From the article:

MOSCOW (AFP) — Tens of thousands of people marched through central Moscow on Monday to celebrate May Day in peaceful demonstrations organized by pro-government trade unions and Communists nostalgic for Soviet times.

About 25,000 trade union members called for a “social state,” holding balloons and flowers, according to police spokesman, Viktor Biryukov, quoted by ITAR-TASS news agency.

Several thousand Communist Party supporters also marched from the Lenin monument on October Square to a bust of Karl Marx near Red Square, carrying red flags and portraits of Stalin, an AFP reporter at the march said.

They may not have the tanks and the commisars available for the parade anymore, but the apparatchiks in the crowd seem to be marching for a return of the tanks and the commisars.

And I think demonstrations organized by “pro-government trade unions” for more bureaucratic patronage may be a good summary of everything that May Day is supposed to be against.

“That assault resulted in the repression the Bolsheviks then unleashed on the left opposition and anarchists in Russia, using the invasion as the basis for claiming they were under attack from White Russians and Imperialists and that all opposition to the Bolsheviks would be considered counter revolutionary.”

This is an important point, but this way of putting it lets the Bolsheviks off the hook too easily. The imperial adventures in Russia didn’t cause the Bolshevik Terror; Bolsheviks caused it. The imperialist support for the Whites only provided them with an excuse for baring their fangs as they’d been hoping to do for quite some time.

Of course, the imperial war in Russia was still unjust, on other, independent grounds, besides the evil excuse-making function that it served for Lenin, Trotsky, et al.