Maidan today: no fascists in sight

The most useful service the US Socialist Workers Party and its international collaborators have provided concerning events in Ukraine is to send a team of worker-correspondents from The Militant there for first-hand reports.

The first report can be read here.

One of the most remarkable facts the story provides is this: workers from all over Ukraine are still encamped in the Maidan square.  They continue to organize food and medical work in tents set up near the burned Trade Unions House.

As a former coal miner told the reporting team, “While we watch Russia.... we also watch the politicians of the new government. Most of them are not much different from those who fled.”

All the petty bourgeois right and left, from Lyndon LaRouche to Workers World Party, have proclaimed the triumph of fascism in Kiev.  But self-organized workers occupy Maidan, as they have for the last three months.  There are no government-directed fascist street-fighting units sweeping them off the streets. 

Actual fascists are denouncing the mass mobilizations that caused Yanukvich to flee.

A friend on Facebook commented earlier today:

Interesting facts on some real fascists denouncing the so-called "neo-nazi coup" in Ukraine:

"The Eurasian ideology draws an entirely different lesson from the twentieth century. Founded around 2001 by the Russian political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, it proposes the realization of National Bolshevism. Rather than rejecting totalitarian ideologies, Eurasianism calls upon politicians of the twenty-first century to draw what is useful from both fascism and Stalinism. Dugin’s major work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, published in 1997, follows closely the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi political theorist. Eurasianism is not only the ideological source of the Eurasian Union, it is also the creed of a number of people in the Putin administration, and the moving force of a rather active far-right Russian youth movement. For years Dugin has openly supported the division and colonization of Ukraine.

"...Glazyev’s book Genocide: Russia and the New World Order claims that the sinister forces of the “new world order” conspired against Russia in the 1990s to bring about economic policies that amounted to “genocide.” This book was published in English by Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine Executive Intelligence Review with a preface by LaRouche. Today Executive Intelligence Review echoes Kremlin propaganda, spreading the word in English that Ukrainian protesters have carried out a Nazi coup and started a civil war."

[Source: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/20/fascism-russia-and-ukraine/]

Mention of Carl Schmitt send me back to the pages devoted to him in Georg Lukac's book The Destruction of Reason [1962]; a scan of the Schmitt pages can be found here.
 
Dugin had this to say several months ago about the protestors in Ukraine:

....First of all, all these groups hate Russia and the Russian president. This hate makes them comrades. And the left wing liberal groups are not less extremist than the neo-Nazi groups. We tend to think that they are liberal, but this is horribly wrong. We find especially in Eastern Europe and Russia very often that the Homosexual-Lobby and the ultranationalist and neo-Nazi groups are allies. Also the Homosexual lobby has very extremist ideas about how to deform, re-educate and influence the society. We shouldn´t forget this. The gay and lesbian lobby is not less dangerous for any society than neo-Nazis."

A responsibility of communists explaining events in Ukraine to fellow workers is not to ape the rhetoric and rationalizations of Russia's capitalist leaders and their publicists (like Dugin), using facts and spin of "fascism triumphant" promoted by the Putin regime to further Moscow's centuries-old domination of Ukraine.

In all questions of analysis, it is important to work from facts and not preconceptions.  Jack Barnes said something similar pertaining to the U.S class struggle:

...It is important to be concrete about where we find ourselves today along the long-term curve of capitalist development worldwide, as well as in class politics in the United States. Otherwise, we will speak in formulas, instead of presenting a sharp, clear analysis, a communist program. We won’t be able to accurately explain what we need to do now to build a proletarian party in this country. This dialectic between the international program and national terrain of communists’ march toward state power applies to party building everywhere in the world. But nowhere are the consequences of failing to act on that class reality more damaging to revolutionary prospects and proletarian integrity than in the strongest bastion of world imperialism, the U.S.A. In the closing paragraphs of the draft political report before this convention, we address this question directly. Thinking and acting along proletarian internationalist lines, we say, is and will remain not only a special responsibility but a special challenge for revolutionists who live and work in the United States: [We] carry out our political activity not only in the wealthiest country on earth, but in one that has not experienced war on its own soil since 1865. It is a country in which there have been bloody class battles and proletarian social movements, but there has never been a revolutionary situation or workers’ insurrection. It is a country that has seen genocidal treatment of native populations and organized murderous violence over decades by reactionary outfits such as the Ku Klux Klan, as well as systematic brutality by cops, National Guardsmen, and employer goons—but has experienced only limited combat in the streets and on the picket lines between fascist gangs and defense guards of labor and the oppressed.[22]

 Along the road to a revolutionary situation, the working class in the United States, together with its broad political vanguard, will go through all these combat experiences. Each of them will take concrete forms, not identical to what has happened anywhere else or ever before in history. There will be unique combinations. Certain stages of class politics will be truncated and combined, others extended. Some will be accelerated, “with a truly American speed,” to use Trotsky’s phrase.[23] But communist workers in the United States will experience all these forms of political struggle before the revolutionary battle for power is posed. The working class in this country will face efforts by the capitalist rulers, their government, and ultrarightist forces to smash the labor movement. Bonapartist regimes, whether installed with electoral cover or through open military coups, will use the power of the imperialist state and heightened levels of demagogy against organizations of workers and farmers. In order to maintain capitalist rule, the propertied families of the bourgeoisie will accept methods they themselves fear and seek to avoid in more tranquil times. They will promote the rise of fascist demagogues and movements, including their most virulent form: national socialist organizations that seek a mass base among the insecure middle classes and layers of demoralized workers by combining radical, anticapitalist verbiage with appeals to the most reactionary—and deadly—nationalist, racist, anti-Semitic, and antiwoman prejudices and superstitions."

"Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun" - (http://www.pathfinderpress.com/site/winter.html)

The Militant's invaluable first-hand reporting from Maidan concludes with this paragraph, more concrete and useful today than any statements by Putin's supporters among the US left today.

“I hope that these events and the Maidan will help change the consciousness of the workers, get them more involved,” said Anya Tchaikovska, who used to work in a bus and construction equipment depot and has been volunteering for the last four months to help coordinate food supplies. “If workers’ demands are not met, there will have to be another Maidan,” she said. 

Lenin's defense of oppressed nations

How Lenin fought to defend Georgia’s self-determination
 
The Pathfinder book Lenin’s Final Fight contains valuable documentary material on the place of Georgia and the national question in the battle by V.I. Lenin to defend the communist course of the October 1917 Russian Revolution against challenges raised by a narrow, nationalist, petty-bourgeois layer that arose in the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin.

Printed below is an excerpt from a review of Lenin’s Final Fight that appeared in the June 5, 1995, Militant.

BY MARTÍN KOPPEL

Readers will find it hard to put down this book as they follow Lenin’s struggle week by week, sometimes day by day, taking up political issues that remain vitally relevant today. Lenin discusses questions including the need to forge a union of workers and peasants republics, to defend the rights of oppressed nationalities and combat Great Russian chauvinism, and to strengthen the alliance between the working class and the peasantry. He takes up the New Economic Policy and its place in the world struggle for socialism, and defends the state monopoly of foreign trade.

These questions, as the book’s introduction notes, “deal with the most decisive piece of unfinished business in front of those who produce the wealth of the world and make possible culture: they deal with the worldwide struggle, opened by the Bolshevik-led revolution nearly eighty years ago, to replace the dictatorship of a tiny minority of exploiting capitalists families with the dictatorship of the proletariat,” that is, a workers state.

The revolutionary government that came to power in October 1917 was based on councils of workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ delegates called soviets, the Russian word for council.

It mobilized peasants to expropriate the big landlords’ estates and distribute the nationalized land to be worked by the tillers. It freed oppressed peoples who had been under the tsarist boot of Russian oppression from Ukraine to Mongolia, and guaranteed their right to national self-determination—the first government in the world to do so.

The Bolshevik leadership organized workers to expropriate capitalist property in industry, banking, and wholesale trade, and established a state monopoly of foreign trade.
 
Georgian republic
In September 1922, just a few months before the stroke that finally debilitated him, Lenin launched a political fight around the question of the Georgian republic and of the voluntary union of Soviet republics.

In a letter to the party’s Political Bureau and addressed to Bolshevik leader Lev Kamenev, Lenin criticizes the proposal by Joseph Stalin, the CP’s general secretary, to incorporate five independent Soviet republics—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belorussia, Georgia, and Ukraine—into the Russian Federation as “autonomous republics.” The book reprints the text of Stalin’s initial plan.

Lenin proposes a completely different approach: that Russia join with the other republics “on an equal basis into a new union, a new federation, the Union of the Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia.”

This stance was crucial, given the strong proindependence sentiments of working people in Georgia and other Soviet republics in the Caucasus because of Russian tsarist domination in the past. The Georgian Communist Party had rejected Stalin’s “autonomization” plan and favored remaining independent as part of a Soviet federation.

Lenin’s Final Fight documents how Lenin waged a political debate to win other members of the Bolshevik leadership to a proletarian internationalist stance on this question. This fight was based on one of the major conquests of the October 1917 revolution: the right of oppressed peoples to national self-determination.
 
‘War to the death’
Through the efforts of Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was founded as a federation of equals at the end of 1922. But Lenin felt compelled to “declare war to the death on dominant nation chauvinism,” as he put it in an October 6 memo to the party’s Political Bureau.

In a series of notes addressed in December 1922 to the upcoming 12th party congress, Lenin makes some of his sharpest and most concise statements on the national question. Referring to the argument by some Russian Communist leaders that a single government is needed to rule over all the Soviet republics, he states, “Where did that assurance come from? Did it not come from that same Russian apparatus which we took over from tsarism and slightly anointed with Soviet oil?”
 
Affirmative action
He adds that without a conscious approach of preferential treatment toward the historically oppressed nations—an affirmative action policy—all talk of a voluntary federation “will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is.”

Lenin condemns Stalin for his “spite against the notorious ‘nationalist socialism.’” Stalin had accused the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party of “nationalist deviations,” saying these should be “burned out with a red-hot iron.”

Lenin’s concern about Great Russian chauvinism was well-founded. Stalin and Grigory Ordzhonikidze, another Central Committee member, resorted to strong-arm tactics to try to ram through their policies on the national question. In protest, the Georgian CC resigned. The conflict flared up in late November when Ordzhonikidze struck one of the dissident Georgian communists during a verbal confrontation. This fact came to light through an investigation by a Political Bureau-appointed commission, headed by Russian CC member Feliks Dzerzhinsky.

Over the final months of 1922, Lenin’s doubts about the conduct of Stalin and his allies around the Georgian question mounted. Lenin organized three of his personal secretaries to carry out a separate investigation in February and March 1923 to verify the Dzerzhinsky commission’s account. They reported to Lenin that Dzerzhinsky had basically whitewashed the abusive policies of Ordzhonikidze and Stalin.

This report—kept secret by Moscow until the collapse of the Stalinist apparatus in the former USSR in 1991—appears in this volume for the first time in any language.

http://www.themilitant.com/2008/7234/723453.html

The Bolsheviks’ policy on national self-determination and voluntary federation

Bolshevik policy on rights of oppressed nations
 
The excerpt printed below is from the resolution “U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War,” which was adopted by the Socialist Workers Party at its 35th national convention in 1990. The resolution appears in New International no. 11.

(1) The socialist revolution sounds the bell of “nation time” for oppressed nations and nationalities.

(2) This course was advanced by the Bolshevik leadership under Lenin’s guidance following the October 1917 revolution.

(a) As the October victory in Russia gave an impulse to revolutionary uprisings elsewhere throughout the old tsarist empire, the communist leadership began to forge a voluntary federation of the various republics organized on the basis of soviet power—both where the dictatorship of the proletariat had been established (as in Russia and the Ukraine), as well as where it could not yet be established but revolutionary workers and peasants governments had come to power (as in most of the Central Asian and Transcaucasian republics).

(b) Lenin insisted on a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not a new “Soviet” nationality with patriotism used as cover for maintenance and expansion of Great Russian chauvinism and bourgeois nationalism; not a new “socialist nation-state” suppressing minority nationalities… .

(c) National self-determination, like other democratic rights, is subordinate to defense of the workers state in face of counterrevolutionary assault and imperialist aggression. The denial of national rights, however, weakens rather than strengthens the defense of a workers state… .

2. The Bolsheviks’ policy on national self-determination and voluntary federation began to be reversed in the early 1920s by the political course of the emerging bureaucratic caste, led by Stalin. In 1922 Lenin opened a political battle against this counterrevolution, but Stalin’s reactionary policies prevailed following Lenin’s death.

a) Stalin’s course was intensified and institutionalized with the consolidation of the caste’s counterrevolution in the early 1930s. The “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” reemerged in fact as a prison house of nations inherited from tsarism and imperialism.

(1) The USSR was no longer a voluntary federation, but a “Soviet” super-state.

(2) The resurgence and domination of Great Russian nationalism within this “Soviet” state obliterated proletarian internationalism… .

e) Once Stalinism had transformed the Soviet Union into the opposite of a voluntary federation of workers and peasants republics, its break-up, its disintegration from within, was inevitable. This became a precondition to a new advance of the worldwide struggle for national liberation and socialism… .

3. Communists and other revolutionists unconditionally support the right to national self-determination.

a) Mass struggles for national rights in the oppressed republics of the USSR, regardless of their initial leadership, reflect not imperialist-inspired counterrevolution, but the aspirations and interests of workers and farmers.

b) Given the break in communist continuity in the Soviet Union and European workers states, national struggles there will not begin with revolutionary proletarian leadership; they are today taking place under petty-bourgeois leadership.

c) Only through the fight for and conquest of the right to national self-determination can space open to develop communist leadership of the toilers in the oppressed nations; to open the road once again toward a voluntary union of soviet republics; and to forge links with anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggles worldwide.

 http://www.themilitant.com/2008/7233/723361.html

--

Ukraine 2007: Yanukovich and Yushchenko

Power struggle sharpens among
bureaucratic rulers in Ukraine
 
BY SAM MANUEL 

WASHINGTON—In a blow to President Victor Yushchenko, Ukraine’s Supreme Administrative Court issued a ruling April 25 blocking his decree to dissolve parliament and call legislative elections in May. The republic’s Constitutional Court is also hearing the matter, but has not yet issued a decision.

The same day, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Tabachnik announced a working group was formed that includes representatives of the “president, prime minister, parliamentary factions, and the opposition” to resolve the political crisis.

A power struggle within Ukraine’s government sharpened after Yushchenko issued his decree April 2. At the root of the conflict is a struggle for influence in the former Soviet republic between Washington, which backs the president, and Moscow, which backs Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich.

Some 7,000 Yanukovich supporters set up a tent camp in Kiev, the capital. They erected a stage in the main square and held rallies outside the president’s office to protest the decree, reported an April 5 Associated Press dispatch.

The rallies were smaller than those held by both sides after the November 2004 presidential elections. Then, tens of thousands of Yushchenko’s supporters held much larger rallies in Kiev condemning the announced vote result as fraudulent. In a compromise, new elections were held in December 2004, in which Yushchenko was elected president—a period that became known as the “Orange Revolution.”

In subsequent elections, Yanukovich won a plurality in parliament and became prime minister, using the office to weaken his rival. The conflict came to a head in March, when 11 supporters of the president in parliament switched sides, giving the prime minister a nearly veto-proof majority.

Yushchenko called the defections illegal. Yanukovich countered that the president’s decree was unconstitutional.

Both Yanukovich and Yushchenko come from the privileged caste that ruled Ukraine when it was part of the former Soviet Union. They were both bureaucrats, Yanukovich in the coal industry in the eastern region and Yushchenko in the banking system. They each served terms as prime minister during the previous presidency of Leonid Kuchma.

Ukraine, with its 10 million Russian-speaking population, has long served as an agricultural breadbasket to Russia, also providing steel, coal, and access to warm-water ports. Much of Russia’s oil and gas sales to western Europe is shipped through Ukraine’s pipelines.

Moscow backs Yanukovich, who favors closer ties to Russia. In an April 6 release, the Russian news agency Novosti credited the prime minister for Ukraine’s 6.7 percent economic growth last year and for developing business contacts with Russia. The same day, Russia’s legislature, the Duma, condemned Yushchenko’s decree as “tantamount to usurpation of power in the country.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill supporting the admission of Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. Washington is also pressing to admit other former Soviet bloc countries, like Albania and the former Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Macedonia.

But Moscow seeks to slow down the inclusion of more neighboring republics into NATO. An April 6 statement by the Duma described the U.S. government’s support for admitting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO as “interference in these countries’ internal affairs,” reported the Russian news agency Interfax. 
 

http://www.themilitant.com/2007/7119/711955.html

Communist approach to Ukraine in Lenin's time

Ukraine: How Bolsheviks championed
right to self-determination
 
BY MICHAEL ITALIE 

The revolutionary government that came to power in Russia in October 1917 freed oppressed peoples who had been under the tsarist boot of Russian domination from Ukraine to Mongolia, and guaranteed their right to national self-determination—the first government in the world to do so. The Bolshevik leadership of the revolution began to forge a voluntary federation of republics based on soviet power. This federation took affirmative action to develop the economies and culture of the oppressed nations in order to close the historical gap between them and the formerly oppressor Russian nation.

The course of the Bolshevik Party, which led the revolution, was reversed in the 1920s by the bureaucratic caste that took political power and led a political counterrevolution—although the caste was unable to destroy the economic foundations of the workers state. The second life the Stalinist regime breathed into Great Russian chauvinism and the oppression of non-Russian nations looms behind the current political crisis that has shaken Ukraine since mid-November, as hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets to support competing presidential candidates following the November 21 election.

The Russian government, which backed Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich in the election, is trying to slow down the establishment of regimes in former Soviet republics on Russia’s borders that are more subservient to Washington and other imperialist powers. Ukraine, which has a large Russian-speaking population, has maintained substantial economic and military ties with Russia since declaring independence in 1991.

During the crisis, forces in the eastern section of Ukraine loyal to Moscow have threatened to split away from the newly constituted country if opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko wins the presidency. This reactionary political course would be a blow to the self-determination of the people of Ukraine, who have fought for decades to free themselves from the yoke of national oppression under a succession of Stalinist regimes in the former Soviet Union.

At the same time, Yushchenko’s perspective of greater integration into NATO and subservience to imperialism is equally reactionary to that of the pro-Moscow government in Kiev.

This article takes up the roots of Ukrainian nationalism and its evolution under the impact of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and its degeneration. 
 
From tsar to Russian Revolution
Ukraine became the possession of the Romanov dynasty in 1654 under the Treaty of Pereyaslav. By the early 20th century Ukraine made up 20 percent of the population of the Great Russian empire. Its land was the most fertile and its industry among the most modern—Ukrainian coal and iron were indispensable to the industry of Russia as a whole.

The feudal monarchy that ruled in Moscow carried out a policy of Russification of Ukraine. In the decades following the Treaty of Pereyaslav the tsars banned the Ukrainian language and suppressed the Ukrainian church. The regime adopted a policy of colonization, under which a privileged Russian minority was fostered in Ukraine.

The October 1917 revolution in Russia brought to power a revolutionary government based on councils of workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ delegates called soviets (the Russian word for council). It mobilized peasants to expropriate the estates of the big landlords and distribute the nationalized land to be worked by the tillers.

The Bolshevik leadership organized workers to expropriate capitalist property in industry and banking, and established a state monopoly of foreign trade. It fought to draw workers into taking increasing control of industry and on that basis advance toward workers’ management, making it possible to begin economic planning to meet social needs.

The Bolsheviks also launched an international communist movement to aid fellow workers and farmers around the world in a common struggle of social and national liberation.

The socialist revolution also sounded the bell of “nation time.” It gave an impulse to revolutionary uprisings elsewhere throughout the tsarist empire, which Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin described as a “prison house of nations”—from Central Asia to the Transcaucasus to the Baltic states.

The Bolsheviks defended the right to self-determination of the nations oppressed by the Romanovs, up to and including the right to form an independent state. Finland, for example, gained its independence at this time.

The Ukrainian struggle for national rights exploded in 1917-19. One of the groups that played a central role in this struggle was the Ukrainian Borotba (Struggle) Party. Convinced that the Bolshevik revolution offered the way forward for the workers and peasants of Ukraine, the Borotba Party merged with the Ukrainian Communist Party (CP) in 1920.

Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky later wrote that “the most important indication of the success of the Leninist policy in the Ukraine was the fusion of the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party with the organization of the Borotbists.” 
 
Russification vs. Ukrainization
As opposed to the Russification of the tsars, the Bolsheviks adopted a policy known as Ukrainization.

The Central Committee of the Russian CP resolved in November 1919 that its members in Ukraine “must put into practice the right of the working people to study in the Ukrainian language and to speak their native language in all Soviet institutions; they must in every way counteract attempts at Russification that push the Ukrainian language into the background and must convert that language into an instrument for the communist education of the working people. Steps must be taken immediately to ensure that in all Soviet institutions there are sufficient Ukrainian-speaking employees and that in future all employees are able to speak Ukrainian.”

The bureaucratic caste that usurped political power in Russia in the 1920s reversed the Bolshevik course all along the line. One of the questions in which this first became apparent was in the policy to be adopted by the government in Moscow toward those nations that had been oppressed by the tsar and were just beginning to enjoy a measure of self-determination. The opening of the struggle against the course of the rising caste is documented in Lenin’s Final Fight, published by Pathfinder Press.

In September 1922, just a few months before the stroke that finally debilitated him, Lenin launched a political fight around the question of the Georgian republic and of the voluntary union of Soviet republics.

In a letter to the party’s Political Bureau and addressed to Bolshevik leader Lev Kamenev, Lenin criticized the proposal by Joseph Stalin, the CP’s general secretary, to incorporate five independent Soviet republics—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belorussia, Georgia, and Ukraine—into the Russian Federation as “autonomous republics.”

Lenin proposed a completely different approach: that Russia join with the other republics “on an equal basis into a new union, a new federation, the Union of the Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia.”

Although Lenin and Trotsky, his principle ally in this fight, won approval for their resolutions at the time, Stalin’s reactionary policies prevailed following Lenin’s death in 1924. 
 
Stalinist counterrevolution
Stalin’s course was intensified and institutionalized with the consolidation of the caste’s counterrevolution in the early 1930s. The “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” reemerged as a prison house of nations—it was no longer a voluntary federation, but a “Soviet” super-state.

By the late 1920s the former Borotbists had been driven out of the Communist Party leadership in Ukraine, and most of them were killed by the Stalin murder machine in the 1930s.

In 1929 the Stalinist bureaucracy began a half-decade of forced collectivization of agriculture. In the name of financing rapid growth of industry, Moscow devastated agriculture in the Soviet Union and shattered the worker-peasant alliance that had made the revolution and was its cornerstone.

The brutality of forced collectivization in Ukraine was doubly severe because Moscow was also determined to crush any nationalist aspirations among the Ukrainian people. The bureaucracy’s policy in the countryside produced a famine that killed several million Ukrainians in 1932-33.

“Nowhere did the purges and repressions assume such a savage character as they did in the Ukraine,” Trotsky wrote in the 1939 article “Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads,” which can be found in Pathfinder’s Writings of Leon Trotsky, [1939-1940].

The reactionary caste in power promoted Russification with a vengeance. Advances made in introducing the Ukrainian language into the schools and public administration were driven back by Stalin and his successors. Classes were given in Russian in the universities in Ukraine, and Russian culture and books became predominant.

Aping the policies of the tsars, the Stalinist regime carried out a course of forced dispersal of oppressed peoples and the colonization of republics with Russians settlers who would become a privileged minority, loyal to Moscow and against the majority of the local population.

Although a certain loosening of restrictions followed in the years after Stalin’s death in 1953, Russification remained in full force under Nikita Khrushchev and those who followed him.

The faintest nationalist expressions continued to be met with repression from Moscow. This occurred regardless of whether it came from the circles of industrial workers that were organized in the late 1950s or Stalinist officials in Ukraine who hoped to ride on nationalist sentiment to build a basis of support against their rivals, such as Ukrainian CP boss Petro Yukhimovych Shelest, who was unceremoniously driven from office in 1973 as a “bourgeois nationalist.” A signal of his impending downfall was when an opponent in the ruling caste condemned a book by Shelest for saying “nothing about the advantages gained [for Ukraine] on entering the unified, centralized Russian state” at the time of the Treaty of Pereyaslav—the agreement among thieves that brought Ukraine under the tsarist yoke three centuries before!

In his 1939 article, Trotsky defended the Leninist policy of establishing the USSR only as a voluntary federation of workers and farmers republics, guaranteeing the rights of national self-determination. He outlined the importance of the working class championing the call for “A united, free, and independent workers’ and peasants’ Soviet Ukraine.”

Only through the struggle for self-determination can the road be opened to a voluntary union of soviet republics, Trotsky explained. “To speed and facilitate this process, to make possible the genuine brotherhood of the peoples in the future,” he wrote, the workers of Russia must “without any reservation declare to the Ukrainian people that they are ready to support with all their might the slogan of an independent Ukraine in a joint struggle against the autocratic bureaucracy and against imperialism.”

Once Stalinism had transformed the Soviet Union into a new prison house of nations, its break-up, its disintegration from within, was inevitable. This became a precondition to a new advance of the worldwide struggle for national liberation and socialism.

Today the workers and farmers in Ukraine need time to build a working-class leadership in the struggle against the devastating economic conditions that are the product of years of Stalinist misrule followed by a decade of efforts by a succession of petty-bourgeois regimes at reestablishing capitalism. Through these battles working people there will learn over time to reject the various choices for misleadership they are presented with today—of the Yushchenko or Yanukovich variety—and forge links with militant workers and proletarian revolutionists worldwide. 

http://www.themilitant.com/2005/6901/690150.html

Ukraine 2004: "dispute among the ruling layers over the extent of ties with Moscow or Washington"

Behind conflict in Ukraine
Dispute over influence in ex-Soviet republic between Moscow, imperialist powers
 
BY MICHAEL ITALIE 

Thousands of protesters took to the streets in Ukraine to support competing presidential candidates following the November 21 election, which was marked by widespread allegations of fraud. Mass demonstrations by backers of Viktor Yushchenko, a former prime minister, have predominated in Kiev, the capital. Rallies backing the current prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich, have been centered in Donetz and other eastern sections of the former Soviet republic.

Behind the developing crisis is a dispute among the ruling layers over the extent of ties with Moscow or Washington.

Moscow, which is backing the current regime, is trying to slow down the establishment of governments in former Soviet republics on Russia’s borders that are more subservient to Washington and other imperialist powers. Ukraine, which has a large Russian-speaking population, has maintained substantial economic and military ties with Russia since declaring independence in 1991. Both historic and recent ties with Russia make Ukraine more important to Moscow than other former Soviet republics—from the Baltics to the Caucasus.

Discontent among working people with deteriorating economic conditions is also a factor in the current conflict. Decades of Stalinist misrule followed by efforts to reestablish capitalism over the last decade have brought an economic catastrophe that has devastated living standards. The republic’s economy contracted sharply in the 1990s and inflation has remained in double digits in recent years.

The national electoral council announced Yanukovich the winner November 24 by a 49.5 percent to 46.6 percent margin. This sparked the first round of antigovernment protests. The supreme court then blocked the final publication of the election results. On November 27, the parliament declared the vote invalid in a nonbinding resolution.

Two days later, outgoing Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma called for new elections to settle the dispute, and Yanukovich said he supported the proposal. Yushchenko, however, indicated new elections would not be enough. “The election was falsified,” he said. “As long as this problem is not solved, all other problems are secondary.”

Yanukovich, who had the backing of Kuchma, promised closer ties with Moscow. Russian president Vladimir Putin officially congratulated Yanukovich the day of the electoral council’s announcement. At the same time, the Kuchma-Yanukovich government was active in the U.S.-led NATO’s Partnership for Peace and sent 1,500 troops to Iraq as part of Washington’s “coalition of the willing.”

Yushchenko differs with the current regime in calling for more rapid moves toward membership in NATO and the European Union (EU). He has also called for the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from Iraq.

Washington and other imperialist powers have sided with the opposition in its claims of electoral fraud. The U.S. government is trying to position itself to gain greater influence in this republic of 48 million bordering Russia, the Black Sea, and the Caucasus region.

“We cannot accept this result as legitimate because it does not meet international standards,” said U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell, the day of the electoral council announcement.

“The validity of the elections [are] in doubt,” said U.S. president George Bush.

U.S. officials raised the possibility of sanctions against Kiev, including cuts in Washington’s $140 million in annual aid. 
 
Economic ruin
On the eve of the election, an Associated Press dispatch described the economy of Ukraine as a “mix of audacious consumption and entrenched poverty.” The candidates competed with each other over who could promise more jobs, and higher wages and pensions.

Efforts by the government of the newly independent country in 1991 to privatize the economy and reestablish capitalism spelt ruin for working people in a republic that had been considered the “breadbasket” of the former Soviet Union. Although privatization has now reached as high as three-quarters of the industrial sector, it is centered in light industry, food processing, pulp and paper, and woodworking, and accounts for 60 percent of industrial output.

The “Mass Privatization Program” began in 1995 through the distribution of “privatization certificates.” It quickly became a bonanza for those in the ruling caste in high managerial positions who bought up the vouchers at a fraction of their stated value from working people desperate for cash.

Between 1991 and 1999 the gross domestic product in Ukraine fell by 60 percent, and has only begun to recover in recent years. Hyperinflation that reached 10,000 percent in the early 1990s wiped out whatever savings working people or the middle classes had been able to put away, and real wages declined by 63 percent during the same period.

An indication of the deteriorating social conditions in Ukraine is the lowering of the life expectancy rate, which fell from 70.5 years in 1990 to 67.9 years in 2000. The relative change among men and women is even more dramatic, with men on average living 11.2 years less.

While the GDP has increased over the last few years, inflation continues to hit working people hard, with the rate expected to reach double digits this year and next.

The economic decline of the last 14 years was preceded by decades of misrule by a privileged bureaucracy under the domination of the Stalinist rulers in Moscow.

The Russian Revolution of October 1917, under the leadership of V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, gave an impulse to revolutionary uprisings throughout the old tsarist empire. The communist leadership began to forge a voluntary federation of the various republics organized on the basis of soviet power—both where working people had overthrown capitalism (as in Russia and Ukraine), as well as where that could not yet be accomplished but revolutionary workers and peasants governments had come to power (as in most of the Central Asian and Transcaucasian republics).

A bureaucracy in Kiev and Moscow came to power in the 1920s through the brutal suppression of workers and farmers and the destruction of the Bolshevik character of the Communist Parties of Ukraine and Russia.

In 1929 the Stalinist bureaucracy began a half-decade of forced collectivization of agriculture. Under the banner of financing rapid industrialization, Moscow devastated Soviet agriculture and destroyed the basis for the worker-peasant alliance that had made the revolution.

The results of forced collectivization in Ukraine were doubly brutal because the Stalinist rulers were also aiming to crush any nationalist aspirations among the Ukrainian people. The bureaucracy’s policy in the countryside produced a famine that killed several million Ukrainians in 1932-33.

More recently, Ukrainian workers and farmers learned to hate the misrule of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Chernobyl nuclear plant meltdown in 1986. Years of disregard for safety measures resulted in the worst nuclear disaster in history, which released 200 times the radioactivity of Washington’s 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

More than 125,000 people in Ukraine and neighboring Belarus died in the disaster, and the United Nations estimates 9 million people in the area suffer from the effects of the radiation.

Both Yanukovich and Yushchenko come from the privileged bureaucratic caste that ruled Ukraine when it was part of the former Soviet Union. Yanukovich was a bureaucrat in the coal industry in the eastern region and Yushchenko in the banking system. They each served terms as prime minister during the presidency of Kuchma, who directed the regime in Kiev toward closer collaboration with Washington and other imperialist powers, while maintaining ties with Moscow.

Kiev joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) in 1994 and has participated in more than 200 of its training exercises. The Ukrainian government hosts the annual PfP training at a military base in western Ukraine. In May 2002 it formally announced its intention of seeking NATO membership. Six months later, Yanukovich, who criticized Yushchenko as “pro-West,” took office as prime minister.

The 1,500 Ukrainian troops stationed in Iraq represent the largest contingent from a non-NATO country. They are based in the sector under Polish command. Their deployment builds on years of cooperation in the Ukrainian-Polish Peacekeeping battalion (Urkpolbat) promoted by Washington and NATO. Urkpolbat has been based in Kosova since July 2000, aiding the imperialist occupation forces in the Balkans.

Kiev has also deployed troops to Afghanistan to join the U.S.-led “war on terrorism” there. 
 
EU membership? No way
While Kiev seeks to increase collaboration with imperialism, which in turn wishes to draw Ukraine further away from Moscow, the European Union shows no interest in bringing Ukraine into EU membership.

The Polish government, which joined the EU in May of this year, is leading the campaign for Ukrainian membership. But Paris, Berlin, and others that dominate the alliance have kept Kiev at arm’s length. In 2002 the president of the European Commission said Ukraine had about as much of a chance of being admitted into the EU as New Zealand. The EU’s official European Neighborhood Policy, whose goal is to create “a ring of friends” around its borders, places Ukraine on the same level as Tunisia, Jordan, and Morocco.

The leading imperialist powers in the EU oppose entry for Ukraine for the same reason they have pushed off Turkey’s possible admission into the distant future: it has an underdeveloped economy and a population larger than many current EU members. The rulers of France and Germany do not wish to provide any subsidies for Ukrainian agriculture.

Mass protests in Kiev began November 22 once the official results appeared to give the election to Yanukovich. Yushchenko supporters were outraged over what they charged was widespread fraud, especially after he had been declared in the lead, according to exit polls the day of the vote.

The following day Yushchenko took a symbolic oath of office in parliament, even as the electoral commission was about to declare his opponent the winner. The outgoing president called for negotiations between the two contenders for office. According to AP, however, a Yushchenko ally told a crowd November 23, “We are ready to negotiate only about the peaceful handing over of power to Yushchenko by Kuchma.” Protesters have surrounded government buildings and set up a tent camp. 
 
Ties with Moscow threatened
In response to the daily protests of Yushchenko supporters, backers of Yanukovich took to the streets as well. The New York Times correspondent in Kiev reported that hundreds of thousands turned out in eastern Ukraine to back Yanukovich. His support is based in those areas, the more industrial regions of the country. The 17 percent of Ukrainians of Russian descent are concentrated there. Yanukovich himself did not learn the Ukrainian language until taking office as prime minister two years ago.

Officials from the eastern Ukraine voted November 28 to hold a referendum on secession should Yanukovich’s election be overturned. In the eastern city of Severodonetsk, about 3,500 local officials from 17 of Ukraine’s 25 regions met with Yanukovich, the BBC reports. While on the one hand saying he would not support such a move, Yanukovich told the meeting, “There is one step to the edge. When the first drop of blood is spilled, we will not be able to stop it.”

Tens of thousands rallied in Donetsk the day before for a referendum on autonomy, and 3,000 gathered in the Black Sea port of Odessa threatening to declare independence if Yushchenko becomes president.

Washington seeks to exploit the political crisis to increase its influence in a region once under the domination of Moscow. Under pressure from Washington, Berlin, and other imperialist powers, Russian officials have backed off from their announcement that Yanukovich was the winner of the presidential election, and stated they would consider a new election as a means out of the crisis.

Moscow refers to Ukraine as part of its “near abroad,” those former Soviet republics that remain under its influence. Ukraine is of special importance because of the role it played as “breadbasket” to the former Soviet Union, providing a large portion of its agricultural needs. It is also rich in iron ore and coal, and supplied much of the USSR’s heavy industry.

An article in the November 25 Economist said that “Ukraine is the key battleground for influence between the EU and Russia.”

Many of the former Soviet republics have joined the U.S.-led NATO alliance, and earlier this year three joined the EU. “Others, such as Romania and Bulgaria, will follow them before long,” the Economist said. “The Union’s new members have toughened visa requirements for Russian visitors and closed their borders to some Russian goods.”

Ukraine is dependent on Russia for about 85 percent of its energy supplies. At the same time, Ukraine is a major transit route for Russian oil and natural gas for export. “A government on bad terms with the Kremlin could choose to increase transit fees, putting a squeeze on Russia’s major source of outside revenue,” noted a November 27 AP dispatch. “It could also choose to use one of its pipelines to carry oil from Caspian countries such as Azerbaijan, rather than Russian oil.”

Earlier this year, Kiev announced it would not carry Russian oil through one pipeline, but reversed itself under pressure from Moscow, according to AP.

The Black Sea port of Sevastopol is home to Russia’s southern naval fleet. The division of the Black Sea fleet after the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a point of contention between Moscow and Kiev. Following years of negotiations, in 1997 an agreement was reached dividing the fleet between the two countries and providing for a 20-year lease to Russia of Sevastopol and other bases on the Black Sea. Under the accord, Moscow can station up to 25,000 troops at these bases, as well as armor, artillery, and military aircraft.

Moscow wants to avoid a situation like the one it faces in Georgia, where it is under pressure to withdraw military units that have been stationed there for decades. 
 

http://www.themilitant.com/2004/6846/684603.html

How communists saw Ukrainian struggle for national rights before World War II

Why Trotsky Called For Independent Ukraine In 1939 

BY MAURICE WILLIAMS

The Albanian struggle for self-determination in Kosova is at the center of the current conflict in Yugoslavia. Brutal suppression of this democratic demand by the bureaucratic regime in Belgrade has led to growing resistance among the Albanians and opened the door for imperialist intervention.

Apologists for the Belgrade government, such as the Workers World newspaper, dismiss the fight for national rights by the Albanians as promoting "national antagonisms in Yugoslavia." They describe those fighting for independence as a U.S.-backed "counter-revolutionary separatist guerrilla insurgency."

In 1939 Communist leader Leon Trotsky took up a similar problem involving the Ukraine in an April 22 article titled "The Ukrainian Question." He elaborated further on this question in reply to a "Marxist" who criticized his earlier document for ignoring the interests of the Soviet Union in a July 22 article called "Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads." The articles can be found in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1938-39) and Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40).

On the eve of the imperialist slaughter of World War II, Trotsky called for "A united, free, and independent workers' and peasants' Soviet Ukraine." He drew on the policies advanced by the Bolsheviks under the leadership of V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the Russian revolution. Lenin insisted on establishing the Soviet Union as a voluntary federation of workers and farmers republics, guaranteeing the rights of national self-determination to all nations and nationalities oppressed under the old czarist empire in Russia.

"Every inclination to evade or postpone the problem of an oppressed nationality," Trotsky wrote, was regarded by Lenin as "a manifestation of Great Russian chauvinism."

Joseph Stalin, who "represented the most centralist and bureaucratic tendency," led the course of reversing the Bolsheviks' policy on national self-determination and voluntary federation, a course that prevailed following Lenin's death. The "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" reemerged as a prison house of nations inherited from tsarism and imperialism. In order to serve the interests of the privileged layer that usurped power in the Soviet Union, the regime of Stalin denied the most legitimate claims of the oppressed nationalities, especially the Georgians and Ukrainians.

"To the totalitarian bureaucracy, Soviet Ukraine became an administrative division of an economic unit and a military base of the USSR," Trotsky explained. The privileged caste strangled and plundered the workers and peasants of the Ukraine, depriving them of any opportunity to express their will.

Under these conditions, "the great masses of the Ukrainian people are dissatisfied with their national fate and wish to change it drastically," said Trotsky. He pointed to the development of separatist tendencies among the Ukrainian people and their hostility to the Soviet bureaucracy. "One of the primary sources of this hostility is the suppression of Ukrainian independence," he noted.

The Ukrainian struggle for national rights exploded in 1917-1919. One of the groups that expressed these nationalist tendencies on the left was the Ukrainian Borotba (Struggle) Party. Convinced that the Bolshevik revolution offered the way forward for workers and peasants of the Ukraine, the Borotba Party merged with the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1920. "The most important indication of the success of the Leninist policy in the Ukraine was the fusion of the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party with the organization of the Borotbists," said Trotsky.

In the late 1920s Borotbists were driven out of leadership as the emerging bureaucratic caste consolidated its domination over the USSR workers state and gutted soviet democracy. Most of the Borotbists were killed by the Stalinist murder machine in the 1930s. "Nowhere did the purges and repressions assume such a savage character as they did in the Ukraine," Trotsky stated.

It was the reactionary policies of the Stalinists that shifted the leadership of the Ukrainian national movement to "the most reactionary Ukrainian cliques who express their `nationalism' by seeking to sell the Ukrainian people to one imperialism or another in return for a promise of fictitious independence," Trotsky explained. This pushed the Ukrainian petty-bourgeoisie and even layers of the working-class masses toward the imperialist camp.

Trotsky called for a political revolution to overthrow the Soviet bureaucracy, while preserving the nationalized property relations made possible by the revolutionary victory of 1917. Sweeping away the Bonapartist caste is a central task of the workers and peasants and key to the defense of the workers state. Trotsky declared the USSR "doomed" under the rule of the Stalinist regime - a statement born out by events in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe.

Far from militarily weakening the Soviet workers state, as "the `friends' of the Kremlin will howl in horror," said Trotsky, "an independent Ukraine ... would become, if only by virtue of its own interests, a mighty southwestern bulwark of the USSR."

The fight for self-determination of the oppressed is intertwined with advancing the interests of workers and farmers the world over; without this policy no revolutionary victory of the toilers is possible.

"There is every reason to assume that in the event of the triumph of the world revolution the tendencies toward unity will immediately acquire enormous force, and that all Soviet republics will find the suitable forms of ties and collaboration. This goal will be achieved only provided the old and compulsory ties, and in consequences old boundaries, are completely destroyed," Trotsky asserted. "To speed and facilitate this process, to make possible the genuine brotherhood of the peoples in the future, the advanced workers of Great Russia must... without any reservation declare to the Ukrainian people that they are ready to support with all their might the slogan of an independent Ukraine in a joint struggle against the autocratic bureaucracy and against imperialism."

http://www.themilitant.com/1999/6320/6320_25.html

Is Moscow defending Ukraine from EU and U.S. imperialism?

A friend on Facebook recently wrote:

Now both Ukraine and Russia are oppressed countries. Russia is led by an anti-imperialist capitalist regime. Because Russia is part of the global anti-imperialist bloc, the US and EU imperialists are trying to lock down Ukraine as a base in their camp. This requires forcing Ukraine to join EU. The majority of Ukrainians oppose it. Why would anyone want to join EU? Workers in Britain, France, and other countries are trying to escape it. EU is an anti-worker imperialist trap.

To me reliance on Putin's regime as "anti-imperialist" recalls a previous disaster for workers who were led to believe their "anti-imperialist" capitalist government had their interests at heart:  Indonesia in 1965.  Such illusions, fostered at the time by Peking as well as the leadership of the Indonesian Communist Party, led to disaster.  Putting reliance on Moscow today as caretaker for the aspirations of Ukraine's workers and farmers, and Russia's, promotes similar illusions. 

Workers need their own leadership and their own party.  Reliance on the class enemy is not even a short-term solution.  It is a deadly trap.  Especially when it also means ignoring three hundred years of national oppression and liquidating the struggle of an oppressed nationality [the Ukrainians], whatever their current level of consciousness and leadership.

More on Indonesia in 1965:

‘Maoism vs. Bolshevism’: Lessons from Indonesia
(In Review column)

Maoism vs. Bolshevism by Joseph Hansen, 90 pages. Pathfinder Press, 1998. Education for Socialists bulletin, Documents of the Socialist Workers Party. $12.

BY EMMA JOHNSON
Maoism vs. Bolshevism deals with the social and political roots and the international repercussions of the “most devastating defeat for the working class since the fascist victory in Germany in 1933”—the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of members and supporters of the Communist Party and other working people in Indonesia in 1965. The Indonesian Communist Party, the biggest in the capitalist world, along with unions and other organizations were wiped out in just a few months.

The massacre was directed by Gen. Suharto, who subsequently led a coup that brought him to power. The reactionary U.S.-backed Suharto tyranny endured for some three decades.

Maoism vs. Bolshevism is a collection of Socialist Workers Party documents between 1966 and 1974 by Joseph Hansen, then a leader of the party.

Hansen poses the question: How could a political force like the Indonesian Communist Party, claiming 3 million members, another 3 million in the youth group and 20 million in mass organizations, undergo a mauling at the hands of armed forces totaling 350,000?

Workers and farmers in Indonesia were inspired by the 1949 Chinese Revolution. The Chinese Communist Party—which came to power on the crest of that mighty social upheaval carried through by millions of Chinese toilers—had enormous prestige and was looked to for leadership and guidance. The defeat in Indonesia cannot be understood, Hansen says, without understanding the role played by the CCP led by Mao Zedong. He compares it to the role the Soviet Communist Party under Joseph Stalin played in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s and in the Spanish Revolution in the 30s.

“In relation to Indonesia, Mao played a role comparable to that of Stalin in the German events,” wrote Hansen. “Just as Stalin … blocked the German Communist Party from developing a revolutionary policy that could have stopped Hitler and put the German working class in power, so Mao out of similar passing diplomatic needs (an alliance with Sukarno and the Indonesian bourgeoisie) blocked the Indonesian Communist party from developing a revolutionary policy that could have stopped the reactionary generals and put the Indonesian working class in power.”

Sukarno became Indonesia’s first president after a powerful national movement forced the Dutch colonialists to cede independence in 1949. He ceded power to Suharto in 1967.

The leadership of the Indonesian Communist Party, with Chairman D.N. Aidit at the helm, put the brakes on the mass movement and subordinated it to the Indonesian bourgeoisie, at the urging of Beijing.

Hansen points to the international repercussions of the defeat in Indonesia. “The most spectacular immediate result … is to be seen in China. The evidence strongly indicates that it was the precipitating cause for the ‘cultural revolution,’” a brutal and culturally repressive campaign launched by the Chinese Communist Party in August 1966.

Maoism vs. Bolshevism documents the discussion in the Fourth International, at the time an international organization of revolutionary parties, going into its 1969 and 1974 World Congresses on the assessment of the Cultural Revolution. The main dividing line is the characterization of the Maoist leadership.

Hansen and others saw the Maoist policy as expressing the interests of a “crystallized bureaucratic caste” that could not be reformed, but had to be overthrown. They characterized this privileged social layer in China as “Stalinist, because of its essential similarity to the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy consolidated in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s.”

It’s this commonality, in fact, that drove at that time the deep rivalry between the Soviet and Chinese governments, the booklet explains.

“Mao’s policy on the international plane was fundamentally opportunist, aimed at reaching an accommodation with American imperialism and at practicing class collaboration with the bourgeoisie in the colonial and semicolonial countries,” Hansen explained. This “generalized policy of peaceful coexistence is dictated by the material interests of the bureaucratic caste, which fears the spread of revolution and the effect it might have on the masses in its own country.”

The opposing position held by Ernest Mandel, Pierre Frank and Livio Maitan, leaders of sections of the Fourth International in Europe, saw the Maoist leadership as “bureaucratic centrist,” sensitive to mass pressure for reforms and that significant concessions to the masses would be a forthcoming result of the Cultural Revolution.

In an assessment of the Cultural Revolution presented to the 1974 World Congress, Hansen points to the effects of the Maoist foreign policy in relation to Vietnam during the U.S. war to roll back the revolution in that country. “The bankruptcy of this [Mao’s] foreign policy became glaringly clear when … Mao offered ‘peaceful coexistence’ to the [U.S. Richard] Nixon administration.

“The real stake for Nixon was Vietnam. Mao paid off by inviting Nixon to Peking in February 1972. So that the Vietnamese should be certain not to miss the point, Nixon timed his visit to Peking to coincide with a savage escalation of the bombing of Indochina.”

The documents point to a number of other examples in which narrow nationalists interests of the Chinese bureaucracy clash irreconcilably with the interests of the working class on the international plane and reveal its counterrevolutionary character. Beijing was the first to recognize the reactionary Boumedienne regime that came to power with the overthrow of the Algerian Revolution in 1965, and among the first to recognize the bloody fascist-like dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. It backed, and in some cases aided, capitalist military dictatorships around the world—from Gen. Francisco Franco’s Spain, to Greece, Ceylon, Sudan, East Bengal and Peru. It opposed reductions in NATO forces aimed against the Soviet Union and gave only lip service to selected workers’ struggles that didn’t impinge on these alliances.

The introduction to Maoism vs. Bolshevism was written by Steve Clark on behalf of the Political Committee of the SWP in 1998, just weeks after Suharto’s resignation.

“Responsibility for the defeat [in Indonesia] lay not with bad ideas, but with a self-serving class-collaborationist course of the privileged bureaucratic caste in Peking and its subservient followers in the leadership of the Indonesian Communist Party,” writes Clark. “Only by clearly understanding the accountability of Stalinism for the 1965 catastrophe in Indonesia can we accurately appreciate the historic significance of the fact … that the Indonesian workers, peasants, and youth who are today beginning to return to political life no longer confront this massive counterrevolutionary obstacle that repeatedly stood in their path to victory throughout much of this century.”

http://www.themilitant.com/2012/7640/764036.html