For the CPM, China and Russia are as infallible as Das Kapital.
That is why the Draft Political Resolution of the 23rd Party Congress describes China as a near utopia where "absolute poverty has been eliminated". Anything dark – human rights violations in Xinjiang province, the stifling of democracy in Hongkong – the resolution says is nothing but attempts by the US to "isolate and weaken China".
It is this very assumption of perfection that has prompted the draft resolution to paint Russia as the victim in the ongoing conflict. "The moving of Russian troops on the border with Ukraine is a result of the renewed efforts to strengthen NATO ties with Ukraine," says the draft resolution drawn up before Russia began pounding Ukraine with shells and missiles.
"The annexation of Crimea (in 2014) and the conflict in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine was an outcome of this tussle," the resolution says.
And the day after Russia began its brutal offensive, the CPM put out a statement firmly backing Russia. "After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States-led NATO has been steadily expanding eastward, contrary to the assurance given to Russia. The efforts to get Ukraine to join NATO would pose a direct threat to Russia’s security. Russia is also concerned about its security due to the threat posed by the presence of NATO forces and missiles at its borders in Eastern Europe. Hence the Russian demand for security guarantees, including Ukraine not joining NATO, is legitimate," it said.
Such an assessment is both devoid of nuance and blind to history. It is said that just before the imminent fall of the Berlin wall in 1994, when Communism looked to have been thoroughly decimated, the then US foreign secretary James Baker had assured Moscow that NATO would not move one inch east. "Not one inch east" is a favourite slogan of Russian apologists now.
The then German minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, perhaps to quicken the evacuation of Soviet forces from East Germany, had also given public speeches saying that the NATO forces will not extend east.
Fact is, both Baker and Genscher were vetoed by their bosses, American president George H Bush and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Both had no intention of ceding even an insignificant inch to an imploding Russia.
In other words, though there were tentative verbal negotiation-stage assurances, there was no official seal of approval for the "not one inch east" theory.
These historical events that led up to the end of the Cold War and after are set out in detail in historian Mary Elise Sarotte's book “Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate”, which came out last November and is considered to be the most definitive tome on post-Cold War geopolitics.
Of course, Unified Germany was assured that NATO forces would not occupy its territory in return for its joining NATO. This, according to the US, did not mean that NATO could not spread to countries east of Germany.
The US, under Bill Clinton, forced this line of thinking on Russian premier Boris Yeltsin, Putin's predecessor who had by then given the impression that he had stopped trying to save his country from an economic disaster.
Thus came about the Russia-NATO agreement in 1997, which opened the way for NATO to expand into Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and bring it within sniffing distance of Russia. In return, Russia was promised massive American investment and a World Trade Organisation membership.
Even if the deal was struck during Russia's worst moment in modern history, the country had officially consented to the expansion that Putin is now so insecure about that he has gone to war.
But one country's source of worry could be another's strength. It is true that Russia was threatened by the expansion of NATO but it was also true that Hungary, Poland and the Baltic states were deeply suspicious of Russia's intentions that they wanted NATO forces on their soil. The brutal war unleashed by Yeltsin in Chechnya in 1994 kept the fear burning.
A June 2016 Levada poll found that 68% of Russians think that deploying NATO troops in the Baltic states and Poland is a threat to Russia. In contrast 67% of Poles surveyed in a 2018 Pew Research Center report favour US forces being based in Poland.
But Poland is a country about which the CPM would not allow a word to be uttered.
