Regarding the slogan of the Donbass masses,
"May the USSR Come Back!"
The position of the Trotskyists

A debate with Russian revolutionaries in the heat of the lessons
of the Ukrainian revolution

Letter from Russia – May 28th, 2018

Hello comrades.  I will try to read your materials in the near future.  It is especially interesting for me to see your position on Ukraine.
1) If I understand correctly, you think that imperialism used the Russian chauvinists (the Putin regime) to put pressure on Ukraine.  To subordinate it to their interests in exchange for protection from Russia.  With this I agree.
2) About the Donbass.  It is currently the most counterrevolutionary region in Europe.  It supplies Assad's troops in Syria with mercenaries.  And it is a bastion of Russian fascism.  The so-called Donbass “militia” was not organized by miners.  His roots are in the Donetsk mafia, from which Yanukovych was a protégé.
Hence the direct intervention of the Putin regime which, after the annexation of Crimea, sent its gunmen under the pretext of the “militia” in Eastern Ukraine.
The army of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie was not ready for such a war and Putin's mercenaries defeated it.
However, there is currently a breakdown of Novorossia's gangs and a slow but steady Ukrainian onslaught on their positions.
It is true that the conspiracy in Minsk provided for the separation of Crimea from Ukraine in exchange for making Ukraine a semi-colony of imperialist Europe.  However, I would not call it the “encirclement of revolutionary Donbass”,  since the same separatists declare themselves opposed to any revolution.  And his ideology is a mix of Russian fascism and 19th century conservatism.

I must also say that the slogan to return the USSR is reactionary.  The fact is that the very term “to come back” is doubtful.  It is necessary to advance to genuine socialism and communism (society without exploitation or oppression).  In our conditions, "return" does not mean the USSR of Lenin and Trotsky of 1922-24 but the empire (tsarism, Stalinism).

Response to Russian Revolutionaries – June 16, 2018

Comrade,

We've just received your note.  We know the communication difficulties you suffer there and we are glad that you have already been able to recover your Facebook.  But we have a delay in responding to your note from 5/28.  Of course, please receive all our apologies, the reason is that the colleague who manages Facebook had not taken account of your message and therefore we had not responded to you before.

We are carefully studying your note to be able to send you our opinion and position on the points of view you raise in it.  As we have already mentioned in other exchanges, it is extremely important for us to reflect and debate with you about Ukraine, which is one of the acid tests of the world situation.  The lessons of the Ukrainian revolution are key for the world proletariat, and the working class of Russia and Europe in particular.  We believe that we do indeed have an ongoing debate on the Ukrainian question, on which we have differences.
For us it is crucial to develop this debate and that you know our position.  This is doubly important, because of your location there and your proximity to the events.  Undoubtedly we can learn a lot from this debate, and for this we believe that we must go to the end with our positions.

We attach to this note a short article that we published for the first time in May 2016 about the genesis of the Ukrainian revolution.  We believe that the substance of the differences we have in relation to the Ukrainian question is concentrated there and that it is a first response to your last note.
We also send you an exchange of letters with the JRCL of Japan from November 2016, with whom we also have a rich debate on the Ukrainian issue.  The exchange of notes that we sent you is centered around the demand around “the return of the USSR”.

In any case, the leadership of the FLTI is preparing a response to your positions.  To deepen our point of view, we want to ask you the following: Are there currents of Russian Stalinists become oligarchs and bourgeoisie who raise the demand for "the return of the USSR"?  Is Putin and his parties raising it, or is there perhaps some leftist current in Russia that we don't know about and is raising it?
It is very important to be able to specify each detail because it seems to us that the Ukrainian masses have shouted the slogan "bring the USSR back" thus expressing the struggle against the sufferings they are enduring in a Ukraine plundered and exploited by the IMF and a handful of oligarchs.

We hope to be able to continue with this very rich debate that is ongoing.  That is why the question we ask is to learn more about the situation from the place of events.  There is no doubt that the Putin oligarchy is forced to try to manipulate the past of the USSR, as it does for example on the anniversaries of the USSR's victory over Germany in World War II.  And it does this to achieve a social base, a social base that is also given to it by the Communist Parties, which are bourgeois and restorationist like Suhanov's.

A hug,

Response from Russia to the note on Ukraine of June 16, on the opportunist use that Stalinism makes of the slogan “May the USSR Come Back” – June 18, 2018

Greetings once again. 
Yes, practically all the Stalinist parties and small sects in Russia in their "rhetoric" say "let's go back to the USSR".  This is a distinctive feature of the Stalinists.  Their propaganda is purely conservative, retrograde in nature.  If we take, for example, the official "communist" Party (KPRF), they play on simple nostalgia for the previous generation (they constantly remind them: how well they lived in the USSR, and how bad it is now).  On the other hand, the CPRF demands the observance of bourgeois legislation, "not just any extremism", and openly calls for support for small and medium capital (provided it is Russian).  There are smaller Stalinist sects (OKP) that use class rhetoric in words, but in reality they are no less reactionary than the KPRF.  They also urge a return to the USSR, that is, to Stalinism.  The decomposition of which gave rise to the modern oligarchic and criminal regime of Putin.

Respuesta a la nota del compañero de Rusia sobre la consigna“Que vuelva la URSS sin burócratas stalinistas ni entregadores del socialismo” y el carácter transicional que esta adquiere en el programa revolucionario- 19 de junio de 2018

Dear comrade,
Yesterday we received your note on Ukraine, regarding the slogan "the USSR return", in response to our request that you provide us with information on how the different currents of the left and the government itself are situated on the question of the former USSR.
I have been reading your answer and I want to send you my first reflections on this matter.  Take this letter as written at full speed, to deepen the debate.
Before getting into this, I wanted to know if you had been able to study our elaborations on Ukraine, especially those that refer to the question of Donbass and "Novorrosia".  Around this we have an important debate and it would be very interesting if you could criticize the texts that we send you since we think that this way the exchange of opinions will be more precise.
But back to the subject of this note.  What you say about the slogan "May the USSR return" is that it is taken opportunistically by the different Communist Parties that "play with the nostalgia of the previous generation", that before they lived better than now.  There is no doubt that they do this in a demagogic way to achieve a social base.  We also have this vision, but playing with the aspirations and illusions of the masses that "it was better before" is not the same as raising the slogan "May the USSR return" as an immediate task of the exploited.  The oligarchy demagogues play on this issue, but they do not propose this course of action to the masses at all, since if this slogan becomes a reality, that new bourgeoisie coming from the bowels of the Communist Party would lose all its properties.  All the candidates of the Communist Parties who ran in the last elections in Russia turned out to be big bourgeois and oligarchs and will never call for the expropriation of themselves.

Nor did we see the Donbass oligarchy, much less the Kiev one, raise the demand for a Soviet Ukraine.  They are the greatest enemies of this task.  They demagogically use the former USSR to manipulate the illusions of the masses, but, I insist, not as an immediate action program.  This is our first appreciation.
We are facing a contradiction, but not for the masses who no longer support this perverse capitalist system, which, in Ukraine in particular, has condemned them to the worst slavery and has transformed its working class into the most impoverished in all of Europe.  The contradiction is fundamentally for the Communist Parties and for the oligarchs of the Kremlin, Donbass and Kiev.  It is clear that none of them, either in their electoral campaign or in their daily activity deceiving the masses, calls to expropriate the capitalists, to recover state ownership of the land, to nationalize natural resources, to expropriate without compensation the imperialist banks that are in Russia, to break with the IMF, etc., because this would be, we insist, calling to expropriate themselves.  This contradiction of those above, of the oligarchs of the Ukraine, of Russia, etc., we and our program must develop to the end to unmask them and achieve the definitive rupture of the masses with that oligarchic filth of servants and partners of imperialism.
The slogan of expropriating Gazprom, 49% of which is owned by BASF and British Petroleum, without compensation and re-nationalizing it under workers' control, just like the expropriation of Citibank and the break with imperialism, goes quickly against the cheap charlatanism of the oligarchy that wants to use the just aspirations of the masses.
From my point of view, there is an issue that qualitatively strengthens this demagoguery of Putin and the new Russophile oligarchy and bourgeoisie of Donbass.  I am convinced that this demagoguery can be supported by the Moscow jackal and his partners in Ukraine, because the Communist Parties and the vast majority of the left, including the renegades of Trotskyism, argue that Putin plays a progressive role in supporting al-Assad  "and its fight against imperialism” in Syria.  These currents have transformed him into a "paladin of the anti-imperialist struggle" in the eyes of the world's masses.  This is the great betrayal of the world left.  What gives credibility to this sinister policy of deceiving the masses is the actions of Stalinism, the renegades of Trotskyism and all the social-imperialist currents of the world that support the massacre of Putin and al-Assad in Syria with the excuse of "the fight against terrorism and the jihadists”.  Without such support and brutal deception of the masses, that Putin oligarchy regime would be terribly weakened by its counter-revolutionary actions against the masses of Eurasia and its massacre in Syria in particular.  Those who have dressed Putin as "anti-imperialist" are the traitors of socialism at the world level, the labor aristocracies and the union bureaucracies that support al-Assad.  That is the decisive element that today allows to a great extent the manipulation of the illusions of the masses by the “Great Russian” oligarchy, from Donbass and from the whole Ukraine.
Our struggle is to present a battle against this terrible deception with which one of the most counterrevolutionary agents of imperialism in the world is presented as an ally of the masses.  And this must be unmasked at the international level before the working class.  The slogan "Let the USSR return without Stalinist bureaucrats or betrayers to socialism (which is how we have raised it) and under the regime of the revolutionary soviets", confronts all the traitors of the reformist left who support Putin, one of the greatest supporters of capitalism in Russia, in the Ukraine and throughout the world.
The cry of the masses of Donbass, who even belatedly in the Ukraine or in the former USSR maintain the just aspiration that their old conquests of the workers' states return, is very important to confront the Stalinism that with the Castro brothers have already raised the war cry that “socialism is no more possible, not even in Cuba”, while they handed over the island to capitalist restoration.  This counterrevolutionary cry is followed by the entire European New Left, from Syriza to Podemos, from Stalinism to all the renegades of Trotskyism, who have already erased the word "socialism" from their political dictionary and the struggle they pose is to conquer a "real democracy”, “a generous one”… In the midst of one of the greatest catastrophes of the capitalist system, such as the one opened by the 2008 crisis, these people do not want more talk of socialism, much less of the dictatorship of the proletariat.  They also collide with the conscience of the rebellious French youth and the slogan “Let the Paris Commune come back!”  which was outlined in the uprisings of 2016 in the Place de la Republique in Paris.  These leaderships went there, like Varoufakis from Greece, to fight for “more democracy” and for a “citizens' republic”.  They are enemies of socialism.
Our slogan makes it possible to confront all the betrayers of the USSR, which were not only the former Soviet bureaucracy but all the renegades of Trotskyism who, hanging by its coattails, followed Stalinism until the restoration of capitalism and continue to do so to this day.
About our slogan "Let the USSR return without Stalinist bureaucrats or socialism deliverers", in our opinion, it is a way of propagandizing our struggle for the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms in all the countries of the world where the working class had managed to expropriate the capitalists.  Actually, the next revolutions in China, Russia, Ukraine, Vietnam or Cuba will not start from scratch, but must start from that historical experience that the masses made with their successful revolutions and combine it with the tasks of the international socialist revolution.
 We Trotskyists posit that the workers' states were a conquest, that Stalinism handed them over and that they must be recovered.  That is the form that the dynamics of the revolution takes for us in the former workers' states.  Fighting for it, Trotskyism will be able to set up the great revolutionary Leninist combat parties, defeating Stalinism and the renegades of Trotskyism, staunch enemies of the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms.  The truth is that they, fighting for a "real democracy", only give the bourgeoisie the right to exercise its class dictatorship against the working class and not against its oppressors.
 Our slogan "Let the USSR return without Stalinist bureaucrats or betrayers of socialism" thus acquires a transitional character.  It is part of the strategic program of the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms.
 Part of the consciousness that the masses have, of their "'nostalgia' for the former USSR" is due to the current catastrophe they are suffering, and this is a starting point precisely to dispute the leadership of the working class and the exploited to all the Stalinist scourge -turned into a new bourgeoisie-, both in the former USSR and in Eastern Europe and decisively worldwide.
 Our slogan starts precisely from the need and the immediate consciousness of the masses to recover the workers' state in order to eat and live with dignity, but as you will see, we do not raise it in an isolated way, but rather we take the cry of "Let the USSR return" linked to "without Stalinist bureaucrats or betrayers of socialism: for the dictatorship of the proletariat."
We programmatically combine this demand, as we do in our Ukraine declarations, with the fight to renationalize all branches of production under workers' control, expropriating the capitalists and bankers without compensation, breaking with imperialism and recovering the soviets, that is, the Red Workers' and Soldiers' Councils.  We believe that in this way we turn against them the demagoguery of this new millionaire oligarchy in which the old Stalinist bureaucracy became.  And that in this way we also combat the entire world left that supports Putin and his gang of millionaires who have in their accounts in the Bahamas, Cyprus, Monaco, London, etc. all the rubles stolen from the Russian people.
Indeed, both you and we want the USSR to return, but not that of Stalin, Brezhnev or Gorbachev, but that of Lenin and Trotsky.  And this will be as a link in a chain of revolutions throughout imperialist Europe.  That is as far as our program goes in the face of the need for the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms in the former USSR, as a central task of the entire European working class in its fight to crush the imperialist Maastricht.  Precisely, isolating the Ukrainian revolution from the combat of the Russian workers, from the masses of Eastern Europe and from the working class of the imperialist powers, was the great betrayal of Stalinism and the reformist left that fenced the revolution in Ukraine and thus allowed the partition of that nation, with the proletariat subjected to the different oligarchies, both those linked to the European Union and those of Moscow.
The debate that we have started on this issue is very important to us.  We want it to be clear that this slogan is not an isolated slogan, but is part of a block of slogans articulated around the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat.  In Trotsky's words, the masses in their combat and in their turn to the left pose "markers of socialism."  In the hands of the exploited in Donbass, the demand “May the USSR return” is against hunger and misery, not in favor of priests, clergymen and the Orthodox Church.  There is a wide angle between the masses and the Donbass bourgeoisie, just as there is a wide angle between the exploited who fight against al-Assad in Syria and the reactionary Sunni clerics, who organize prayers to bring the Muslim masses to their knees at the feet of the millionaire bourgeoisie in the liberated zones.
The Transitional Program is a bridge.  It has a point on one shore that is the needs and consciousness of the masses, which are manipulated by all traitorous directions.  Precisely, the program consists of taking the just aspirations of the masses, through a block of slogans, to the other shore, which is none other than the revolutionary victory of the masses and the need to defeat all the leaderships that betray their combats, without which victory against the exploiters is impossible.
We believe that we must have a dialogue with the Soviet aspirations of the masses, handed out to imperialism yesterday by the Stalinist scourge and subjected today to the most ferocious exploitation by their descendants: the new Russian and Eastern European oligarchy, tied by thousands of ties and businesses to imperialism, and committed to it in the worst massacres of the oppressed peoples of Eurasia and the whole world.
I think that together we are going to state that we are fighting for the Victory of the socialist revolution in Russia, in Eastern Europe and throughout the imperialist Maastricht and that, therefore, we are combatants for the return of the USSR of Lenin, Trotsky and the revolutionary Third International.  We will agree that the flags of the USSR cannot be left to the Stalinists and counterrevolutionary oligarchs.  We believe that it is necessary to challenge the Stalinist scourge, which has become a new bourgeoisie (and which today is part of the same court of the fascist Putin), around that just aspiration of the masses to get out of this capitalist system that martyrs them.
We also propose this program of restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms for China, Vietnam and for Cuba itself, which in recent years was handed over to imperialism.  As we have already said, the Castro brothers -who have already finished giving in the Cuban revolution to imperialism- have raised against the world working class the war cry of "socialism is no more, not even in Cuba".  The fact that sectors of the Ukrainian masses of Donbass in their aspirations maintain the conscience that the USSR must return, is a clash with the policy of Stalinism that openly says and does the opposite at the international level and in the former workers' states themselves.  And this, I insist, even goes against the oligarchs of the Russian CP and of Putin himself, who will never think of raising the task of "May the USSR return", expropriating the capitalists, because as we already said, it would mean calling to expropriate themselves.  And much less will they raise it as a slogan for action, for struggle and for socialist revolution.  We insist, our task is to unmask them so that the masses settle accounts with that oligarchy that filled its bank accounts by expropriating the goods created by the Soviet working class.
For us, the slogan of restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms, of the workers' and soldiers' councils, also confronts the new mandarins of the Chinese oligarchy, slave owners of their own working class, and opens a dialogue with broad layers of the workers who have been cheated with the program of "market socialism" of the Chinese bourgeoisie, a partner of imperialism.
In our opinion, this slogan of restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms must be incorporated into the Transitional Program since the working class in the 20th century took power in a third of the planet and the Stalinist scourge handed it over.  In those countries, the next socialist revolutions are going to be intimately linked to defeating the current oligarchic bourgeois regimes and governments, lackeys, servants and partners of imperialism, coming from the old Stalinist scourge that restored capitalism, but not without first collaborating with the defeat of hundreds of revolutionary processes throughout the world.  I believe that the entry into combat of the Russian, Chinese, Cuban or Vietnamese masses, as happened with the Ukrainian ones, will tend to rescue in their conscience what their old historical conquests were.  Recovering these lost conquests will only be possible with the victory of the international socialist revolution.

In the Ukrainian revolution we could see desperate workers earning 200 euros, in worse conditions than Chinese workers.  For this reason, it gives us the impression that, effectively, the Communist Parties and the oligarchy have to play demagogy with the slogan of the return to the former USSR, but this is shouted by the masses and not by the reactionary priests of the Orthodox Church.  This is how they must manipulate the masses who see that, unlike what some believed in '89 when the workers' states collapsed, the imperialist West did not give them full Supermarket shelves to get out of famine, but multiplied their misery and slavery.  New crashes and crises in Russia, like those we have already seen in Romania, in Georgia or in the Ukraine itself, will push the masses into this torrent of struggle to recover the lost conquests and this will be inseparable from the struggle and revolutionary uprisings against the new oligarchies emerged from the bowels of the Stalinist scourge.
If until '89 the program of struggle for the political revolution in the degenerated and deformed workers' states, played a central role as part of the world socialist revolution to defeat the bureaucracy and put those workers' states as a bastion of the world revolution, the current struggle for the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms means not to consider this historic battle over.  It is like losing a union at the hands of a union bureaucracy that has turned into business men and handed it over to the capitalists from within.  The call to recover that union is the fight to recover an old conquest that was lost.  Ultimately, our fight to recover and restore the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms means recovering a lost conquest and without the bureaucracy that gave it in.  And that is a starting point, we insist, to develop a revolutionary program for the former workers' states of the East, which will be inextricably linked to the struggle for the victory of the socialist revolution in imperialist Europe and internationally.  This is the path that history left us to fight for the United Socialist States of Europe, starting from the living experience of the working class of that continent and worldwide.
In the case of Cuba, the cry of the Donbass masses of “Let the USSR come back” was a direct blow to Stalinism in the nose.  It is a slogan that in the hands of the revolutionaries allows us to unmask the current surrender of the Cuban workers' state.  The Stalinist scourge in Cuba, today transformed into a new bourgeoisie, was and continues to be the most important obstacle in the American continent for the advance of the socialist revolution.  I really don't think it was the reactionary clergy of the Orthodox Church and the pro-Russian oligarchy, with the incense of the "priest Gapon", who mobilized in Donbass saying "Let the USSR come back".  They manipulated and manipulate daily that consciousness of the masses to submit the working class to the Russophile bourgeoisie.
Ukrainian workers shouting "May the USSR return" as a demand linked to the defeat of the fascist troops in Kiev, whether the Donbass oligarchy likes it or not, is a heavy blow to all the gravediggers of socialism.  And we propose it as a program promoted in the streets, which is not the same as what the Russian oligarchy does, saying "before we lived better."  The fact is that the oligarchs of the Russian CP who talk about this will never think of proposing the annulment of the right of inheritance, the restitution of all the shares of the companies stolen by the oligarchs, the workers' control of all the branches of production and much less that the red soldiers expel all the officers of the white armies and the regime of the soviets, the councils of workers and soldiers is imposed.  This demagoguery of the oligarchs would last very little if there were a vanguard Bolshevik Party in the former USSR and internationally.
To the extent that the economic crisis that has already begun in Russia develops, as in all the BRICS, this struggle to return to the old conquest will be multiplied by a thousand and the gangs of the Putin oligarchy will find it very difficult to manipulate that historical socialist consciousness of the masses which, if it returned on a large scale, would be a mortal danger for all the possessing classes.
We believe that in this we will not have differences.  We insist, this slogan "May the USSR return", put forward by the masses in Ukraine as a motion in the streets, if taken up by the Trotskyists and articulated as part of the fight for a Soviet, socialist and independent Ukraine, allows Putin's oligarchy, Yanukovych's heirs, etc. to be unmasked in Ukraine.  It is precisely a slogan that allows us to dispute the leadership of the masses to the oligarchs, either when they are "officialist" or when they are "opposition", as in the case of Donbass against Kiev.
In 2014, in Donbass, the working class was terrified about losing their jobs.  The IMF plan and the privatization of the mines caused dozens of thousands of layoffs, the disarticulation of production with the Russian industrial-military apparatus on the other side of the border, etc.  That is to say, the ruin for the masses… In those masses of Donbass, the slogan “May the USSR return” meant confronting the IMF plan, not “long live the oligarchy and its millionaire businesses”.
For us, it was the CPs at the international level and in Europe in particular, which submitted that just aspiration of the masses to the counterrevolutionary oligarchy of the fictitious “Republic of Novorossia” and Moscow.  That is the point that we think you do not see: the perfidious counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism at the Russian, Ukrainian and world level, which was the one that ended up expropriating the Ukrainian revolution and subjecting the masses of Donbass and Kiev to the miserable Minsk pact, which, like the one in Geneva for Syria and the Middle East, monitors the surrender of the masses and in this case the partition of Ukraine.
Stalinism with its international, and European  in particular, policies of popular front in Ukraine, ended up subjecting the Donbass workers to the pro-Russian oligarchy, beginning by separating and dividing the Ukrainian working class between East and West.
You must be aware, like us, that this policy of class collaboration with the pro-Russian oligarchy of "Novorrosia" was a policy voted and organized by European Stalinism, including the KKE, which runs the trade unions in Greece, in a meeting held in Lugansk in May 2015, where dozens of Communist Parties and bureaucracies of the European trade union centers participated.  This conference was also supported by currents of Trotskyist renegades such as Antarsya from Greece (ie the French NPA and the English SWP) who sent a delegation and the Greek EEK who sent a letter of support to the Stalinists who marched to Donbass to finish consolidating the surrender from within of that revolutionary sector of the masses of Ukraine and subjecting them to the Minsk counterrevolutionary pact.
The European Communist Parties organized the "international brigades" to go as fifth-column to Donbass, in our opinion, to massacre everyone who opposed the policy of partitioning Ukraine and proclaimed the unity of the revolution of the masses of Donbass with the Kiev workers.  This policy, as we will also agree, meant in the first place to tear apart the Ukrainian working class, when the workers of Donbass and Kiev have the same demands and the same enemy, which is imperialism that supports the fascist bourgeoisie of the capital as well as the counter-revolutionary oligarchy of “Novorosia” and that ceded the Crimean peninsula to the assassin Putin as a base of operations for the counter-revolution in Eurasia.
We are, and our program expresses it, declared enemies of that oligarchy of “Novorosia” and of the Stalinist scoundrels that subjected the working class to that oligarchy, taking advantage of the hatred of the masses against the fascist and reactionary bourgeoisie of Kiev.  Thus, we insist, they divided the Ukrainian working class and divided the nation, which today is a thousand times more subjugated and looted by the IMF.  The Minsk Pact of the European Union, the US imperialists and Putin is a guarantee of this.  Like the bloodied Syria under the Geneva pact, becoming more and more a protectorate, the divided Ukraine is nothing more than a new protectorate under the command of the Minsk conference, that is, of  US imperialism and the IMF.
In our opinion, and this is a preview of the debate that we believe we should deepen, you are confusing the revolutionary character of the uprising of the masses in Ukraine against Yanukovych, a pro-Putin oligarch and the biggest agent of the IMF in that nation, with the expropriation of this revolutionary rise by the pro-Russian oligarchy in Donbass and the pro-Western bourgeoisie in Kiev.
Seeing the flags of the Ukrainian CP with those of al-Assad does not surprise us at all. Because this revolutionary process has already been stifled and strangled by Stalinism that subjected the masses to the oligarchy of "Novorosia" and, by that means, to the Minsk pact under US command. But that is the content of the counterrevolution, of the defeat of the revolution, of its expropriation.
Seeing Kiev in revolt with the rank and file soldiers refusing to join the Ukrainian army because they were against going to crush the masses of Donbass, is the content of the revolution, which opened the conditions to defeat imperialism and the oligarchy in the whole Ukraine, uniting all the exploited of the nation by means of the workers' and soldiers' councils.  Instead, the constitution of “Novorrosia”, a fictitious republic that split the Ukrainian labor movement, is the content of the counterrevolution.
We are facing a bloodied revolution, betrayed and fenced by the forces of Stalinism and the world reformist left.  And we are facing a nation that was trampled by NATO and the IMF.  In 2014, when the US did not accept Putin's proposal that Yanukovych continue in power, with Russia putting the 15,000 million dollars for the repayment to the IMF of debt maturities, the coward from Moscow quickly removed the 120,000 men he had in the border with Ukraine and it was occupied by a few thousand NATO soldiers. The masses of Donbass at that time did not support Yanukovych who was hated by all the workers of Ukrania.  If not, he would have gone to the Donbass to organize a counteroffensive to stay in power.  To tell the truth, we do not see that it was the Donetsk mafia, or the “Gapon priests”, or the Moscow gunmen, who entered the Donbass with the slogan “May the USSR return”.  They were Yanukovych's praetorian guard as he was the direct agent of the IMF in Ukraine, who applied his plans of hunger, looting and dispossession.
What's more, when Kerry, Obama's secretary of state, traveled and set foot in Ukraine, none of Putin's generals remained.  They all fled. The masses were left alone to resist in Kiev and Donbass… Putin's clerics and gunmen returned when they had to control the revolted masses, when the bombings and attacks by the fascist army of Kiev – which destroyed and set fire to the house of the unions in Odessa - were not enough to defeat the masses... And, as in Syria, where ISIS, Sunni generals and the YPG turned to contain and strangle the revolutionary uprising of the workers, in Ukraine it was these counter-revolutionary gangs to control the masses and submit them to the Minsk pact.
That is why Syria is a good example to distinguish the content of the revolution from that of the counterrevolution.  The FSA generals, under Turkish command, taking Al Bab and Afrin, handing over Aleppo and raising al-Assad's flag again as they did in Ghouta and Douma, is not the content of the Syrian revolution, of its coordination committees of 2011- 2012… it is the content of the counterrevolution, not of the revolution.  It is the content of their expropriation and even of their enormous defeats.
There was a great debate around the lesson of the Chinese revolution between Trotsky and Preobrazhensky on this point.
The fact is that the masses and their revolutions, which threaten and sometimes sweep away a large part of the citadel of power, are one thing, and quite another thing is that, due to a crisis of leadership, the reaction expropriates the struggles of the masses to create the conditions for their losses.  That is the paradox.  Just like the “February Paradox” that you know and that Trotsky magnificently developed: the masses carry out a huge revolution that sweeps away the tsar but they hand over power to the bourgeoisie and thus the February soviets become collaborators.  Like any analogy, it is not perfect, but this is also the analogy with the Syrian revolution because the masses defeated al-Assad's army and opened the way to set up the soviets, the workers' and soldiers' councils, but, due to a crisis of revolutionary leadership, they handed over the leadership of their revolution to the scoundrels of the Sunni bourgeoisie and their "pseudo-democratic" generals, whose party-armies went to destroy the self-organization of the masses and prevent a single coin, a single asset owned by capitalists from being touched by the people in the liberated zones.  These are generals as much or even more reactionary, counter-revolutionary and religious than those brought by Putin to Donbass to defeat the Ukrainian revolution and prevent the masses from arming themselves.  We affirm that generals of FSA and Al Nusra and their army-parties are the equivalent in the Syrian revolution to the pact forged between the Stalinists of the entire Europe with the Russophile counter-revolutionary forces of the Donbass oligarchy in the Ukraine.
Syria and Ukraine were two foci of the revolution where imperialism concentrated its forces to defeat them.  I will not repeat here our vision of the Ukrainian revolution, which is expressed in the different materials that we have sent you about its abortion in Maidan Square, its extension to the Donbass and its submission via Stalinism to the pro-Russian oligarchy, with the gun of the fascist army of Kiev aiming at the masses.  But the partition of Ukraine and the unheard-of sufferings of the masses speak of the defeat of a revolution, not of its victory either in Novorossia or in Kiev.
I think it is very important to open this reflection with you, but we must try to go to the end so that the real differences that exist are understood.  I do not think that you are against the return of the USSR of Trotsky and Lenin, of the revolutionary Third International and of the soviets.  We may have differences about the development of the Ukrainian revolution and even whether it started.  In that case, you will have to define a characterization of the events that convulsed that nation from 2013 to 2015. But with this slogan and this just demand of  the Return of the USSR" we will all agree.  The debate is open.  Let's deepen it.
We insist that our program, as you will see in this note and in all our materials, was articulated around the fight for a Soviet, socialist and independent Ukraine.  In this case you would not be arguing against a position that refuses to fight Stalinism, quite the contrary.  Our program aims to unite the ranks of the Ukrainian working class by defeating fascism in Kiev and the perfidious counter-revolutionary policy of the Popular Front in Donbass.  Both, like the two ends of the same rope, submitted both the Ukrainian masses to the Minsk pact and the plundered nation to the IMF.
You comrades and us, we vindicate ourselves from Trotskyism.  We vindicate Bolshevism in the resistance that in the 1930s fought to set up a fraction of the Third International.  We are from the Trotskyist movement, that is, the Bolsheviks of the former USSR, and we make ours the legacy of the Russian Communist Party of Lenin and Trotsky who, at the head of the Red Army, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party and with the support of the world working class, defeated 14 imperialist armies.  We are the Fourth International, the world party that defended the USSR and to do so stated that the program for that was the victory of the European and world revolution.  When the excrescence of the Stalinist scourge arose, our world party organized the fight for political revolution to crush the Soviet bureaucracy.  We are from the party that left its bones in Vorkuta and other concentration camps of Stalinism.  That is why we are not going to leave the flags of the USSR to those who bastardized it, usurped it, handed it over and massacred it, to that Stalinist excrescence of the USSR that destroyed it by betraying the world revolution.  Surely we will quickly agree on this.
We eagerly await your input and criticism.  Let's make you know that your positions are being known and published by all the comrades of the FLTI.
We hope you are well.  We know about the harsh conditions you are endeavoring in there and the brave fight you are putting up against the fascist Putin and his oligarchic counter-revolutionary regime.  We consider you a bulwark for regrouping the forces of international revolutionary socialism.  Great battles and revolutions of the world working class have united us, not only those of the Maghreb and the Middle East.
Let's continue the discussion.  To do this, I insist, it is very important that you thoroughly understand our positions.
We come from different political traditions and we may not be able to understand some of your questions.  Good.  We hope that this will be a contribution to shed more light on the issues under discussion.
We are always at your disposition.  We want you to know that the family of Abu Al Baraa is not alone, but has our full support and our fight.  Our work with the Arabic-language newspaper “The Truth of the Oppressed” is making progress in Syria.  And, like you, we are following up to the minute the attack on the last trenches of the Syrian revolution.  The battlefield has expanded to the borders of Syria as Jordan and Palestine demonstrate.
We would be interested in following together the life in the Syrian refugee camps, where the exploited who were subjected to live as landless pariahs by imperialism, Al Assad and Putin are found.  Like the Palestinian people in Jordan or Lebanon in previous decades, the Syrian workers in the refugee camps will fight hard since they are already part of the Lebanese, Jordanian, Turkish working class and also of the working class in imperialist Europe itself.  We are closely following these processes in the refugee camps and there we must also focus our forces.
Charles Munzer
PS: I am going to quote an extract from the Theses of '89, our work on capitalist restoration in the former workers' states, which is  being translated into English, where we precisely define the proposals that I advance in this letter.  This was written in the year 2000 but is still totally valid.  There we stated that the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms is a task of the working class of the former workers' states and also of the proletariat of the imperialist powers of Europe.  It is a link in the strategic struggle to conquer the historical demand of the Socialist United States of Europe.  In this work we affirm:
“…because the confrontation between revolution and counterrevolution at the world level is not defined, we affirm that the program and strategy of the principled Trotskyists for the former workers states in liquidation, against the restorationist dictatorships of capital, must be for an entire historical period, the struggle for the restoration of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.  This task must be incorporated into the Transitional Program for the world proletarian revolution, just as Trotsky in the 1930s updated the revolutionary program by incorporating the task of political revolution, and it can only be carried forward and led by a regenerated revolutionary party of the Fourth International purged of Menshevik centrists.
So, since the confrontation between revolution and counter-revolution is not defined at the world level, it is the task of the international revolutionary proletariat not to consider this, like any conquest, for definitively lost, for an entire historical period, and also to inscribe in its program the struggle for the restoration of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat in those countries.
 This struggle is a task not only for the working classes of the former workers' states in liquidation, but of the entire Western and world proletariat, which must take it as their own.  How could the Western proletariat fight to recover lost conquests, confront the counterrevolutionary leaderships, defend the conquests it still maintains and achieve new ones, if it does not take into its own hands, as its own task, the struggle for the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the former workers' states in liquidation, in a speed race with the world imperialist bourgeoisie, which wants to impose the counterrevolution and reincorporate these states into the world division of labor as colonies and semi-colonies, after inflicting harsh defeats on the Western proletariat?