Presentation of Chapter III:
2014: Poroshenko assumes the presidency and unleashes a fierce counterrevolutionary offensive
The plan that Yanukovych, supported by Putin, could not implement to further reduce wages and state expenditures and to close 50% of the Donbass mines, after the abortion of the Maidan Square uprising, was implemented by the elected pro-European Union and pro-NATO Poroshenko government.
As we stated in this Chapter, after a brief transition period where Prime Minister Turchynov took over, Poroshenko won the tutored elections, under the supervision of the European Union and NATO.
Putin had earned the hatred of the entire Ukrainian working class for his support to Yanukovych and his IMF plan. In his withdrawal from Ukraine, Putin stole the Crimean Peninsula, where Russia has a military base that was never there to promote the Ukrainian revolution and end with NATO and the IMF, but rather to control the masses.
Poroshenko came to fulfill the task that his predecessor had not been able to. From the government, he unleashed a ferocious attack of massive lay-offs in the Donbass mines. Undoubtedly, beginning to apply the IMF plan throughout the Donbass meant dividing the workers there, where a fundamental part of the mining labor movement is concentrated, from the rest of the Ukrainian working class. Ultimately, Poroshenko attacked the Donbass miners with a clear goal: to split the Ukrainian working class, in order to finish subjugating the nation.
The IMF demanded the closure of a large part of the Donbass mines that were owned or subsidized by the state, where a huge investment was required. Those mines had been looted for decades by Moscow, keeping their minerals and coal to feed the industrial-military apparatus, first of the former USSR and later of the "great" Russia.
The Donbass mine workers movement had a huge tradition of struggle, even against Stalinism. In 1967 it had led a huge revolutionary struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy. Its leaders were fiercely assassinated, as it became known after 1989 when the secret archives of the Kremlin came to light.
This time, as soon as Poroshenko's attack of mine closures and layoffs began, the mining proletariat entered the scene in heavy fighting in the whole Donbass. They made theirs the cry of “May the USSR return!”, which not only made Poroshenko and Kyiv to tremble, but also the scoundrel and murderer Putin and his gang of Moscow oligarchs.
In the face of Ukraine's crisis and bankruptcy and the ferocious attack of imperialism, which would leave a trail of layoffs and thousands of new second or third-class migrants to imperialist Europe, the egalitarian consciousness that existed in the workers of the former USSR resurfaced among the Donbass miners. In the former USSR there was job security, as it was a conquest of the revolution -something Stalinism voraciously surrendered to the capitalist system, associating itself with imperialism.
Then a powerful workers' resistance movement arose, which turned into a counteroffensive in Donbass. The masses of that region threatened to unify, as Maidan Square had done before, the Ukrainian working class against the IMF attack. The workers took over the mines. The power of the Donbass legislatures and municipalities was left without basis. The working class took over the streets. The mining movement marched to arm itself and developed its independent unions, giving them a new revolutionary content.
As we mention in this work, Putin had stationed 120,000 men on the border with Ukraine, which he quickly withdrew for fear that his rank-and-file soldiers would join the Donbass miners in their fight.
The Ukrainian army had broken up. Rank-and-file soldiers from the Ukrainian East came out in support of the miners' uprising.
This time the revolutionary crisis threatened to develop not on Maidan Square, but on the streets of Donbass.
In response to this, the puppet government of NATO and the European Union launched a counter-revolutionary civil war, supported even by fascist forces.
The Stalinist cynics who today say "NATO get out" and support Putin in his invasion of Ukraine, want to hide that while Poroshenko launched a genocidal massacre against rebellious Donbass, and NATO sent 3,000 men to the border with Russia, Putin retreated, as we have already said, withdrawing his more than 120 thousand men to negotiate a slice of Ukraine, which was submerged in an open process of recolonization. Putin sent the rank and file soldiers of his army far away so that they would not fraternize with the Donbass miners in the face of the attack by the Kyiv forces and thus left a hand free for the Poroshenko massacre. This is the truth of the facts, which the treacherous leaders of the proletariat, i.e. Stalinists and renegades of Trotskyism want to hide: Putin liberated the area and even the skies for NATO and the Kyiv troops to crush revolted Donbass.
In this Third Chapter we present the article of "The International Workers Organizer" published on June 11, 2014, where the revolutionary Marxists put the motion of:
“Let's stop the massacre of the Poroshenko government, its police, counter-revolutionary officers and its fascist militia!”
***
For the world workers' vanguard to know what this counterrevolutionary offensive in Kyiv was like, we publish an article on the Odessa massacre of May 2, 2014, entitled:
“The Odessa massacre at the hands of fascists: 46 workers killed and 20 survivors imprisoned and on trial”
***
Along with this we are publishing the fight for a revolutionary program to unite the Ukrainian working class, that is, the workers of East and West and the fight to set up a revolutionary leadership, under the title:
"For a Marxist program to unite the Ukrainian working class and the exploited from East and West!"
That is what the essence of revolutionary politics was about. For, if the struggle of Maidan Square against Yanukovych's IMF plan tended to unify the Ukrainian working class, this time, the uprising and the revolutionary crisis that were opening in Donbass was the great point of support to fight for uniting the Ukrainian working class for it to be able to lead the fight against imperialism and its partner Putin, who desperately sought to regain control of Donbass and was looking to Crimea to steal it from Ukraine. Thus his conspiracy began against the Donbass mineworkers uprising.
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