Presentation of Chapter II:
2014: Key Year
The collapse of the colony under the tutelage of the IMF and administered by the Yanukovych government, partner of the Moscow oligarchs
In 2014, Ukraine declared bankruptcy and defaulted the repayment of the foreign debt with which the IMF, together with the plundering of the transnationals, was sucking its enormous wealth. Faced with the empty coffers of the Ukrainian Central Bank, the repayment of the debt became impossible.
Therefore, the International Monetary Fund forced the hated government of Putin's partner, the millionaire Yanukovych to impose a ferocious attack against the exploited. In response, a mass uprising spread throughout Ukraine against the International Monetary Fund's plan to attack all the workers' gains, to close hundreds of unproductive mines and to lay off hundreds of thousands of workers. That is what the international usurers demanded and Yanukovych was ready to implement all the way.
What the Stalinists call a "coup d'état" against the billionaire pro-IMF Yanukovych government, which had Putin's support, was nothing more than a ferocious mass uprising that spread all across Ukraine to overthrow it. Its most advanced point was in Maidan Square in Kyiv, which had the support of miners from all over the Donbass.
The only one who defended Yanukovych and his pro-IMF plan was Putin, who offered 15 billion dollars to get Ukraine out of default. It was already too late: imperialism was going for all, having ascertained that Yanukovych was not the government capable of implementing such an attack on the masses. The proof of this is that the closure of mines and the dismissal of thousands of workers demanded by the IMF were only implemented under the counterrevolutionary tutelage of Moscow in the Donbass from 2015 to 2017.
In 2014, for the workers and the poor, on one side there were the IMF, Yanukovych and Putin, and on the other side their need to put an end to hunger, misery, unemployment... In these conditions, the demagogy of the European Union speaking about the "goodness" of the entry of Ukraine into Maastricht, opened a period of enormous illusions in the masses. This allowed the bourgeoisie -using the rhetoric that they would get out of the crisis by entering in the Europe of Maastricht-, to re-stabilize their regime after the fall of Yanukovych, who was defeated by the direct action of the masses.
This explains the abortion of that huge revolutionary mass uprising of Maidan Square, as it is developed in this Chapter, which was diverted to a position of joining the European Union and fleeing from the clutches of Yanukovych and Putin.
In these conditions the false illusions of the masses of having a better life within Maastricht, imposed even with the collaboration of the traitorous leaderships of Europe in particular, was the cause of the diversion of the revolutionary process and the financial and gas bourgeoisie of Kyiv's takeover of the process of Maidan Square.
So the Ukrainian working class came out of the boiling oil of Moscow, was stomped on by imperialism and was taken to the burning embers of the European Union.
It was not the illusions of the masses that diverted their struggles, but the fierce defense of the European Union of the imperialist powers exerted by the entire European left, the Stalinist bureaucracies of the trade unions and the self-styled "revolutionary socialists" who openly supported and still support it.
Let us name the traitors: they are Syriza in Greece and the Stalinist bureaucracy of the French, Greek, Portuguese, Belgian trade union centers... It is also the case of the Worker Commissions (CC.OO.) in the Spanish state, of the German social democracy, the Labourites of England, Podemos of Spain, etc.
Even bourgeois "left" wings like Mélenchon or Varoufakis went so far as to propose that the task was to "democratize" the European Union and conquer a "more social Maastricht". They are responsible for awakening illusions among the masses of the former Soviet republics in the European Union. What are these traitors talking about?
If today there is something that is making the consciousness of the masses evolve towards the left, it is that the supermarket shelves of the imperialist countries of the West no longer show even a minimum abundance for the upper strata of the working class, different from 1989, when the USSR was collapsing, subjected to the world capitalist economy, and the workers could not see how to escape from the catastrophe to which they had been led by the capitalist restoration. Today, unlike what happened in those years, inflation and the high cost of living are hitting hard on the workers of the entire European continent.
Moreover, there are still countries in Eastern Europe that have been waiting 15 years to join the European Union because they do not "meet the conditions" to do so. This blackmail is the way in which Maastricht dominates, oppresses and imposes draconian plans of plunder, adjustment and sweatshops on the nations of Eastern Europe, as it does today with Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia, Romania, etc.
The greatest "backwardness" of the Ukrainian working class is the betrayal of the leaderships of the European proletariat, not to mention those who today keep saying that Putin, the greatest murderer and repressor of the workers of Russia and the entire Eurasia, part of a millionaire oligarchy enslaving the working class, would be the "great stoppage on the advance of imperialism". These bastards treat Putin as if he were the Che Guevara of the East. It is a fallacy and a vile lie.
As we see in the course of the present war, the promise by Maastricht of an Ukraine's membership in the EU is a brutal deception, which they can carry out since, we reiterate, all the trade union, Stalinist and social-imperialist leaderships support the EU.
Under conditions of crash and catastrophe, the uprising of Maidan Square was a first failed attempt of the Ukrainian revolution, thanks to the betrayal of the leaderships of the European working class, the social-imperialist parties, the Stalinists and the groups of renegades of Trotskyism that supported either Maastricht or Putin. Today these leaderships blame the Ukrainian working class for the adverse conditions in which the masses were left after 2014, which allowed a brutal imperialist bourgeois counter-offensive for years, as we will see later.
In this second Chapter about the genesis of the current war, we publish the work that refers to these convulsive events of 2014:
Ukraine:
A colony under imperialist tutelage,
or a Soviet, socialist and independent nation
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