As candidates and members of the Socialist Workers Party campaign across the country, they get out the truth about Moscow’s murderous war against the people of Ukraine and rally workers to join in defending Ukraine’s sovereignty. They take the weekly Militant coverage of the war and its consequences for working people in today’s deepening crisis of imperialism to strike picket lines, workers’ doorsteps, social protests and everywhere else they go.
The political stance taken by the SWP in support of the Ukrainian people’s right to self-determination goes back decades to the party’s founding in 1938. It’s rooted in the SWP’s continuity with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the revolutionary leadership of Vladimir Lenin.
Prior to that revolution, under czarist rule, Ukrainians, Jews, Tatars and millions in Central Asia and the Caucasus region were oppressed, denied the basic right to read or use their native language, practice their religion or exercise control over cultural, economic and political affairs. In the words of Lenin, Russia was a “prison house of nations.”
With the victory of the Bolsheviks, the new workers and peasants government championed the right of self-determination for oppressed nationalities, not only within the Russian Empire, but worldwide. It established a voluntary federation of the Russian, Ukrainian and four other republics — the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Ukrainian national pride grew and culture flourished. Pogroms against Jews were ended. Lenin insisted that revolutionary communists must “declare war to the death on Great Russian chauvinism” and against Jew-hatred.
But after Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin consolidated a bloody counterrevolution against Lenin’s revolutionary internationalist course, driving working people out of politics and imposing Moscow’s control. The Stalinist regime dealt harsh blows to Ukrainians’ national aspirations. Tens of thousands of revolutionary militants were executed or sent to the Gulag. Stalin imposed forced collectivization and grain confiscation in the countryside, especially harshly in Ukraine. This resulted in some 3.9 million workers and peasants dying of starvation in 1932 and 1933.
Leon Trotsky, who led the fight to continue Lenin’s political course, wrote in 1939, “Nowhere did the purges and repression assume such a savage character as they did in the Ukraine.” He said that one source of the “irreconcilable hostility of the Ukrainian masses” to the Soviet bureaucracy was “the suppression of Ukrainian independence.” A year later, Stalin had Trotsky assassinated in Mexico, where he lived and continued his political work in exile.
Moscow’s rule over Ukraine and other oppressed nations continued under subsequent Stalinist regimes until the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. Afterward, Ukraine and 13 other former republics declared independence.
Back fight for Ukrainian sovereignty
Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin insists Stalin was right on Ukraine, as against Lenin. Days before the 2022 Russian invasion of that country, Putin denied Ukrainians exist as a separate nationality, claiming Ukraine is “an inalienable part” of Russia. He is conducting his war along these lines.
Putin said Lenin “planted an atomic bomb under the building that is called Russia” by backing Ukraine’s right to self-determination. Putin says the revolution itself was a disaster for “Mother Russia,” preferring the rule of the czars.
In Ukraine, eight years before Putin’s full-scale invasion, hundreds of thousands of workers and youth from all over the country mobilized to oust the pro-Moscow government of Viktor Yanukovych in the Revolution for Dignity, known as the Maidan.
The editor of the Militant, John Studer, and other leaders of the SWP and Communist League in the U.K., went on three reporting trips there in solidarity with the Maidan and the struggles of working people in Ukraine and Crimea. They spoke with coal miners, nuclear workers in Chernobyl and Enerhodar, rail and other workers, Jewish leaders and defenders of Ukraine’s sovereignty in Kharkiv, Kryvyi Rih, Dnipro and other cities. They met with Mustafa Dzhemilev, the central leader of the Crimean Tatar people, who was expelled from Crimea after Moscow occupied it in 2014.
Today many of these workers are on the front lines battling against Putin’s forces and organizing in labor unions at home struggling for better wages and working conditions. Ukrainian workers with whom the SWP is in touch send information for use by the Militant.
The Socialist Workers Party will continue to explain the key questions in the battle of Ukrainian working people defending their country’s sovereignty and a working-class road to political power there and worldwide.