not the Russian left of today who condemned that.

            The commentator makes these points on a Russian nationalist website, but it is quite likely that the current Kremlin campaign against the Russian left will draw on them because the hyperbole and absurdity of the positions of the Russian left about the Soviet past are things that will help the Putin regime suppress this form of opposition.