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| Return to: Left History: a digital archive | Return to: Say no to imperialist wars! | Return to: NATO-Yugoslav War Internet Resources |
The Prussian military strategist Karl von Clausewitz said that "war is the continuation of politics by other means." This spring's rain of missiles and bombs on the people of Yugoslavia was an armed continuation of the economic scorched-earth policy that Wall Street and the International Monetary Fund have imposed on all of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics.
There is vast sympathy for Yugoslavia in the former Soviet Union. Mass demonstrations closed the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during the bombing. Rocket-propelled grenades hit it too.
The traditional May 9 marches marking the Soviet people's 1945 victory over Nazi Germany turned into mass demonstrations in support of Yugoslavia. In Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and other former Soviet cities, tens of thousands wore "NATO target" signs and carried Yugoslav flags.
In Leningrad a human blockade prevented delegations from NATO states from bringing flowers to the burial site of 400,000 Leningraders who died during the Nazi siege.
Thousands of Russians volunteered to fight in Yugoslavia.
The Western media ascribed this sentiment to culture and religion. In both Russia and Yugoslavia most people are Slavs and Eastern Orthodoxy is the dominant religion.
But there is also a common heritage of anti-Nazi resistance and socialist revolution. And there is the knowledge that Yugoslavia was targeted for destruction by the same monopoly capitalist forces that have impoverished the people of the former USSR.
Bombing Yugoslavia was also meant to send a message to the people of the former Soviet republics not to defy the dictates of Washington and Wall Street, either in the coming Ukrainian and Russian elections or in the streets.
The Moscow politicians appear to have gotten NATO's message, as shown by their apparent haste to accommodate the International Monetary Fund's demands. But in industrial towns and cities across the former Soviet Union, there are stirrings of class struggle.
The workers of the former Soviet Union also understand the Pentagon's message. A striking worker told Workers World, "We know if we start a new revolution, we will face NATO strikes."
But for them, like the people of Yugoslavia, resistance is a matter of survival.
"We have been fighting for survival since 1989," an ore processor told Workers World. Her plant is in the town of Salir, deep in the taiga forest in the Kuzbas region of Siberia. The plant is surrounded by gold fields. But the workers there, mostly women, are hungry.
"We were promised that if our plant was privatized, we would make a lot of money. But now most of the plant is closed, and we are starving. We haven't gotten our full wages since 1995.
"Before 1989 we had a lot of goods, we had free health care, free education. Now we can't afford soap and all we eat is the potatoes we grow. Last spring we were desperate. People were eating dogs."
A year ago, however, the workers' movement in Russia was reborn when coal miners blocked the trans-Siberian railway. The U.S./NATO attack on Yugoslavia has further shown these workers that they have but one choice: not the illusory capitalist prosperity promised by the counter-revolution, but the class struggle against the capitalist bloodsuckers.
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