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Vol. 79/No. 23      June 22, 2015

 
Ukraine anti-communist laws:
an attack on the working class
 
BY MAGGIE TROWE  
Under the pretext of combating Moscow’s aggression and aid to separatists in eastern Ukraine, the government of President Petro Poroshenko is attacking political rights, including with a new “decommunization” law and moves to ban the Communist Party of Ukraine. This campaign puts wind in the sails of anti-working-class forces, some of whom have carried out physical assaults on supporters of the CP and other opponents of the current regime.

In the president’s annual speech to parliament June 4, Poroshenko targeted the “countless fifth column nourished in Ukraine by the enemy.”

“Unfortunately,” he said, “I see a lot of people in this hall willing to use leftist slogans of the dead Communist Party of Ukraine.”

Poroshenko signed a series of thought-control laws May 15, including one called “On the Condemnation of the Communist and National Socialist (Nazi) Totalitarian Regimes in Ukraine and Ban on the Propaganda of their Symbols.” It makes it a crime to deny “the criminal character of the communist totalitarian regime of 1917-1991 in Ukraine.” The legislation would make it a crime to use the word “communist” in a political party’s name or singing the Soviet hymn, with up to 10 years in prison as punishment.

An April 9 letter signed by more than 40 academics urged Poroshenko not to sign the bill.

Since the uprising in February 2014 that led to the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, whose Party of Regions had close relations with Moscow, bourgeois politicians of various stripes have demanded the Communist Party be banned. The party came in fifth in the 2012 parliamentary elections, receiving 13 percent of the vote.

On April 17 the regional council in Ivano-Frankivsk, a city in southwest Ukraine, banned activities of the Communist Party of Ukraine, the Party of Regions, the Opposition Bloc and the Ukraine Development Party.

There have been a number of reports of threats and assaults against activists in the CP and the Leninist Communist Youth League of Ukraine. In a June 6 statement, the World Federation of Democratic Youth condemned the attacks and the new laws.
 
 
Related articles:
Ukraine workers fight gov’t attacks on unions
Capitalist regime weakens defense of sovereignty
Ukraine: stop attacks on political rights!
 
 
 
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