If self-determination is to mean anything, the West should back off and respect the results of Crimea’s referendum. If the overwhelming majority of Crimea’s citizens wish to decamp back to the Russian Federation, so be it. In any case, the West is hardly in a position to take the moral high-ground when it comes to illegal foreign interventions. They specialise in the field. Self-determination is a movable feast for the Western powers as it is for the Russian Federation. If it suits their geo-political interests they’ll scream and shout in favour, but if it contradicts their self-proclaimed national interests then no amount of referenda will be sufficient.

As for Crimea, like Kosovo before it, this is an old fashioned East-West tug of war for influence and power. It’s as simple as that. But it is easy to argue that the whole mess is the direct result of NATO’s relentlessly aggressive eastward expansion with total disregard for Russian sensibilities. Had the West embraced Russia into an expanded Eurasia twenty years ago rather than continue with its cold war mentality, all the resultant nonsense in the Balkans, in Georgia and now the Ukraine could have been avoided.

Incidentally, Russia and the Ukraine have a lot in common. They are both currently led by gangsters and Oligarchs with both nations having more than their fair share of neo-fascist sympathisers and authoritarian, xenophobic political parties. The social gains and collectivised property achieved under the old Soviet Union have largely dissipated but the old authoritarianism lingers on. As for the West, it can offer little more. Vast swathes of its young people are either unemployed or in depressingly low paid menial work. Debt is endemic with little sign of respite. As for social enlightenment, Europe and the US have their own legions of xenophobes, homophobes, racists, neo Nazis and generally unsavoury reactionaries. Just watch the results of the coming European elections for the sickening evidence. Greece and Hungary already have fascist parties in government. Their isolation will likely be short lived. They will be joined by other fascist MEP’s soon enough from France, Holland, Austria and the UK. Even Spain is revisiting its Franco past by introducing draconian anti-abortion legislation. As for homophobia, the US is hardly in a position to lecture the Russian Federation. Half the US states still have homophobic legislation on their statutes.

For the young people of Ukraine, including those in Crimea, looking East or West is a fairly grim prospect. The plain fact is, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, (with all its obvious failings), humanity could be said to have taken a significant step backwards. Rather than tentatively looking forward to a more socialised world we seem to be living through an age of global reaction; endless neo-liberal interventionist wars, cycles of boom and bust, global indebtedness and corporate collapse, and a remorseless widening of the gap between the global wealthy elites and the rest of us. Oh, and I nearly forgot to mention, a worsening environmental catastrophe that cuts across national borders and stubbornly refuses to go away. Not a lot to cheer about.

The Soviet Union was the first real attempt by we humans, in our long and sordid ten thousand year history of class based civilisation, to socialise the means of production. It ended, rather dispiritingly, after seventy years, in a whimper rather than a bang. Perhaps for that we should be grateful. Almost nobody inside or outside the Soviet Union, rose to defend the social gains of the period, and few seem to mourn its passing. Contemporary western historians tend to write it off as an abject failure but I suspect history will be much kinder. Although clearly the Soviet Communist Party, in all its various historical manifestations, failed to grasp the dialectic between collective ownership and individual aspirations, the Soviet Union did leave some significant markers for future generations. Free or heavily subsidised state provision in housing, childcare, education and health were so revolutionary that Western Europe was forced to mimic them in order to placate their own citizens. Even today, in the face of a fierce reactionary corporate offensive, some of these social gains are proving stubbornly resilient to capitalist privatisations. And the legacy of the Soviet Union still flickers in China, where state controlled capital just about holds sway in the sew-saw battle between private and social ownership. The capitalist roaders are still on the capitalist road but the selfish, egoistic interests of private capital have not fully eclipsed the social aspirations once embodied within the Chinese Communist party. Yet.

One of the obvious failings of the Soviet Union was its inability to rationally and sensitively deal with the multi-ethnic nature of what it was attempting to construct. Too much diktat and not enough diplomacy and consent. Putting Stalin in control of the nationalities question was akin to putting the Kray twins in charge of the Met. Khrushchev was little better. Administrative decrees only served to create a poisonous periphery which not only had disastrous consequences during the Second World War but are still playing themselves out to this day. Ongoing tensions between Great Russian chauvinism on the one hand, and petty national aspirations in Chechnya and Georgia are two glaringly ugly and bloody examples. Grimly, Ukraine may soon follow down that same bloody path. Of course, the West was and is only too ready to exploit these tensions for its own aggrandisement. Admittedly the Soviet authorities did not always have the luxury of slow and patient negotiations; the embryonic Soviet Union was surrounded by hostile forces from day one. Revolutionary class interests had, out of necessity, to trump local national ambitions. But this did not always excuse the heavy handed Russian imperial response to local sensitivities. Little wonder many of the former Soviet republics now look to Western Europe rather than the Russian Federation for their future development.

To what degree these socio-political discussions are currently taking place in Russia, in the Ukraine, and in the Crimean peninsula in particular, is an interesting question in itself. Crises invariable open up cans of worms that were thought to be long dead and buried. A few weeks ago TV cameras picked up on some Ukrainian soldiers walking out of their base to confront their Russian counterparts carrying both a Ukrainian flag and the old Soviet one. What was that all about. The BBC reporters seemed perplexed and even embarrassed and the footage quickly disappeared from our screens. But it is highly unlikely that a social experiment as monumentally important as the Soviet Union would simply disappear from human consciousness. Bourgeois politicians, oligarchs, right wing historians and political gangsters East and West would like just that; to airbrush the first substantial experiment in socialised property out of history. But the memories of what was achieved, as well as the mistakes made and the crimes committed, will linger on and repeatedly resurface during times of crisis.

Today, as Crimean’s vote in their hastily organised referendum, an International Union of Socialist Republics seems a wholly fanciful concept, but as Marx once whimsically remarked, humanity will continue to return to uncompleted tasks.