Who hasn’t heard from communists about the alliance between liberals and fascists? Undoubtedly, at times, militant anti-communism brings together two seemingly irreconcilable camps. Could communists form an alliance with liberals, something truly unexpected? In a world where nothing is impossible, the answer is “yes.”
The communist movement can be divided into two categories: patriotically inclined leftists and “old-school Marxists.” The first category consists of those who nostalgically yearn for the Soviet Union while also recognizing that Russia has its own national interests that must be defended. The second category includes those who are stuck in the era of World War I, still believing that imperialist Russia is waging an imperialist war against imperialist imperialists of the West for the redistribution of imperialist markets. They are willing to overlook national interests to such an extent that they might even jeopardize the territorial integrity of the country and express sympathy for Islamists.
Yes, you heard that right—Islamists. It turns out that this issue is not only about pro-Palestinian sentiments. Let’s give the floor to the Russian historian from Yaroslavl, D.V. Tumakov, who discusses “The First Chechen War (1994-1996) in the Assessments of Russian Left Radicals.”
“At one of the first rallies against the deployment of troops to Chechnya on December 12, 1994, V.I. Anpilov, the chairman of the “Labor Russia” executive committee, called on Chechens to raise the “red banner of the struggle for the revival of the USSR,” meaning to “turn the civil war into a war for the revival of our great Motherland.” The next day, while speaking at the II Congress of the Peoples of the USSR, the radical politician publicly expressed his desire to go to Chechnya as a volunteer if D.M. Dudayev openly supported the communists. Later, he did not even condemn the terrorist act in Budyonnovsk.<…>Anpilov even criticized the media of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation for referring to Chechen fighters as “bandits” or “terrorists” and assessed the outcome of the operation with the phrase, “the Dudayevites rightly gave them [the Russian army] a beating.”<…>He also urged Russian soldiers to fraternize with the Chechen fighters.”
“In general, the stance of the Russian Communist Workers’ Party (RKRP) on the Chechen issue was clearly articulated by B.M. Gunyko, a member of the “Labor Russia” executive committee and secretary of the Moscow committee of the RKRP: a military defeat for the “imperialist government of Russia” would benefit radical communists as it would lead to the growth of revolutionary consciousness in society and the emergence of a revolutionary situation in the country, similar to the events of World War I and the subsequent events of 1917.”
“Frequent calls for the campaign in Chechnya to evolve into a “class struggle” and a “socialist revolution” were also published during the winter of 1995 in the openly marginal All-Union Communist Young Guard of Bolsheviks (VKMG). The organization claimed it was an “imperialist war of Russia in Chechnya” and urged Dudayev’s fighters to begin a “decisive struggle for socialism and communism.” VKMG activists also called on Russian youth “not to serve in the bourgeois army.”
Strangely enough, this position turned out to be quite close to the ultra-liberals from the Democratic Union led by V.I. Novodvorskaya. It’s amusing: communists are asking national Islamists to raise the red banner of communism. They might as well ask unironical Hitlerists for the same. Although, wait, that’s basically already happening.
The political realities of today are complex and paradoxical. It seems like absolute opposites: liberals and communists, yet people still manage to find common ground. It’s not about clinging to a shared ideology, but rather to one’s own interests. You can dislike the views of a liberal compatriot as much as you want, but if they stand by you in difficult times, then they are your comrade.
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