UNION CITY, N.J. — “Look at the pictures of tens of thousands of people chanting slogans at the funeral for Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny,” John Studer, editor of the Militant, told a Militant Labor Forum here March 2. That’s the answer “to anyone who thought the death of Navalny would break the back of opposition to Putin and his war against the nation and people of Ukraine.”
“Two anniversaries were marked by the people of Ukraine a week ago,” Studer, who is a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee, said. “Ten years ago, months of mobilizations by working people and youth culminated in the overthrow of the Moscow-backed president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych.” Studer explained he was part of three reporting teams to Ukraine in the wake of what became known as the Maidan revolution.
The second anniversary is the start of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war, two years ago, “to conquer Ukraine and once again subjugate it,” he said. “Moscow’s invasion aimed to kill Ukraine’s leadership, who Putin falsely paints as Nazis,” while denying Ukraine is a real country.
A week after the war started, Jack Barnes, Socialist Workers Party national secretary, issued a statement for the party’s National Committee.
“It stands up well,” Studer said. It explains why workers should support Ukraine’s independence and demand the withdrawal of Moscow’s forces. SWP members will get out the truth about the Russian invasion, Barnes wrote, among “working people far and wide, including strike picket lines, social protests, at workers’ doorsteps and everywhere else we go.” The statement is available at themilitant.com.
“Putin’s invasion is the first major war on European soil since the second imperialist world war,” Studer said.
“It was a watershed marking a series of shifts in alliances among capitalist powers, renewed rearmament, and the threat of more wars, a shift that took another giant step with the Oct. 7 pogrom against Jews by Hamas.
“These events follow the coming apart of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union in 1991, and the sounding of the opening guns of World War III by the Iraq war that year,” Studer said. “They give an impulse to imperialism’s drive to more cutthroat competition, plunder and war.
“In recent decades, U.S. imperialism has gotten weaker — just look at the war in Afghanistan — but it retains its position on top of the imperialist world order. As it declines, it will drag down the whole rotten imperialist system with it.”
But the working class is not observing these developments from the sidelines. “We are actors in history, capable of transforming the world and ourselves. It’s happened twice in the imperialist epoch — in Russia under the leadership of V.I. Lenin and in Cuba in 1959 under the leadership of Fidel Castro,” Studer said.
“With proper leadership, the toilers took power, setting examples we look to today. They are the continuity of the SWP.”
Reporting trips after the Maidan
Studer recounted what Militant reporters learned during the reporting trips to Ukraine in 2014 and 2015.
“We saw the impact of the Maidan uprising on rank-and-file workers, how it strengthened the working class, how determined all the workers we met were to make sure Moscow never got its hands on Ukraine again.” They were also “determined to strengthen their unions and improve the situation of the working class in every way they could.”
The reporting teams met with central leaders of Ukraine’s unions, including Mykhailo Volynets; leaders of the Crimean Tatars, including Mustafa Dzhemilev; Joseph Zissels, national leader of Ukraine’s Jewish movement; and many more.
Recognizing the determination of workers in Ukraine today to resist the invasion, despite the real challenges they face, is important. It’s the opposite of the picture of despair painted by much of the U.S. press, Studer said. The capitalist rulers here would like the war over quickly, with little concern for Ukraine’s loss of territory and the potential for future conflict.
During the discussion one forum participant described talking to a Ukrainian co-worker, who told him, “Don’t trust the Russians, they’re all the same.”
The most important allies in the fight to get Moscow’s forces out of Ukraine are workers in Russia, Studer said. He described protests against the war across Russia. “That’s why, from the SWP’s first statement, the party opposed the U.S. rulers’ sanctions on Russia,” which fall hardest on workers there.
By the late 1930s the regime headed by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union had driven workers out of politics and murdered the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution that had brought the working class to power in 1917. Communist continuity was kept alive by co-thinkers of the SWP in Stalin’s prison camps up until the 1950s.
A working-class leadership in Russia will be rebuilt in the years ahead through struggles against Russia’s capitalist rulers and in collaboration with communists in the U.S. and elsewhere. Cadres can be won among Russian workers here and in Europe.
War shakes consciousness of millions
Today, “the cataclysm of war has shaken the consciousness of millions,” Studer said, making more workers “open to the examples of the Russian and Cuban revolutions.”
“When workers from Ukraine or Russia talk to SWP members today at protests here against Putin’s war, they’re interested,” Studer said. “They say, you’re a socialist who supports Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews. They say, you’re communists but you support a sovereign Ukraine. A whole new discussion unfolds.
“Ultimately, the only road forward depends on workers forging the leadership we need,” Studer concluded. “It is the working class taking power in the U.S. that will spell the death knell for every form of national oppression, for Jew-hatred, for capitalist exploitation and its wars and brutality worldwide.”