Presentation of Chapter IV:
December 2014 - January 2015: Decisive clashes between revolution and counterrevolution
Imperialism, with its Poroshenko government, steps on the Ukraine
The dual power of workers and soldiers arises in Donbass
Civil war begins
The brutal cruelty against Donbass by the Kyiv army was nothing less than the cruelty of the ruling classes and imperialism against the revolted workers, whom they needed to finish crushing or controlling again.
The governorates and municipalities of Donbass, especially in Donetsk and Lugansk, had been left without any power. Against them, the mineworkers' committees developed, which began to arm themselves for the civil war in the face of the attack by the Kyiv troops; the soldiers' committees, and even wings of the lower officers and non-commissioned officers of the army emerged, in the process of its dissolution, who struggled to maintain the unity of Ukraine, defeating Kyiv's fascism. An independent mass action was underway.
We present here an article about it, entitled:
“The Kyiv government and Putin impose a siege to defeat the heroic workers and the mass resistance in Donbass”
As we have already seen, the Donbass was finally besieged and the working class was momentarily dislocated and divided. That was the objective of the counterrevolutionary civil war promoted by imperialism.
The Ukrainian official army, under the command of Poroshenko, made a call for recruiting thousands of soldiers between 18 and 25 years old to go fight in Donbass. However, the children of the working class and the poor of Ukraine refused massively to enlist and go and fight under the Kyiv army. The committee of mothers and relatives against Poroshenko's war emerged. More than 7,500 soldiers faced criminal charges for refusing to join the army.
So it was not because of the resistance of the Russian army or because of the counter-revolutionary forces of world Stalinism, let alone because of the courage of the IMF lackeys of the Kyiv army generalship, but because of the heroic combat of the Donbass miners and the workers of all of Ukraine, that Poroshenko could not enter that region for 8 years.
Donbass was besieged. The workers' vanguard was killed and Kyiv was left without coal. Who was selling it to the NATO government? The "anti-imperialist champion" Putin, who did it from Russia and Kazakhstan. "Business is business". This exposes the hostile character of Putin as the executioner of the Ukrainian working class and of the Donbass workers in particular.
If Poroshenko's troops under NATO command could not defeat Donbass, a "Trojan Horse" had to be sent, that is, a counterrevolutionary fifth column to defeat it from within and restore the bourgeois power in Donbass and control tightly the revolted masses.
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Given the seriousness of this historical process that threatened to transform Ukraine into one of the capitals of the European and world revolution, we reproduce an appeal by the Collective for the Re-Foundation of the Fourth International / FLTI, of January 2015, entitled:
"For the re-foundation of the Bolshevik-Leninist party in Ukraine"
As in the Syrian civil war when they supported al-Assad, Putin or imperialism from the Astana and Geneva Conferences, in Ukraine, the renegades of Trotskyism, allied to Stalinism, played a perfidious and sinister role as the left wing of the World Social Forum. From a meeting in Minsk, leaders of the British SWP, the French NPA and the Stalinist Communist Parties of Russia and Ukraine issued a statement calling for "peace" and to "dismantle the armed groups", while the fascist forces under the command of NATO did not stop massacring the workers of Donbass.
The LIT-CI, which saw a "victory" in the expropriation and abortion of the Maidan Square uprising in Kyiv, proposed "defending the unity of the Ukrainian working class" by means of calling to "defeat the separatist movement of the Ukrainian miners", as if the ranks of the Ukrainian proletariat could be united without the Donbass miners, together with the workers of Kyiv and the whole of Ukraine, crushing Poroshenko's army, NATO and the IMF. This only could have been possible if the workers of Donbass had freed themselves from the manipulation of Stalinism and the bonapartist gendarme in Moscow.
The intervention of the former Trotskyists in these events of the revolution and counterrevolution in the Ukrainian civil war was miserable. As we will see later, they went so far as to support the Stalinist "international brigades" going there, with the excuse of supporting the Donbass miners. Those brigades went instead to act as executioners of the miners' independent organizations and, associated to Putin's paid mercenaries, they organized the assassination of the movement best leaders.
This is what the crisis of the uprisings and revolutionary outbursts of the masses in Ukraine is about: an exacerbated crisis of leadership, which is nothing more than the overabundance of treacherous leaderships that separated the Ukrainian exploited from the European and Russian working class, calling for their submission either to the imperialist Europe of Maastricht or, as we have already said, to the “boiling oil” of their executioner Putin.
In these events, the "democratic" diversion of the fight against Yanukovych resulted in the abortion of the revolutionary process and in a totally proto-fascist government that sought to attack one of the hearts of the Ukrainian proletariat with methods of civil war, as in Donbass. Meanwhile, in this region where the labor movement was leading a revolutionary uprising against the Poroshenko government, a policy of class collaboration was openly implemented to liquidate the dual power with backstabs from the fifth column. It was the same policy that promoted Stalinism in the '30s with the so-called "Popular Front", with which the Communist Parties betrayed the Spanish Civil War and the 1930s revolutionary process in France, to later seal a deal with the butchers of the imperialist powers on the side of the "Allies" in World War II.
This key issue is developed in the January 2015 article:
“The reformist left subjects the exploited to their executioners”
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