Presentation of Chapter VII:
2016-2020
Fierce class war and heroic worker resistance
The indomitable Ukrainian masses openly clashed with the Minsk Accords of the US, the EU and Putin
The Minsk Accords for the tutelage of Ukraine began to settle in 2016. This was the result of the heavy blows and defeats suffered by the Ukrainian working class both in Kyiv and in the Donbass, not only by means of gunshots and counterrevolutionary wars, but also with deceit and betrayal. This way, the proletariat was taken out of the offensive position it had conquered since 2014 with the fall of the Yanukovych government and then with the heroic struggle of the workers of the East against the fascist attack of Kyiv on the Donbass.
As we have already demonstrated, in this phase of offensive and civil war, the working class at every step sought its unity throughout the Ukraine. It achieved milestones with the defeat of Yanukovych and the struggle of the Kyiv workers refusing to strengthen the fascist counter-revolutionary forces attacking the Donbass miners.
The Minsk Accords were the regime of colonial rule imposed by the retreat and partition of the working class. Those Accords guaranteed a brutal offensive against all the workers gains.
But this was not enough to exhaust the forces of the proletariat against the ferocious attack launched from the Kyiv government and from the bourgeoisie that controlled the so-called “Novorossia” in the east.
The Ukrainian working class never stopped fighting. Thus, despite the betrayals and stabbings in the back, from 2016 to 2020 we witnessed a period of extremely harsh resistance by the working class against utility fees increases, devaluations, closure and conversion of mines and full-fledged attacks on the workers and exploited; that is, against the IMF and its plans to plunder the nation.
More often in the territory controlled by Kyiv, but also in Donbass, the Ukrainian working class presented battle with strikes, pickets, demonstrations on a recurring basis. Today the world reformist left, in all its variants, also hides this period of heroic resistance that the long-suffering Ukrainian proletariat carried out.
The demand for a living wage and the payment of wages that are arrears for months were the engines of this fierce resistance.
In the dynamics of its struggle, the working class tended to unite its ranks and thus put the Minsk Accords of partition and pillage of the nation in check. The working class, uniting its ranks, as leader of the exploited masses of the entire Ukraine, objectively put on the order of the day the struggle to break with the IMF and its plans to redouble the chains of the subjugated nation.
As we will see in the next chapter, it is precisely the fact that the Ukrainian working class was not defeated and had carried out tough resistance struggles what weakened the Minsk Accords regime of domination and tutelage of Ukraine and made it impossible for all looters and enslavers of the nation to apply to the end the IMF plans. The bourgeoisie had to crush the working class.
Putin's current invasion and his actions to take over Donbass and southern Ukraine directly has this objective: to crush and split the working class with a counterrevolutionary war, to destroy its cities and even the factories where the workers are enslaved, to subjugate the Ukraine East to Moscow's bayonet regime and to leave Kyiv for NATO and imperialism.
Meanwhile, in the West, in the midst of a war of military attrition, siege and for territory, with entire cities demolished by Russian bombings, the Zelensky government launches a brutal attack against the working class, as we have already seen, allowing the capitalists to dismiss at will, not paying salaries, etc., invoking the "fight against Russian troops".
In other words, Putin's invasion is the Minsk Accords' offensive to split Ukraine and crush its working class, while the government in Kyiv prepares to put what remains of the nation at the feet of NATO and the EU.
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In this period of 2016-2020, then, the Ukrainian working class was struggling to face the attacks, but was tightly controlled by a new Stalinist pro-Putin bureaucracy in Donbass, and on the other hand, by a new trade union bureaucracy linked to the social-imperialist parties and bureaucracies of the Europe of Maastricht. The tragedy of the Ukrainian working class was shown at every step: the betrayal of the leaderships that imposed the division of its ranks was the big obstacle that it had in a thousand and one battles. The indomitable Ukrainian working class faced the same attack under Kyiv’s boot as it did under Putin’s boot, but the leaderships made sure that these responses from the workers were uncoordinated.
During the development of the current war, several “international” currents behind a pseudo-Trotskyist disguise have traveled to Ukraine only for a few hours, just to take a selfie surrounded by the trade union leaders in Kyiv.
But no photo is enough to show that they are connecting themselves to the heart of the Ukrainian working class, because what defines the minimally working-class and combative character of any trade union leadership of that martyred and now invaded nation, is whether you fight tooth and nail to reconstitute the unity of the Ukrainian working class from Donbass to Kyiv, as a precondition for the proletariat to break with the bourgeoisie and be able to take the leadership of the war against the counterrevolutionary invasion of Moscow, and break all ties with NATO and the EU.
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As we have seen, the Minsk Accords were not enough to finish defeating the masses either in Kyiv or in Donbass. It was necessary to apply the Syrian plan: to partition and occupy the nation to strategically defeat the proletariat.
We therefore publish the different correspondents that account for this period of great resistance of the Ukrainian working class, from Kyiv to Donbass, included in the 2016-2020 period, which is kept under lock and key by the servants of Putin and NATO:
“The masses of Kiev fight against the plans of starvation, misery and plunder imposed by Poroshenko on behalf of the IMF and the EU”
July, 2016
“The miners of the western region –controlled by Kyiv- come out to fight”
August 2016
“Tens of thousands of workers paralyze the Arcelor-Mittal plant and the miners take to the streets against privatization”
July, 2018
The mining workers continue to fight in defense of their work and for the payment of wage arrears"
July, 2018
"With strikes and occupations, the miners return to the fight against the oligarchs of the Donbass and Moscow"
August, 2020
“The iron miners return to fight against the IMF-styled attack of the fascist government of Kyiv”
September, 2020
This chapter, dedicated to the combats of the Ukrainian working class in the resistance -which in its dynamic confronted the Minsk Accords-, ends with an article that explains why Stalinism was able to play a decisive and counterrevolutionary role in Ukraine despite the working class demonstrating enormous energy in the combat, first in Maidan Square, then in the Donbass and also in the fierce resistance of the period that we develop in this section.
It was not the Ukrainian working class that did not rise to the occasion, but the leaderships that betrayed it. That's what the following note is about:
On the survival of Stalinism after 1989
Who revived Lazarus?
In it, the reasons for the permanence of Stalinism are developed in depth, as it was kept for betraying the working class of Eastern Europe, after it handed over the former workers' states to the bourgeoisie and imperialism in 1989, after defeating and betraying the world revolution.
It is clear that without the left mantle that the renegades of Trotskyism in the West and in the East gave to Stalinism -even passing off Putin, the executioner of the USSR as "progressive" in the face of imperialism-, that pestilent corpse would have never been able to revive. This speaks about the crisis of the World Party of the Socialist Revolution, that is, the Fourth International.
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