Large demonstrations broke out against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s move July 22 to push through a law putting the prosecutor general, whom he had appointed, in charge over two “anti-corruption” government agencies. Within days Zelensky retreated.
After security forces arrested some anti-corruption officials, the protests grew, reaching 10,000 in Kyiv. Thousands more turned out in Kharkiv, Lviv, Chernihiv, Dnipro, Odesa and other cities, large and small. A common demand was for Zelensky to “veto the law” that he had just promoted.
Other signs said things like, “My father, my brother, my husband isn’t on the front line for this,” reported Elizaveta Antonova in the July 25 Meduza, a pro-Ukraine online Russian-language news outlet.
Despite being ordered not to, many soldiers joined the protests, in and out of uniform. One veteran, a double amputee, held a sign at a rally near the president’s Kyiv office reading, “We are fighting for Ukraine, not your impunity.”
The protests, as well as similar pressure from his “democratic” imperialist backers in Washington and across Europe, forced Zelensky to announce plans to throw out the bill.
For years a wing of Ukraine’s capitalist rulers have promoted the need for the government to “fight corruption,” by which they mean to target their opponents. But this demand finds resonance among working people who are all too familiar with bureaucratic swindles and inter-capitalist battles for a front row place at the public trough, dating back to the era of Stalinist rule.
The political crisis erupted as Moscow’s bombardment of Ukrainian cities escalates and its military assaults in the east continue. Faced with this, Ukrainian toilers are keenly concerned about reports of embezzlement from Kyiv’s military budget.
Facing Moscow’s murderous war, Ukraine’s working people make the greatest sacrifices, both at the front and in the country’s beleaguered cities. At the same time, workers and their unions are fighting to defend their rights and working conditions from attacks by the bosses and their government that use the cover of the war. Strikes are illegal.
Dmytro Koziatynskyi, a war veteran and protest organizer, was quoted by Newsweek urging a mass response to prevent a “return to the dark days of [Viktor] Yanukovych,” the pro-Moscow former president of Ukraine.
Critics said Zelensky’s law was rushed through parliament with unusual speed to protect his own inner circle.
Stalinist tyranny to capitalist theft
Yanukovych tried to defend his regime and its perks with a brutal crackdown, but hundreds of thousands occupied the streets for months in the face of armed cops and other pro-regime thugs in the popular Maidan uprising of 2014. The recent actions erupted despite Ukraine’s wartime martial law and without the support of any opposition parties.
At the end of the 1980s the Stalinist regime atop the Soviet Union imploded. Capitalists emerged from the disintegrating bureaucratic caste, seizing ever greater hunks of the newly privatized factories and other enterprises. They were aided by “experts” from Harvard and elsewhere.
In the years since, every government in power in Ukraine has tried to win support by denouncing corruption. What this usually boils down to is charges against political rivals.
But no government bureau or law enforcement agency in a capitalist state can end corruption. It is endemic to the profit system, whether in Kyiv or Washington. To eliminate corruption, and all of capitalism’s other tools used to boost profits out of the labor of working people, it will take mighty revolutionary movements, with seasoned proletarian leaderships, to take political power and transform society from top to bottom.