"Democracy" Movement Made in U.S.A.
Ukraine: Robber Barons and Nationalist Demagogues Fall Out
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 838, 10 December 2004.
DECEMBER 5—To go by the images in newspapers and on TV screens in the U.S., what has been going on in Ukraine in the past two weeks is a "carnival of democracy" driven forward by young kids dyeing their hair orange and dancing to live rock music on the streets of Kiev. "The story line could not have been simpler," wrote the New York Times (4 December). "There were villains, a hero and a chorus. The chorus was the people themselves." The hero of this "Orange Revolution" is the pro-Western politician Viktor Yushchenko. The villains—per the American government and media—are a corrupt, tyrannical cabal of Communist holdovers led by current president Leonid Kuchma and heir apparent Viktor Yanukovich who, working in cahoots with Russia's Vladimir Putin, allegedly robbed Yushchenko of his victory in the second round of the presidential elections.
This fairy tale account is sponsored by the same American ruling class that is slaughtering thousands in Najaf, Mosul, Falluja and Baghdad in order, it claims, to bring "democracy" to the Iraqi peoples at bayonet point. In fact, the "spontaneous" outpouring on the streets of Kiev—though tapping into widespread revulsion with official corruption—is orchestrated and funded by the U.S. government and various other agencies of American imperialism, among others. And this "democratic" opposition includes anti-Semitic demagogues railing against a "Russian-Jewish mafia," the open Nazis of the UNSO and admirers of Hitler's genocidal Ukrainian auxiliaries in World War II.
At every level, the spectacle being played out in Ukraine is the product of the capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet workers state and ravaged the economies and peoples of the former Soviet republics. Intoxicated by "death of communism" triumphalism, the U.S. ruling class has been riding roughshod over the peoples of the world and is now engaged in a flagrantly provocative intervention in a country that is, after all, considered by a still nuclear-armed capitalist Russia to be its backyard. With the concentration of industry in the east and the military importance of the Black Sea and the Crimean peninsula, Ukraine remains of strategic importance to Russia.
A phalanx of American "observers," including Republican Senator Richard Lugar, descended on Kiev to arrogantly rule the second round election results out of order, while White House spokesmen issued imperious threats against Putin's Ukrainian allies. The scenario played out in Ukraine has now become a tried and tested means for U.S. imperialism to impose regime change in the former deformed workers states. London Guardian correspondent Ian Traynor reported (26 November):
"Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.
"Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.
"Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko."
These campaigns are part of a concerted effort to install U.S./NATO military forces or American-loyal regimes on the periphery of the former Soviet Union. It includes stationing troops in Kosovo following the 1999 war against Serbia and in Central Asia and Georgia in conjunction with the "war on terror."
Within Ukraine itself, what is going on is a falling-out between two equally corrupt gangs of robber barons who were earlier scratching each other's backs as they gorged themselves on the privatized theft of the industrial wealth built up over decades by the multinational Soviet working class. Among these robber barons is Kuchma's son-in-law, who was recently given the country's largest steel producer, formerly state owned, for $800 million—roughly half the bid offered by U.S. Steel! Yushchenko is a former director of the central bank who served as Kuchma's prime minister for over a year. Yushchenko's chief lieutenant and "people power" agitator is a rapacious tycoon named Yulia Timoshenko, dubbed the "Eleven Billion Dollar Woman" in Matthew Brzezinski's 2001 book, Casino Moscow. Timoshenko gained control of nearly 20 percent of Ukraine's gross domestic product through her intimate ties to another of Kuchma's prime ministers, one Pavlo Lazarenko, who is now serving time in the U.S. on money-laundering and extortion charges.
Both sides in this squalid power play in Ukraine have demagogically stoked historic fears and antagonisms between the heavily Russified and Orthodox eastern Ukraine and the more Uniate Catholic and rural western Ukraine. Largely undercut under Soviet rule, these antagonisms returned with capitalist restoration and have been brought to a head in recent weeks, with district administrations in the east threatening to stage plebiscites for regional autonomy. Capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe was driven by—and subsequently served to deepen—bourgeois nationalism. Even if Yushchenko wins the rerun of the second round mandated by the Supreme Court without further turmoil, this will settle nothing.
Ukraine: Between Russia and a Hard Place
Before the October Revolution of 1917, the Ukraine (like Poland) was partitioned between the Russian tsarist empire and the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg empire. The western Ukraine, Austrian eastern Galicia, was populated by ethnic Ukrainian peasants toiling under a Polish landed aristocracy, with Jewish merchants and moneylenders acting as middlemen between the gentry and the peasantry. The eastern Ukraine was subjected under tsarism to forced Russification, with the urban areas populated mainly by ethnic Russians and Jews. Thus Ukrainian nationalism tended to take on a strongly anti-Semitic and anti-Polish, as well as anti-Russian, coloration. At the same time, the proletarian revolution and its Bolshevik vanguard in the Ukraine were necessarily based on the heavily Russian and Jewish eastern urban population.
As a result, the Civil War in the Ukraine following the October Revolution took on a particularly bloody character. Deeply hostile to the rule of the multinational proletariat, successive short-lived Ukrainian bourgeois-nationalist regimes were directly sponsored by German imperialism and/or allied with the Great Russian White Guards and their imperialist patrons—notably Germany and France—as well as with Pilsudski's capitalist Poland, itself a client of French imperialism. Whatever their mutual hostilities, all the imperialist and local bourgeoisies made common cause against Soviet Russia. Finally, the Ukrainian nationalist Petliura, notorious for his massacres of the Jewish population in western Ukraine, made a bloc with the Polish nationalist Pilsudski, ceding the western territories to Poland, a land grab consolidated through the 1920 Soviet-Polish war a year later. When Hitler's Nazis moved into western Ukraine in 1941, they were welcomed by the Ukrainian nationalists, who had already prepared lists of Jews, Poles and Communists to be murdered.
Despite bureaucratic degeneration under the Russian-centered regime of Stalin and his heirs, under Soviet power and the centrally planned, collectivized economy, the Ukraine underwent massive industrialization. The capitalist counterrevolution of 1991-92, leading to the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the creation of distinct capitalist nation-states in the former Soviet republics, dealt a severe body blow to the Ukrainian economy, which had been integrated into an all-Union economic division of labor and had been reliant on Russia for its supplies of oil and natural gas. Output in the period up to 1999 fell to less than 40 percent of the 1991 level.
Thanks in good part to the austerity policies pursued by Kuchma and his various prime ministers, notably Yushchenko, hyperinflation was reined in and the economy somewhat stabilized in the last few years. Today, as an Associated Press (19 November) article put it, Ukraine exhibits "a mix of audacious consumption and entrenched poverty." While the cheapest model in one car showroom in Kiev goes for $48,000, elderly pensioners nearby try to survive on $53 a month. The gross domestic product is now climbing at the rate of 11 to 13 percent a year and the stock market jumped 100 percent in the past year. What fuels this prosperity for the new bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie is the massive looting of formerly state-owned industry and the intense exploitation of a highly trained and educated proletariat. At $160 per month, average labor costs (including taxes and social benefits) are far lower than they are even in neighboring Poland, where they average $400 a month.
The appetite among the Ukrainian bourgeoisie for greater investment from the West, which already accounts for 80 percent of all direct foreign investment, has exacerbated the tensions between those looking to maintain Ukraine's traditional ties to Russia and those seeking to draw closer to the U.S. and the European Union (EU). Despite its current pro-Russian posture, the Ukrainian regime has continuously tried to suck up to U.S. imperialism since the counterrevolution, agreeing to Washington's dictates to destroy its nuclear arsenal (for a price) and deploying troops to participate in the colonial occupation of Iraq. For that matter, Putin's Russia has been more than willing to act as soft cops for U.S./NATO imperialism when the situation availed itself, as in Kosovo in 1999, and heartily embraced Bush's "war on terror"—not least in justifying its own murderous colonial occupation of Chechnya.
Capitalist counterrevolution has brought with it a recrudescence of all the old regional and interimperialist rivalries, and ushered in new ones. While Germany is going along with the U.S. vendetta against Kuchma/Yanukovich, Social Democratic chancellor Gerhard Schröder has demonstratively maintained friendly relations with Putin throughout the confrontation. Meanwhile, Poland—this time acting as a lackey of U.S., not French, imperialism—has moved aggressively to reassert its historic interests in Ukraine. Ex-Stalinist president Aleksander Kwasniewski and former Solidarność leader Lech Walesa both visited Kiev, the former as a "mediator" blessed by Bush and the latter in open solidarity with the "Orange Revolution." The Polish Sejm (parliament), with many parliamentarians ostentatiously dressed in orange, passed a resolution demanding that the Kiev regime "respect free elections," while rallies supporting Yushchenko have been staged throughout the country, in at least one case raising the demand, "Ukraine Without Putin."
For New October Revolutions!
The Bolshevik Revolution transformed what Lenin called the tsarist "prison house of peoples" into a multinational federation. What made this possible was the Bolsheviks' internationalist program, which asserted full and equal national rights for all peoples—including the right of national independence—in order to secure the fullest unity of the workers of all nationalities. From 1919 to 1923, the head of the Ukrainian Soviet government was Christian Rakovsky, the outstanding Romanian revolutionary socialist and Bolshevik leader, who later became Trotsky's key ally in the International Left Opposition.
Keenly sensitive to any hint of anti-Ukrainian prejudices among the largely Russian or Russified Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, Lenin and Trotsky insisted that all Communist administrators working there had to speak Ukrainian. Rakovsky continued this tradition. In line with Lenin's express concerns, Rakovsky was singularly outspoken at the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923 in denouncing the chauvinist treatment by Stalin and his allies of the Georgian Communists, an early sign of the nationalist bureaucracy consolidating around Stalin's leadership. Placing the struggle against Russian chauvinism firmly in the context of the program of world socialist revolution, Rakovsky declared: "If we are to become the centre of the struggle of the oppressed nationalities outside the boundaries of the USSR, we must internally, within the boundaries of the USSR, make a correct decision on the national question" (Christian Rakovsky, Selected Writings on Opposition in the USSR 1923-30 [1980]).
The kind of ethnic and regional hostilities that are coming to the fore today can only be overcome through proletarian class struggle. This was palpable in the 1993 Donbass miners strike, the first major workers struggle in the former Soviet Union after the capitalist counterrevolution. A red banner at one of the strike demonstrations proclaimed: "Nationalism Shall Not Pass!" The strike soon spread from the Donbass coal fields to the cities and on to the western Ukraine, including cities near the Polish border. But the union leadership, working closely with the mine directors, derailed the struggle into a demand for regional "self-administration" in the east, whereby the mine directors would get regional autonomy in order to exercise control over profits.
In a 1996 article titled "Why Marxists Do Not Raise the Call ‘Restore the Soviet Union'" (WV No. 639, 16 February 1996), we wrote: "What will the interpenetrated and heavily assimilated Eastern Ukraine population want to do in the aftermath of proletarian revolution—go with Russia, the Western Ukraine, a socialist federation linking them, or some other variant?" The outcome of this question depends heavily on whether the next wave of revolutionary ferment is generated, for example, from Warsaw or Berlin in the west or Moscow in the east—or Central Asia. One thing is certain: the only way out of the immiseration and fratricide unleashed by capitalist counterrevolution lies in socialist revolution to sweep away all the new capitalist ruling classes and return to the Bolshevik internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky.