Tell me, please, what is the policy of your party, the KPRF, in Russia now? What are your short-term goals now, what is the main issue and so on? The Communist Party of the Russian Federation is a very important opposition party in the State Duma?
We promote our line, which is fundamentally different from that of the ruling regime. Our programme involves changing the very foundations of society. If Russia is now a capitalist state with certain ambitions on the international stage, but our line is different. We assume that the capitalist foundations of society must be replaced by socialist, socially oriented ones. We believe that the main question of the economy is the question of ownership, because now private ownership prevails in our country, state-monopoly capitalism reigns supreme. Of course, there should be state and collective ownership and it should be managed according to a strict plan, not on the basis of market relations.
It is absolutely clear that on this new economic basis that we are promoting, completely different superstructural institutions must be created. The functioning of the state mechanism must be different, the social and cultural sphere must be different, and so on. This is our main contradiction with the present government, because it does not want to change anything. They are quite comfortable with the oligarchic capitalism that has arisen as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rejection of the socialist system. They are also happy with what the country's leadership is doing now. They are trying to make small changes, but only so that nothing fundamental changes. Yes, some things are improving, and that is hard to deny.
Recently, the tax system has improved and some of our proposals that we have been cultivating for God knows how many years, that we need a progressive tax, have finally been taken into account. Yes, some of it has been reflected in government policy, some steps have been taken, but it still has a very limited effect. In our view, it is not enough, and although our proposals have found some reflection in government policy, we cannot stop there. We must change the situation very seriously, change it further and much more thoroughly. In brief, it looks like this.
You recently initiated a rally at the Boris Yelentin Center. What was the purpose of this gathering?
First, a little digression. The fact is that since roughly the beginning of the Kovid era, you cannot hold rallies in Russia. First, under the pretext of combating the coronavirus, restrictions were imposed that made it impossible to hold mass events. Then it seemed very convenient for the authorities to suppress any social and political activity. Now, under the pretext of the difficult situation, restrictions are being imposed on the holding of mass social and political events, etc. This all looks rather curious, of course, especially as pro-government rallies are indeed allowed, they do take place, and if you want to organise an event in support of, say, the President, you are unlikely to encounter any obstacles.
At the same time, at every opposition meeting where there is any objection to the policies of the current government, we immediately receive a decree from the mayor of Moscow, who has already lifted all restrictions except one. - to hold mass events. All under the same pretext of a supposedly raging coronavirus. This means that what you have said is strictly speaking not a rally, but a meeting with MPs, and unfortunately this is the only form that still allows people to gather in some way, to look at each other, to express an opinion and to organise at least some form of collective action in the street. Because it is practically impossible to meet on the street on a political topic other than in the form of a meeting with an MP or MPs. Only the status of a deputy, and not just any deputy, not a municipal or city deputy, but the status of a member of the State Duma, allows us to do that. And indeed, we held such a meeting at the place where they plan to open a branch of the Yeltsin Center in Moscow.
The Yeltsin Centre itself is located in the city of Yekaterinburg, formerly Sverdlovsk (Yeltsin was born there). A huge complex was opened there, which cost the state treasury a huge sum - more than 7 billion rubles. This is the Boris Yeltsin Centre. There is a very large exhibition there, there are many exhibitions, and most of them are quite tendentious, one-sided. The general leitmotif is that Russia lived for a thousand years in darkness, in lawlessness, our history was very dark, everything in it was bad, in the tsarist part, in the Soviet period in general, nothing was worse than the Soviet period, according to them. But with the advent of democracy, capitalism, with the advent of Boris Yeltsin, supposedly a new side of our history began, supposedly freedom, democracy and so on began to prevail.
It's all very one-sided, and our party there in Sverdlovsk is actively fighting for the Yeltsin Center to be closed down and rebuilt for some other, more useful use, for whatever: a palace of creative arts for young people, a social facility, say, any other function would be better than what we have now. But unfortunately, the authorities not only do not want to close it down, but they want to open a branch in Moscow, in a former nobleman's residence, it is such a beautiful, good building, it is being restored now, and we do not agree with these plans, we think that it is definitely not a monument that should be immortalised, because the Yeltsin era is above all an era of betrayal, of the destruction of our power, of the death of our country. So we've had several of these meetings and it seems that there has been some progress, now they are no longer talking about giving this branch of the Yeltsin Centre the whole property, they are beginning to convince us that it will be some small room with a few exhibits, some small gallery and so on.
On the one hand, it's probably not bad that they're not going to build a whole building on it, but only a small part of it, but again, we still disagree, because Yeltsin is clearly a very negative figure in our history, the vast majority of our citizens are very sceptical about him, and even those who once voted for him no longer support this figure, so popular opinion is on our side here, but the authorities are staying the course and have not yet abandoned their plans, so this is the subject of another confrontation.
Yes, if I'm not mistaken, you also gave a speech in the State Duma about the Russian philosopher Ilyin. Your speech was basically against inciting fascism. Can you comment on that, what was the content of your speech?
Because in the spring of this year, there was a scandal at one of Russia's relatively large universities. The management decided to create such an institution within this university as a higher political school, which in itself is not bad, but they decided to give this institution the name of the philosopher Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin. This is a very odious figure in Russian history, in the history of Russian philosophy. In general, he came from quite radical White Guard positions, he was characterized by militant, implacable and total anti-Bolshevism, he was a categoricalopponent of communist ideas, he was basically for class society.
And if we look at his proposal for how he thought the Russian state should be organised after the fall of Bolshevism, and he lived his whole life with the dream that Soviet power would finally end, we see there the view that there should be a system of limited rights, a kind of bourgeois democracy, but not for everyone. And in short, democracy can be called very conditional, strictly speaking, he was for a kind of moderate fascist, Francoist dictatorship. And of course, when they decided to name a department at a major university after such a person, well, it caused considerable outrage among the student and faculty community.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time that attempts have been made in Russia to perpetuate the memory of various odious or, to put it mildly, controversial figures: In St. Petersburg they once tried to restore a memorial plaque to Mannerheim, in the Rostov region there is a monument to a Cossack ataman very similar to Krasnov, who served the Nazis, and so on - there are many examples, they are only isolated touches, and therefore when they took it up, none of these cases had as great a resonance as the story of Ilyin.
And the fact that it has reached a very high level there, and that a number of prominent statesmen have commented on it, starting with Volodin, the Chairman of the State Duma, Presidential spokesman Peskov, and many others, generally shows that this issue has reached a completely new level, so to speak, which was not the case before. Accordingly, our party was, of course, on the side of those who opposed this centre being named after Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin. There were a number of parliamentary questions from my side and from our colleagues, especially Vladimir Isakov, our MP who heads the youth movement (Komsomol). I have to say that my speech in the State Duma naturally caused the representatives of the authorities literally great heartburn, they began to criticise and condemn me in every possible way, but they could not answer anything in terms of content and argument, because Ilyin's pro-fascist views are absolutely obvious, one simply cannot argue with that, well, in any case, and we never heard any serious arguments from our opponents on this matter.
This story actually continues in connection with the fact that the rector of the Russian State University of the Humanities, Rector Bezborodov, has finally left his post, he is actually fired, but so far this centre has not been renamed, that is, it still bears Ilyin's name. Of course, in one form or another, the struggle will continue in this respect, but the other thing that is important is that in connection with Ilyin's story a very wide circle of people, representatives of the student body, who take anti-fascist positions, has formed, I mean, it wasn't so visible before, but against the background of this story, groups of young people have started to emerge in many universities by self-organisation, who have joined the campaign against the perpetuation of Ilyin's memory and have taken these anti-fascist positions.
Well, of course, a certain stage of this struggle has passed, the story of Ilyin has somewhat receded into the background, but those initiative groups of anti-fascist conviction, they have not disappeared, by the way, in this room where we are now, in this hall, there was a conference of representatives of such initiative student groups, an anti-fascist conference, where it was stated that they would continue their anti-fascist work and that it would be broader than just the fight against the Ilyin Centre, it would also concern social aspects, especially the fight, for example, for an increase in the wages of the students of the Ilyin Centre.
In my opinion, it was a good initiative that we as a party supported. It is important that the Chairman of our Party, Gennady Andreyevich Zyuganov, also supported this campaign at the plenary session of the Central Committee. He was quite clear and quite harsh in his assessment of Ivan Ilyin, in fact he described him as one of the ideologues of fascism, so I think we did absolutely the right thing, and above all we were consistent, we spoke from communist and anti-fascist positions. That's why it's such an important story, especially against the background that Russia is now involved in a special military operation and one of the slogans is to fight against Ukrainian Nazism, which objectively exists and generally we have encountered it many times, and against that background it looks very strange, to put it mildly, of course, that in Russia itself somebody is trying to glorify fascist figures.
Question about anti-fascism. The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, they sent the Azov Battalion on a tour of Europe, in such a theatrical format, to indoctrinate the society in Europe that they are really just an elite army unit. Your view on these processes, like the current fascism in Europe?
On the recent anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, an international anti-fascist forum was held in Minsk, initiated by our party, and attended by representatives of a number of European, left-wing, communist and workers' parties, as well as representatives of the former USSR. So in the final resolution of this forum there was, among other things, the thesis that the Western democracies had actually degenerated into autocracies. That is to say, the bourgeois democracy, which was a kind of calling card of the Western world, where, all other things being equal, certain elements of freedom were actually present, is long gone.
In the West, there has long been quite strict censorship, we see that there are huge problems with media freedom, we see that bourgeois democracy is increasingly showing itself in all its glory and that, as the classics of Marxism again said, democracy is only for those who have capital, and everyone else is forced to play the role of statists or find themselves in some kind of dependent position. And we see that elements of fascism in political regimes are becoming more and more widespread. Those features that are usually emphasized in fascist regimes are increasingly found in the United States and in many countries, especially in Western Europe. This is, of course, a very worrying trend, because we realise that at one time, in the 1930s, fascism in the West did not emerge out of nowhere, and in many countries fascists actually came to power legally or semi-legally.
This means that Europe has unfortunately seen fascists come to power, and a large part of the population has accepted this. Let us not forget this and remember that it still leaves some ground for this ideology. Because wherever there is capitalism, especially capitalism in its imperialist phase, there is fertile ground for fascism, and the threat of the fascialisation of regimes is very real. Against this background, it is unfortunately not surprising that many ruling circles in European countries have supported Ukraine, where people of openly chauvinist, radically nationalist convictions have come to power, for whom fascism is not only not an unconditional evil, but who speak of it as something not only permissible, but even quite possible and right.
We can see that a certain part of the army in Ukraine is actually fighting under Nazi flags, the very battalion you mentioned, the Azov battalion, which, by the way, is considered a terrorist organisation in Russia, whose symbols and everything else is banned. So an inquisitive person who is not lazy enough to go on the Internet and enter a few symbols into a search engine will very easily find a huge number of photographs showing soldiers of this battalion with flags of the Third Reich, with SS symbols, with all sorts of transformed forms of Nazi symbols, from the rotunda to all sorts of runes. The fact that this public is fascist and that Nazi views are the norm for them is quite obvious.
In other words, it is a very specific nationalist armed formation created with the direct support of the Ukrainian state and the oligarchy behind it. The fact that they are now trying to somehow whitewash this black fascist dog and show that they are supposedly not such bad people, and somehow even dragging them around Europe, just shows how far they have fallen morally, not only in the ruling circles of Ukraine itself, but how far the European elite, who agree with this, who approve of it, have fallen. For us, of course, this is extremely regrettable, because we believe that Europe is certainly one of the world's centres in the socio-cultural sense.
Europe has given a lot to the world, and the fact that it is now slipping back into this fascist mire not only does not add to its beauty, but also creates a great danger, because fascism in our concept is militant capitalism, and the fascisation of political regimes in the West is one of the factors that may bring a new great war closer not only in Europe, but in the whole world. Unfortunately, we are now forced to state that the capitalist world seems to have moved from a relatively peaceful phase of its existence to a relatively non-peaceful phase, international tensions have risen sharply and many people are already talking about the fact that a third world war, including a war using nuclear weapons, is not far off; it is a great danger and must be prevented.
You mentioned earlier about the Special Military Operation (SMO). The KPRF was the initiator of the recognition of the DNR and LNR in the State Duma. How did this process take place?
When the coup d'état took place in Ukraine and the events that would later become known as the "Russian Spring" began, the people of Crimea did not accept this new power in Kiev. The people of Crimea opposed this and expressed their wish to be together with Russia. We welcomed the return of Crimea to its home port, but, unlike the Russian authorities, we were in favour of returning the original Russian territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics to Russia according to a similar scenario. Let me remind you that many people still forget this, but the Donbas was the industrial heart of the Russian empire, and there is even a poster from the time of the Great October Socialist Revolution, 'Donbas - the heart of Russia', where it is depicted as the heart pumping the blood vessels of the economy, and there are connections from it to all parts of the European part of Russia.
This is our long history and it is no coincidence that the vast majority of the population there is Russian, Russian-speaking. And in fact, when it was subsequently decided to change the administrative boundaries of Donbass when it was annexed to Ukraine, the Soviet authorities, among other things, addressed the problem of strengthening this proletarian component among the population of Ukraine, because it remained a predominantly agrarian country. And without the proletarian Donbass it would have been much more difficult to unite the interests of the Russian proletariat and the Ukrainian peasantry. But this administrative change unfortunately, after a long time, was reflected in this difficult situation where the Soviet Union had ceased to exist, and these territories remained annexed to Ukraine, that is, remained as the territory of another state. However, the Russian population did not go anywhere and, in general, as in Crimea, the vast majority was naturally ethnically Russian and gravitated towards Russia, well, for quite objective reasons.
You were one of the first, your party, the KPRF, if I'm not mistaken, to send humanitarian aid? Yes, because when the riots started there and the uprising of the people against the pro-fascist, Nazi, new Ukrainian government, we were really the first, our party was the first to support the indignation of the people. We thought that it was absolutely right for these regions to gain independence from Ukraine, and from the very beginning we were in favour of this scenario, we believed that the right of the people to self-determination was not abolished and that the people of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics would have every right to gain independence and to separate from Ukraine.
Unfortunately, this position did not find active support from the Russian authorities and institutions at the time. Moreover, it is now clear, and this is generally no secret, and even the highest representatives of the state are talking about it, that the Minsk agreements were in fact an attempt to return these territories to Ukraine, that is, to push them back into the arms of the new Ukrainian authorities. At the same time, the shelling of Donetsk and Luhansk has not stopped, there have been relatively large casualties, and throughout this time, our side has not only continued to consistently defend the independence of the DNR and LNR from these very positions, but has also provided a great deal of humanitarian aid.
We are not the ruling party, we don't have such great resources, but nevertheless, using our connections, using the patriotic enthusiasm of our citizens, we have collected humanitarian aid, food, medicine, clothes, textbooks in Russian, much, much more. We have been sending it regularly for many years, just recently the 127th humanitarian convoy of our party went there. I have to tell you, and I do not want to boast, but at a certain stage, in 2014-2015, we were actually the only ones supporting Donbas, and our humanitarian aid was a very important factor for the people and the defenders of Donbas. When there was a blockade by the Ukrainian regime, when the shelling was most intense, when the humanitarian situation was very difficult, including the interruption of food, pensions, social benefits and medicines, at a certain stage it was our party's contribution that helped to provide humanitarian aid to the people and defenders of Donbas quite significantly. We simply saved many people from starvation. So this is our principled position, we have always been in favour of integration processes in the post-Soviet space, because from the very beginning we considered the break-up of the Soviet Union to be completely unjust and, moreover, illegal. After all, you know that at one time there was a referendum on the preservation of the USSR on this issue - at that time the majority of people said "Yes!" Union.
A few days ago I read a statement by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who said: "Blocking humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip may be "moral and justifiable" even if it leads to the death of two million civilians who will starve to death." Here is a politician's statement addressed directly to an Israeli minister representing a country that has experienced fascist genocide and holocaust in the last century. Can we comment on this?
In reality, of course, it looks, to put it mildly, frightening when the leaders of the Jewish state speak from such radically nationalist and, as it turns out, actually partly solidaristic positions with fascist methods of leadership and political struggle. Unfortunately, there is no inoculation against fascism in anyone.
Again in the West, when the conflict in Ukraine broke out, there was also the informational throwing of the thesis that Zelensky is a Jew. That is, according to this narrative, there can't be fascism in Ukraine, but frankly, it's hard to imagine a sillier view. In this sense, one cannot but condemn the very harsh and radical stance of the Israeli leadership towards the Palestinian population, and I would like to remind you that since the days of the Soviet Union, our position has generally remained adamant: that the Palestinians have every right to establish a Palestinian state, and that the methods by which Israel is carrying out the so-called conquest of the living space are totally unjust, not very different in nature from fascism, and in this sense, the fight against radical Zionism, which is the only way to fight fascism.
I don't think I'm sinning against the truth when I say that the Zionist circles that run the Jewish state today are coming from these radical positions, and therefore what is happening in Palestine is of course a humanitarian disaster. They are simply destroying the population there by all sorts of methods, from purely military bombing to blockades, to restricting the supply of food and medicine. All of this simply looks monstrous, and the fact that many Western leaders are turning a blind eye to it and pursuing a very monstrous policy is equally monstrous. For example, in connection with the special military operation in Ukraine, they are trying to portray Russia in the blackest demonic colours, spitting on and denigrating everything that is happening there, while events connected with the Palestinian population are taking place on Israeli territory, while the situation there is a thousand times worse and even qualitatively completely different.
Russia does not set itself the task of doing something about the Ukrainian population there, rather the opposite, although it is not always easy there, but it is still assumed that the Ukrainian people are in no way the enemy of the Russian people, that the Ukrainian people themselves are in many ways the deceived victims of fascist criminals. Israel has a fundamentally different policy; in fact, it simply wants to get rid of a population that it has alienated and generally suppressed and tortured by the most brutal methods. However, the leaders of the European Union and the United States are acting in accordance with a double morality and hypocrisy: for them, it is Russia and only Russia that is committing horrors, and they simply turn a blind eye to Israel's fundamentally different, far more serious and worse policy towards the Palestinians.
The political situation in Israel is not simple. Zionism as a mainstream political movement naturally has several subtypes. There are relatively peaceful forms of Zionism, many even claiming that it is merely a movement for the return of Jews to Israel, but there are also radical forms of Zionism which generally differ little from fascism in the true sense of the word. Our party, the CPRF, understands all this, and our sympathies are of course with the Palestinian people. Although there are healthy forces in Israeli society, the local Communist Party, for example, also speaks from a class position and generally condemns the militaristic circles of the Israeli state and favours reconciliation between peoples.
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