Sergei Prokofiev Was One of the Soviet Union’s Great Composers

Sergei Prokofiev died 70 years ago today, overshadowed by the death of Josef Stalin, who had banned much of his work. But Prokofiev’s brilliant musical compositions have outlived him and still sound fresh and exciting to modern listeners.

Sergei Prokofiev, 1918. (Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)


BYSIMON BEHRMAN
03.05.2023
Jacobin

Two of the twentieth century’s most brilliant composers, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, produced some of their best work in the shadow of Josef Stalin’s dictatorship. Like so many Soviet writers and filmmakers, they attracted the ire of Stalin’s cultural commissars, precisely because of their creativity.

While Shostakovich lived to see the end of the worst excesses of Stalin’s rule, and thus greater space in which artists could express themselves, Prokofiev had the horrible luck to die on the very same day as Stalin in 1953. As a result, the Soviet press barely reported on the death of one of the country’s greatest artists.

Even his coffin had to be taken by hand through back streets from his Moscow apartment, as a hearse was prohibited from picking it up to make space for the crowds thronging the roads for Stalin’s funeral. But Prokofiev’s work has escaped from Stalin’s shadow to enjoy lasting and deserved renown.

Breakdown of Tradition

Sergei Prokofiev was a vital transitional figure in musical history. Born in 1891, he began to compose as a child prodigy in the shadow of the great romantic Russian tradition of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Alexander Glazunov, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov — the latter two were also teachers of the young Prokofiev at the Saint Petersburg Conservatoire in the first decade of the twentieth century.Sergei Prokofiev’s work has escaped from Stalin’s shadow to enjoy lasting and deserved renown.

At the same time, his maturation as a man and composer took place against the backdrop of the breakdown of that tradition in favor of the mystical expressionism of Alexander Scriabin and the angular modernism of Igor Stravinsky. In spite of the turbulent and extreme contrasts in stylistic influences, Prokofiev managed to develop a strong musical personality and highly distinctive style of his own.

On the one hand, his music often has lush melodies and harmonies, while on the other, dissonances abound. There is a romanticism in much of his music, and yet it always sounds very much of the twentieth century. Whereas many composers go through periods in their style, Prokofiev tended to move back and forth between the romantic and the modern, or to overlay them in the same piece.

His relationship to his times also has its peculiarities. Like Stravinsky and Shostakovich, he found his life disrupted and dominated by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its consequences. Stravinsky defined himself ever after in opposition to communism. Shostakovich took inspiration from the revolution and remained engaged — albeit often highly critically — with socialist ideals for most of his life.

Prokofiev, however, seems to have been largely disengaged from politics. In the summer of 1917, while the revolution reached a particularly tense and violent point, he retreated to the countryside to write the lighthearted Classical Symphony (1917), inspired by music of the eighteenth century. He left Russia in 1918, not fleeing the new Soviet power, but so that he could take up lucrative offers to perform in the United States and Western Europe.

Return to Moscow

He led a largely itinerant life, performing his works as a pianist and conductor around the world, before returning to the USSR in 1936. The decision to return, precisely at the moment when Stalin’s dictatorship was going full throttle in its purges, may seem very odd. Yet this is only the case when we look at it in terms of the political context.Prokofiev’s move back to the USSR was mostly down to his homesickness and to the fact that he would be more financially secure there.

For Prokofiev, the move back to the USSR was mostly down to his homesickness and to the fact that he would be more financially secure there, allowing him to focus on his composing, rather than having to rely on endless touring and performing in the West. In short, the radical upheavals of the interwar period appeared to be mere background for him, important only insofar as they affected his ability to make his musical career.

A fascinating insight into Prokofiev’s worldview can be found in his published diary from his first return to the USSR for a concert tour in early 1927. At this time, the revolution was at a key inflection point. Leon Trotsky and his followers were effectively in opposition to the regime, but they were still free to speak out, and Stalin had yet to fully assert his dominance.

Culturally, life was still very open, with a great deal of artistic experimentation. The glimpses of the famous conductorless orchestra Persimfans in rehearsal and performance in Prokofiev’s diaries is particularly tantalizing. His keen eye and cool detachment from the politics makes for an often interesting (although superficial) picture.

For example, at one point he expressed an interest in attending a public lecture by Trotsky in Moscow because Trotsky was known to be such a great speaker, but Prokofiev’s handlers encouraged him to avoid it and go to a concert instead. Coming out of the concert he noticed a large crowd outside the venue where Trotsky was speaking:

One could sense that the atmosphere of Trotsky’s lecture had been electric and we were glad we had not gone: we might have got into political trouble and for no good reason at all.

Insofar as he expressed political opinions, they tended to be rather cynical.

Satire and Grotesquery

That said, he was an artist of his time. Coupled with his immense skills in creating orchestral color, melody, and rhythmic vitality, this characteristic not only made his music highly engaging in its own terms, but also enabled it to capture much of the energy of the revolutionary period and of a rapidly industrializing society.Prokofiev’s music captured much of the energy of the revolutionary period and of a rapidly industrializing society.

When he was still in his twenties, he had already developed a distinctive modernist voice in works such as Chout (1915/1920), the Scythian Suite (1914–15), the third and fourth piano sonatas (both 1917), and most especially in the opera and orchestral suite The Love for Three Oranges (1919/1924). All of these pieces illustrate his distinctive angular style, and his ability to develop great spans of resolutely tonal music that are nonetheless full of spiky dissonances fully integrated into the whole.

Another aspect of his music, particularly in the 1920s, was grotesquery. The Love for Three Oranges, for which Prokofiev wrote the libretto as well as the music, is loosely based on an eighteenth-century commedia dell’arte play. It is part Brechtian satire, part farce.

Even by the standards of comic opera, the story is often outrageous. It begins with a debate between different theatrical forms. A key moment involves a witch falling over and exposing her underwear, and one character is a fairy who emerges from an orange only to be turned into a giant rat.

The Piano Concerto No. 2 (1912/1923) contains a fiendishly difficult scherzo, in which the pianist has to maintain an uninterrupted and fast-paced series of runs, chased by “whoops” from the orchestra. This sense of musical fun and adventure is one of the most attractive elements in his music.

Satirical and grotesque elements were a feature of much art that followed the Russian Revolution, expressing perhaps the confidence that followed the comprehensive overthrow of a backward and autocratic regime. One can hear this in the music of Shostakovich, and it was also a distinctive feature in the writings of Mikhail Bulgakov, the duo Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, and the radical theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Meyerhold was particularly close to the modernist composers of the period, including Prokofiev. However, a crude Stalinist narrative later emerged of untrammeled Soviet progress, favoring a style known as Socialist Realism, which promoted grandiosity and populism over artistic subtlety. This had effectively stamped out the satirical edge in Soviet art by the late 1930s.

Apex and End Point

Prokofiev’s decision to return to live in the USSR at a time when modernism in art was being effectively prohibited did lead to a turn toward a more conservative musical style in certain works, for example in the operas Semyon Kotko (1939) and War and Peace (1941–43), and the ballet Cinderella (1940–44). There were also, for the first time in his career, clear attempts to be more populist with scores for movies such as Lieutenant Kije (1933–34) and Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938–39), along with the evergreen piece for children, Peter and the Wolf (1936).All artists were forced to adapt their style to Socialist Realism if they were to survive at all, much less continue their careers in the USSR.

These observations are not meant as a criticism. For one thing, all artists were forced to adapt their style to Socialist Realism if they were to survive at all, much less continue their careers in the USSR. Prokofiev’s later operas are not to my taste, but they do have a secure place in the repertoire of opera houses around the world.

On the other hand, the Lieutenant Kije Suite is one of the most enjoyable pieces I know, and yet it has great pathos, too. The opening moments, with a haunting solo trumpet followed swiftly by a light march, set the whole tone of the piece. It ends with that same solo trumpet melody, rather than the expected big bang.

Alexander Nevsky is often thrilling, especially in the music for the battle on the ice between the title character’s army and the Teutonic invaders. And Peter and the Wolf is still, over eighty years later, one of the best introductions to the orchestra and to classical music in general.

During this period, Prokofiev also produced one of the true masterpieces of the twentieth century, the ballet score Romeo and Juliet (1935–36), which has much of his signature angularity, allied to memorable melodies. Indeed, his ballet music represents both an apex and an end point of the great tradition of classical ballet music. His music of the 1930s is the core of his secure place in the repertoire and his continuing popularity today.

New Adventures

Like Shostakovich and others, Prokofiev continued to be much more challenging and musically adventurous in smaller-scale works, such as his Violin Sonata No. 1 (1938). This is especially the case in the sixth, seventh, and eighth piano sonatas (1939–44), which are collectively known as the War Sonatas. These are pieces that are tremendously challenging for even the greatest pianists — not just technically, but also musically in capturing subtle shifts in feeling.The hope that accompanied the victory over fascism led both Prokofiev and Shostakovich to attempt a revival of the earlier revolutionary style.

The hope and no doubt sense of relief that accompanied the victory over fascism in 1945 led both Prokofiev and Shostakovich to attempt a revival of the earlier revolutionary style of satire and freer uses of dissonance. In that year, both composers presented a new symphony. Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9 radically undermined the expected victory symphony with a relatively short, small-scored, and lightweight piece.

Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 is much more equivocal in terms of tone. It is a tightly structured piece and can be enjoyed in a fairly straightforward way, and it immediately became one of his most popular works in the USSR and abroad. There are some marvelously big tunes and exciting climaxes, and mostly this has the character of a grand victory piece.

The patina of victory was enhanced when the premiere in Moscow, conducted by the composer, had to be delayed a few minutes while military guns outside fired to celebrate the Soviet army crossing into Germany. Prokofiev described the piece as “a hymn to free and happy Man, to his mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit.”


Yet one does have to carefully scrutinize public pronouncements made under the harsh repression of Stalin’s dictatorship. The second movement is very playful, with some of the angularity of Prokofiev’s works from the 1910s and ’20s, while the third is dark, often punctuated with his trademark dissonances. The grinding chords of the final movement evoke big, mechanized processes — a sort of aural equivalent of the factory scenes in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.

It is at the climax of the symphony that things unexpectedly take an ambiguous turn. We appear to be headed toward a heroic conclusion when the music starts to break out into a wild frenzy. The orchestration thins out, leaving a string quartet apparently playing out of key. A trumpet interjects with a sustained note awkwardly guiding the final chord back to the home key of B-flat.

This ending has an interesting parallel with Shostakovich’s own Symphony No. 5 (1937), which also ends with a subtle undermining of heroism. Indeed, Shostakovich made a similarly deceptive public statement about his fifth, saying that it represented the “triumph of socialist man.” Both composers were highly adept at exploiting the ambiguities possible in nonvocal music.

The Zhdanov Decree

Whatever misgivings the regime had about the style employed by Prokofiev and others at the end of the war, the criticisms were relatively muted. Perhaps as a result, Prokofiev returned to a much more challenging style in his Symphony No. 6 (1945–47). But Stalin’s cultural commissar Andrei Zhdanov put a stop to any perceived weakening of the doctrine of Socialist Realism in February 1948. Prokofiev was denounced by name in the “Zhdanov Decree,” along with Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian, and others.Stalin’s cultural commissar Andrei Zhdanov put a stop to any perceived weakening of the doctrine of Socialist Realism in February 1948.

Immediately, many works of these composers were banned outright, and their music was dropped from performances in general. Prokofiev slid quickly into dire financial circumstances as a result. This, combined with poor health, led to a sad decline in the last few years of his life. If that were not enough, his ex-wife, the mother of his children, was sent to the gulag in 1947, from which she would not emerge until the late 1950s, long after his death.

During those last years, he produced only a handful of works, mostly small, minor pieces. The major works from this period include the final Symphony No. 7 (1951–52). Inspired by the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, he also wrote a Cello Sonata (1949) and the Symphony-Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (1950–52).

All of the pieces, especially the works for cello, have a level of introspection and depth of emotion hitherto rare in Prokofiev’s music, with the exception of his War Sonatas. They are hauntingly beautiful, with an added poignancy for listeners aware of the difficulties that marred the end of his life.

Prokofiev’s work stands, together with that of Shostakovich, as the pinnacle of music in the USSR. His detachment in terms of emotion and politics means that his music does not express all the hopes and despair of the Soviet experiment in the way that Shostakovich’s does, nor does it as often reach the same emotional depths. But, technically, he was perhaps the better composer.

His ability to hold onto the great romantic Russian tradition while also being fearlessly inventive and modernist meant he was the guide and inspiration for a whole line of Soviet composers, from Shostakovich to Khachaturian and Alfred Schnittke. He was one of the composers that defined modernism in the first half of the twentieth century, and much of his music still sounds fresh and exciting, even seventy years after his death.

CONTRIBUTOR
Simon Behrman is the author of Shostakovich: Socialism, Stalin & Symphonies.

WHEN THIS WAS FIRST PERFORMED A RIOT BROKE OUT AT THE OPERA

 

PROKOFIEV'S ANTI WAR SATIRE THE LIEUTANT KEIJI SUITE 

WAS THE THEME IN LOVE & DEATH WOODY ALLEN'S TAKE OFF ON

WAR AND PEACE AND RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHERS

 

   

Marxism, Stalinism, and Queerphobia

A historical survey of Marxism and queer life, from the young Soviet Union to Stalinist homophobia.



Marco Helmbrecht and Niko Weber July 17, 2022

For decades, common sense dictated that Marxism focused solely on class antagonisms and ignored other forms of oppression, like the oppression of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people. Indeed, many of those claiming the mantle of Marxism, from those in the Stalinist tradition to the social democratic tradition — including even the present-day Democratic Socialists of America — downplayed the importance of special oppression and maintained an economistic strategy that benefited only the upper strata of the working class. But the reactionary positions of Stalinism and social democracy on sexual and gender oppression do not reflect the legacy of Marxism in the slightest, as a look into the history of the revolutionary workers movement shows. Rather, revolutionary socialism in Russia, with the October Revolution, led the way toward a radical change in the material and ideological foundations of LGBTQ+ discrimination. Reactionary deviations occurred when parties and organizations, despite their socialist self-image, abandoned the revolutionary horizon and tried to come to terms with the capitalist world. This historical insight can help us clarify what kind of politics we need for emancipation today with a new onslaught of attacks on the rights of queer people, particularly in the United States, the world’s most advanced capitalist “democracy.”
The Bolshevik Advance

In the second half of the 19th century, a gay scene formed in Russia’s two most important cities, Saint Petersburg and Moscow. It created places for socializing, such as bathhouses; linguistic codes (tetki, which roughly translates as “auntie,” a word that was applied to homosexual men, both by them and others); elements of a dress code; and, at least in private spaces, cross-dressing. As historian Dan Healey describes in his influential work on the history of homosexuality in revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, it would be “heterosexist and nationalist chauvinism to claim that in tsarist Russia or in the USSR, this homosexual subculture was imported from abroad or created by Communist misrule.”1

At the same time, same-sex intercourse between men was illegal under the rules of the Orthodox Church. Until 1917, consensual “sodomy” was punishable by exile to Siberia. But the this threat was unevenly realized. The abolition of the czarist legal codes in 1917 meant the de facto decriminalization of homosexuality, and with the adoption of a new code in 1922, references to “sodomy” disappeared from the official legal texts of the young Soviet state. After revolutionary 18th-century France, the Soviet Union was thus one of the first states in the world to legalize homosexuality. In the Weimar Republic, meanwhile, the infamous paragraph 175 from the Kaiserreich, criminalizing homosexuality, remained in force before it was tightened under fascism and ultimately abolished in the Federal Republic only in 1994 — a lifetime after decriminalization in the Soviet Union.

Women who entered into romantic or sexual relationships with other women had less access to the public sphere in Russia and accordingly found it more difficult to form a cohesive community. Fewer sources exist on this issue, since same-sex intercourse between women was not punishable and therefore does not show up, for instance, in court records. Nevertheless, economically independent women in particular succeeded in forming networks and entering into relationships beyond the traditional heterosexual family. In the military climate of the Civil War years after the October Revolution, many women adopted a masculine style, which on the one hand signaled a loyalty to the Revolution and a willingness to defend it, but on the other hand could also be code for homosexual women to attract other women. The lines to transsexuality were blurry sometimes. In response to a survey on sexuality at Moscow’s Sverdlov University in 1923, one answer was “I want to be a man, I impatiently await scientific discoveries of castration and grafting of male organs (glands).”2 Such operations were indeed performed in the 1920s, even if their success was doubtful owing to still rudimentary methods. Even apart from medical interventions, many took advantage of the opportunity to change their gender identity. They had appropriate identification documents issued, adopted male variants of their old names, and changed their clothing and appearance. This was accompanied by lively scientific debates about the origin and nature of homosexuality and gender, which were widely considered to be closely related. Biologist Nikolai Konstantinovich Koltsov asserted, “Of course, there is no intermediate sex, but rather an infinite quantity of intermediate sexes.”3

Evgenii Fedorovich M. began to assume a male identity in 1915, when he was 17 years old. During the revolution he had his name changed in the official documents and began to work in the secret service. In 1922, with the new documents, Yevgeny married a woman who, in the sources, is named S. Even after the change of identity became known; a local court case in which the couple stood accused of a “crime against nature” failed, and the marriage persisted. The court ruled the union legal because it was mutually consensual — the gender identity of the spouses was irrelevant. The couple continued to live together as a family for several years with a child that S. gave birth to after an affair with a colleague.4 The revolutionary awakening and the rejection of traditional norms were not only represented by elite Bolsheviks but also allowed people like Yevgeny an unprecedented degree of self-determination.

Bourgeois historical scholarship has occasionally claimed that the Bolsheviks did not intend to legalize homosexuality at all by abolishing the czarist legal codes. Simon Karlinsky, for example, claimed that the October Revolution reversed and negated the advances for gay rights achieved in the revolutions of 1905 and of February 1917, passing over the first decriminalization of “sodomy” as an aside.5 Healey, however, comes to the following, unequivocal conclusion based on the files of the Commissariat of Justice, which became accessible with the opening of the Soviet archives in 1991:

While these documents do not discuss the sodomy statute in detail, they do demonstrate a principled intent to decriminalize the act between consenting adults, expressed from the earliest efforts to write a socialist criminal code in 1918 to the eventual adoption of legislation in 1922.6

By decriminalizing male homosexuality, the Bolsheviks stood in the long tradition of the labor movement. In 1898, for example, the leader of the German Social Democrats, August Bebel, had been the first politician to call for homosexual emancipation in a parliament. Three years earlier, socialists had defended the famous writer Oscar Wilde when he was put on trial for his homosexuality. Eduard Bernstein sharply criticized the idea that homosexuality deviated from “nature,” proposing instead that it be understood as a deviation from “the firmly maintained fictional norm,” and holding that “there is no reasonable ground why a similar contract between man and man should be criminally punished.”7 Socialists were not the only ones to call for the legalization of homosexuality. After the October Revolution, however, they not only raised the demand but actually put it into practice.

The pamphlet “The Sexual Revolution in Russia,” written in 1923 by the head of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, Dr. Grigorii Batkis, gives an impression of the official position of the Bolsheviks in the first years after the revolution. In it he writes,

[Soviet legislation] declares the absolute noninterference of the state and society into sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured, and no one’s interests are encroached upon. Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality — Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called “natural” intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters.8

Of course, in the young Soviet Union, not all the prejudices were eliminated from one day to the next. They had become ingrained in decades and centuries of tsarist backwardness. Moreover, the legalization policy of the Bolsheviks did not extend to the entire area of the Soviet Union. The code of the Uzbek SSR, for example, which was established in 1926, still contained paragraphs against homosexuality. While in the European center of the country, homosexuality was understood as an innate characteristic of a minority; in the periphery it was conceived of as a widespread phenomenon arising from social conditions. Healey calls this a “contradiction between the Soviet Union’s declared sexual vanguardism and its policies in outlying regions.”9 Furthermore, during the 1920s, access to ballrooms and meeting halls in the urban centers dwindled more and more, which, according to a common interpretation, led to a retreat into the private sphere. This is contradicted, however, by the fact that homosexual men played important public roles in the young Soviet republic. Author Mikhail Kuzmin, who came from an aristocratic background and wrote the first coming-out novel affirming homosexuality, Wings, in 1906, sympathized with the revolution and served as chairman of the Petrograd Artists’ Association. Kuzmin was friends with the openly gay Georgy Chicherin, who served as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, a post that was roughly equal to a Soviet foreign minister, from 1918 to 1930.

A few isolated statements by Lenin are often used to argue that the Bolsheviks allegedly took a prudish position on questions of sexuality. In correspondence with the French socialist Inessa Armand in 1915, he defended himself against the demand for a “freedom of love.”10 In a few lines, he argued that freedom from material calculations, religious prejudices, or “from the fetters of the law, the courts and the police” would be poorly expressed by this phrase and could also be understood to mean freedom “from the serious element in love” or “from childbirth,” which he described as a bourgeois demand. Healey, too, infers from these lines (and from similar statements attributed to Lenin after his death by Clara Zetkin11) that Lenin may well have meant to say that those suffering from a “personal abnormality” in their sexual lives should do so in private while devoting themselves to the revolution.12 Sherry Wolf strongly rejects this “rather stilted reading of Lenin’s thoughts” in Sexuality and Socialism, arguing that it conforms to the Cold War caricature of Lenin as a teetotaling ascetic.13 In fact, Lenin’s letters to Armand were not published until 1939 under Stalin to signal, as Healey himself writes in a footnote, that the “changes to family policy in the 1930s had Leninist origins.”14

The Stalinist Rollback

Contrary to the hopes of the Bolsheviks, by 1923, no further socialist states had emerged from the European revolutionary upsurge after World War I. In capitalist encirclement, material deprivation after years of first world and then civil war, and the resulting massive attenuation of the Soviet industrial proletariat, an extensive bureaucracy had taken hold in all areas of administration, attempting to elevate the country’s isolation to the status of theory with “socialism in one country.”

The bureaucracy’s interest in self-preservation, coexisting with the capitalist West, was matched by an increased demand for labor, which led to a policy of increasing the birth rate. Efforts to abolish the family, whose tasks for social reproduction were to be made superfluous through the establishment of public child care, laundry shop, or state canteens, were replaced by the consolidation of traditional family and gender norms. In a trade union newspaper, Aron Solz, who had held leading posts in the Soviet judiciary before being ousted in 1938, wrote: “A Soviet woman has equal rights with a man, but she is not relieved of the great and honorable natural duty: she’s a mother, she gives life.”15

The ideological justification for the renewed criminalization of homosexuality was provided in 1934 by Stalin’s mouthpiece on cultural issues, the author Maxim Gorky. He attributed to homosexuality a corrupting influence on youth and contrasted the myth of Russian “purity” with the decay of the “overcivilized” West, which, supposedly, along with homosexuality, also gave rise to fascism. His utterance culminates in the infamous statement: “Destroy the homosexuals — Fascism will disappear.”16

Just as the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1922 had been part of a broader effort to overcome any form of oppression based on gender or sexuality, the counterreforms of the 1930s were also not limited to reintroducing the persecution of homosexuality. Prostitution was also recriminalized, abortions banned, and the women’s section of the party’s Central Committee dissolved. Leon Trotsky described this policy of prohibitions as “the philosophy of a priest endowed also with the powers of a gendarme.”17 This turn toward a cult of motherhood was accompanied by the cruel persecution of any real or imagined political opposition. In her book Bread and Roses, Andrea D’Atri describes, in relation to women’s politics, the discontinuity between the first decrees of the nascent workers’ state and the outrageous later provisions of the bureaucracy. For the bureaucracy, it was clear: “The revolution needed to be opposed with a counterrevolution.”18 This rupture was enforced with the deportation, imprisonment, torture, and murder of countless people.

With the help of the Comintern, which had been stripped of its revolutionary content, the Stalinist bureaucracy, from the mid-1920s onward, carried its reactionary ideology into the Communist Parties in the rest of the world. In revolutionary Cuba, the Communist Party bureaucracy arrested and jailed gay men, forced HIV-positive people into state-run sanatoriums, and expelled thousands of queer people with the Mariel boat lift in 1980. Not until 1986 were all provisions criminalizing homosexuality removed from the legal code. Though homosexuality was not officially prohibited in China until after Mao’s death, men who sought out sexual relations with other men could be charged with “hooliganism,” particularly during the so-called Cultural Revolution initiated by Mao and his allies.

Communist parties around the world thereby exerted a strong conservative influence on the entire Left in the following decades. Thus, for a long time, queer hostility on the left was not limited to Stalinist organizations. The Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the United States, for example, also “unofficially” excluded homosexuals and trans people from the organization in the years around the Stonewall Riot, i.e., amid the emergence of a radicalized LGBT liberation movement. The policy of exclusion from its youth organization was even declared publicly, even if it soon turned out to be unenforceable. Even when the organization changed its position in a 1975 pamphlet advocating for gay rights in the U.S., it argued that it was “cultural imperialism” to apply this demand to Cuba, where public displays of homosexuality were banned by the Castro regime. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, however, homosexuality had been legal there. The implication that Cubans were particularly conservative or even all heterosexual was even then nothing more than a racist stereotype.

The SWP was not the only organization in the tradition of Trotskyism to take such positions. In an interview, Ray Goodspeed, who supported the grand strike in the British mines in 1984 with Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, known from the film Pride, tells of the attitude of his organization at the time: “‘Militant,’ the group to which I belonged at the time, considered gay rights a bourgeois concern and imagined that the workers would not be able to handle it. However, when I came out, it was only the party hacks who had strange reactions, while the working-class people were quite easygoing.”

Even though the SWP claimed to carry forward the revolutionary legacy of Trotskyism, it held openly reactionary positions on this question. These were not, however, merely an isolated aberration but a consequence of the deviation from the political method of Marxism. This deviation consisted in an increased “objectivism,” that is, the relativization of the role of the political vanguard of the class and the consequent adaptation to the given. Instead of trying to lift the at the time backward consciousness in large parts of the U.S. working class with the help of transitional demands, the SWP adapted to this conservatism. At the same time, its uncritical attitude toward Cuba led it to confound the necessary defense of the achievements of the Cuban Revolution with the defense of the bureaucracy, which not only persecuted homosexuals but also suppressed any form of proletarian democracy.

The Legacy

The contradictions that persisted in Bolshevik policy toward homosexuality after 1917 cannot be understood without placing them in the context of the material shortages and international isolation of the young Soviet state. Today, however, these historically specific circumstances no longer exist, and the considerable development of the productive forces in the wake of the enormous devastation of World War II would put a new socialist attempt in an infinitely better position. Whereas in the young Soviet state, for example, attempts to socialize reproductive labor were bound to fail and the project of abolishing the heteronormative family remained stuck in its infancy, the economic conditions for such a project are incomparably superior today. There is no doubt that the possibilities for liberation from gender and sexual oppression exist.

The legalization of homosexuality in the Soviet Union was not only a milestone in the history of sexual liberation, but also a testament to the power of a Marxism that organizes itself independently of all institutions of the bourgeois state. As Lenin put it in 1902, such a movement is “trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected.”19 The reversals of conquests by LGTBTQ people that are now taking place in the United States demonstrate the impossibility of true democracy within the framework of capitalism. A revolutionary socialist struggle that seeks to transform society can win recognition and freedoms for queer people that far surpass what the capitalists’ so-called democracies around the world have acheived.

First published in German on June 19, 2021 in Klasse Gegen Klasse Magazin.

Translated by Marco Helmbrecht


Notes

Notes↑1 Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), 48.
↑2 Ibid., 63.
↑3 Ibid., 166.
↑4 Ibid., 68–72.
↑5 Simon Karlinsky, “Russia’s Literature and Culture: The Impact of the October Revolution,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, edited by Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., 357 (New York, 1989).
↑6 Healey, Homosexual Desire, 116.
↑7 Eduard Bernstein, “The Judgement of Abnormal Sexual Intercourse,” Die Neue Zeit 13/2 (1895), 228-233.
↑8 Sherry Wolf, Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation (Chicago 2009), 91.
↑9 Healey, Homosexual Desire, 162.
↑10 V. I. Lenin to Inessa Armand, January 17, 1915, in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 35, (Moscow, 1976), 180–81.
↑11 Clara Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin (New York, 1934).
↑12 Healey, Homosexual Desire, 113.
↑13 Wolf, Sexuality and Socialism, 93.
↑14 Healey, Homosexual Desire, 301.
↑15 Victoria I. Sakevich and Boris P. Denisov, Birth Control in Russia: Overcoming the State System Resistance (Moscow, 2014), 9.
↑16 Healey, Homosexual Desire, 189–90.
↑17 Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is it Going? (New York, 1937).
↑18 Andrea D’Atri, Bread and Roses. Gender and Class under Capitalism (London 2021), 96.
↑19 V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement, in Lenin’s Collected Works, vol. 5 (Moscow, 1961),347–30.

 

Train Derailment in Metro Detroit Illustrates That Capitalist Control of the Railroads Is Fundamentally Unsafe


With the capitalists in control of the railroads, they will destroy the environment and poison and kill workers. The catastrophe in East Palestine will not be the last if we don’t nationalize our railroads and put the safety of people and the environment over profit.

Emma Boyhtari February 28, 2023

Andy Morrison, The Detroit News

In the early morning of February 16, another train derailed in Van Buren Township, Michigan, in Metro Detroit, an area of over 5 million people. The train belonged to Norfolk Southern, the same company responsible for the spill in East Palestine, Ohio. No hazardous materials are reported to have leaked. Michigan congresswoman Debbie Dingell, who voted to squash the rail workers’ strike, said in a statement that one of the railcars contained hazardous material, but it was away from the area of the train that derailed. The car contained liquid chlorine, and in the photo above, you can see how close the crash was to the Huron River, a large source of drinking water for the city of Ann Arbor, home to almost 123,000 residents. The river is also linked to the Detroit River, Detroit’s source of drinking water. Detroit is home to roughly 700,000 people, while millions more throughout Southeast Michigan receive their water through its infrastructure. Yet another environmental catastrophe was narrowly avoided. Though the cause of this derailment is still unknown (the investigation is “active and ongoing”), even Dingell is demanding answers. In a letter to the company, she said she found this second derailment “deeply concerning” and requested the company’s presence at a town hall meeting.

These derailments result from capitalists’ putting profit before the safety of workers. More specifically, the Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR): a management and scheduling system that was created to boost efficiency and profits. PSR was first implemented in 1998 to make the freight rail system more efficient and cost-effective. Other companies put it into effect in the following years. In 2019, Norfolk Southern enacted PSR.

Essentially, PSR has reduced the number of employees and amount of time for safety inspections, putting pressure on workers to rush inspections and ignore problems that could be hazardous because it would hurt the “PSR metrics,” meaning it would take more time and require more workers to repair. This means it has been more likely that problems get ignored or accidentally overlooked by overworked workers, leading to greater likelihood of a crash. For instance, PSR has shortened the time for safety inspections. Norfolk Southern management recommended that workers spend no more than two and a half minutes on any given railcar. More recently, this has been reduced to only 90 seconds to inspect each car. Since Norfolk Southern is not the only company to use PSR, it’s not just the fault of one company’s negligence, but the profit imperative of capitalism that makes these corporations put profit over the lives of workers and the environment.

According to Vice, several rail workers said they knew before the crash in Ohio that the 32N train was notorious for its breaking knuckles or drawbars (the parts that link the cars together) and its imbalance of weight among cars. Workers brought their concerns about the train to management, who dismissed their warnings, “which workers say is a consistent pattern since PSR has been implemented,” said Vice. “On the run that ended abruptly on the outskirts of East Palestine, multiple red flags, including two mechanical problems, about 32N went undetected or were ignored in the hours leading up to the crash. … 32N has a nickname among some rail workers. … They call it 32 Nasty.” Not only are safety inspections shorter, but trains are also made longer and heavier. Since the same number of workers are placed on trains regardless of their length, it means more profit as well as longer, heavier, and more dangerous trains managed by only a few workers.

Though train derailments have always been common, occurring about 1,000 times a year, they have become more frequent since the implementation of PSR. USA Today reports,


Having fewer and longer trains means data about overall railroad accidents can make it appear as if there have been fewer accidents over the past decade. But a USA TODAY analysis of federal safety data by rate of train accidents per million train miles shows that the rate of accidents has been ticking up for Norfolk Southern progressively over the past decade.

Additionally, the number of hazmat derailments has increased, meaning the railroad industry has been putting our environment and communities more and more at risk each year. In 2012 there were 14 hazmat cars damaged or derailed, while in 2020 there were 117 and in 2021, 85.

None of these can be treated as an individual, local problem. As of February 25, both Michigan and Texas received, with no prior notice, contaminated soil and water from the crash site in East Palestine from Norfolk Southern. The company sent the materials before the EPA took over and without alerting government officials from respective states. According to CNN, 2 million gallons of contaminated firefighting water were expected to be sent to Harris County, Texas, when officials learned that half a million gallons were already there. Similarly in Michigan, 15 truckloads of contaminated soil were sent to the U.S. Ecology Wayne Disposal in Belleville, Michigan. Ironically, this is also in Debbie Dingell’s district, where the state’s most recent derailment occurred.

The derailment in Van Buren Township wasn’t the only one to occur in Michigan this month. On February 1, in Southwest Detroit, a train hung off the train tracks. Though there were no hazmat cars, there very well could have been. In light of catastrophic derailments like the one in East Palestine, and near-miss derailments like in Michigan, the practice of PSR in the railroad industry is frightening, to say the least. And one can’t help but conclude that with these longer and heavier trains carrying hazardous materials, when derailments happen, the results are going to be much more catastrophic; they’re going to happen in more densely populated areas like cities, and more often. In 2014, the Obama administration tried to regulate the industry by requiring electronically controlled pneumatic brakes (ECP) that reduce the distance it takes for trains to stop on when carrying a certain amount and type of hazardous material. But a lobbying group, the Association of American Railroads, which Norfolk Southern is a part of, opposed the regulation, stating the brakes would be too costly. In 2018, when Trump was in office, the rule was repealed, paving the way for more catastrophic derailments.

Similarly, in early December, Biden and the Democrats showed their true colors by voting yes on an imposed contract for rail workers that ignored their central demands for more sick days, better pay, and healthcare. This proved that Biden is just as business and profit focused as Trump. Several Railway unions have called for the nationalization of railways under worker control, including the Railway Workers United (RWU) and the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE). But it’s not enough to say “nationalization.” We can’t trust a government that functions for the good of corporations and billionaires. We need nationalization under worker control. We need workers in control of their own safety and well-being, because only they have the expertise and the knowledge to keep themselves, our communities, and the environment safe. In 2021 the UE proposed legislation called the Green Locomotive Project, which would’ve introduced cleaner diesel as well as electric locomotives, but it was opposed in Congress. We, as revolutionary socialists, know that until railways are nationalized under worker control, safety and the good of communities and the environment will always come second to profit making. This is only further proved by what happened in East Palestine and Van Buren Township and by management’s failure to stop the catastrophe.

Dossier: One Year of a Reactionary War in Ukraine

With the aim of developing an international perspective for working class intervention against the reactionary war in Ukraine, we publish this dossier. These articles engage with some of the key debates the war has opened on the Left, analysis on how the geopolitical crisis is developing, and the positions of our international tendency: the Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International.

Left Voice March 5, 2023


A year ago, in an escalation of longstanding tensions with NATO, Russia invaded Ukraine. In response, NATO, led by U.S. imperialism, has used the war to not only finance, ship weapons, and provide military training to Ukraine, but also to increase military budgets to historic proportions, rearm European powers, and expand NATO influence in the region — precipitating a dangerous escalation. Before the war, the alliance was fraying, but the consensus to curb Russia’s ambitions has begun to revitalize NATO, strengthening (if not repairing) ties between the world’s imperialist powers and reasserting U.S. hegemony in Europe. Now, two new countries — Finland and Sweden — have entered the process to join the alliance. The United States has convinced European countries to send tanks and more to Ukraine, and rearmament means the stage is set for the Western powers to lead new imperialist advances.

Clearly, this is not a just war between Russia and Ukraine, but a war that continues the long-term conflicts between Western imperialist powers and Russia — one that is now being advanced by Putin’s reactionary regime. For now, as Biden’s visit to Kiev and Putin’s recent state of the nation speech reflect, both sides are committed to prolonging the conflict and escalating tensions for the foreseeable future. But as the world’s powers jockey for better positions, this war offers nothing but misery for the working class, especially as Zelenskyy continues to subordinate their interests to Western imperialism in the name of “self-determination.”

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine for the interests of Russian capital is absolutely reactionary. Putin heads an authoritarian and despotic regime in the service of oligarchs of his inner circle. His regime prevents the independent and democratic organization of the workers and persecutes with imprisonment those who oppose the war in Ukraine.

Beyond the tactical objectives of the war is the strategic challenge of deepening tensions between capitalist powers. The international order based on the neoliberal consensus and undisputed hegemony of the U.S. in the last 30 years is in crisis. The involvement of the great traditional imperialist powers (the United States/NATO) and emerging powers (an alliance of China and Russia with variable allies) sets the stage for future confrontations in the dispute for hegemony.

Given the horrors of the war, we shouldn’t submit ourselves to being the pawns of the ruling class once again! Through the year, we’ve seen the effects this war has had around the world, from Ukrainians suffering its worst consequences, Russians facing deployment and sanctions, and the masses around the world facing a cost of living crisis and supply shortages exacerbated by this protracted conflict. From the U.K. to France to Peru, workers are fighting back against various expressions of the capitalist crisis at hand.

Even here in the U.S., a new generation of youth and workers are increasingly coming to anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist conclusions and rejecting the price paid by years of neoliberal policies. The billions of dollars being spent around the world to fund this reactionary war are a key part of an attempt to re-legitimize that neoliberal world order; consequently, defying the capitalists’ war is a critical struggle for the working class and oppressed. At Left Voice, we side with neither Putin nor NATO — it’s only through independent and international working class struggle against the war, the economic crisis, and all the oppression this system brings that we can find a path out of this historic crisis and link our struggle to one for a socialist system.

With the aim of developing this international perspective for working class intervention against the reactionary war, we republish some of our key analysis developed throughout the war by our international tendency, the Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International. This dossier includes original analysis by Left Voice and translations from our comrades in Europe and Latin America.

No to war in Ukraine! Neither Putin nor NATO! Down with NATO rearmament and intervention! No weapons shipments to Ukraine! Russian troops out of Ukraine! For an independent socialist Ukraine! For an independent, international working class resistance to crisis, inflation, and war!

Statements by the Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International:Statement at the outbreak of the war: No to the War! Russian Troops Out of Ukraine! NATO Out of Eastern Europe! No to Imperialist Rearmament!
Left Voice/Klasse Gegen Klasse statement: No to NATO Tanks in Ukraine, Let’s Fight the Escalation!

Analysis one year into the war:Five These on the War in Ukraine by Sou Mi
One Year of the War in Ukraine: A Socialist Perspective by Claudia Cinatti
Ukraine: One Year of a Reactionary War by Philippe Alcoy

Analysis throughout the year:Geopolitical Tensions Increase amid Growing Economic and Political Crises by Sou Mi
With the NDAA, Biden Advances Towards Greater Conflict with Russia and China by Sam Carliner

Debates on the war:The Imperialist Role of Weapons to Ukraine — a Debate with Workers’ Voice by Sam Carliner
Socialists Should Not Support Imperialist Weapons Shipments to the Ukrainian Government by Nathaniel Flakin and James Dennis Hoff
NATO and Imperialist Military Expansionism by Josefina L. Martínez and Diego Lotito
Putin, Lenin, and Ukrainian Self-Determination by Nathaniel Flakin
Left Voice Magazine March 2022:Prospects for the War One Month after Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine by Claudia Cinatti
Once Again on the Debates Regarding the War in Ukraine by Matías Maiello
Militarism, Imperialism, and Self-Determination: Marxist Debates on the War by Josefina L. Martínez and Daniel Matos
War and the Reformist Left: We Need a 21st-Century Zimmerwald by Santiago Lupe
The Challenge of an Independent Anti-Imperialist Policy in Ukraine: A Response to Achcar and Kouvélakis by Juan Chingo, Philippe Alcoy, and Pierre Reip
Debates on the War in Ukraine by Matías Maiello

The Connection Between Global Health & Global Warming

Dr. Larry Brilliant discusses his time in an ashram, eradicating small pox, and how humans are the most invasive species on the planet.

David Kirkpatrick
Published on March 5, 2023

Photo via Getty

Many will recognize Dr. Larry Brilliant as CNN’s resident COVID expert, but the epidemiologist is most famous for leading the World Health Organization team that eradicated smallpox. He’s also stewarded the philanthropic efforts of both Google and Salesforce and has been a mentor to many tech leaders, including Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. But before all that, Brilliant lived in an ashram in India for many years, studying under guru Neem Karoli Baba (also the spiritual teacher of Ram Das), who drove him to pursue a career in public health.

Brilliant sat down with Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick at the Techonomy 2022 retreat in Sonoma, CA, to discuss his journey into public health and the connection between global warming and global health. This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity. The full interview can be viewed on techonomy.com.

David Kirkpatrick: You had this period when you were a devoted follower of a very inspiring guru. And he inspired you then to go into public health. Tell us about that.

Dr. Larry Brilliant: Here’s the kind of inspiration he used: I would sit there, and I would meditate and he would throw apples at my testicles and say, “you should get out of the ashram.” He had really good aim. My guru, Neem Karoli Baba, told me I should go to the World Health Organization office in New Delhi and get a job helping eradicate smallpox because this was God’s gift to humanity. So, I went to WHO, which took about 17 hours on a train and a bus, and of course, they kicked me out because I was wearing this white dress, had hair down to the middle of my back, and had a big beard.

I went back up, and I saw my guru, and he asked, “Did you get your job?” And I said, “No.” He said, “Go back.” I took the 17-hour journey back and, of course, they kicked me out again. Rinse and repeat about 12 times, but I got smart. I trimmed the beard, I lost the dress, and I put on a suit and tie.

One time I walked into the WHO office, there was this tall American. And he said, “Are you American? Who are you?” I said, “I’m a doctor.” He said, “Okay, why are you here?” I told him that my guru, who lives in the Himalayas, told me that I was supposed to come work for WHO and help eradicate smallpox. “Well,” he said, “I’m the head of the global smallpox eradication program, and we don’t have a smallpox eradication program in India. But since we’re here, maybe I could interview you.” He eventually did hire me, and I became the head of the program. It took ten years to eradicate smallpox.

RELATEDHow a System-of-Systems Approach Can Help Fight Climate Change

And you did more or less eradicate smallpox.

With 150,000 of the most wonderful, courageous people in the world. It’s the only disease that’s ever been eradicated.

You have done enormous research and communication around the pandemic. What’s the connection between global health and global warming, particularly concerning pandemics?

The primary connection is that the antecedent causes of climate change and global warming are many of the exact antecedent causes of pandemics. As the Earth gets warmer, animals from the south migrate to the north. Over a billion more people are at risk of malaria right now because the Anopheles mosquito can now breed at higher altitudes and greater latitudes. Animals meeting other animals carrying the same viruses leads to variants. We’re having a tremendous amount of spillover because the forests and rainforests are being clear-cut.

I was the science advisor on the film Contagion. We tried to make a movie that would be a fictional representation of what we thought would happen. We didn’t expect to get it so close. But the whole premise was a bat with a virus enters the human environment, which is what happened with COVID—and with SARS, and probably with MERS and Ebola.

Fossil fuels create greenhouse gases, leading to global warming. And with that, you wind up changing the way water works, the way salt works, and the entire ecosystem of the planet. The same things that cause climate change cause spillover, where animals and humans live in each other’s territory. Spillover is occurring now at five times the rate that it did 50 years ago. Every year one, two, or three new novel diseases that have never been seen in human beings are spilling over from animals, and we’re exposed to them.

All of these factors are hitting simultaneously, leading to animals and humans sharing the same habitat. That’s why we’ve gotten a cacophony of these viruses over the last ten years, like SARS, MERS, Ebola, West Nile disease, Lyme disease, and COVID.

There are a lot of other linkages to climate change. Global warming increases famine, drought, and floods and winds up putting more salt in the Earth. One of the biggest things we see in global health is that as water levels rise, they bring salt and we lose agricultural land. That means that climate change can lead to famine.

The primary culprit is modernity. The most invasive species in the world is us humans. We’re the ones that are putting the world at such ecological risk. And with it, we will find challenges to our food, challenges to our water, challenges to agriculture, and challenges to pandemics as well.
You also are very worried about COVID variants right now. Could you tell us why?

Right now, we’re in a funny stage with the COVID pandemic. Three years ago, I wrote an article in Foreign Affairs called “The Forever Virus.” And people got mad at me because we were all done with the pandemic and wanted to move on. I hope that’s true. We may be there. Right now, there are four coronaviruses that preceded this one that retired into the retirement home of coronaviruses, which means they became colds. That’s right, half of the colds you get are Coronaviruses, which are related to SARS-CoV-2. This virus may be going through that process now. And I pray to God that it is.

RELATED  Marion Nestle's Unexpected yet Impactful Life in Food Politics

But we’ve also got five terrible new sub-variants. Each one is more infectious than the other. All of them are mysterious in terms of how many diseases they’ll cause. And right now, we’re playing a whack-a-mole game with new vaccines that are more effective in stopping you from getting it, but great effectiveness and preventing you from dying. But we’re fighting the battle of the last variant. So, I am still determining where it’s going to go.
The theme of our conference is innovation must save the world. Do you think innovation is going to help us save the world?

A lot of innovations are pretty terrible. Nuclear weapons are an innovation that hasn’t really worked out. But I hope innovation is going to make a big difference. In the fight against COVID, for example, DARPA worked on mRNA technology for years, and as a result, we had it ready to convert into vaccines. That quickly saved millions and millions of lives.

But the innovation we need is a total change in human consciousness about compassion, altruism, and stopping to think of others as others. When I think of innovation, I think of the infrastructure of how we allocate resources and the decisions we make. To have innovations that are going to have enduring value, we have to help bridge the gap between the rich and the poor, and do equitable redistribution of the resources that we need to make the world a better place. We’ve got to focus on vision and values.

THE NEW ORDER REQUIRES JOY DIVISIONS

 BY PAUL CAMPOS

 

/

 

ON MARCH 5, 2023

 

/

 

Oh stop being hysterical — he’s being serious not literal (or is it the other way around; I honestly can never remember):

Former President Donald Trump had a special message for the men in the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference Saturday when he detailed his plans to have ‘baby bonuses’ for couples – part of his pitch to take the White House again.

‘We will support baby boomers and we will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom, how does that sound? I want a baby boom,’ Trump said, chuckling, ‘You men are so lucky out there. You are so lucky, men.’ 

On Friday, Trump announced he wanted to build up to 10 so-called ‘freedom cities,’ with flying cars and lots of babies – launching a ‘quantum leap’ agenda as part of his 2024 presidential run. 

We will hold a competition to build new freedom cities on the frontier to give countless Americans a new shot at home ownership and the American dream,’ Trump said during Saturday’s address, which ran nearly an hour and 45 minutes. 

‘We will rename our schools and boulevards not after communists but after great, American patriots,’ he continued. ‘We will get rid of bad and ugly buildings and return to the magnificent classical style of western civilization.’ 

Lawyers, Guns & Money (lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com)

Understanding why some in the US don’t want victory in Ukraine

BY BILL SCHNEIDER, 

OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 03/05/23 
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

Russian President Vladimir Putin sees the Ukraine war as purely a matter of Russia’s national interest. In his view, Russia is fighting to reclaim territory that is historically part of the Russian empire. The war is a “local issue” that should not be an international concern.

The U.S. and its NATO allies see the Russian invasion as a grave violation of international order — an act of aggression by one sovereign state against another. In President Biden’s view, the U.S. has an obligation to defend that order. Just as it did when Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait in 1990.

When the first President Bush addressed Congress after the Iraqi invasion, he offered a stirring call to internationalist principle. Our purpose, Bush said, is to “defend civilized values around the world,” among them our commitment to “support the rule of law” and “stand up to aggression.” Which is more or less what the U.S. is doing now — but without sending U.S. troops.

Putin, however, blames the U.S. and its allies for turning the Ukraine conflict into “a global confrontation.” He sees Russia as “the aggrieved victim of a predatory West,” as the editors of the Washington Post put it.

President Biden’s response: “The West was not plotting to attack Russia.” The war was caused by “President Putin’s craven lust for land and power.”

The dominant bipartisan view since World War II is that the U.S. does not just have national interests: It also has international interests. Primary among these, a commitment to preserve world order and humanitarian values.

The argument for international interests was made by President Harry Truman when he announced the Truman Doctrine in 1947: “It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

Whenever there is a threat to world order (like Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait) or to humanitarian values (like “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia), if the United States does not do anything, nothing will be done.

What would have happened if the United States had failed to act after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990? Most likely, nothing. Kuwait would have become part of Iraq.

Having acted in Kuwait, the first President Bush left the crisis in Bosnia to the Europeans. Bosnia was in Europe’s backyard. The U.S. had no vital interests there. What happened? Nothing.

The Europeans failed to act, and a new horror entered the world’s vocabulary: ethnic cleansing. Finally, the U.S. felt morally compelled to step in and lead a coalition to end the brutality.

When atrocities occurred in Cambodia, Rwanda, Congo and Darfur, the whole world — including the United States — looked away. So, nothing was done. The result was genocide.

The view that the United States has international interests as well as national interests has been the consensus of the U.S. political establishment of both parties since 1947. The American people have never completely bought into the idea, however. And it is now being challenged by a populist movement on the far right.

It started with Donald Trump, who argued that the U.S. has no interest in protecting the liberal world order. Most memorably, in his 2019 speech to the United Nations General Assembly he declared, “The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots.” In other words, America First.

Trump’s neo-isolationist views have been echoed by some on the right who oppose President Biden’s support for Ukraine. Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis denounced the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy saying, “They have effectively a blank-check policy with no clear strategic objective … I don’t think it’s in our interests to be getting into a proxy war with China.”Biden’s mining NIMBY-ism fuels China’s critical minerals dominanceCOVID-19 vaccines won’t be free for long. What will they cost?

In some measure, this is pure partisanship, predictable in a time of bitter political polarization. But some on the far right see Putin as an ally in the U.S. culture wars. Putin regularly accuses the West of moral depravity. He told the Russian people in his annual state of the nation speech, “Millions of people in the West understand that they are being led to a real spiritual catastrophe. The elites, one must say, are simply going crazy.”

The war in Ukraine is a steel cage death match for Putin and Biden. It’s hard to see how Putin could stay in office if Russia is driven out of Ukraine (though it’s unclear who would succeed him). It’s also hard to see how Joe Biden could be re-elected if Ukraine falls to the Russians. If the war is fought to a stalemate, it’s not clear how either of them could survive politically without being able to claim “victory.”

Bill Schneider is an emeritus professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and author of “Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable” (Simon & Schuster).

East Palestine toxic train derailment shows urgency of passing new safety law, Sen. Brown says

"It shouldn't take a rail disaster to get us working together," he said.

ByTal Axelrod
March 5, 2023



Norfolk Southern prioritized ‘greed and incompetence’ over safety: Sherrod Brown

George Stephanopoulos interviews Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, on “This Week.”

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown on Sunday touted the need for new bipartisan rail safety legislation weeks after the toxic train derailment in East Palestine sparked an uproar over existing regulations and precautions for rail companies.

"It shouldn't take a rail disaster to get us working together like that. And that's what we're going to be doing," Brown told ABC "This Week" anchor George Stephanopoulos.

The Democratic lawmaker said he believed his proposal, backed by him and Ohio's Republican senator, J.D. Vance, among others, could pass their chamber even if its prospects in the House were less clear. President Joe Biden endorsed the legislation Thursday and encouraged Congress to act quickly on it.

The fallout from the train derailment has become a political debate, with Republicans like former President Donald Trump accusing the Biden administration of ignoring East Palestine while the White House has pushed back.

"They want this fixed. They don't care about partisan politics there," Brown said on "This Week," referencing the residents of East Palestine. "They care that this corporation continues to weaken safety rules and continues to be immensely profitable while undermining public health, public safety for their workers and for the communities that they that they drive through."

MORE: 20 cars of Norfolk Southern cargo train derail in Ohio

Last month's derailment, which saw noxious chemicals spilling into the waterways and soil in East Palestine, a small Ohio village near the Pennsylvania border, led to bipartisan calls in Congress for a legislative solution.

Norfolk Southern, which operated the train, said Wednesday that the company is "committed" to working on ways to prevent another incident like what took place in East Palestine. But on Saturday, another Norfolk Southern train derailed in Ohio, this time in Springfield. The company said that unlike in East Palestine, this train was not carrying hazardous materials.

Brown told Stephanopoulos that while other officials he has spoken to were "pretty satisfied with Norfolk Southern's response" to the latest derailment, he wants to know more, like if there any "contaminants" leftover in that train's cars that could impact the surrounding area.

"The railroad’s got a lot of questions they've got to answer and they really haven't done it very well yet," Brown said.

Norfolk Southern's CEO, Alan Shaw, will appear Thursday before the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee. On "This Week," Brown blamed the self-interest of the company's executives for recent incidents.


"Ohio's now had four derailments. As of yesterday, four derailments in the last five months. East Palestine was the most serious, but we still have questions ... about these other derailments too," Brown said.

He and Vance teamed up with four other senators of both parties to introduce the Railway Safety Act of 2023, which seeks to address the causes and fallout of the crash.

Among other things, their bill would mandate that rail companies inform emergency response commissions what hazardous materials are traveling through their states and when; require crews to consist of at least two people at a time when many companies are moving toward single-person crews; and increase fines and inspections.

"The fines for safety have averaged about $10,000 over the last few years to Norfolk Southern, on CSX, in the other big railroads. That's just pennies on the dollar, a cost of doing business, and it's no incentive to make it safer," Brown said.

The legislation would also institute new national requirements for monitoring wheel bearings, including to automatically detect any issues. An overheated wheel bearing, to which the crew was alerted too late, contributed to the crash in East Palestine, federal authorities have said.

However, Brown acknowledged uncertainty about whether his bill could pass the Republican-controlled House after some conservatives in the chamber cast the legislation as overly restrictive.

"I think our chances in the Senate are good. I make no predictions in the House," Brown said, pointing to the influence of lobbyists.

"I am very concerned about the power of the railroads to beat back safety regulations. But you'd think a disaster that happened in East Palestine would have gotten their attention," he said.

MORE: East Palestine residents confront town leaders, Norfolk Southern

Stephanopoulos separately pressed the senator on whether he is concerned about running for reelection in a red state next year, likely on the same ballot as President Joe Biden, who would face stiff headwinds winning the erstwhile swing state.

"I don't think a lot about that," Brown insisted, referencing his extensive travel across Ohio.

Throughout the interview, Brown sounded off the same populist notes that are likely to underscore his next campaign in a state dominated by the kinds of blue-collar voters who defected from Democrats to back former President Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.

"People are still concerned, based on my last few trips there [to East Palestine]. This company has done huge stock buybacks and they were trying to do an even bigger one this year; they've laid off a third of their workforce," Brown said of Norfolk Southern. "Their greed and incompetence always take precedent over their workers and safety."

Sen. Joe Manchin says he will support proposed bipartisan rail safety legislation

BY MELISSA QUINN

MARCH 5, 2023 / 

Washington — Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, said Sunday that he supports bipartisan rail safety legislation introduced in the wake of the toxic train disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, that led to serious health and environmental concerns for the community's residents.

"I'm going to be supporting that," Manchin said in an interview with "Face the Nation." "We need to do it."Transcript: Sen. Joe Manchin on "Face the Nation"

The measure, called the Railway Safety Act, was unveiled last week by a bipartisan group of six senators — including the two from Ohio — and aims to implement reforms to prevent future derailments. The plan requires rail carriers to give advance notice to state emergency response officials about what they're transporting, increases rail car inspections to ensure those carrying hazardous materials are inspected at regular intervals and requires crews of at least two people for every train.

It also bolsters the monitoring of wheel bearings, which the National Transportation Safety Board found overheated in the Feb. 3 derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, imposes new safety requirements and procedures for trains carrying hazardous materials like vinyl chloride, which was in five of the tank cars that derailed, and heightens fines for rail carriers for wrongdoing.

President Joe Biden has endorsed the bill and called on Congress to swiftly advance the rail safety measures.

"This bill will make important progress – and we need to do even more, like require state of the art braking systems, provide more funding for federal safety inspections, invest in worker safety, fortify state emergency management and response, and hold companies like Norfolk Southern accountable not just for the immediate damage, but also the long-term health and economic damage to communities like East Palestine," Mr. Biden said in a statement.

Manchin, too, said there should be more action at the federal level to prevent future derailments, including requiring certain trains to be outfitted with electronically controlled pneumatic brakes, as well as ordering routine maintenance checks and auditing.

"I don't think any of that has been done," he said. "And it's time for us to get serious about this. We're moving many, many products, many more products on the rails and on our roads than we ever did before."

The bipartisan nature of the rail safety bill stands in contrast to the response to the East Palestine train derailment, which has been divided along partisan lines. Republicans have accused the Biden administration, and specifically Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, of waiting too long to respond to the disaster, while Democrats have blamed former President Donald Trump for unwinding rail safety measures that were put in place during the Obama administration.

Democrats have specifically pointed to the Trump administration's decision to rescind a 2015 rule requiring trains carrying highly flammable materials to have advanced braking systems, withdraw a plan to require two-member crews on freight trains and stop regular safety audits of railroads.

Still, the bipartisan support for the legislation is a positive sign for advancement in the Senate. Whether the proposal can pass the GOP-led House, though, is less clear.

Rep. Brad Wenstrup, a Republican from Ohio, told "Face the Nation" that Congress "should take a look" if a review of rail incidents shows there were safety gaps, but stressed that issues should be addressed.

"We're always trying to do better, I hope that we can," he said.Transcript: Rep. Brad Wenstrup on "Face the Nation"

Wenstrup also said that in incidents where there may be toxic chemical reactions and fires started as a result of a derailment, it's critical that standard operating procedures are in place and followed to protect the surrounding communities.

"Do we have a standard operating procedure of how we manage a community? What our reaction is from the government? What are we looking for? How do we protect our people?" he said. "Let's make sure that we have a good standard operating procedure, so although these instances are rare, according to the numbers, we have to be prepared for that 0.1% or whatever the case may be."