Vol. 80/No. 15 April 18, 2016
(front page)
Attack on Ukraine Communist Party is threat to working class
This latest attack is part of an ongoing series of physical assaults, destruction of political offices, “disappearances” of CP members and government efforts to ban the party from exercising its right to participate in politics.
These attacks are a deadly threat to the working class and labor movement, precedents that will be turned against all those who fight for a class-struggle road forward in Ukraine.
The CP and Communist Youth were seeking to replace a commemorative plaque celebrating former Stalinist leader Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1971 to 1989, who died in 1990. Their banner was stomped and burned by the thugs.
Shcherbytsky is notorious for attempting to hide and minimize the scope of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. He ordered workers to turn out for a May Day rally in Kiev five days after the power plant exploded, while radiation was still raining down on the city.
On Feb. 27 the Ukrainian Security Service accused Kononovych and his brother Alexander, a secretary of the Communist Party’s Volyn regional committee, of supporting the separatist forces backed by Moscow in Donetsk and Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine. Alexander Kononovych was seized on the street and kidnapped March 12.
The physical attacks have been encouraged by the government of President Petro Poroshenko, which has filed suit to ban the Communist Party and passed “decommunization” laws aimed at outlawing the party, “communist symbols” and literature. And laying the basis for jailing its members.
Two years ago mass popular mobilizations known as the “Maidan” overthrew the Moscow-backed government of Viktor Yanukovych. Over the following months, the capitalist rulers sought to get the workers and youth who had mobilized off the streets.
Since taking office in May 2014, the Poroshenko regime has moved to crack down on political rights and impose layoffs and cuts in social spending that have dealt blows to working people. He accuses opponents of the regime of being “fifth columnists,” suggesting any disagreement with government policies amounts to supporting the rebellion in the east.
The Communist Party of Ukraine sent out an international appeal Feb. 29 urging support to its ongoing efforts to challenge the ban in court.
At the same time, the Moscow-backed leaders of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics banned the CP there, preventing them from taking part in local elections in October 2014 and 2015.
Various groups in the labor movement that say they seek to advance a rebirth of Marxism and that fight against attacks on political rights in Ukraine have taken widely different positions on whether to fight against the attacks on the Communist Party.
The banning of the party “gives us a real chance to rehabilitate the name Communists for the Ukrainian working class, though it will not be that easy,” Artem Klymenko, a member of the Flame socialist group in Poltava, told the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign in December. “Decommunization has many negative consequences, because it is part of the anti-democratic policies,” he said. “As for the ban of the Communist Party, it is not the worst thing.”
“To my mind, the fact of banning CPU does not have a negative impact on democratic rights in Ukraine,” Volodymyr Sotnyk, a member of the Free Trade Union of Railway Workers of Ukraine in Kiev, told the same group. “De facto the working class has never been protected by CPU. Now the place for a real left party is vacant.”
“The attacks on the Communist Party of Ukraine have nothing to do with the political positions of the party, which are against the interests of the working class. They are part of the capitalist government’s broader attacks on the unions and parties of the left,” Ivan Ovcharenko, a leader of the all-Ukrainian Defense of Labor union in Kiev, told the Militant by Skype March 20. “The government’s ‘decommunization’ moves have made it more difficult for socialists like us to function.”
“Workers and all defenders of political rights must stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian Communist Party, its youth organization and members against physical attacks and legislative assaults,” the Militant said in an editorial last July. “They are the naked fist that gives meaning to the capitalist rulers’ ‘decommunization’ laws, which seek to outlaw communist political views.”
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