Groucho Marxism

The UK and other European nations are currently being urged to prepare for potential conflict with Russia. In a recent speech, NATO chief Mark Rutte said that Russia could attack a NATO country in the next five years. According to Rutte, “Russia is already escalating its covert campaign against our societies,” and we “must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured.” The problem with these statements is that they are impossible for the layperson to verify, so Rutte is essentially asking for us to take his word for it. It is tempting to invoke Hitchens’ razor – ‘that which is asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence’ – and simply dismiss Rutte’s claims. But let’s be generous and examine whether there is anything behind them.

Rutte would probably argue that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is evidence that it is willing to attack other nations. It is conceivable that once Putin is finished in Ukraine, he may turn his sights to other nations that have significant Russian minorities – particularly Latvia and Estonia, whose populations are over 20% ethnically Russian. These nations were of course once part of the USSR, the dissolution of which was famously described by Putin as a the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe.” And Putin is not alone; most Russians view the Soviet Union’s dissolution with regret. According to the Wilson centre, a US-based think tank dedicated to research and policy discussions on global issues, many Russians believe the Soviet era was Russia’s best historical period, offering prosperity and opportunity.

This nostalgia for the Soviet Union amongst Russians flies in the face of the standard Western narrative that capitalism is a superior system to socialism. But what do people in other former Soviet republics think? Something that isn’t often talked about in the west is that a referendum on the future of the Soviet Union was held in 1991, in which people from different republics were asked to vote on whether they wanted to keep the union together. The vote was boycotted by the authorities of in Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova, but turnout was over 80% across the rest of the Soviet Union. In every republic where people were allowed to vote – Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and the central Asian republics – they voted overwhelmingly in favour of preserving the union.

All the republics that boycotted the vote organized their own referendums, and in each of these people voted overwhelmingly in favour of leaving the Soviet Union. So it seems pretty safe to say that the people of Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova do not want to go back to being part of a union ruled by Moscow. This highlights a qualitative difference between these states on the one hand and Ukraine on the other. Whereas the former have long histories that are independent of Russian rule, the histories of Ukraine and Russia have always been intertwined. It is well-known that Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, used to be the capital of an East Slavic state named Kievan Rus’ which is considered the precursor of modern-day Russia.

I am not in any way trying to justify Putin’s invasion of Ukraine here. The point is that just because Putin invaded Ukraine, it does not necessarily follow that he will seek to invade other former Soviet states – and it definitely doesn’t follow that he will seek to invade other European nations. So it seems there is little evidence to back up Rutte’s assertion. At this point we make invoke another principle popularized by the American physicist Carl Sagan: ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ Rutte’s claim that we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured is certainly extraordinary, but the evidence for it certainly isn’t, so it can be legitimately dismissed.

Why, then, are we being prepared for war? I can think of a few reasons. The first reason is to create a distraction. Things are not going well in Europe at the moment; the cost of living crisis is really beginning to bite, and people are looking for explanations as to why their lives are getting worse. It is helpful for the ruling class in Europe to create bogeyman on which to blame all of the continent’s problems as it distracts from the real problem – namely, the neoliberal capitalist system we are all being forced to live under. The second reason is to do with Europe’s increasing irrelevance on the global stage. The ruling elite of Europe thinks that if it can convince people they under imminent threat of war, they will be more willing to allow their governments to rearm, which will in turn grant them more power.

The third reason relates to the role and relevance of NATO. It seems pretty clear that the eastward expansion of NATO was the trigger that led to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Again, I am not in any way justifying the invasion, the responsibility for which clearly sits primarily with Russia. But NATO must be held responsible too, as if it hadn’t expanded eastwards the invasion would never have happened. If people realized that NATO had largely manufactured this situation itself, they would be a lot less likely to support the alliance. It is in NATO’s interest to exaggerate the Russian threat as that justifies both its eastward expansion and its continued existence. This is probably the key reason for Rutte’s bellicose outburst.

Unfortunately, Rutte’s statement has been unquestioningly parroted across the mainstream media, to the extent that many people across Europe probably believe that war with Russia is imminent. I suspect NATO’s strategy is to keep making this prediction until it eventually becomes self-fulfilling. It is important therefore that we on the left counteract NATO’s narrative and call out this dangerous warmongering nonsense, before it’s too late.