The last week of October saw a bizarre hostage-taking drama and its bloody aftermath in Moscow. The Chechen rebels took in about 800 civilian theatergoers as hostages to protest against Russian occupation of Chechnya and threatened to blow up them all along with about 50 of themselves unless the Russians leave the small conclave in South Central Russia within three days. Their act was a shortsighted armed misadventure on civilians meant to seek a military victory in the war theater of Chechnyan hills. The states that lose tens of thousands and millions in wars don’t bargain for the lives of a few hundred civilians to abandon a prized land. This abandonment cannot happen without a real war on the battlefield and the Chechnyans must learn this if they really want to drive out Russia from their land.

If Russia remained unnerved when it lost 300 in Moscow bomb blasts a few years ago and now more than a hundred lost in the rescue operation in the theater in October last, this is sufficient to come around the point that war can be won only in the war arena and not through the exchange of hostages. This kind of operation can only damage the popularity and justifiability of a right cause. It is another matter when the states indulge in carnages and wholesale deaths of civilians as they are reactionaries and they maintain their class rule at any cost and without any regard for human lives belonging not only to other classes but also to their own, so that, their rule as a class would not suffer. So to defend their class rule they would indulge in any crime against humanity. The bloody gas operation by Russia is a pointer to the fact where the theater was turned into a gas-chamber and the counting of the dead was suddenly stopped.

But the revolutionaries, who espouse the cause of all the oppressed classes of their nation cannot indulge in such acts as they have to unite not only their whole nation, but also, are not to make enemies of the classes of the oppressor nation that are not oppressing them. So any such acts that are directed against the people of the oppressed nation without any distinction harm their cause. On the other hand, the proletariat and other classes of the oppressor nation that are not part of the ruling classes must support the just cause of the oppressed nation and oppose the oppressive policies of their own ruling class. This proletarian internationalist policy of the oppressed classes of the oppressor nation must be upheld in practice for uniting with the oppressed of all the nations.

It is a misfortune that the great revolutionary traditions of the Russian proletariat of fighting against the Great Russian chauvinism are no more to be seen. The revolutionary legacy of the Bolshevik party and the October Revolution have been destroyed by decades of the revisionist rule and the Russian people now are paying for the crimes of the revisionists and their present heirs who now rule over Russia. If the Russian working class and other oppressed classes within Russia don’t revive their revolutionary traditions of fighting against their own great Russian chauvinism more such tragedies will come in future that will only further brutalize them. It is the need of the hour that the Russian proletariat stands up against their own imperialist bourgeoisie and speak up in defence of the right to self determination of nations now inhabiting the vast land of Russia which has reverted to the Czarist times of national oppression and keeping non-Russian nations in bondage.

Russia long ago abandoned respecting the rights of other nations when the revisionist rulers starting from Khrushchev turned the Soviet union once again into a prison of nations. The wages for revisionist policies have been very dearly paid up by the proletarian masses of Russia and all the nations of the ex-Soviet union in the form of the collapse and disintegration of the country in 1991. Now the very existence of Russian federation itself is being threatened by the imperialist policies of the present rulers.

Some of the Chechnyan rebels, who are blinded by their narrow nationalism and religious fanaticism, are misleading the national aspiration of the Chechnyan people into a fratricidal relationship with the Russian working class and the people of other non-ruling classes by indulging in such kinds of terrorist acts that only help the Russian imperialist bourgeoisie who want all the Russians united behind nefarious imperialist designs in Central
Asia and worldwide.

The Putin administration has declared after gassing the Theater that "should anyone as much as attempt to use such weapons against our country, Russia responds with measures commensurate with the threat and will strike at the terrorists, organisers of their crimes, their moral and financial sponsorers wherever they may be." Mark the words! These are no different from what the US imperialists are saying. There is no mention of the crimes of the Russian imperialist state and it is an attempt to threaten the neighbours or any potential opponent whom the Russian State would like to roll over in quest for its own hegemony.

Putin declared that he was prepared to use Russian armed forces abroad in pre-emptive strikes at other countries where "terrorists" found shelter or support. It is meant to threaten Georgia and other Central Asian countries lest they collaborate with Chechnyans, Daghestanis, Osset-ians who all want an end to the national oppression they are subjected to and to break free of Russia.

The Russian rulers say that they mourn their dead. This is the same ruse the US rulers resorted to after 9/11 to mobilize the US people behind the US imperialist war designs. Moscow too wants its impoverished people united behind it in its bid to secure Central Asian resources in the name of fight against terrorism.

October 29, 2002