Vol. 78/No. 8      March 3, 2014

The demonstrations began in November after Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovich, under pressure from Moscow, declined to sign a trade agreement with the European Union. “Russian President Vladimir Putin put heavy pressure on the Ukraine government — a combination of threats along with the carrot of a $15 billion loan and lower natural gas prices — in its quest to maintain economic and political control over the country,” said Fiske.

“The protests that erupted were not about disagreements over whether the European Union or Moscow is offering Ukraine a better trade deal,” Fiske said, “but the fight of the masses in Ukraine against Russian domination. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been taking to the streets against the Yanukovich government and its policies.”

Russian domination of most of what today is Ukraine goes back to the 17th century, Fiske said. The czars banned the Ukrainian language, tried to replace it with Russian, and brought hundreds of thousands of Russians to live there as a counterweight to Ukrainian national aspirations. “Ukraine was typical of Czarist Russia,” he said. “As Vladimir Lenin, central leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, pointed out, the Russian empire was a prison house of nations.”

The socialist revolution that brought working people to power in Russia in 1917 and a few years later in the Ukraine began to throw open those prison doors. “It marked a huge change in development in the Ukraine. Soviets, revolutionary councils, spread throughout the country,” Fiske said.

“The Bolshevik Party and revolutionary government under Lenin’s leadership carried out a policy of Ukrainization to undo the Russification of the Czars, encouraging the teaching of the Ukrainian language and the flowering of Ukrainian national culture,” Fiske said. “The Bolshevik policy was for the right of self-determination, for complete freedom for oppressed nations to be independent.”

“The rise of a privileged caste tied to the government bureaucracy, whose leading representative became Josef Stalin, reversed these gains,” Fiske noted.

While stamping out the national rights of oppressed peoples throughout the former Russian empire, the Soviet Union government under Stalin reimposed the Russification of the Ukraine. Communist leaders in Ukraine were assassinated on the orders of Stalin.

The counterrevolutionary course of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union over decades led to its collapse in 1991, Fiske said. This opened up political space for working people to organize and enter politics with their own struggles and demands. At the same time, an aspiring capitalist class drawn mostly from those with ties to the old government bureaucracy began to accumulate wealth, largely through theft of state property. New governments adopted a course of reimposing social relations of capitalist exploitation.

The current authoritarian regime of President Putin is run by the remnants of the Stalinist secret police apparatus and represents a major obstacle. Putin himself was a long-time KGB operative who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and later headed the Federal Security Service, the KGB’s successor.

While Ukraine won its formal independence in the early ’90s, its government functions much like Moscow’s, using police repression to stifle opposition to its anti-working-class course.

The imperialist governments in the E.U. and the U.S. are no friends of working people in Ukraine, Fiske said. They want the Ukraine government “to stop subsidizing gas and to cut what they see as too high a social wage,” to ensure repayment of loans and maximize profits.

“The struggles for independence from Russian domination in Ukraine is part of the fight to open up political space and prepare the working class for battles to come,” Fiske said. “It will inspire other oppressed nationalities to stand up for their rights against Russian domination in countries of the former Soviet Union, including within Ukraine itself as with the Tatars in the Crimea.”
 
 
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