Above: miners in Donbass demonstrating against Washington’s Ukraine coup in 2014, photo by Ivan Sekretarev/AP
During the last ten years, as we’ve entered into a third world war, the global working class has been regaining the agency which it lost with the Soviet Union’s demise. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to upon discovering how big a role the Donbass region’s miners had in making Russia’s Ukraine action possible. From this piece of history, we can draw a connection to the growing anti-imperialist activities of workers throughout other countries, and figure out the direction all of this is going in. The logical conclusion of everything we’ve seen so far is for a new wave of revolutions to occur, helping the USA’s workers overthrow their own government; which will represent the loss of monopoly capital’s most valuable asset, and a turning point in humanity’s evolution.
This story of rekindled hope begins ten years ago in the former eastern Ukraine, which is now Russian territory. The U.S. had just carried out its fascist coup in Kiev, and the effort to resist this new Nazi state was being led by the proletariat. The coal miners, and the predominant parts of their union leadership, had an instrumental role in making the Donbass separatist effort succeed. This was reported even by the U.S. media, like in this article by Gabriela Baczynska of Reuters:
The protesters, from Ukraine’s largest mine workers’ union, waved DNR flags and banners that read “We will revive the power of the Donbass”. The Donbass, comprising coal mines and steel mills, is Ukraine’s industrial heartland. “I want peace and to be able to work and make money. I want the occupying soldiers to leave and return to their Kiev junta,” said Valery, who works at the state-owned Abakumova mine. He said the miners backed the DNR, which was declared after a makeshift referendum on May 11 condemned by Kiev and the West…Coal miner Vladislav said he hoped Russia would recognize the DNR as an independent state, adding: “But I can also live on bread and water if that is what it takes to win independence.” The Union of Mine Workers to which most of Wednesday’s protesters belong has close links to the Party of the Regions, which ousted president Yanukovich once led. Some independent miners’ unions distanced themselves from Wednesday’s rally in Donetsk. “We did not organize this action,” said Mykola Volynko, head of the Independent Miners’ Trade Union of the Donbass, on Ukrainian television.
These opposition forces within the unions, which sought to promote liberal pro-NATO ideas and capitulate to the fascists, weren’t able to gain enough support. Against the will of the east’s popular masses, their attempts to interfere were futile; the peoples of Crimea and Donbass overwhelmingly backed the efforts to break away from Kiev’s rule, and to then defend the east from invasion. And the miners from the remaining Ukrainian territory have since experienced things that show which side in this conflict the workers ought to side with.
As was reported by the CIA’s own Radio Free Europe in 2016, miners became outraged by the Ukrainian government’s refusal to compensate their labor. The fascist state has treated them like they’re worthless, even as their work has provided life-saving energy for a Ukraine that’s been ravaged by war. And though the fascists have terrorized Ukraine’s workers movement into submission, such developments make both Ukraine and Russia readier for the eventual socialist restoration. Under the surface of this conflict, a shift has been happening, wherein the proletariat has progressively turned the power balance back in its favor.
Within Russia, this process has looked like the workers applying pressure upon the state, and increasingly getting results. Russia’s labor movement has made such gains because the country’s state was not totally transformed by the anti-communist coup; however much destruction the Yeltsin camp inflicted, it couldn’t manage to demolish the entirety of the Soviet structure. How could it? All of today’s Russia exists on foundations that the Soviets built. And this has aided the mass efforts to turn Russia back into an anti-imperialist force. As observed by my fellow Marxist-Leninist AvantGarde1917:
The Russian economy predominantly adheres to capitalist principles, permitting private ownership and free enterprise to address gaps in numerous consumer sectors —both temporarily in the 1920s, and again temporarily today. Nevertheless, these contradictions signify a transitional phase rather than being the product of a definitive counter-revolution, unlike other former soviet republics—where the counter-revolution was final and successful.
In light of Putin’s electoral victory in 2024—reflecting widespread support and the highest turnout rate since 1990, his favorability among the working class is not incidental. This is a working class which largely, and increasingly, views the state leadership as one which represents their own interests and will. Putin’s policies, such as the re-nationalization of energy resources, increased state investment in infrastructure, the reinstatement of social protections such as healthcare and pensions, and indeed the Special Military Operation (SMO), have reinstated a sense of stability, pride, and dignity among a populace that endured significant hardship during the neoliberal crisis of the 1990s. The experiment with neoliberalism is viewed as having been attempted, rejected, and reversed.
It’s because neoliberalism has been progressively dismantled in Russia that the country was prepared to militarily defeat the imperialists; only through nationalizations could Russia have a war economy. Throughout the next eight years after Euromaidan, as Kiev collectively punished the Donbass people and the mass graves got larger, the revolutionary forces kept gathering strength. The evils which everyone was witnessing from Kiev showed everyone how right the Donbass separatists were, and how urgent was the task of combating fascism. Then in February 2022, when Kiev launched an offensive that would have left Donbass like Gaza, Russia’s government granted the proletariat its wish. The Donbass people were rescued.
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation pushed for intervention from inside the legislature, and that’s an important part within this story. But we can’t forget that the essence of these pressure efforts came from the bottom-up. From the most organic and raw desires of the working masses, who were seeing their people again being menaced by fascism. This fundamentally proletarian character of the Russian SMO’s origins refutes all arguments about the operation being “imperialist,” or being primarily driven by Russian capitalist interests. Such narratives erase the contributions of the workers who’ve been fighting to defeat fascism, and to repair the damages from the USSR’s fall.
All of this is crucial to understanding the broader, global revolutionary process that’s now underway. The SMO has been an indispensable catalyst within this process, and that’s because of its proletarian nature; Russia’s operation wouldn’t have happened in the first place without the Donbass proletariat. And neither would have all the positive impacts that the SMO has had on the anti-colonial struggle, the geopolitical struggle, or the class struggle within all nations.
From the Ukraine conflict, the imperialist bourgeoisie have gained an expansion for NATO and more war profits; yet these “victories” have cost them everything. The Global South has united against Washington, making BRICS greatly expand and the dollar further decline; the contradictions within the imperialist countries have intensified, provoking the workers in ways that have only begun; a growing antiwar backlash has come about, with our ruling class now scrambling to manage it. The Donbass miners created a domino effect that’s vastly accelerated the decline of the globe’s largest superpower. And this will ultimately bring an unprecedented series of revolts, inspired by Russia’s success in fighting back against monopoly capital.
This wave of rebellions has already begun; we’re just in the beginning stage of it. It started with the revolution in the Sahel, whose participants have outwardly shown they feel greater hope because of Russia’s efforts to combat colonial interests. Next came the Al Aqsa Flood Operation, a paradigm-shattering strategic triumph which was undertaken in part because Russia had shown such a victory was possible. In the spring of 2022, voices within Hamas were openly talking about the new hope that the SMO represented, showing Russia’s action had influenced the organization’s morale and military thinking. Every part in this great liberation story is connected, and the connections will become more apparent as the story continues to be written.
The imperialists are trying to write a story of their own, defined by division and instability. They’ve used the Zionist entity’s expanding genocide as a cover for new assaults upon civilization, activating their terror forces for another insurgency within Syria. And the crucial force behind this operation has been Turkey, the country whose leader is providing indispensable material assistance to the genocide.
As the “Israeli” settler colony continues to unravel, Washington will try to make Turkey its new primary tool for spreading chaos across west Asia. And the facilitators of these future proxy wars will claim to have been pro-Palestine all along, like how Erdogan does. Yet the regime’s lies don’t fool the Turkish workers, who are now staging their own uprising. They’ve been carrying out raids on ships that are bound for “Israel,” obstructing Erdogan’s aid to the genocide in any ways they can. Their example must inspire freedom-loving peoples all around the globe, like how the Donbass miners have. And though our media in the United States does all it can to hide developments like these, it’s worthwhile for us to bring this story to the workers here, to the best extent that we can. If we do the work, we’ll expand these recent revolutionary gains into where we live, and make our own contribution to a wider collective victory.
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