I was arguing with someone in the V**shite subreddit because I’m a masochist. That was the first time I’d ever heard the term “little green men.” Apparently, not knowing who these guys are disqualifies me from having an opinion on Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, so I’m trying to learn. Who are these people? Did they do something awful and genocidal that I’m not aware of? Or is this person just talking out of their ass?
In my research, I encountered more of Stalin’s infamous deportations, namely that of the Crimean Tartars to the Central Asian SSRs. It seems downright ghoulish to me that he would do that, especially given the death and suffering it caused. Is anyone familiar with the rationale behind these deportations? Is it not as bad as it seems, or is this a black mark on his record? If it’s a black mark, how do we make sense of that while still upholding Stalin’s legacy?
And of course, whenever Russia comes up, the radlibs and the anarchists all flock together to insist that Russia is a colonizing, imperialist power. I’m aware that imperialism is something pretty specific, and not something that Russia can be rightfully accused of. Even so, I have to admit that I’m not fresh on what DOES count as imperialism. Will someone elucidate this for me?
Thanks in advance.
We acknowledge the good, the complex, and the errors without exceptionalizing them as uniquely moral or malicious. He achieved invaluable victories for the working class. His actions as a revolutionary were absolutely crucial to the founding of the first socialist state and he oversaw Europe’s liberation from 20th century fascism more than any singular leader, warts and all. And along the way he also made grave errors, made unsavory decisions, and even gave into some reactionary social views of the time.
We uphold Stalin’s legacy in a similar way anti-communists are able to somehow hold up the legacy of liberal leaders (although unlike libs, we gotta pursue our revolutionary history with rigorous honesty). FDR interned Japanese people en masse and proceeded over the most destructive civilian bombing campaign in history. George Washington was a horrific slaver and rapist, was famously cruel in his genociding of indigenous nations, and held the record for the most wealthy US president all the way up until Donald fucking Trump. Lincoln oversaw the largest mass execution of native people in the history of America. Andrew Jackson, the fucking successful prototype for Hitler, still has a talking robot showcased at Disney World.
I’m not saying this for whataboutisms sake, but how come communists and communist figures are expected to be 100% correct and righteous without hindsight when anticommunists and liberals are allowed to confidently uphold literal slavers and genocidaires as great, respectable men void of any criticism? Any honest study of Stalin will demonstrate that he was not some unique “despot” or whatever when compared to other Allied Power leaders.
Is anyone familiar with the rationale behind these deportations?
So, brutal calculus of war essentially?
Precisely what I was going to say and you said it 10 months ago. There is nuance here that needs to be understood rationally and through a historical materialist framework, even if it is uncomfortable and even callous.
The reason behind the deportations were that the Tatars were thought to collaborate with the Nazis. I understand that there were some that did and that something had to be done but I disagree with the way the deportations went. I don’t think that all the Tatars had to be displaced. I don’t understand why women, children and red army soldiers had to be relocated as well. And it doesn’t sit well with me that they couldn’t return until the 80s. I see it as a learning moment. To me, this doesn’t change much about Stalin, he had a positive influence on the world
My wife and I have been getting into Eurovision as of late, in 2016 Ukraine competed with the song “1944”. Which was about the 1944 deportation of Crimean Tatars to the CASSR, and about the 2014 invasion of Crimea. I was unfamiliar with the former event, so I did some digging.
As far as I can find, there was heavy suspicion that the Tatars were collaborating with the Nazis. The previous history of the Tatars backing the whites in the civil war didn’t help their case, and while facing the threat of Nazi resurgence / collaborationist resistance the logical choice was to send possible insurgents somewhere that they’d be unable to cause any real harm.
it’s not pretty history, but it did make sense. And no, it’s not the same as colonial displacement. For it to be on par with that, the intention would’ve needed to rely on replacing Tatars with Russians. It was simply a tool for reducing the risk of insurgency.
Alright…since others have addressed the topics of the Tartars and little green men, I’ll speak on imperialism.
In Imperialism, the Highest Stage, Lenin explains imperialism is a natural result of capitalism outgrowing it’s national border. Capitalism evolves by the process of owners of businesses extracting surplus labor value from workers (stealing wages) in order to expand their businesses and capture more markets and thus more value. When a business does this and expands into another nation(s) to control it’s resources to satisfy it’s business’ interests, that is imperialism. Invading another nation militarily in not by definition imperialism. It can be done for imperialist causes, or it can be done to secure the sovereignty and/or existence of a state (of a competing bourgeois’ interests) as is the case with Russia and Ukraine, among other reasons as well.
Ukraine’s government is a puppet government, a vassal state of the US bourgeoisie (who are the big bourgeoisie for those who have read Stalin). The US has expanded into Ukraine with the intention to capture markets in Russia due to their economic interests (they have expanded to such an extent they require capturing all of Russia to maintain itself…that is how parasitic the US economy is)
As well, he differentiates capitalism as viewed as occurring in a vacuum within each respective country, and capitalism occurring as it does - within the global economy as 1 interconnected system. As such, if 1 nation goes to expand and doing so results in being eaten by competing capitalist powers, the expansion is not successful. In another hypothetical scenario, regional alliances between imperial powers who are able to project their power but whose interests do not contradict (those who are physically able to work together without resulting in a conflict over mutually necessary resources) can occur. As well, alliances can break apart when this scenario changes from one of harmony to one of conflict. The latter is what happened to the Russian bourgeoisie when they worked together with the NED and CIA to counterrevolt the Soviet Union, and then the latter stabbed the former in the back and expanded into Russian territory. Really though, if the Russian bourgeois had read works and applied the learning, they would have understood this was going to happen and a partnership could never occur as a power vacuum left by the absence of a superpower (and thus a massive resurgence of previously unavailable resources becoming available) necessitated western expansion.
These are 2 of many many aspects he explains far better than I could. I highly recommend reading comrade Lenin’s works Imperialism, the Highest Stage. I can’t count how many times I reference this works in my day to day. It is considered by most to be an essential read for Marxists.
Link here
IIRC the little green men were soldiers in unmarked uniforms who occupied Crimea and the Donbass. The Russian government sent them, but they lie about their involvement. They were used to create the illusion of popular resistance against the Ukrainian government to help manufacture consent for the annexation.
It’s the liberal “no u” when anti-imperialists bring up the Maidan coup, since the little green men are rarely, if ever, acknowledged by anti-imperialists in the same way libs refuse to acknowledge the coup.
I see. That explains why I had never heard the term before. I was fourteen or fifteen when the annexation of Crimea occurred, so I certainly wasn’t paying attention. It makes sense why people here don’t talk about them. It really undermines this idea that people in these oblasts are welcoming the Russian liberators.
So is that just not true? Is there anything that actually supports the idea that people in Crimea and the Donbass want to reaffix to Russia? The elections were a landslide, and I doubt they were faked, but maybe they were? Were these just paramilitaries send to support existing rebels? This is kind of big news to me.
The “little green men” are a myth born out of propaganda lies of the western and pro-Maidan media. There is literally no evidence for this. What there is evidence for is massive defections from the Ukrainian military and police to the side of the rebels in Donbass at that time, as well as lots of regular people in Eastern Ukraine picking up weapons and joining the militias to defend their home towns from the fascists. There were a few volunteers who came over from Russia but they were an insignificant minority.
As for Crimea, Russia didn’t need to send anyone over there covertly, not only did they already have a military base in Crimea that they had been leasing from Ukraine ever since its independence, but Crimea was always an autonomous region of Ukraine with its own parliament and constitution, and it was its own local authorities who organized the referendum. Polls in Crimea have always showed a much greater affinity for Russia than for Ukraine among the population there, Russia didn’t need to manipulate anything.
So whenever you hear that expression know that the person using it is invoking a literal conspiracy theory.
In fact Russia at the time did just about whatever it could to sabotage the Donbass rebels, they attempted to stop people from Russia going to volunteer to help the Donbass rebels and even pressured the DPR forces into retreating from numerous cities that they had already managed to take over like Mariupol.
This resulted in violent reprisals by forces of the Kiev regime in these places. Nazis like the Azov battalion came from Western Ukraine, murdered, raped and tortured with impunity any real or suspected rebel collaborationists, and anyone who had supported the idea of referendums for autonomy in the regions that rejected the Maidan coup.
Moscow forced the Donbass republics into the Minsk agreements after they had just inflicted a crushing defeat on the Maidan regime at Debaltsevo, which robbed the rebels of all momentum and gave Kiev the time to be re-armed and trained by the West, to reform and expand their army integrating highly ideological Nazi units in such a way as to ensure that there would be no more defections like in 2014/15.
Why would Russia simultaneously engage in these alleged covert activities while everything else that they did undermined the same cause that they supposedly were instigating or fabricating?
The reality is the Russian government was very reluctant for a very long time about the idea of further secessions from Ukraine after Crimea, and you will hear this from lots of people in the Donbass who felt left abandoned by Russia and were waiting for eight years for some real help. And even that likely took a lot of political pressuring of the timid liberals in the Kremlin from the likes of Russia’s communists and other supporters of the Donbass.
The entire theory of the “little green men” makes no sense and directly contradicts the available evidence and the testimonies of the locals.
If you google “public opinion survey residents of the autonomous republic of crimea” you can find a survey made by US in 2013. There is one for Ukraine as well. The surveys tells atleast how ethnically Russian Crimea is and how divided rest of Ukraine is between the west and Russia.
I’m not sure beyond what I said in the previous comment. The results I found looking for it were lib publications. I haven’t seen it addressed in anti NATO stuff I’ve read in the same way the coup and shellings of the Donbass were.
Because it was a meme that was plastered around every liberal western media publication at the time. It was very clear that there was a concerted and co-ordinated campaign to spread this myth in order to delegitimize the anti-Maidan rebellions. But it had just about as much credibility as the “ghost of Kiev” meme.
I remember a number of other such stories from 2014 that were picked up by the media in the west - especially in Europe, you couldn’t escape this shit - it was everywhere, but they have since been sort of dropped or pushed out of the public consciousness because they turned out to not stand up to scrutiny.
The only people still parroting these ridiculous things are people who have been extremely deeply immersed in pro-Maidan propaganda. That’s how you can tell someone is not just a person who jumped on a popular bandwagon last year, but a hardcore cultist with deep Russophobia and liberal brainworms.
They are Europe’s equivalent to the kind of people who still to this day go on about Russiagate in the US.
