We publish an inofficial translation of an article by the Brazilian Newspaper A Nova Democracia that was sent to us.
Victory Day and Putin's speech
On the 9th of May, the Victory Day of the Soviet Union over German Nazism, the present ultra-reactionary head of Russian imperialism, Vladimir Putin, gave a speech extolling the date. The reactionary made comparisons between the immortal heroism of Soviet communists, soldiers and citizens and his dirty war of imperialist aggression over Ukraine. That glorious moment in human history was starring Soviet soldiers, many of Ukrainian origin.
The 11-minute speech expressed, in its content, the defence of the Russian invasion over the Ukrainian nation. Putin related the present invasion to the 9th of May 1945 to make it seem that the "bravery" of the Russian soldiers in the struggle to "denazify" Ukraine - as "humanist" imperialist rhetoric to justify their rapacious interests - has a relationship with the purposes that mobilised the working class and all the peoples of the world, especially the Soviet, to shed their blood for the cause of defeating German aggression against the first socialist fatherland in the history of mankind.
Despite the historical falsehood that the statement expresses, it should first be pointed out that Putin's speech at the current point in the war is made to seize the moment and intensify the motives of the war in Russian public opinion with a view to increasing the recruitment of soldiers. In the weeks leading up to the speech, reactionary analysts linked to other imperialist powers pointed out that the intention to associate the present Ukraine with Hitler's Germany and to compare his intentions to Stalin's glorious Soviet Union played a key role as a means of demonstrating strength.
The military forces of Russian imperialism
According to CNN, the Yankee press monopoly, of the 20 generals in the front command of the Russian invasion, at least seven were killed. The first major casualty of the Russian imperialist army was Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky, in charge of the 7th Airborne Division. Later died Russian Lieutenant-General Yakov Rezantse; Major-General and first deputy commander of the 41st army of the Central Military District of Russia, Vitaly Gerasimov; Major-General Andrei Kolesnikov, commander of the 29th Combined Armed Army; Major-General Oleg Mityaev, commander of the 150th Russian Motorized Marine Division; the commander of the 331st Russian Parachute Regiment, Colonel Sergei Sukharev (a death that was exposed on Russia's own state television) and Lieutenant Colonel commander of the 8th Combined Arms Squadron, Andrey Mordvichev, who was the seventh senior officer killed. The story ends by pointing out that there is still at least one further important casualty, and that is the deputy commander of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, Captain Andrey Paly. Some of these were killed by the admittedly fascist and NATO and US funded Azov Battalion.
Meanwhile, reports of escapes are accumulating: in an audio supposedly intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence service, a Russian soldier expresses displeasure at the amount of troop leakage and casualties. Also according to CNN, this intercepted soldier states that "more Russians have died in Ukraine than in 4 years of the Chechen war". In the same audio, it is claimed that elite members of RosGvardia, Russia's National Guard, and Omon, the Special Police Force, have left Ukraine.
The exact number of soldiers of Russian imperialism who have been killed in Ukraine is uncertain. Officials of the imperialist body NATO stated in March that more than 15,000 Russians have died in the fighting. For its part, the Russian government does not provide updates. However, in mid-March, Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian tabloid, published - and later removed - a Russian Defence Ministry report recording 9,861 deaths of the country's reactionary armed forces in the war.
Deaths of Russian imperialists who control the biggest gas companies
As Putin tightens his speech by boosting the rhetoric of the war of aggression around his coterie, the number of major imperialist businessmen linked to the Russian state bureaucracy who have been found dead is growing.
There are four separate cases of billionaire Russians, linked to the Kremlin and the oil industry, who have died by suicide since the invasion began. Among them, Sergei Protosenya, a Russian oligarch who previously served as vice chairman of the Novatek gas company (Russia's second largest gas company), was found dead in a villa in Spain along with his wife and daughter. Oligarch Vladislav Avayev, former vice-chairman of the Russian bank connected to the country's largest oil company, was found dead in his luxury Moscow flat along with his pregnant wife and 13-year-old daughter. Russian oligarchs Alexander Tulyakov and Leonid Shulman were also found dead in their homes near St Petersburg days after the Russian invasion; both were former executives of state gas company Gazprom, and evidence at both scenes suggested suicide.
Shulman's body was also found with a suicide note, while Tulyakov was found by his partner hanging in his garage, according to British media monopoly Mirror. In March, billionaire businessman and Medstom wholesale company owner Vasily Melnikov was also found dead in his home in the city of Nizhny Novgorod alongside the bodies of his wife and two children. Police investigations have determined that this case was a "murder-suicide," according to Russian news agency Kommersant.
More recently, on the 1st of May, a GazProm executive, Andrei Krukowski, was found dead after allegedly falling off a cliff. He is already the sixth billionaire found dead since the Russian invasion began.
The accumulation of news about the increase in the number of deaths by suicide of Russian oligarchs expresses, in itself, that there reigns among the Russian imperialists not the "certainty of victory" but rather uncertainty, doubt. Without discounting that, in reality, what may have occurred were not simple suicides, but machinations with the participation of the Russian espionage apparatus linked to Putin's group, according to precedents, see the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, double spy, who acted for Russia and England, in 2018.
Historical falsehood
As usual in every period of invasion over Ukraine, the attempt by Russian imperialism and its boss, Putin, is to use the patriotic memory and pride of the Russian people and the Russian ethnic minorities in Ukraine to confuse the population about what is happening and legitimise the actions of the atomic superpower Russia. Besides claiming that the sovereignty of different nationalities is in danger in the Donbass and that the way to guarantee national sovereignty is that of proxy war under the baton of Russian imperialism, it denounces that the "enemies of Russia" have used terrorists and mercenaries to spread division and weaken the country internally - ignoring that in Ukraine the Russian policy has been exactly this.
Nevertheless, in Ukraine, reactionary nationalists linked to NATO and the US, running the government in coalition with fascists, seek to disconnect the resistance of the Ukrainian people to Ukrainian national liberation from the process of the October 1917 Socialist Revolution. For this, these sectors rely on the most ludicrous anti-communist campaigns of slander and prevarication on the fact that the Ukrainian people fought undaunted against the German invasion of Soviet territory at the time of the Great Patriotic War. Meanwhile, they rehabilitate figures like the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semite Stepan Bandera.
The confusion caused by appearances and facts leads part of "anti-yankee progressivism" to take, in its assessment of Ukraine, exactly the same position as the Yankees used to justify the terrible invasion of Afghanistan, that it is reaction which is in power and that a "progressive" foreign power must intervene directly in a formally independent nation to rid it of backward, fascist or feudal elements. What imperialist power to date has directly intervened in a subjugated country to rid it of any backwardness? On the contrary, all of them were, sooner or later, militarily defeated by the national resistances, even if under non-proletarian orientations.
Victory Day of 1945
Victory Day, in fact, as a consequence of the Great Patriotic War, came after the surrender of the lives of 27 million Soviets in resistance against all manner of vilification, barbarities and atrocities of the Nazis, a considerable number of these deaths being in resistance in the then Soviet Republic of Ukraine.
But the victory came propelled in particular by the leadership of Josef Stalin and the Communist Party, and by the warp of the Red Army, as an expression of an army that represented and had in its ranks, in a unity of steel, the workers and peasants.
Celebrating this passage in world history, a great epic of the struggle of the peoples for freedom and of the working class for its emancipation, cannot be done by those who pursue objectives opposed to those.
The glorious Red Army represented diametrically opposed interests of the present Russian imperialist army. It originated as a Bolshevik construct immediately after the Great October Socialist Revolution, forging itself in the Civil War against the White Army, defending the territory after the invasion of 14 imperialist powers and firmly expelling them. Later, its existence and development proved fundamental in the internationalist struggles, vanguarding the front line in the international anti-fascist brigades in various parts of the planet, as in the Spanish Civil War, as well as providing weapons and human material for anti-colonial wars.
It is worth mentioning, jointly, the inexorable contribution of the Red Army in supporting the Chinese Revolution against the Japanese invasion that began in 1937.
In 1941, the newspaper "New China" read: "During the four years of our holy war, Soviet aid became the most important and reliable foreign assistance. Later, there is the aid of the establishment of support in the Northeast region of China, in Manchuria, where, by the action of the Red Army, one of the most important revolutionary support bases is consolidated, which would serve to concentrate Chinese revolutionary troops led by the CCP and advance in the victory over Kuomintang, triumphing in 1949. In other words, the Red Army, as a consequence of the just policy of the Union of Socialist and Soviet Republics, provided a Herculean role as a military and political revolutionary support structure for all the revolutions of the world.
What, therefore, is similar in the present Russian Army to the great Red Army? Nothing. Its true approach could only be to the period of capitalist restoration in the USSR, in which from the 'secret report' of Kruschov at the 20th Congress and its two successors, modern revisionism was systematised which would drive social-imperialism where the 'Soviet Army' passed from being the army of the international proletariat in the service of the World Proletarian Revolution, an excellent supporter of the wars of liberation that took place in the world, to be used as an instrument of wars of prey and partition of the world, as was done in Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Cambodia, etc. , where unjust wars were promoted in the contest of world contention.
The day will come when, in fact, the Russian and Ukrainian peoples will again put up a fight as a real army to rekindle the revolutionary torch that the stormy winds of counter-revolution are trying to blow out, making the socialist counter-restoration prevail. At that moment, the masses of the two nations will see, with confidence, that the internationalist and solidary past, that what unified them in times of triumph of socialism, never perished. On the contrary, it has remained, and will serve as a fundamental tool for the final victory.
