Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V.I.Lenin
Economic and Philosophic Science Review
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No 1676 July 17th 2026                                                                                                                                              40p 

Trot sneers at Cuba’s leadership just as imperialism steps up its strangling blockade and threatens bloodcurdling invasion underlines yet more what a treacherous fraud is this petty bourgeois fake-”left”ism. But revisionist “defence” of Havana against Western hatred of its brilliant communist example, just as dire and dishonest, from the dilettante RCG poseurs to complacent Stalinist sectarians from Proletarian/Lalkar still covering up past mistakes. None spell out crucial importance of the dictatorship of the proletariat, still at the heart of Havana’s resistance nor set its opening up moves in the crucial context of monopoly capitalism’s Catastrophic breakdown. Leninism needed

Cuba’s just announced partial opening of its communist economy to Western investment and direct trade has exposed yet again the whole fake-“left”, with treachery and defeatism from the Trotskyists and confusion and complacency from revisionism.
As discussed last issue (No 1675) the immediate cries of “betrayal” and “treachery” world wide against Havana from the dilettante posturing fake “anti-imperialist” Trots demonstrates their underlying hatred and contempt for this heroic workers state, (and all workers states) despite their lip-service “recognition” of its stunning near 70-year long fighting defiance of the giant US imperialist power on whose doorstep it sits.
Most of them sneered at the Cuban revolution early on as “just another Stalinist regime”, part of the endless service to imperialism begun by Trotsky himself, (See EPSR Books Vol 5, 29 and 30) denouncing the Soviet and pro-Soviet camp (and continuing still against China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos etc) with Trotsky-derived bilious “theories” of “bureaucratic sellouts” and “counter-revolutionary castes” – (meaning a new ruling class, but without saying so because it makes no Marxist scientific sense) – all about an alleged “elite” supposedly intent from the first moments of undermining the “real” working class movement and restoring capitalism, (even while they carried out the revolution!)
All the workers states’ leaderships are lyingly declared by these petty bourgeois mountebanks as allegedly producing nothing but “hellholes”, as these countries and especially the former Soviet Union, are mendaciously painted by their self-satisfied smugness, in colours as luridly hostile as any imperialist propaganda brainwashing Goebbels accounts, if not more so.
All describe completely poisonous idealist nightmare fantasies bearing no relation to the socialist aiming societies they are rubbishing.
Not only is this a vile negative calumny against the workers states, full of poison (because of petty bourgeois individualist hatred of their class discipline and unity); its damaging effect impacts on workers’ consciousness everywhere.
And that is doubled by failure to spell out the enormous positive achievements and advances made by the working class once the stifling, repressive, divisive and alienating tyranny of capitalist rule and exploitation is lifted from the backs of humanity, putting them on a path towards an eventual classless communist world society whose condition for existence is the capacity for every one to flourish to their full ability.   
Over Cuba most of the Trots changed their tune eventually, but only as the huge achievements and revolutionary fighting sacrifices of the Castro-led workers state won so much massive support and approval from the international proletariat that standing against it became impossible for these slippery opportunists, if they were to keep their position in the “labour movement” and not be instantly rejected by any principled worker with two brain cells to rub together. 
(See eg EPSR  No725 09-11-93, quoted last issue, on the Spartacist forerunners’ initial 1960s total hostility to Castro, opposing the “peasant-guerrilla road to socialism” as “suicidal adventurism” (so much for Mao’s giant 20-year long revolution then, let alone Fidel!!!) and constantly calling for “political revolution” ever since.
Slimy Trot sabotage like this tries only to undermine workers states’ authority with petty bourgeois idealist “rank-and-fileism”, while pretending to be looking out for “the true interests of the workers”.
Their pseudo-“concern” is nothing but anti-leadership anti-communism and their “political revolution” calls have sustained only attempt after attempt to foster fraudulent “workers democratic” upheavals, allegedly to “improve” and “defend” the workers states but in practice doing the exact opposite with their disruption.
From East German disturbances in 1953, and the violent Hungarian fascist uprising in 1956 to the petty bourgeois Prague Spring in 1968, and then ten-year-long Solidarnosc pseudo-“trade union” stunt in Poland they all turned out to be nothing but counter-revolution.
Wildly exaggerated and overblown, (see EPSR No 1674 p7)) the 1980 Pilsudski-worshipping upheaval was never a “workers movement” (however much a few less bright workers might have been stampeded along with it) but a backward religion-soaked petty bourgeois counter-revolution, provoked and organised long before by the CIA and funded by the corrupt and reactionary Catholic Church.
Its ten-year-long disruptive turmoil finally culminated in the outright fascism of restored capitalism in Warsaw (and tipped Moscow into its liquidation), which was soon a leading proponent of imperialist warmongering in Afghanistan and Iraq and now at the heart of NATO’s vicious and deadly 12 years of anti-Russian war using Ukraine’s Bandera-loving nazi-nationalists as proxies.
Solidarnosc was backed by every part of the Trotskyist “left” including the slyly lying Spartacists who then suddenly changed their position ten months in, after an opportunist finger in the political wind recognised that the reactionary counter-revolutionary nature of the whole racket had become too smelly for advanced workers to be taken in and for the Sparts’ pretence of “determined anti-imperialism” not to be discredited (see issue last week, EPSR 1206 28-10-03 and many others).  
The same twisted “support” (!!) given to Poland is now been turned on Havana (once more), misrepresenting the new changes announced by Havana either to drown international workers’ understanding in defeatism, declaring that capitalism has already been reinstated (RCP!!!) or they are “evidence” of a “bureaucratic plot” to reinstate it.
The measures have been seized on immediately by the Trots just at the point where Cuba is under heavier onslaught than ever from imperialist siege blockade – reaching near starvation conditions without energy as the US (illegally) cuts off all oil supply – to try and end its communism.
With pressure ramped up by bloodcurdling invasion threats from Washington it is utter treachery and irresponsibility to be undermining Havana at this point, setting it up for the potential bloodbath of massacring vengeance and destruction that hate-filled imperialism wishes for communism, far beyond even the horrors and atrocities imposed on country after country in Latin America over decades of suppression of anything even halfway towards socialism (El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia).
Of course there are risks in opening up the economy and changes are in part made under severe duress to hold ground.
But there is nothing which needs automatically invite the sniping which has come from the Trots; no hint in Havana of gushing support for the “free market” and “democracy” such as the Gorbachevite capitulation pumped out in the Soviet Union as “perestroika and glasnost” after 1987.
Re-organising the economy and production, battling against bureaucratic holdups, trying out different methods, and a constant juggling with management techniques is not out of line with a workers state economy albeit in tough conditions and under duress. As the EPSR said:

Although the USSR, for example, suffered miserably from chronic bureaucratic sclerosis on the way to the tragic self-liquidation under the Gorbachevite small-minded philistines, – there had never been anything but endless change and alteration in the Soviet system, adjusting and tinkering with the economic planning system ceaselessly (and see, for example, extracts from a Fidel Castro speech over the coming weeks, how even the most radical amendments remain far from alien to workers statehood and socialism, which are plainly predicated on rational planned development of each and every kind).
Thus it is obvious that there is nothing inherent in planned socialist statehood itself which would prevent whatever difficulties might emerge under workers governments from being completely resolved in due course. (EPSR No797 11-04-95).

From the outside it is obviously difficult to fully assess just how dangerous the new Cuban “opening up” will be, in inevitably allowing capitalist infiltration and shallow consumerist attitudes (always a worry in China and Vietnam for example).
But that can be countered if anti-imperialist leadership guidance for mass understanding is deep and clear enough. 
Revisionist flaws, still untackled, raise some doubts on that but as discussed last issue, the Cuban leadership has asserted that it will retain state control for the strategic direction of the economy.
That is not necessarily any different to Lenin’s Bolsheviks’ New Economic Policy methods in the early 1920s, which worked precisely because the new dictatorship of the proletariat had overall political control, and could contain the use of capitalist concessions to build up the war-shattered Soviet economy from the largely primitive and backward conditions Tsarist feudalism had left it in (plus massive WW1 and civil war damage to what capitalist infrastructure there was).
Letting sections of the economy be run by capitalists under often financially onerous deals with Western, mostly US, capitalists (for mineral extraction and other investment concessions) was a price worth paying to learn management and engineering etc from these outsiders said Lenin.
Once they had trained and developed enough of the working class they could rely on their own talents and fully industrialise under firm state control as happened in the late 1920s and 30s, (under Stalin’s leadership!).
After that the USSR went on to gigantic achievements, including the virtually single-handed defeat of the Western coordinated and egged-on German Nazi onslaught in 1941-45 and undoubted parity with imperialism post-war (even outpacing the West in some technological, scientific, cultural and social respects (first man in space eg)) despite huge disadvantages, and the imposed expensive need to remain constantly on the defensive against belligerent imperialist nuclear encirclement and economic siege.
Only later did the full impact of revisionist retreat from continuous revolutionary philosophical development and leadership, temporarily halt the USSR. 
Despite much effort and sacrifice supporting world anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and communist struggles, in the Spanish civil war, in the history altering 1941-5 defeat of German Nazism and then post-WW2, revisionism steadily pulled away from a perspective of non-stop international struggle to defeat imperialism worldwide and complete the world revolution.
Quantitative retreat over decades (as far back as the late 1920s)  became qualitative change in the late 1980s into Gorbachevite liquidationist counter-revolution (see EPSR Books Vol13 on Gorbachevism, and Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics).
But China resisted and much smaller and even more constrained Cuba retained enough defiant spirit, despite its own revisionist weaknesses to hang on throughout the demoralising setback.
Genuine anti-imperialist communism would and should give full unconditional support to this brave people, their own stunning achievements and their leadership, against the vicious Empire bullying (and lying propaganda), especially at this most vulnerable point, as discussed last issue.
But that certainly does not mean ignoring any of the undoubted limitations in Havana’s perspectives which have not overcome many of the revisionist flaws inherited from the Third International as most clearly apparent recently in the capitulation of the Venezuelan allies, after Washington’s monstrous kidnap of president Nicolás Maduro.
Just the opposite, they need to be identified and polemicised with.
The Chavistas’ failure to press forwards with the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat, which was never established by Caracas as its necessary conscious aim, despite its left nationalist orientation and many excellent commune level socialist developments, has proved disastrous there, with outright class collaboration with Washington now apparent in the wake of the US kidnap.
But advice on that perspective and much else was never spelt out by Havana as a critical issue either, nor by the whole “left” spectrum as many times pointed out on similar questions by the EPSR:

Castro’s weakness in Marxist-Leninist science is always being excused in similar ways as ‘wise tactics under the threat of instant US imperialist obliteration if he says too much’, etc. This meant going along with the catastrophic defence of Gorbachevism by Castro, the ANC/SACP, and others, as it unfolded from 1984 to 1991. It meant going along with Havana’s zero-useful advice to the Sandinista Revolution, helping its downfall to a CIA electoral sucker-punch because of an absence of any understanding historically about imperialist boom and crisis, Soviet revisionist retreat, and the neglect of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It meant the criminal destruction of the Grenada Revolution without a fight because of Castro’s friendship with the anti-Leninist populist Maurice Bishop. It meant watching Cuba lending tragic support to the anti-Leninist delusions of Allende in Chile, culminating in predictable counter-revolutionary disaster.
Castro’s heroic Cuba remains the greatest practical revolutionary example to mankind that could be imagined, worth a thousand communist programmes. But the rest of the international working class desperately needs programmed communist perspectives as well. It is still getting no such leadership (see Group of 77 Castro speech on a later page).(EPSR No1044 16-05-00)

If there are further revisionist illusions being reflected in these new changes – for example in the lack of emphasis on the Catastrophic crisis of capitalism as being the driving force of history and the basis for the demented and unstoppable warmongering of the last 30 years they also need to be commented on.
The use of terms like “multilateralism” in Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel’s introduction to the new measures sounds a warning for example, hinting as it does at revisionist long-term “peaceful world balance” perspectives, which is never going to be possible and least of all in the now overt crisis warmongering period signalled by Trumpism and the tearing up of all past “world freedom and democracy” pretences.  
And perhaps, it could be added, so could Havana’s advice to such revolutionary armed groups as the FARC in Colombia, to stand down from 30 years of armed struggle and follow solely a parliamentary “peaceful road”, with Cuba mediating “peace process” negotiations in Havana.
But it did so before the revolution had reached any kind of decisive point against the vicious US-stooge bourgeois Bogota regime, in contrast to the IRA/Sinn Féin Irish national liberation struggle for example, which only negotiated the 1998 Good Friday Agreement after it had fought the British imperialist occupation of the north to an effective standstill. “Democratic” peace was won by armed struggle.
As Leninism suggested Colombian peace has proved an illusion, now seeing once again an outrageous stitch-up of the recent presidential “election” (this time by computer hacking of the ballot counts) to install an ultra-reactionary president once more, just as has been pulled off in various ways all around Latin America from Ecuador and Peru to Chile and Argentina, all looking to emulate Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador and its monstrous concentration camp prison savagery, torture and intimidation against the working class (under cover of “suppressing the gangs” and housing “migrants” from the US):

Outgoing Colombian President Gustavo Petro has accused Israel of hacking the presidential election, claiming that changes to election servers allowed outsiders to manipulate voting data.
He made the remarks after right-wing candidate Abelardo De La Espriella won the presidential election on Sunday by a narrow margin, preliminary results show, defeating leftist Senator Ivan Cepeda and signaling a shift away from Petro’s progressive policies.
With nearly all ballots counted, De La Espriella secured 49.66% of the vote against 48.70% for Cepeda, according to the National Registry. The 47-year-old lawyer and businessman, who was endorsed by US President Donald Trump, campaigned on promises to crack down on crime, end peace talks with armed groups, and restore ties with Israel after Petro severed diplomatic relations.
Petro, a longtime critic of Western powers, has accused the US of perpetuating global inequality and described Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as “genocide.”
In a post on Sunday on X, Petro said he had warned that election software developed by the Bautista brothers was vulnerable, citing a 2018 ruling by Colombia’s Council of State, and had called for it to be replaced with publicly owned software and subjected to an independent audit.
Petro said there was evidence that the IP addresses of several servers belonging to Colombia’s National Registry were changed, which he claimed indicates that the software was breached and “others entered data for polling stations and voting centers.”
“The only entity in the world with the capacity to do that is the state of Israel,” he added.
He said he would provide judges with details of the allegedly altered servers and called for a full recount and an investigation into vulnerabilities in the election software.
De La Espriella, who pushed for closer ties with Washington, has already received congratulations from Trump and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He pledged to restore diplomatic relations with Israel and open a Colombian Embassy in Jerusalem, reversing Petro’s severing of ties.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar congratulated De La Espriella on his “impressive victory” and said Israel looks forward to strengthening bilateral ties.
The close ties between De La Espriella and Israel were on display throughout his campaign. During a meeting with Sa’ar in November, De La Espriella said that “a strategic alliance with the State of Israel and the US government will not only make us stronger, but will place us on the right side of history.”

Whether or not Zionism is specifically responsible, or the just-as-dirty Langley or other skulduggery, all Marxist understanding should have constantly warned this ballot fixing is an inevitable aspect of bourgeois “democracy”; bourgeois elections are endlessly bent, manipulated and fixed by big money and corporate influence in a thousand and one underhand manoeuvres from crudely obvious vote rigging, bribery and corruption, and the monopoly billionaire finance support which buys virtually all US elections, or sabotages those candidates who are “not suitable” or sufficiently compliant as the Zionist AIPAC constantly does, to the subtle and insidious influence of the mainstream Western press, and now social media, and expensive advertising.
On top is outright censorship of opposition views and news, (under the laughable label of “stopping disinformation”), banning all but “official media” like the ever-more-reactionary BBC as well as drowning out reason with the constant hum of “cultural”, “celebrity” and consumerist philistinism and anti-communist brainwashing.
In Britain (and Germany etc) intimidation against Palestine supporters or anti-Ukraine protestors etc, is ramped up using ridiculous “anti-terrorist” or “media protection” laws (with new ones passed virtually weekly – by the foul reactionary stooge Labourites at present) and with many turned into unpeople with debilitating “debanking”, arbitrary detention and prison, international sanctions and even illegal citizenship-stripping including such figures as the United Nations Palestine rapporteur Francesca Albanese or many staff on the International Criminal Court etc.
On these grounds those who notionally side with Cuba and its leadership, but uncritically, need to be taken up, – which means most revisionists groups and those like the Fight Racism Fight Imperialism Revolutionary Communist Group.
None spell out the importance of the dictatorship of the proletariat, nor put the capitalist crisis at the heart of analysis, the driving cause of Washington’s demented panicking aggression and the slump/warmongering context in which these developments need to be understood.
How to tackle making such criticism is a crucial issue for Marxist Leninist development, because the first requirement is to stand in unconditional solidarity with any workers state, as previously declared (and spelled out many times by the EPSR):

Communists will accept the Cuban socialist revolution for what it is, – clearly a workers state, with the bourgeoisie abolished, and battling right on the front line against world (mainly US) imperialism, – a magnificent historic advance, – full of flaws, faults, and imperfections, obviously, – but a breakthrough development to be enthusiastically fought for and defended by all serious-minded workers and socialists the world over, – urging the Cuban comrades wherever possible to vastly deepen their revolution’s grasp of Marxist-Leninist science which is their gravest weakness.[..]
Fake ‘communists’ deride the Cuban workers state for its ‘human rights’ crimes, for its ‘Stalinist dictatorship’, for its ‘collectivisation of poverty through its counter-revolutionary policy of socialism-in-one-country, instead of the collectivisation of wealth through permanent international revolution’, etc.
Real communists, on the other hand, would back Cuba with unconditional support in all of its conflicts with bourgeois ideological derision, whether from rightwing ‘free world’ imperialist disinformation or from fake-‘left’ petty-bourgeois individualist subjectivism, (the other side of the same counter-revolutionary ‘democracy’ coin.)
But real communists would also like to polemicise with the Cuban revolutionary party on disputed questions of Marxist-Leninist science which could mislead the international working class and harm the Cuban workers state itself (see countless past EPS Reviews on such polemics), – (incidentally giving the lie to the unserious and irresponsible Trot parroting of “totalitarian Stalinist dictatorship and cover-up” and “the denial of the freedom of criticism”, etc.)
It is only out of the unconditional solidarity with the Cuban revolution against all attacks on it by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois idealist philosophy that real communists can have the standing to seriously polemicise with the Cuban revolutionary party about crucial differences on international historical lessons, such as Allende, Grenada, Gorbachev, etc, etc. (EPSR No 901 29-04-97)

But while huge sensitivity is called for, that is vastly different to the grovelling sycophancy of supposed supporters including like Revolutionary Communist Group, reeking in middle class guilt, defeatism and contempt for the mainstream working class, seen as permanently corrupted by imperialist bribery and blamed for being “too greedy” as they were in the 1980s strike movements, which even saw the RCG initially write-off the 1984-5 miners strike, only to pitch in behind the reformist Labour Plan for Coal illusions later on, which held back the revolutionary lessons that needed to be made.  
Their defeatism still grasps nothing about the movement of the crisis and the class struggle, and of revolutionary theory coming into its own as the Catastrophe’s slump and war conditions force the majority of workers into spontaneous class war against the capitalist state and its grotesque inequalities and destructiveness (however much they may have been bought off as a “labour aristocracy” in the past and however much the revolutionary understanding has to confront their prejudices and brainwashed illusions – which will not dissipate spontaneously but have to be fought by the revolutionary party both inside and outside the “organised” sections).
The RCG has always compensated for this peculiar form of defeatism by a self-righteous over-emphasis on what are declared to be the most oppressed sections of the working class, particularly those pushed down by racism, to the nonsensical point of declaring the fight against racism to be the same as the fight against imperialism – a topsy-turvy position which takes attention from the need to overthrow capitalism. 
Instead of seeing racism and other single issue burdens to be a result of capitalist alienation and oppression, it declares them primary.
Alongside, particular international struggles are adopted like  Cuba, but ignoring China, North Korea, Vietnam etc.
All these other crucial struggles are written off by the RCG in the same way as the rest of the Trots do – these poseurs in fact lined up with the violent counter-revolutionary students in the 1989 Tiananmen “democracy” provocation for example (see EPSR Book Vol 16 China), and supported the nazi-saturated Croat “Utashe” nationalist breakaway against the not-quite-so reactionary Serbian revisionist nationalism  during the decade long Western meddling and skulduggery in the civil war break up of former socialist Yugoslavia and the eventual NATO blitzing.
They spent years disrupting the unity of the SACP/ANC led anti-apartheid movement with backing for petty bourgeois individualists like the Kitsons, complete with gushing uncritical welcomes on their hijacked City Apartheid platform for reactionary Labour frauds like Ken Livingstone.  
And while they just about managed to avoid supporting the Solidarnosc disruption in Poland, accepting it was a bogus front, they sat on the fence on for months, avoiding any comment when it was the most urgent issue facing the world working class (as potential Western invasion was on the cards). 
Most significantly, they never came out in unconditional support (however critically) of the Polish workers state facing the CIA-Vatican disruption.
Like all Trots they cannot bear to uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat or even mention it (see ILWP Bulletin (EPSR) No479 25-01-89) – true to their petty bourgeois fear of the working class.
The same is true now over Cuba, lauded for its “democracy”, not its firmness, in this tirade against the admittedly dire and anti-communist CPGB-PCC in its Weekly Worker letters column: 

Eddie Ford follows the well-worn and disgraceful path of the British left in dealing with its Cuba problem, relying on anecdotes and opinion presented as fact (‘Under siege and still resisting’, May 28).
It is a pity that he did not leave his article to the few paragraphs that show some basic appreciation of the pressures on the Cuban revolution in the face of 65 years of US aggression. He does not pay tribute to its massive achievements, and what humanity stands to lose if imperialism triumphs. Where is the praise for an underdeveloped, formerly oppressed, neo-colonial state, which built a system of universal healthcare free at the point of use? Free universal education, even up to university level? An educated professional and technical population, over half of whom are women?
Cuba created a biotechnology industry which has created pioneering treatments for cancer, against mother-baby transfer of Aids, five Covid vaccines; sent hundreds of thousands of healthcare professionals across the world to deal with crises such as Ebola and Covid. It is a state where working class democracy exists to the full, where there is the most advanced stand on LGTBQ+ rights in the new Family Code. Why decline to mention the fight and defeat of apartheid forces in Angola and then support for the liberation of Namibia? Or its solidarity with the Palestinian people?
Instead we get a miserably shallow dive, at which the petty bourgeois left excels, when forced to deal with Cuba. Ford says: “It is perfectly legitimate to critique early revolutionary Cuba, seeing that there are those who held it up as a model – and still do.” Why? What is the purpose of such a critique? For a left in Britain which has spent decades defending a racist, imperialist, warmongering Labour Party we can only expect a prelude to some counter-revolutionary sentiment. Does he mean as a model to be followed in Britain? Britain is a major imperialist power which has, like all imperialist powers, ensured the political domination of a privileged layer of the working class over the mass of the working class.
The problems we face in Britain are quite different from those faced by revolutionaries in Cuba. Here, the obstacles are created by the left, describing themselves as ‘revolutionary socialists’, while obsessing over electoral politics. In this context, communists have to point to the examples cited above as a demonstration of what socialism can achieve even in an underdeveloped country, showing that it is both possible and necessary, and that it will never be achieved by wretched electoral vehicles, such as Your Party et al.
The petty bourgeois or social-democratic left constantly works to expunge the revolutionary essence of the Cuban revolution from the records. Ford’s superficial account of Guevara’s approach to revolutionary foci is supposed to do the trick, especially if you ignore the parts where Che spoke of the need to build alliances with the urban movement, where there were already revolutionary processes taking place.
But this is not the end of Guevara’s achievements. His extensive theoretical contribution on the subjective element of building socialism, the need for a constant development of political consciousness as part of the development of the productive forces is unequalled since Lenin. (see H Yaffe Che Guevara: the economics of revolution, 2009). It is one of the many great legacies of the Cuban revolution as much as it is of an outstanding theoretician. Ford does not address this – why? Is he completely ignorant of it?
So when Ford repeats the mantra, “it no longer represents a model to follow”, there is simply arrogance: ‘We socialists here in Britain may have achieved nothing – indeed we may be in full and ignominious retreat – but, by jingo, we can tell others across the world how a socialist revolution has to be done or not done.’
We in the RCG are often told that we are uncritical of the Cuban revolution. What the left misses is that the fiercest critics of their revolution are the Cuban people themselves – fierce because they are constantly having to fight intellectually and politically for the best path forward to defend their achievements, when they know that these best paths are never going to be the ideal ones, while imperialism exists. Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! regularly covers the changes, the retreats, the recoveries, the advances, as Cuba grapples with the operation of the law of value. We unashamedly engage with what the Cuban leadership thinks and says, and certainly do not condescendingly dismiss them as ‘Stalinists’ or ‘bureaucrats’. We are clear: the true communists in Cuba are within the Communist Party of Cuba, and we unreservedly stand with them and the Cuban people.
Trashy dismissals of our standpoint – with labels like ‘Castroists’, ‘Maoists’, ‘sub-Maoists’, ‘Stalinists’, ‘third worldists’, ‘Guevarists’, ‘ultra-leftists’, ‘dogmatists’ (we have had all of these) – betray the unwillingness of the social-democratic left to get out of its self-serving framework and engage with questions of imperialism and the working class struggle in the imperialist countries (with those divisions repeatedly described by Lenin), or, in alliance with the oppressed, in the underdeveloped countries.
In Britain, for the RCG that means ending the ludicrous ambition of creating a new social-democratic party or imagining that it can be perfected under a different name; it means ending the obsession with the overtly reactionary trade unions as the primary or even exclusive site of working class struggle.
The struggle to defend the Cuban revolution is the vital question of the day.
Robert Clough Revolutionary Communist Group

For all its correct enough swipes at the WW this supposed “defence” of Cuba reeks of hypocrisy and petty bourgeois self-righteousness and defeatism, both in what it says and in what it leaves out, all covered up with gibberish pseudo-Marxism like “grappling with the law of value” – whatever that means. Presumably taking a Ryan Air flight would be “grappling with the law of gravity”??  
Just the phrases “paying tribute to” or “praising” Cuba’s achievements make the point, an indulgent verbal patting on the head of a people “who started with nothing” which contains all the Western arrogance this RCG accuses everyone else of, masked by a play-acting “white” humility that would make Uriah Heap blush as they lash everyone else for “telling the Cubans what to do”.
As explained above there is no question of one-sidedly pontificating to anyone, but what else is Marxism for if it is not the struggle to understand the world and give leadership to the working class, internationally? Let that be through as comradely and calm polemical discussion as possible recognising weaknesses on all sides if they are there, and correcting them, but: 

Flawed, weak, or incomplete anti-imperialism must be described as such for the international working-class to be able to proceed to conscious world socialist revolution through an increasing number of trial-and-error experiences. Such consciousness is the whole aim and the whole content of the struggle for Marxist-Leninist philosophy. (EPSR No 1044 op cit) 

And failing to grasp that is the greatest weakness of all, tantamount to failing to see the fight for theory – or rather correct theory – as the overriding question, a petty bourgeois weakness this RCG has always shown despite its long academic screeds filled with painstaking detail about world struggles, allegedly revolutionary but always ending up with just the same pacifist/reformist demands as the rest of the “left”.
Lauding Che’s writings is fine – he certainly was a powerful intellectual as well as dedicated practical revolutionary – but does not deal with philosophical weaknesses. 
Some of Cuba’s internationalism has been a giant historic example for the world (doctors, Angola) – and one in the eye for Trot sneers about “socialism in one country” – but the theory of “seeding” revolution verges on voluntarism rather than concrete analysis, again as pointed out:

As it also happens, the Cuban workers state did in fact indulge in some revolutionary fantasy by sending its most outstanding revolutionary emissary, Che Guevara, to first Zaire and then Bolivia to try to spark off anti-imperialist revolutions in those countries, both ending in failure and eventually in the death of Guevara (EPSR 901 op cit). 

Multiple further points in this letter reveal the shallowness and dilettante petty bourgeois nature of this RCG.
Despite a correct swipe at those who ignore the revolution’s many positive advances, the letter’s listing is all over the shop, absurdly placing Cuba’s “family code” LGBTQ+ rights on a par with, if not above, the staggering and historic contribution made by its armed forces in the struggle against South African apartheid’s domination over Angola and Namibia.
There are plenty who might see the Code’s provisions as at least a lesser blow to imperialism, and that potentially some of its philosophical base is flawed anyway as a universal principle.
The declaration that all forms of sexuality are simply to be declared “normal” (as opposed to society overcoming past bigotry, and homophobic persecution etc and letting everyone pursue their private lives without interference) remains a far from settled question requiring complex psychological and sociological investigation, one very likely only possible once human society, worldwide, has evolved far into a communist (and sensitively communal) future.
The usual “homophobe” or “transphobe” accusations etc that follow such caveats are anti-science reaction in themselves and a suspicion must be that Havana wins such approval because it has been playing to Western single-issue reformist politics promulgated by the fake-“left”.
However well Cuba’s code works this issue has become a giant obstacle to debate and polemic in the capitalist countries, filled with non-stop self-righteous wrangling and “no platforming” substituting for the fight for revolutionary understanding and in fact hostile to it.
As frequently pointed out by the EPSR, all variants of single-issue politics and “human rights” have become “the last refuge of anti-communism” (within capitalist nations) and have remained so, both as attention grabbing distractions and as a means of berating the rising anti-imperialist struggle for not being “perfect” (in Trotskyist idealist judgement) and therefore to be opposed or “condemned”.
But as declared before: 

A Marxist explanation [shows] the need to isolate the main enemy and singlemindedly put off all other issues (EPSR No1242 20-07-04)

As spelt out then, insistence on society declaring LBGTQ+ “normality” by single-issue “the personal is political” campaigns, and overriding or deferring the main struggle to do so, has frequently led to complete reaction, particularly against the Middle Eastern struggles around the Zionist genocidal occupation of Palestine where the “gay rights” issue is used to oppose the Islamic orientated resistance (which has cultural limits on this matter).
Notable single-issue campaigners like Peter Tatchell have mounted counter-demonstrations to Palestinian support on this basis, even marching with Zionist demonstrations. 
But by far the most important question is the entirely wrong emphasis thrown onto “working class democracy” which is the biggest distortion in this supposed “defence” of Cuba.
And why so? Because of its failure to mention at all the dictatorship of the proletariat, either in Cuba itself or as the crucial element in Leninist understanding of the world class struggle.
That means “democracy”, as the term is used by the RCG at least, becomes nothing more than another version of the “rank-and-fileism” anti-theory beloved of all Trots (where the group’s roots lie).
But democracy developed within a workers state is something completely different to the shallow notions of “voting” under capitalism, which even if it were fair and balanced (it never has been and cannot be under capitalist class dictatorship rule) would still not be a guarantee of the correct path forwards which depends on the battle for scientific understanding not a Babel of contending factions. 
Nor is it “the best means of making decisions” in the crude majority wins sense. What if they vote for Farage??? 
In Cuba “democracy” is a detailed extension of the working class dictatorship and only made possible by it.
As far as can be grasped from Havana’s public accounts of the process, it gives shape to the Leninist dialectical understanding that it is the strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat which widens true democracy.
Ever better education and conditions for the population, and suppression of deliberate disruption and counter-revolutionary provocations by the bourgeoisie (both internally and from external subversion), allows ever widening mass educated participation in a growing common understanding of how to advance the whole society. 
Elections are not an antagonistic gladiatorial contest, nor “the majority view from below” but a detailed examination of policies put forwards by detailed leadership over many months, based on polemical scientific analysis, with feedback and reasoned discussion heard and incorporated (if fitting with the agreed scientific Leninist view) before the best and most competent representatives are chosen.
Disciplined party-developed Marxist-Leninist theory is the heart of the process and is precisely what the RCGers, and for that matter the rest of the fake-“left” do not begin to grasp despite all their declarations and claims to be building revolutionary understanding.
And that demands a profound grasp of the totality of the world capitalist system, its balance of class forces, and their historical movement and development, and most of all the ever deepening unsolvable economic and political contradictions, hurtling into the greatest Catastrophe in history with a monopoly ruling class intent on imposing permanent and worsening warmongering chaos as its “escape route” (see page 6, Marx’s Capital (and notes), Lenin’s multiple volumes of economic and revolutionary writings and the EPSR’s work in nearly 1700 issues).
All that contrasts with bourgeois “democracy” which is nothing but a clever façade to cover over the actual dictatorship of big money and capital, whose interests dictate all that goes on, save for trivial tinkerings and minor reforms let through in prosperous times to keep the whole racket going with the illusion of change.
Even such minor “gains” are blocked off or reversed once the crisis bites heavily and conditions no longer allow for even that minimal pretence, as is now becoming clearer as the monopoly capitalist Catastrophe spirals inwards, propped up only by the extraordinary extension of credit made since the 2008-09 global banking breakdown.
That “financial nuclear winter” moment to which non-stop crisis “wobbles” (regional and world level trade perturbations in fact like the 1987 Black Monday, GATT talk conflicts, Latin American bankruptcy, or the Asian currency meltdown, the 2000 doc.com implosion) had all been leading, has festered ever since, bandaged with even greater insanely inflationary credit creation but still imposing cuts and austerity on the growing poor and deprived while opening the inequality gap to surreal levels.
And it is all due to implode any moment as the insane AI/digital data-centre bubble expands ever further, with not a chance in hell of the ludicrous dollar tides of investment swamping “the markets” all making any profit.
With it has come the escalation of already three decades of warmongering and the Trumpite/Zionist dropping of any serious effort to maintain the anyway fraudulent “freedom and democracy” – raw bullying genocidal force and intimidation is now to the fore, the savage face of monopoly capitalism which has only its brute terrorising force to rely on in order to get through the greatest “overproduction” Catastrophe, ready to burst (see economics box p6). 
Failure to understand the critical importance of the fight for theory, allied with defeatism, underlines the sneering here against the Your Party development, of possible interest to Marxists not because it is going to lead revolution but because it reflects growing anti-capitalist movement in the working class (which is far from “swinging rightwards”).
As such it might (and no more than that) still offer a forum where the crucial argument for revolutionary theory can be made (while never becoming the revolutionary party itself).
Meanwhile conventional, not to say aspic-preserved, Stalinist revisionism’s support is just as flawed, with the Lalkar/Proletarian CPGB-ML once again missing out the central significance of imperialism’s Catastrophic crisis collapse and world war drive as the critical context within which to understand these revolutionary tactics.
Why is there a “tightened US blockade” to deal with? 
Because the Empire is more desperate and hammered than ever before.
Sound enough points about the Cubans retaining state control fail to draw out the importance of having first established the dictatorship of the proletariat, a crucial difference with the obvious counterpart Venezuela.
These Brarites have only just made excuses for the appalling class collaboration by the Caracas government under Delcy Rodriguez, declaring that the cooperation with US bullying in the wake of January’s disgusting and illegal Maduro kidnap, is no more than “clever tactics” – even citing Lenin’s Brest-Litovsk retreat in 1918 which handed over huge chunks of territory to the German imperialists to fend off an imminent attack.
But the Bolsheviks had a newly established workers state to protect, precisely what does not exist in left nationalist Venezuela, now swamped with US agents and corporations (see last issue) and above all cooperating with the US diktat on shutting down oil exports to China and obviously Cuba.   
As discussed, the Proletarian made no challenge at all to the RCG’s gush about “bottom up commune socialism” in Venezuela at a recent rally, which was (patronisingly) declared the “example to the world of the way forwards” for achieving socialism. 
That is both shallowly wrong in itself and implicitly an attack on the necessary struggle for leadership and revolutionary theory without which any amount of spontaneous/communal struggle cannot carry through to full socialism.        
The Brarites’ failure to differentiate left reformism (however boldly and rightly it has developed communes and workers militias) from class dictatorship is more than an error but reflects its own revisionist perspective and failure to take up any struggle to understand what went wrong with the Soviet Union.
So its perspective on Cuba simply refers to the difficulties for Havana which emerged “when the Soviet Union collapsed” without any explanation at all of what that collapse was.
Since it simply denies the failings and retreats in the Soviet philosophy from Stalin’s time onwards, which culminated in Gorbachevism’s liquidation of the Soviet workers state, all it can do is slip over that giant event and its obvious importance for understanding now, simply declaring that “reforms were poorly thought through” and combined with “political liberalism”.
Worse still this then leads onto all kinds of hypocritical contradictions.
The Stalinists have always blamed the post-1953 bureaucratic inheritors of the allegedly flawless Stalin (!) - and especially Nikita Kruschev - for suddenly (and unexpectedly) undermining the Soviet Union, and in particular by introducing “market methods”, thundering against their abandonment of “proper Soviet state ownership and planning” as sneaking in counter-revolution.
As the EPSR has shown many times (EPSR Books Vol 18 Five polemics on bankrupt Third Internationalism and Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics), this “blame Kruschev” notion is a crude scapegoating which gives no explanation at all of Soviet philosophical flaws which have origins much deeper and further back and which Kruschev and later bureaucratic leadership simply magnified. 
The Proletarianites consequently have never squared China’s massive use of NEP-style capitalist concessions and outside investment – surely “market methods”(?) – with their uncritical Stalin worship.
But suddenly China’s example of using a capitalist sector in the economy (and on a huge scale) is referred to as a significant positive example for Cuba’s decisions which supposedly, in contrast to the Soviet Union, are being done the “right way”, now they slip in. 
So they seem to be, though the sudden conversion to Beijing’s approach now misses out any comment at all about the obvious uncertainties and dangers of China’s policies.
Just as much as with Cuba, there is obvious Western influence, and the huge impact of consumerist shallowness, which allied to the continuing revisionist weakness of Beijing itself, remains a permanent concern.
But as revisionists themselves the CBGB-ML are now in awe of the giant strides made by China (obviously in some respects rightly so)  and see only “socialist tradition” (as they refer to Lenin’s complexly thought out strategy of the New Economic Policy) in its use of capitalist methods on a huge scale.   
“Tradition”??? About the most conservative concept possible emerges from supposed Marxists whose rationale as alleged revolutionaries must surely be about grasping the total disruption, chaos and breakdown that paralysed class society is unavoidably heading into as a result of its inescapable Catastrophic breakdown and the constant struggle to keep up with and understand ever moving reality.
But these are no more real revolutionaries than any of the rest of the left, albeit they come down on the right side on this Cuba question.
And their own wooden Stalinist revisionism blinds them to Beijing’s flaws:

[...] impenetrably Revisionist-impaired (as far as can be deduced, in that completing the world socialist revolution is never mentioned as the most sensible and logical solution to repeated Cold-War problems with imperialist hostility, cheating, and aggressiveness EPSR No1084 10-04-01).

or over the Western Tiananmen provocation

The CPC can see now from the Soviet Union’s subsequent catastrophe that listening to imperialism’s “free market” blandishments, as Gorbachev did with his Stalinist revisionist inheritance, was a disaster. Its leadership should have seen more clearly then what a disgusting counter-revolutionary stunt were the petty bourgeois pro-American protests for ‘more democracy’ there, and smashed them much sooner. To this day, the CPC leadership still do not take Western imperialism’s worldwide counter-revolutionary conspiracy seriously enough, because they continue to lack, or fail to exhibit, the faintest grasp of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary philosophy for a world socialist revolution as the only final answer to capitalist warmongering and bourgeois-imperialist tyranny on earth.  EPSR No1073 23-01-01)

Good signs are that Beijing builds its own military and economic defences and capacities without pause, to staggering technological levels. And Western provocations do continue to be contained:

Hong Kong authorities have raided two bookstores and arrested five people on suspicion of selling allegedly seditious publications, according to local media reports, in the latest step targeting independent booksellers.
Videos and photos from multiple media outlets on Wednesday showed officers wearing vests marked with “police” seizing boxes from the building that houses Have A Nice Stay, a bookshop founded by former journalists. AFP reporters saw officers also lead away a woman in handcuffs to a van.
A few streets away a similar scene played out, with boxes taken from the building housing the Greenfield Book Store, according to a video by online news outlet The Collective.
Police said in a statement they arrested two men and three women on suspicion of displaying and offering for sale items with “seditious intention”, breaching the 2024 national security law, after raiding two stores in the Mong July 17th 2026 district, without identifying the locations. AFP reporters witnessed the raid on Have A Nice Stay, and local media, citing unnamed sources, said officers had searched the Greenfield Book Store.
It is the third round of arrests linked to independent bookstores after similar operations in March and June that were widely seen as stifling dissent in the Asian financial hub.
Hong Kong was once known for its freedom of publication and freedom of expression. Some Chinese residents crossed the border to buy books deemed to be too politically sensitive on the mainland.

Would that be the same “freedom of publication" suppressed throughout the West on anything to do with Zionism and its genocidal blitz of Palestine????
But there still there is no guidance for the world working class on the total breakdown crisis, nor even on US/Zionist  warmongering and threats in all directions.
Instead the world gets a complacent view of a future stability achieved by “multilateralism” a totally disarming nonsense which leaves workers with no grasp of the World War Three unfolding, unstoppable until ever more degenerate imperialism is completely ended in the only way possible, defeat for its war blitzing and the development of conscious revolutionary leadership to overthrow it – forever.
There is no “promising escape route from the blockade” for Cuba as the complacent Brarites conclude with equally delusory complacency – only perhaps a chance to hold off the starvation siege while remaining ready for an all-out people’s war against  invasion if desperate and filthy US imperialism tries it.
Build Leninism  Alan  Scott

E P S R BOX

Leaving the world to be run by the greed of the capitalist monopolies can never stop resulting in periodic crises where trade-war destruction MUST rule, and to which the only antidote is Revolution and a strong workers state, --- as these essentials of Marxist-Leninist SCIENCE explain.

Only the crisis events of collapsing imperialist rule interpreted in this Marxist-Leninist light will educate a mass workers party of leadership to do the necessary tasks.

The Revisionist retreat from the Soviet workers state because of crawling to shallow Western glitz and shame at their own past bureaucratic mistakes has only proved the soundness of Lenin's 'State & Revolution' science about a very long period of proletarian dictatorship being the only way for the world to see-off monopoly imperialist warmongering, now back with a vengeance.

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It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's teachings is the class struggle; but this is not true. And from this untruth very often springs the opportunist distortion of Marxism, its falsification in such a way as to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists;  they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the "Kautskyites" (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat. V.I.Lenin

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"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." (Capital. Vol III. P568.)

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" For many a decade past", wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crisis a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary...they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

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The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms, but we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms. (in such a manner) that - to oversimplify the matter for the sake of clarity - five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution. (Lenin Dec 1916: Principles involved in the war issue.)

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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperia1ist struggles).

NordStream nonsense: Western “James Bond” Ukraine fantasies
Why you’ve only read half the story – behind the most destructive act of industrial sabotage in history is a web of excuses and misdirection

The Nord Stream saga has taken a turn for the absurd, with a new book claiming that the star saboteur who blew up the gas pipelines was a Ukrainian erotic model-turned-deep sea diver. This detail is the latest addition to an ever-shifting story – while one key coincidence has completely flown under the radar.
Published on June 19, ‘The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Greatest Sabotage in History’ promises an inside look at the operation that destroyed the Nord Stream lines. Author Bojan Pancevski doesn’t quibble with the ‘official’ story circulated by the German media – that a Ukrainian commando unit carried out the attack, but adds some pulp-fiction flourish to the tale.
Pancevski claims that a former erotic model identified only as ‘Freya’ was “the bravest diver in the whole group,” without whose experience diving to depths of 100 meters the operation could not have been pulled off. Another of the divers was sick with Covid-19, but Pancevski nevertheless claims he carried out the kind of dive that has killed experienced military frogmen before. 
After the Ukraine conflict escalated in 2022, ‘Freya’, a Ukrainian who posed naked for soft-porn magazines before turning to diving, apparently “contacted a dubious intelligence unit through her diving colleagues,” and volunteered her services. Asked if she would be willing to take part in the costliest act of industrial sabotage in history, ‘Freya’ supposedly replied “where do I sign.”
Most of Pancevski’s claims cite Ukrainian intelligence sources, with his imagination filling in the gaps (Pancevski insists that the alleged saboteurs inherited their appetite for risk from the Zaporozhian cossacks of the 15th century). Marketed by its publisher as “compelling as a spy thriller,” the book is, according to a New York Times review, pitched “a little too eagerly in the direction of Hollywood.”
Although the story plumbs the depths of 1960s spy-caper silliness, it is no more far-fetched than the official narrative to date. In the most recent retelling of the operation, Der Spiegel claimed in February that a “Ukrainian secret commando unit” approached the cia in spring 2022 with plans to blow up the four individual gas pipelines that make up the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 connectors. Der Spiegel’s Ukrainian sources told the outlet that the cia “liked the plan,” shared technical data on the pipelines, and was even willing to finance the operation, until it abruptly withdrew its support in early summer.
The Ukrainians, or so the story goes, went ahead and blew up the pipelines without American permission, using a rented yacht to transport the explosives to the blast sites.
The latest report is unlikely to raise any eyebrows in Moscow. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has dismissed the entire premise of a small team of Ukrainians pulling off an operation beyond the capability of most state militaries as “ridiculous.” To understand just how ridiculous the German story is, it’s necessary to jump back to 2022.
A junction in the story
On September 26, 2022, a seismometer on the Danish island of Bornholm detected two spikes consistent with underwater explosions – one just after 2am, and another just after 7pm. Danish and Swedish authorities then determined that both Nord Stream 1 lines had been destroyed and one Nord Stream 2 line damaged roughly 60 km northeast of Bornholm, while an explosion around 25 km southeast of the island had destroyed the other Nord Stream 2 line.
As images of bubbling gas leaks hit international media, a separate story went almost entirely unreported: less than 24 hours after the second round of blasts, Poland and Norway celebrated the opening of the Baltic Pipe, a gas pipeline transiting Norwegian gas to Poland via Denmark, passing over Nord Stream just south of Bornholm.
Built between 2020 and 2022, the Baltic Pipe joins the larger Norway-Netherlands Europipe II in the North Sea. It allows 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas to reach Poland every year – less than a tenth of Nord Stream’s capacity, but enough to cover two-thirds of Poland’s total imports in 2024. Poland sells some of this gas on to other EU countries, which after the destruction of Nord Stream were guaranteed to need a new source for the foreseeable future.
With their own supply assured and Russia’s key gas conduit to the EU out of action, the excitement in Warsaw was palpable. “Thank you, usa,” Poland’s now-foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, tweeted. Sikorski deleted his tweet two days later. His jubilation was premature and off message, as the West had collectively decided on a different narrative.
Flooding the zone
Over the next week, Ukraine and its Western backers flooded the media with false claims. The editorial board of the Washington Post pointed out that whoever pulled off the attack possessed the “kind of capability usually wielded by a state actor.” It was taken as gospel in the US and Europe that this actor was Russia.
“[The] Gas leak from ns-1 [Nord Stream 1] is nothing more than a terrorist attack planned by Russia and an act of aggression towards the EU” – Mikhail Podoliak, adviser to Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky
It “seems” Russia is behind this “act of sabotage” – US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm
“Only Russia can really be considered for this” – former German intelligence chief Gerhard Schindler
“This is clearly an act of sabotage of some sort and Russia certainly is the most likely suspect” – former cia Director John Brennan
‘A lot of people know’ who blew up Nord Stream – Trump
The EU stopped short of accusing Russia, but European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen attributed the leaks to “sabotage” and “deliberate disruption,” claiming that Russia had previously used gas as a “weapon” against Western Europe.
Russia – which invested billions of dollars in building the pipelines – called the accusations “predictable, stupid, and absurd.” 
“It’s obvious to everyone who benefits from it,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said a week after the explosions. “Those who benefit are the ones who have done it,” he added, pinning the blame on “the Anglo-Saxons,” a Russian colloquialism for the us-uk transatlantic alliance. Still, accusations of Russian involvement persisted. European security officials told cnn and other outlets that they had spotted Russian ships near Bornholm on the day of the explosions, but the theory that Russia carried out the attack was metaphorically blown out of the water by American journalist Seymour Hersh in February 2023.
Hersh blames the cia
Over a series of reports, Hersh made the case that the cia, working with the Norwegian Navy, used nato military exercises in the Baltic Sea in June 2022 as cover to plant remotely-triggered explosive devices on the Nord Stream lines. Citing a source with “direct knowledge of the operational planning,” Hersh alleged that the order to carry out the operation came directly from US President Joe Biden.
Only the US, Hersh explained, had the means, motive, and opportunity to pull off such an audacious attack.
Means: 
The Nord Stream pipelines sat on the seabed at a depth of between 80 and 110 meters. At this depth, divers must breathe hypoxic Trimix gas, carry around 90 kg of equipment, and spend (very roughly) 90 minutes decompressing on the way up for every two minutes spent on the seabed. Furthermore, a single diver or pair of divers would rarely attempt more than one of these dives in a single day, meaning the crew of the yacht – described in one report as “not the vessel anyone would choose” for such a mission – would have had to remain at sea amid active military exercises for days on end.
RT spoke to a scuba diving expert who said it was “not impossible, but highly unlikely” that a small team of divers could pull off such an operation.
Even 50-meter dives can kill the most experienced military divers, but the divers of the US Navy’s Florida Diving and Salvage Center  (from p8) possess the equipment and the know-how to carry out engineering operations at this depth. The CIA recruited these divers, commandeered a Norwegian mine-hunting vessel, and planted shaped explosive charges on the pipelines in June 2022, Hersh’s source claimed.
The charges were reportedly triggered on September 26 by a sonar buoy dropped from a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane.

Motive:
US antipathy toward Nord Stream is a matter of public record, and transcends presidential administrations. Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have all condemned the pipelines, and urged the EU to abandon Russian gas for American lng – a pricier fuel that prior to 2022 was a hard sell in Europe.
According to Hersh, Biden planned on blowing up the pipelines long before Russia sent troops into Ukraine in 2022. As he worked out the logistics with the cia behind closed doors, he delivered a public threat in early February: in the event of military action by Russia, “there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it,” he said.
Biden’s reasoning was twofold, Hersh’s source explained. First, blowing up Nord Stream satisfied the longtime US goal of forcing the EU into reliance on American lng imports. Secondly, Germany’s economy before 2022 was dependent on Russia for 55% of its gas supply. By destroying Nord Stream, the US prevented a possible rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow, guaranteeing that Chancellor Olaf Scholz stayed committed to providing military support for Ukraine.
“The President of the United States would rather see Germany freeze than [see] Germany possibly stop supporting Ukraine,” Hersh wrote.
Opportunity:
Planting each charge was an hours-long endeavor, and the presence of military divers wouldn’t go unnoticed, unless they had an excuse to be in the area. nato’s baltops exercises gave the cia the cover it needed. Running from June 5 to June 17, the baltops drills involved 14 nato states, and included US-led experiments with mine-hunting drones and deep-sea communications technology in the Baltic Sea.
Hersh predicted that American and German intelligence agencies would soon come up with an alternate story and feed it to friendly media outlets. In April 2023, The New York Times, Die Zeit, and Der Spiegel published the first versions of this tale.
Enter the Germans
Roughly, their story goes as follows: a six-person Ukrainian team rented a 15-meter pleasure yacht – the Andromeda – at the German port of Rostock, sailed through active nato military exercises, anchored in waters too deep to actually anchor such a craft, spent hours at 80 meters planting timed explosives weighing up to 27 kg each at four different sites, and somehow had time to decompress and leave the scene before sunrise. This, Der Spiegel and other outlets allege, is the version of events German prosecutors are following.
The details of the story have shifted since 2023. First, it was carried out by Ukrainian civilians “buoyed by alcohol and patriotic fervor,” and then by a crack Ukrainian commando unit. Zelensky gave the plot his blessing in one version, until he didn’t, and the operation was then carried out by former Ukrainian commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny, without the knowledge of his political rival, the former comedian.
One version has the Ukrainian state funding the attack, another has a private business figure supplying the cash. 
Now, the focus of attention is on how much the cia knew about the attack, and when. This has been the subject of lively debate within Western media, but at no point has the central premise of a small Ukrainian team using a yacht been questioned.
“Five people were sitting around drinking, having a laugh, and decided ‘Why don’t we blow up the Nord Stream pipelines?’ They had diving skills, allegedly hired a little boat, sailed to the place where the Nord Streams were passing, went down, planted explosives and detonated them,” Lavrov commented in 2024. “If someone can actually believe this version, then it’s only people who are afraid of the truth and are trying to protect the criminal Kiev regime in any way possible.”
Two suspects have been arrested for their role in this supposed plot. One was held in Poland until a judge set him free in October, arguing that destroying Nord Stream was a legitimate act of war against an “aggressor,” and not a terrorist attack on civilian infrastructure. He will not be extradited to Germany, a fact that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk made clear on X:
“Polish court denied extradition to Germany of a Ukrainian national suspected of blowing up Nord Stream 2 and released him from custody. And rightly so. The case is closed,” he wrote.
The alleged ringleader of the group, a Ukrainian national named Sergey Kuznetsov, is currently in German custody. However, Ukrainian media claim that the evidence against him is flimsy and won’t support criminal charges. If this is true, then a confession is the only hope that the Germans have of backing up their own conspiracy theory.
Meanwhile, every new revelation and plot twist in the Nord Stream story brings the official narrative closer to the reality: that the attack was not carried out by a group of Ukrainian drunkards, or a rogue military cell, but done with the prior knowledge and likely participation of the cia and at least one nato partner. This is why nobody in Moscow takes the Western Kabuki theater seriously: they know.