Ukraine Con Game: Opportunism, Crime and Punishment

Taaffeite CWI: From Yeltsin’s Barricades to the Augean Stables

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 828, 11 June 2004.

As many as ten self-styled revolutionary organizations around the world have boasted for several years about their supposed Ukrainian “sections.” Last July, the Ukrainian affiliates of these fraudulent Internationals went up in smoke. It turned out that the Ukrainian section of Peter Taaffe’s London-based Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), led by one Oleg Vernik, had organized a cynical scam to defraud these groups for money by simultaneously pretending to be the Ukrainian “section” of all of them (see “Con Artists Get Conned—Chickens Come Home to Roost in Kiev,” WV No. 808, 29 August 2003, and article on page 6 of this issue). The CWI leadership protests that it had no responsibility for the swindle. But this operation, given its far-flung scope and glaring visibility before the Ukrainian and Russian left, would have been impossible unless the London offices of Peter Taaffe looked the other way.

Now the CWI leadership is engaged in damage control, admitting what it feels obliged to—and not a whit more. A “Statement from the International Secretariat of the CWI on the Ukraine Organisation,” dated 29 August 2003, informed the conned groups that six of the Kiev con artists had been expelled from the CWI. As for the others, the statement declared that “within the ranks of the Ukrainian organisation are some very good comrades, some of whom acquiesced to the dishonest methods”! Oleg Vernik himself was merely suspended, and his expulsion was referred to the next meeting of the CWI’s International Executive Committee (IEC). To our knowledge, no further information has been released by the CWI on their current relationship with Vernik.

The CWI clearly hoped to keep their Russian organization out of the spotlight and even mandated it to join in the cleanup of its Kiev mess. But a leader of the Moscow CWI, Ilya Budraitskis, was cited by three groups—the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP), the International Bolshevik Tendency (BT) and, reportedly, the Internationalist Group (IG)—as one of the con artists. The BT then posted a statement voted by the CWI’s IEC at a 19-24 November 2003 meeting, admitting that Budraitskis had, indeed, presented himself to the LRP, the BT and Workers Power’s League for the Fifth International as a member of their putative Kiev group. Assuring the world that Budraitskis “was not motivated by any desire to gain money” and that he is committed “to building the CWI on a principled basis,” they announced that he had been removed from leading bodies of the Russian CWI for at least six months.

The Russian Taaffeites’ real attitude—utter cynicism—is reflected on their Web site where they have carried on a dialogue with critics of their handling of the scandal. To one critic who protested, “You are wrong to think that people will soon forget,” the site administrator responded, “We don’t give a damn who, what or where is forgotten or remembered.” He continued: “No one but losers is interested in the fate of the ‘socialist activists of the BT’ and their ilk. After all, they regarded themselves as the most intelligent and advanced—so, they got what their intelligence and level of development were worth.” When the critic insisted to “know your position on the Ukrainian CWI,” the site administrator replied: “On what basis do you demand a reckoning from us? This is an internal CWI matter.”

The CWI on Yeltsin’s Barricades

The corruption of the Ukrainian and Russian CWI sections flourished in the particularly reactionary setting of the post-counterrevolution ex-USSR. We in the International Communist League fought to the end against the capitalist counterrevolutions of 1989-92 in the former Soviet bloc on the basis of Trotsky’s program (see “Why We Fought to Defend the Soviet Union,” WV Nos. 809 and 810, 12 and 26 September 2003). A crucial part of our fight in the USSR was a ruthless exposure of the CWI’s prostitution of Trotskyism to counterrevolution.

These days Peter Taaffe claims the Militant tendency opposed Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s pro-imperialist countercoup in August 1991 that ushered in the period of open counterrevolution, culminating in the creation of a bourgeois state and the restoration of capitalist rule. In a 2002 online publication, Militant’s Real History, Taaffe wrote: “We publicly distanced ourselves from the pro-capitalist Yeltsinites, some of whom flooded towards the defence of their hero at the White House in Moscow.” This is a lie. They were on Yeltsin’s White House barricades. The front-page headlines of their newspaper, Rabochaya Demokratiya (October 1991), trumpeted: “Where We Were,” “On the Barricades in Moscow...” “...And in Leningrad.” They wrote:

“I am a participant in the struggle for democracy. I would like to tell about how this all happened, what I saw with my own eyes.

“On the 19th, Monday...

“I went to the White House and helped build barricades around the monument to the martyrs of the 1905 Revolution.

“It was symbolic that the barricades of the 1905 Revolution stood on the same place where the barricades of the revolution of 1991 arose! Only then, the revolution ended in defeat, whereas, now, in Victory!”

The International Communist League fought for unconditional military defense of the Soviet workers state and its collectivized property forms. In our August 1991 statement, “Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counterrevolution!”, tens of thousands of copies of which were distributed throughout the Soviet Union, we wrote that workers mobilizations should have cleaned out the counterrevolutionary rabble on Yeltsin’s barricades, thus opening the road to proletarian political revolution to sweep the traitors away.

The adherents to Taaffe’s Militant tendency did not just climb on Yeltsin’s barricades—where they were, in any case, not needed. They went to the factories, where these social-democratic traitors tried to head off workers mobilizations against Yeltsin and Bush’s “democrats”:

“From the declarations of the [putschist State Emergency Committee] it followed that they were acting against the so-called ‘democrats,’ and that posed the danger of support to the putschists by workers organizations that did not share the principles of the ‘democrats’—the rule of private property and capitalist power. And that is exactly what happened. Some of the workers organizations were getting ready to send greetings of welcome, and at several factories the workers even tried to organize defense detachments in support of the putschists.

“From the morning on, all of our members explained to workers at their workplaces that the position of the Emergency Committee did not coincide with their interests. In addition to this, they connected up with worker activists of other organizations, in order to prevent hasty actions.”

—“Where We Were”

The impulse of these workers was far better than that of the Militant tendency, whose support to Yeltsin put it in the same camp as every imperialist power on the face of the globe. Unfortunately, the stodgy bureaucrats of the putschist “Emergency Committee” sought to prevent the workers from mobilizing against Yeltsin because they too were committed to a program of capitalist restoration and didn’t want in any way to antagonize the imperialist powers. As our August 1991 statement noted, class-conscious Soviet workers who saw the urgent need to halt the capitalist-restorationist forces would have been against Yeltsin but also would have had no illusions in the anti-Yeltsin coup. Pointing to a call by a workers conference that had been initiated the previous month by delegates from 400 major Moscow-area plants to form workers militias for the preservation of socialized property in solidarity with the “Emergency Committee,” we wrote: “A call for workers militias to smash the counterrevolutionary Yeltsinite demonstrations was certainly in order. But if the Emergency Committee had consolidated power, it would have attempted to disband any such workers militias, which would otherwise have inevitably and rapidly escaped its political control. The last thing these degenerate Stalinists wanted to see was the independent mobilization of the working class.”

We fought to oust the Stalinist traitors through a proletarian political revolution based on the defense of the gains of the great 1917 Russian Revolution that remained embodied in the Soviet Union despite its degeneration. The Militant’s opposition to the Stalinist coup-makers flowed directly from their line that anything, including capitalist restoration, was preferable to “Stalinist totalitarianism.” Finding itself in the camp of imperialist-inspired counterrevolution was nothing new for this outfit. They opposed the Soviet Red Army intervention in Afghanistan against CIA-backed Islamic reaction, hailed the clerical and anti-Semitic Solidarność “union” in Poland that sought to overthrow the Polish deformed workers state in 1981, and advocated the capitalist reunification of Germany in 1989-90 (see Spartacist pamphlet Militant Labour’s Touching Faith in the Capitalist State [1994]).

From “Democratic” Counterrevolution to the “Red”/Brown Swamp

As Yeltsin’s “democratic” capitalist social counterrevolution descended into economic collapse and ethnic slaughters, Russia’s new ruling capitalist gangs increasingly portrayed these horrors as a national degradation inflicted by the usual suspects: foreigners, Jews, minorities, etc. This was the ideological basis for the emergence of the “red”/brown opposition coalition that encompassed everything from fascists and monarchists to so-called leftists. The International Communist League answered the rising brown tide by publishing an issue of our Russian-language Byulleten’ Spartakovtsev especially devoted to the role of a Leninist party as the people’s tribune, defending women, gays, Jews, minorities and oppressed nationalities, all the targets of the returning medievalist bigotry of Russia’s benighted past. The Russian Militant swam with the brown tide, tailing after the main bastion of the “red”/brown coalition, the grotesquely misnamed Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), which was Russia’s largest party.

More recently, commenting on the 7 December 2003 Russian Duma (parliament) elections that handed the KPRF a severe defeat, the CWI’s Rob Jones posted on their English-language Web site: “We...called on workers and youth to not support any of the parties supported by big business—including the CP—but called on workers to organise their own independent class organisations, to assist working class struggle” (“Election Victory for Pro-Putin United Russia Party,” 10 December 2003).

This is another lie. The real position of the Russian Taaffeites, currently named “Socialist Resistance,” is captured in their June 2003 Russian-language declaration, “Parliamentary Elections in Russia: The Orientation of Socialist Resistance.” There the Russian Taaffeites hid behind the fact that there are two tiers of candidates in the elections, party-slate and individual. While for the party-slate tier they declared that “there is no way we could call for a vote to such a party” as the KPRF, for the individual candidacies they endorsed voting for KPRF “worker” candidates: “In each area, after candidacies are put forward, worker candidates (if there are such) will be selected from trade unions, the Russian Labor Party, the RKRP, the KPRF or other parties, that Socialist Resistance will support” (emphasis added).

Their declaration also reveals that the Russian Taaffeites had a standing policy of giving support (direct or indirect) to the KPRF:

“In the previous Duma elections of 1993 and 1998, our slogan was, ‘Not one vote to the Right!’ This meant a call to not vote for bourgeois, that is, rightist parties, and logically, to vote for a leftist party. But how to determine what party is leftist? We answered as follows. Since you have made the conscious choice to not vote for bourgeois parties, make a second conscious choice. If you believe the KPRF is a leftist party—vote for it. And better yet, join it and verify if that is really the case.... We ourselves after all have no illusions in these parties; we believe that it is necessary to vote for a genuine Labor Party. There is no such party? That means it is necessary to build it! But today on the so-called left there in fact remains only one party—the KPRF.” (emphasis added)

Electoral support to the KPRF is not a tactical question. The KPRF is on the other side of the class line. From its inception in 1993, the KPRF was always an outright bourgeois party, hostile to working-class actions. It was the main channel for diverting anger away from capitalist counterrevolution to racism and anti-Semitism—the “socialism of fools”—at home and behind Russian imperial ambitions abroad. In October 1998, when prominent KPRF leader General Albert Makashov repeatedly declared, “I will round up all the Yids and send them to the next world!” the KPRF-dominated Duma refused to even consider rebuking him. When the Chechen people won de facto independence by defeating Yeltsin’s barbarous colonial-style First Chechen War of 1994-96, the KPRF spearheaded opposition to the Peace Treaty as a disgrace to Russian regional imperial ambitions in the Caucasus and Central Asia. By 2001, the KPRF ruled most of the Russian regions, and in 1998 a KPRF member was first deputy prime minister in Yeltsin’s cabinet. The KPRF’s party slate candidates in the 2003 Duma elections included one billionaire and 16 millionaires; among them were barons from Russia’s then-largest oil giant Yukos, including the former chairman, Sergei Muravlenko! No class-conscious worker would have ever called for a vote to the despicable, bourgeois KPRF.

The Russian and Ukrainian CWI: In Bed with Fascists

The Taaffeites’ adaptation to plebeian Russian nationalism led them far beyond the electoral arena of the KPRF. They courted and consorted with fascists in Russia and Ukraine! Peter Taaffe proclaims that the CWI is leading a movement against the National Bolshevik Party (NBP) fascists in Russia, because he knows how scandalous the CWI’s real connection to them is. So Taaffe presents himself to the world on the Internet as having been a target of NBP disruption when he gave a speech in Moscow on May Day 1998:

“The CWI at the time were heavily involved in an anti-fascist campaign whose main target was the so-called National Bolshevik Party led by Limonov—a right-wing nationalist organization which attracted a lot of youth by using radical, apparently left symbols such as Che Guevara but whose main ideologues were fascist. They use for example the Nazi armbands, the only difference being they have replaced the swastika with the hammer and sickle. When some of this group turned up at the meeting the Chair announced they would not be allowed to speak. Half way through the meeting they started heckling, accusing us of being Jews.”

— Peter Taaffe, Militant’s Real History

Actually, Taaffe’s problem at that meeting was not with the NBP, but rather with the fact that one of our comrades in attendance denounced the presence of the fascists and walked out in protest. The NBP was clearly invited. As we noted in our article “‘Little England’ Labourites Embrace Russian Fascists” (WV No. 696, 11 September 1998), the CWI distributed on May Day 1998 a grotesque appeal in Levy Avangard, the paper of its Russian group, titled “How to Understand the NBP.” This sickening piece appeals to the fascists, “In which world do you want to live, my dear friend?” It then expresses “pity” for those fascists who want to preserve “everything in the form of an ever-rotating swastika.” To those fascists who want to live “in a world of true Man, acknowledging reality,” the article concludes with the invitation, “why are you still not with us?”

Taaffe now disputes our exposure of how they welcomed the fascists at their 1998 May Day forum. Here is an independent account of the incident, which was published in an anarchist journal:

“After the session began, [G.], who was attending as a guest (representing a competing Trotskyist tendency, the ‘Spartacists’), began to openly express indignation at the presence in the hall of members of the NBP. Calling them reactionaries and ‘semi-fascists’ (the only thing unclear was why only ‘semi’), he declared that he was leaving the hall, not wishing to be in the same room with them. To our astonishment, the wrath of the gathering fell not on the heads of the ‘Natsbols’ [National Bolsheviks], but on the ‘disrupter of the peace.’ On the faces of Trotskyists of other tendencies appeared smirks, and taunts of ‘good riddance!’ broke out; Mark, the comrade in arms of the historian Rogovin ([Northite] ‘International Committee of the Fourth International’), declared, ‘Good Bye!’ One of the ‘Limonovites’ clearly said, ‘Leprous Yid!’ There was not the slightest reaction to this. There was no protest whatsoever from [leaders of the Russian CWI] Shibanov and Jones, who responded to the fascists’ outburst with complete indifference. But then, when [G.] returned to the hall to take a couple of pictures of the National Bolsheviks in the hall, Shibanov jumped up and made for him, possibly wanting to seize the film. But the ‘Spartacist’ left the gathering in time.”

— Vladimir Sirogin, “May Day à la Trotskyists (Notes of an Eyewitness),” Naperekor, Summer 1998

The May 1998 meeting was not an isolated instance. Last year, the CWI conducted an ongoing dialogue with the NBP on a discussion page of the Russian CWI Web site titled “Question by a Natsbol to Marxists.” When the NBP physically attacked local Taaffeites at a Revolution Day demonstration on 7 November 2003 in the city of Yaroslavl, the Russian CWI responded by opening yet another new discussion site, “Questions to Members of the NBP.” Seeking a truce and a continuation of the online dialogue, the Taaffeites’ postings included an assurance to the NBP: “We are not about to start up any wars.”

This came amid escalating fascist attacks. Within days of the NBP attack on the Taaffeites, a dormitory at Moscow’s Lumumba University erupted into flames (see “Racism and Capitalist Counterrevolution—Moscow Foreign Student Dorm Fire Kills 43,” WV No. 818, 23 January). The students were under constant assault by skinheads, and many of them say the skinheads started the fire.

The Russian Taaffeites’ pursuit of fascist youth may have yielded them no more than humiliation and beatings, but the Ukrainian CWI “Workers Resistance” (RS) actually collaborated openly with the fascists! On 15 February 2003, the day of coordinated international protest against the U.S. war in Iraq, the Ukrain-ian CWI posted on their official Web site a statement signed by them and, among others, the fascist Ukrainian Brotherhood (Odessa) [Bratstvo]. There is no ambiguity about the nature of this group. The Russian Taaffeites themselves, in a Web posting dated 6 April 2004, call Bratstvo “a fascistic organization,” the Ukrainian analogue of the Russian National Bolshevik Party.

In Full View of the State

The impunity with which the CWI’s Ukrainian franchise was able to carry out its scams is highly suspicious. The Russian, and especially the Ukrainian, bourgeois states persecute opposition movements with a vengeance. As we wrote, this is something we experienced directly:

“We fought to the last barricades against Yeltsin-Bush capitalist counterrevolution and fought to build a real organization in the USSR. And we paid the price. The Kremlin bureaucracy and then the capitalist regimes that replaced it knew the ICL was for real and witchhunted us with a vengeance. Our comrades were arrested, terrorized, attacked and hounded by the fascists and Stalinists alike. In 1992 the senior leader of the ICL’s Moscow Station, Martha Phillips, was murdered at her post; the authorities stonewalled while we tried in vain to find out who killed her. In 1995, we were repressed and officially banned from Ukraine.”

— “Con Artists Get Conned—Chickens Come Home to Roost in Kiev,” WV No. 808, 29 August 2003

The Ukrainian political police even carried out an old-fashioned book-burning of the Russian-language edition of Trotsky’s The Communist International After Lenin that we published and extensively distributed throughout the former USSR. The ICL received statements of solidarity against our banishment from Ukraine from as far away as South Africa. But next door in Moscow, the CWI said nothing, and from its Ukrainian section, the silence was even more deafening.

Today the Ukrainian Security Service is at it again. This time it is not the Trotskyist ICL, but a murky “red”/brown youth organization in Odessa and Nikolaev that is charged with, among other things, plotting to overthrow the existing order. The eleven Russian and Ukrainian citizens rounded up in December 2002 have been subjected to such heinous tortures that four of them have attempted suicide, and one died of his injuries in November 2003. Yet Vernik and his ilk were able to operate with impunity for over 12 years in full view of the bourgeois state. What explains that? Either the politics of the Kiev CWI are as gentle to the Ukrainian bourgeois state as Peter Taaffe’s call for control of the police by “democratic committees” in London, and/or their politics and practices are known to be fraudulent in multiple ways.

The corruption unearthed in the Taaffeites’ Ukrainian and Russian groups is a damning indictment of the real program behind their orthodox-sounding phraseology. The cynicism of the Kiev con artists did not simply fall from the sky. It was nurtured by the CWI’s pursuit of imperialist-backed “democratic” counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union. It is just as much a product of the CWI’s systematic prostitution of Trotskyism as is their conciliation of openly fascist elements like the Russian National Bolshevik Party and Ukrainian Bratstvo. Exposing the Taaffeites’ embrace of the forces of capitalist counterrevolution in the land of the October Revolution is part and parcel of the International Communist League’s fight to reforge Trotsky’s Fourth International.