World World Party defends Great Russian chauvinism in Ukraine

Workers World Party's unconditional defense of Great Russian chauvinism against the oppressed Ukrainian nation continues. Again they liquidate the national question of the Ukrainians. Not even lip service is paid.

Can anyone imagine this party talking about the class struggle in the United States and not mentioning the oppressed Black nationality?

But for Workers World Party politics begin with support for any regime that for whatever temporary or episodic reason finds itself opposed to  Washington's policies. They do not follow the class lines on these questions. Instead they promote a pragmatic geopolitics of "great powers."

This is not an academic question.  Rather, it is the kind of unprincipled politics that led to workers and peasants to defeat in Indonesia in 1965. [Not to mention Germany in the early 1930s.] Workers, farmers and oppressed nationalities must rely on our own class forces, whatever the level of their leadership or consciousness.  The Putins of the world will not defend us any more than the Assads, Obamas, or DeBlasios. 

The Ukrainian national question was never "solved" for all time during the lifespan of the USSR.  No wonder there are people in Ukraine willing to die for their oppressed nation and fight (with whatever illusions and whatever caliber of leadership) for its liberation,  just like Kurds and Palestinians.

[Previous generations' communist leaders understood the social weight of the Ukrainian national question very well, as can be seen here and here.]

166 years of the Communist Manifesto

‘Communist Manifesto’ speaks to workers today

(Books of the Month column)
 
Below is an excerpt from a 1937 introduction to the Communist Manifesto by Leon Trotsky. The introduction by the Bolshevik leader noted then, as remains the case today, the freshness and relevance of the Manifesto’s most important sections. Pathfinder’s Spanish-language edition of this founding programmatic document of the modern communist movement is one of its Books of the Month for August. Copyright © 1992 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY LEON TROTSKY  

It is hard to believe that the centennial of the Manifesto of the Communist Party is only ten years away! This pamphlet, displaying greater genius than any other in world literature, astounds us even today by its freshness. Its most important sections appear to have been written yesterday. Assuredly the young authors (Marx was twenty-nine, Engels twenty-seven) were able to look further into the future than anyone before them, and perhaps than anyone since them.

Already in their joint preface to the edition of 1872, Marx and Engels declared that despite the fact that certain secondary passages in the Manifesto were antiquated, they felt that they no longer had any right to alter the original text inasmuch as the Manifesto had already become a historical document, during the intervening period of twenty-five years. Sixty-five additional years have elapsed since that time. Isolated passages in the Manifesto have receded still further into the past. We shall try to establish succinctly in this preface both those ideas in the Manifesto which retain their full force today and those which require important alteration or amplification.

1. The materialist conception of history discovered by Marx only a short while before and applied with consummate skill in the Manifesto, has completely withstood the test of events and the blows of hostile criticism. It constitutes today one of the most precious instruments of human thought. All other interpretations of the historical process have lost all scientific meaning. We can state with certainty that it is impossible in our time to be not only a revolutionary militant but even a literate observer in politics without assimilating the materialist interpretation of history.

2. The first chapter of the Manifesto opens with the following words: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” This postulate, the most important conclusion drawn from the materialist interpretation of history, immediately became an issue in the class struggle. Especially venomous attacks were directed by reactionary hypocrites, liberal doctrinaires, and idealistic democrats against the theory which replaced “common welfare,” “national unity” and “eternal moral truths” as the driving force by the struggle of material interests. They were later joined by recruits from the ranks of the labor movement itself, by the so-called revisionists, i.e., the proponents of reviewing (“revising”) Marxism in the spirit of class collaboration and class conciliation. Finally in our own time, the same path has been followed in practice by the contemptible epigones of the Communist International (the “Stalinists”): the policy of the so-called People's Front flows wholly from the denial of the laws of the class struggle. Meanwhile, it is precisely the epoch of imperialism, bringing all social contradictions to the point of highest tension, which gives to the Communist Manifesto its supreme theoretical triumph.

3. The anatomy of capitalism, as a specific stage in the economic development of society, was given by Marx in its finished form in Capital (1867). But already in the Communist Manifesto the main lines of the future analysis are firmly sketched: the payment for labor power as equivalent to the cost of its reproduction; the appropriation of surplus value by the capitalists; competition as the basic law of social relations; the ruination of intermediate classes, i.e., the urban petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry; the concentration of wealth in the hands of an ever diminishing number of property owners at the one pole, and the numerical growth of the proletariat at the other; the preparation of the material and political preconditions for the socialist regime.

4. The proposition in the Manifesto condemning the tendency of capitalism to lower the living standards of the workers, and even to transform them into paupers, had been subjected to a heavy barrage. Parsons, professors, ministers, journalists, social democratic theoreticians, and trade union leaders came to the front against the so-called theory of impoverishment. They invariably discovered signs of growing prosperity among the toilers, palming off the labor aristocracy as the proletariat or taking a fleeting tendency as permanent. Meanwhile, even the development of the mightiest capitalism in the world, namely U.S. capitalism, has transformed millions of workers into paupers who are maintained at the expense of federal, municipal, or private charity.  
 

http://www.themilitant.com/2005/6933/693349.html

Behind Chattanooga UAW defeat

Facing crisis, AFL-CIO tops
turn further from struggle

BY SUSAN LAMONT

Marking a further retreat by the current labor officialdom from any perspective of actively organizing workers into unions and bringing union power to bear, delegates to the Sept. 8-11 AFL-CIO convention overwhelmingly approved a resolution to begin incorporating nonlabor political organizations into the federation and shoring up its dues base with “workers centers.”

The labor movement can’t be “limited to workplaces where a majority of employees votes ‘Yes,” said the resolution.

The AFL-CIO will encourage “worker centers” like “OUR Walmart” and “Fight for 15” to affiliate. These union-initiated groups, which also involve students, social service organization staffers and others, have organized protests around the country calling for higher pay and better working conditions for retail, fast-food and other workers, but without organizing the ranks themselves to establish actual unions.

Liberal political organizations that share the labor federation’s orientation to the Democratic Party, including the NAACP, National Organization for Women, National Council of La Raza and the Sierra Club, are invited to join the labor federation as well.

“The crisis for labor has deepened,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told the New York Times Sept. 6. “We really have to experiment.” Nonunion affiliated workers can help lobby state legislatures for a higher minimum wage, push Congress to raise taxes on the wealthy and help press employers to improve safety conditions, Trumka said.

U.S. union membership stood at 14.4 million workers in 2012, representing 11.3 percent of the U.S. workforce, a 97-year low. In the last two decades, under the capitalists’ unrelenting assaults, union membership has declined from 20.1 percent to its current level.

In a related move, United Auto Workers President Bob King announced Sept. 6 that the union was cooperating with Volkswagen to create a German-style “works council” at the company’s Chattanooga, Tenn., assembly plant, which employs some 2,400 workers. “Volkswagen is a great company and they really believe worker representation is part of their success,” said King, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Under this proposal, workers at the Chattanooga plant would join the UAW, which would then represent them on the company-union “works council,” which would include representatives of management, salaried employees and plant workers.

To date, none of the many auto assembly plants in the South owned by German, Japanese and South Korean manufacturers has been organized by the UAW or any other union.

Meanwhile, membership in the UAW stands at 390,000, down from 1.5 million in 1979. Promoting collaboration with car manufacturers and the government to “save the U.S. auto industry,” UAW officials have promoted concession contracts, establishing divisive wage tiers. Efforts by the union tops to increase the AFL-CIO’s size by including nonunion workers and groups is not aimed at strengthening unions, but rather at stemming the loss of the officials’ dues base and regaining a measure of influence in capitalist politics, above all in the Democratic Party.

By promoting class collaboration with the bosses and election of “friendly” capitalist politicians as the unions’ main purpose, the officialdom’s decades-long class-collaborationist course has hamstrung the union movement. It has been key to the union’s continued bleeding of membership and inability to recruit new forces, at a time of capitalist crisis when workers are starting to look for a way to fight back.

Unions strong, not weak

Supporters of the Militant who distribute the paper door to door in working-class areas around the country each week are meeting workers who want to discuss what is happening in the labor movement and how the unions can be strengthened.

In these discussions, communist workers explain that the unions are not “weak,” as many labor officials claim, pointing to declining numbers. This is simply an excuse for their refusal to organize workers and use union power — instead of subordinating workers and their organizations to the bosses, their government and the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties.

The unions are not a “thing,” but an activity, a movement — a “we” of all its members. Even today the unions encompass millions of workers with enormous potential to deal major blows to the bosses.

Our unions can and will become powerful instruments to fight back against attacks by the bosses and their government when workers start to take hold of them. During a recovery in hiring after a long period of high unemployment in the 1930s, “men and women from nowhere” started to gain confidence and waged mighty battles in the plants and on the streets that built the industrial unions.

http://www.themilitant.com/2013/7734/773402.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

Ukraine today

.... After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine declared its formal independence, but still remained a political and economic vassal of Russia. While Ukrainian is the principal language for two-thirds of the country, Russian predominates in large parts of the eastern and southern parts, which are also the more industrially developed regions.

Former Soviet bureaucrats used their positions to assemble fortunes for themselves and their cronies as chunks of the Russian economy were privatized. Former KGB political police lieutenant-colonel Putin took the presidency on behalf of these new capitalist layers. His regime is the true heir of the Stalinist police apparatus and murder machine.

Moscow still has close ties to Ukraine’s police apparatus and the armies of both countries have held joint exercises since Yanukovich took office.

Yanukovich attempted to quell the demonstrations with police violence and pushed through a law restricting the right to protest. The move backfired. The protests widened, including to the southern and eastern parts of the country, which have been Yanukovich’s main base of support.

As the protests spread, Yanukovich offered concessions, while his police forces continued to selectively go after leading activists in the opposition. His prime minister and cabinet resigned Jan. 28, and Yanukovich invited opposition leaders to join the government. He signed a repeal of the anti-protest law Jan. 31 and approved an amnesty for jailed protesters, on condition they evacuate government buildings they have occupied in Kiev and other cities.

The main opposition parties rejected the concessions. They demanded the immediate release of more than 100 people arrested in recent weeks. At least six people have been killed by cops and pro-government thugs and many others kidnapped and beaten since the protests began.

The protests in Ukraine have begun to win support from other opponents of Putin’s autocratic rule, including in Russia itself. At a Feb. 1 protest of several thousand in Moscow calling for freeing 20 people arrested at an anti-Putin demonstration in May 2012, some participants carried Ukrainian flags in solidarity with the protests there.

In addition to suffering under Russian tyranny, Ukraine has been especially hard hit by the worldwide capitalist economic crisis. Its economy contracted by nearly 15 percent in 2009, among the biggest declines in the world.

The Ukraine government owes $5.5 billion in loans due in 2014, $3 billion of it to the International Monetary Fund, but its foreign currency reserves have dropped by about one-third over the past year. Another $10 billion is due next year.

The IMF, prior to the latest crisis, has been urging Kiev to cut fuel subsidies and other government spending as a condition for more loans, steps that would fall heavily on working people.

President Putin has sought to take advantage of Ukraine’s precarious economic crisis to strengthen Moscow’s hand and to press Yanukovich to take a harder line on the protests...

http://www.themilitant.com/2014/7806/index.shtml

Age of devaluation

 
Workers face ruin as capitalists pull
billions from semicolonial countries

(front page)
 
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS  

Recent currency devaluations in Argentina, Turkey and elsewhere in the world are among the latest manifestations of a deepening world capitalist crisis. They will mean declining real wages and rising prices for basic goods, devastating the lives of working people.
Finding it harder to maximize profits through investing in expanded productive capacity, capitalists have turned to other avenues for the highest returns. This includes financial speculation in stocks, bonds and currency markets and other financial paper in so-called emerging markets, a term used to refer to less developed colonial and semicolonial nations.

Since 2008, U.S. capitalists have poured $1.1 trillion into these countries, inflating a giant and increasingly unstable debt balloon.

Now the propertied holders of this debt are acting on fears over the growing risks, rapidly dialing back these “investments,” not just in Argentina and Turkey, but Hungary, Brazil, India, South Africa, Indonesia and other places.

This fear, according to the prevailing view among financial commentators, was stoked by two developments. One, growing signs of a slowdown in Chinese manufacturing, which many capitalists hoped would drive a world economic recovery. And two, the decision of the Federal Reserve Bank to begin tapering back its money printing schemes, which, according to its proponents, help buoy capital investment.

The Argentine government devalued the peso Jan. 23, as international currency traders started dumping it. The peso’s value against the dollar slid 15 percent in two hours until the central bank stepped in and sold $1.25 billion of its dwindling foreign currency reserves over the next few days to stem the tide. Argentina’s reserves have fallen to $28.3 billion from a peak of $52.6 billion in January 2011.

The credit rating agency Moody’s is betting the peso will lose another 50 percent of its value this year, reported the Financial Times, as Argentina’s inflation rate, an estimated 28 percent in 2013, continues to rise.

The Turkish lira fell 20 percent against the dollar over the past month. In response, the country’s central bank raised interest rates Jan. 28, starting with the seven-day repurchase rate, which it more than doubled from 4.5 to 10 percent. While this slowed the lira’s slide, it “arrived too late to convince foreign investors to treat Turkey as the promising investment it was for them until recently,” said a Marketwatch opinion column. The move is, however, expected to bring an end to a construction boom fueled by massive real estate speculation.

Not one of the countries that capitalists refer to as “emerging” or “developing” nations has ever emerged or developed into an advanced capitalist power, or ever will. This has been true since the rise of imperialism in the early 1900s, a scientific conclusion explained by Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin nearly 100 years ago in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Workers and peasants in the colonial and semicolonial world are exploited by domestic and foreign capitalists while at the same time held in debt bondage to international finance capital through the agencies of the national bourgeoisies in their countries. Vast quantities of wealth produced by the toilers are siphoned into banks in the U.S. and other imperialist centers to cover interest payments on the debt. Turkey’s foreign debt is $373 billion; Argentina’s, $141 billion.

“Since the consolidation of imperialism,” wrote Jack Barnes, Socialist Workers Party national secretary, in Capitalism’s World Disorder, “every action by finance capital in relation to the more economically backward countries ends up further warping the economies of the colonial or semicolonial countries. That is the effect of every bank loan to their ruling classes; every investment in landed, industrial, and commercial capital; every purchase of bonds issued by a semicolonial administration; every trade pact; every scheme to peg the value of weaker currencies to stronger ones.”  
 
 

http://www.themilitant.com/2014/7806/780605.html

Ukraine: Putin, imperialists vie for influence

.... The unfolding events in Ukraine have historical roots in the anti-working-class course of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc governments following the usurpation of political power by privileged bureaucratic social layers in the 1920s — a course which led to their collapse in the early 1990s. Since then, the remnants of the ruling bureaucracies in Ukraine and the rest of the Soviet bloc have moved to reimpose capitalist exploitation on the working class. The social crisis resulting from this course is today exacerbated by the deepening crisis of capitalism on a world scale..

With roots in different industries and other sources of capital, some emerging capitalists have gravitated toward traditional ties with Moscow, while others look to new opportunities in closer economic integration with western Europe.

Conflicts between different factions of the new capitalist layers exploded around the 2004 presidential election. Yanukovich, who emerged from the government-run eastern coal industry and had strong ties to Russia, claimed victory. His opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, came out of the state banking apparatus and oriented towards Washington and capitalist governments in Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, backing Yushchenko and a break with Russia. But his rule ended six years later amid growing disdain for the thievery and corruption of his government, laying the basis for Yanukovich and his clique to take the elections.

The forces leading the opposition are capitalist parties with seats in Ukraine’s parliament. One of the main groups organizing the protests is the Fatherland party of jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, prime minister in Yushchenko’s cabinet, representing oligarchs on the outs.

UDAR — punch in Ukrainian — is led by Vitali Klitschko, a former heavyweight world boxing champion who gained his wealth outside of any ties to Ukrainian politics and presents himself as a savior, a fighter against corruption.

The third party in Independence Square is Svoboda. The party was founded in the early 1990s, but traces its roots to the Ukrainian partisan army in World War II, which was loosely allied with Nazi Germany. Party leader Oleg Tyagnibok says “Nationalism is love of the land” and has come out against a supposed “Jewish-Russian mafia” running Ukraine. Members of Svoboda make up a large part of the muscle defending the square against the cops.

The oligarchs competing allegiances with either side are based on pragmatic interests, not ideological views on “democracy,” as is often presented in the big-business press of Europe and the U.S.

The Eastern Partnership, which Yanukovich said no to Nov. 21, was set up in 2007, aiming to integrate Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Ukraine into the EU with removal of tariffs on imports and exports.

Yanukovich said he couldn’t sign the deal because of steep cuts to government expenditures and state enterprises demanded by the International Monetary Fund to grant a loan on one hand and threats of trade sanctions from Moscow on the other. On Dec. 15, the European Union suspended talks with Ukraine, saying that Yanukovich’s words and deeds were increasingly diverging.

Ukraine, like many other countries in the region, is going through an acute economic and financial crisis. The government needs $18 billion by March 2014 to roll over debt and pay Russia for outstanding bills of oil and gas. In addition to the bailout and lower gas prices, Moscow has also pledged to resume oil supplies to a refinery after a three-year break.

Ukraine relies on Russia for about 60 percent of its gas consumption and the Russian government has turned the gas off twice in the last seven years. Since July Moscow had imposed trade restrictions that cost Ukraine $2 billion.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said the deal “is not tied to any conditions” and the issue of Ukraine joining the 2010 customs and trade agreement between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan “was not discussed.”

Ukraine is Russia’s traditional breadbasket and a key source of steel, coal and access to warm-water ports on the Black Sea.

The entire eastern industrialized part of the country — Yanukovich’s traditional support base — has seen very little participation in the demonstrations. The eastern Donbass region accounts for one-fifth of Ukraine’s industrial production and export revenues. Russia imports machinery and manufactured goods. EU imports metals and light industrial products.

The cultural ties are also stronger. Speakers of the Russian language make up 17 percent of Ukraine’s population, in Donbass it’s nearly 40 percent.

Local industries are hugely dependent on Russian supplies and markets. The prospect of joining the EU is not very popular here. “Before joining any international organizations, Ukraine should first develop our own economy,” a housewife in Donetsk told BBC Dec. 3. “Look at our poor pensioners surviving on the breadline. I am against joining the EU.”  
 

http://www.themilitant.com/2013/7747/774701.html