Ukraine- Feburary 28, 2022
Ukraine, the national question and
Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ position
Ukraine, since 2014, has become a nation divided, occupied and colonized by imperialism and its henchman Putin. But now it is also a bombed and invaded nation.
In 2014/2015 the US used its hitman Putin to strangle the revolution and split Ukraine in the Minsk counter-revolutionary Agreement. With the fascism of Kyiv and the perfidious counterrevolutionary policy of the popular front in Donbass, as the two ends of the same rope, they subjected the Ukrainian masses to the Minsk Agreement and the looted nation to the IMF, turning it into an actual protectorate. In return to contain the Donbass workers who, together with the Kyiv masses, had overthrown the pro-Russian president Yanukovych, imperialism gave Crimea and Donbass to Moscow. There, Putin's Black Hundreds crushed the revolted mining movement and imposed a completely fascist regime, as the U.S. did in Kyiv, under the banner of “democracy” and “freedom”. With these counterrevolutionary pacts, U.S. imperialism with their gendarme Putin crushed in Ukraine, and kept the booty of Ukrainian gas, whose main company remained in the hands of Biden's son. The role of the eastern and western bourgeoisie, and of all the agents of imperialism in the region, was to keep the proletariat ranks torn apart to prevent the victory of the exploited.
And now the Minsk Agreement exploded from the right, because it was not the working masses of Europe, Russia, the US and the world that rose up against it, but first of all, imperialism seeking to keep Ukraine by joining it to NATO, and then the assassin Putin advancing on the entire Ukrainian territory.
But in historical terms, the national question in Ukraine is not new: it could not be resolved, except in the period of Soviet and Socialist Ukraine when in 1922 it voluntarily federated into the USSR. This is what Putin is talking about, when he affirms that the existence of the Ukraine is Lenin's fault.
Ukraine is a nation that arrived late in the constitution of nations developed by capitalism in Europe in the 19th century. Historically subdued by the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later by the Czarist Russia, it was part of that prison of nations that was known as Russia. But as we said, in 1922 with the heroic socialist revolution of the USSR of 1917, Ukraine obtained the right to national self-determination and even independence. This was the only way, like Socialist and Soviet Ukraine, it could take its own destiny into its own hands.
With the expropriation of the October Revolution in hands of Stalinism, the USSR once again became a prison of nations and Ukraine was again trapped there.
Ukraine's “independence” after capitalist restoration in the former USSR was nothing but an illusion. Ukraine was born in the '90s as an “independent nation”, owing 17% of the enormous external debt that Russia had with Citibank and the imperialist banks; with the Russian military base in Crimea to guarantee the circulation of gas and oil pipelines through Ukrainian territory to Germany; and submitted to the businesses of the “Great Russian” bourgeoisie associated with the big imperialist oil companies such as the French Total, the German BASF and British Petroleum.
And the Stalinist scourge also bequeathed the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe to Ukraine, which left the richest lands of Ukraine poisoned with radiation to this day, where children continue to be born with brain tumors and have the highest rate of cancer patients in the world.
In other words, in the 1990s, Ukraine was born as a semi-colony and as a link in the business of the great European imperialist powers with Russia. Strangled by European transnational banks, and subjected to the IMF, Ukraine has lost all national independence. And strangled by the Stalinist boot, it does not even have a national language.
But we must also affirm that Ukraine is a nation that could never be dominated by the tsars or by Stalinism, because they perceive themselves as an independent European nation.
In Ukraine, power was not taken in 1917, as in Russia, but in 1922. During those years, the revolution and the counter-revolution came face to face on Ukrainian territory. The 14 imperialist armies that invaded the USSR entered through Ukraine, to steal its wheat and food. In 1917, the white troops of tsarism took over Ukraine, which was recovered by the Red Army. But that same year, the Rada and the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist movement were formed, which expelled the Red Army. In 1918 German troops occupied the country and dissolved the Rada, establishing a puppet regime that fell after Germany's defeat in World War I.
In the heat of these events, a left-wing nationalist movement arose that had its political expression in the Borotbá Party. Trotsky (1939) argues that nationalist tendencies burst into the Ukraine violently between 1917 and 1919: “The left wing of these tendencies expressed itself in the Borotba Party. The most important indicator of the success of the Leninist policy in the Ukraine was the merger of the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party with the organization of the Borotbists. The Ukrainian Bolshevik Party, which had been alone for 3 years, decentralized from the Third International and isolated, guided by the politics of the revolutionary Marxists who had taken power in '17, took power in Ukraine and the first measure was a plebiscite for the independence of Ukraine. In doing so, the Ukrainian masses, who had suffered through dozens of occupations, voted for national independence. The Bolsheviks thus demonstrated that the national independence of the Ukraine could and only wanted to be guaranteed by the workers' and peasants' soviets. And it was later that those workers' councils, in 1922, voted for the voluntary federation with the USSR. The only time Ukraine was independent and self-organized was under a Soviet Government, until Stalinism turned the USSR into a prison of nations, which, like tsarism before, oppressed nations such as the Ukrainian, Georgian, Chechen, etc.
That is why Trotsky affirmed that Stalin's oppression pushed Ukraine more and more towards imperialism, exacerbating separatist tendencies, and therefore he affirmed in the face of the Second World War that the unity and independence of the Ukraine of workers and peasants in the struggle against imperialism and against Muscovite Bonapartism, was a first order question, and the only way to guarantee it is maintaining its Soviet and revolutionary character. “Despite the enourmous progress made by the October Revolution in the field of international relations, the isolated proletarian revolution in a backward country was unable to resolve the national question, especially the Ukrainian one, which is essentially international in character. The Thermidorian reaction, crowned by the Bonapartist bureaucracy, has driven the masses back even in the national sphere. The great masses of the Ukrainian people are dissatisfied with the situation of their nation and want to drastically change it” (Trotsky, 1939). That is why his slogan was: For an independent Soviet Ukraine!
This historical problem of Ukraine is key issue because Ukraine's national feeling is progressive, because it is an oppressed, crushed and occupied nation, which today in the face of the Russian invasion defends its independence with self-organized pickets, hammers, Molotov cocktails and sticks. It is a nation where the masses want to be independent and, unable to survive after the fall of the USSR, hundreds and thousands of Ukrainian workers are forced to flee to the West to work as slave labor. A large part of the population of Ukraine lives off the euros sent by workers who went to work in other European countries.
The bourgeoisie and imperialism have always tried to use in their favor that national feeling of the Ukrainian masses, which expresses in a labyrinthine way the struggle against their miserable conditions of existence (Trotsky: 1939). In 2014, the Kyiv oligarchy channeled the rightful aspirations of a sector of the masses and their hatred for President Yanukovych and the butcher Putin, and expropriating their combat, diverted the revolutionary uprising, promising the exploited that the solution to their hardships would come with an agreement with the European Union. Stalinism and the pro-Russian bourgeoisie did the same, they usurped the national and anti-imperialist sentiment, more than legitimate, of the Donbass masses, who knew that if the Kyiv plan advanced, they would close the mines.
But the Ukrainian bourgeoisie has long since shown that it has never liberated and has no intention of liberating Ukraine. As we stated in 2014, “the national question and the feeling that nests against the oppression of decades and centuries of the Ukrainian people by the tsars, Stalinism and now imperialism, can only be resolved –as the October revolution demonstrated– by a Soviet and independent Ukraine, federated by its own will into the Socialist United States of Europe. For this, it will be necessary to conquer a new victorious socialist revolution in Ukraine and in all the countries of the former USSR”. For a united, free and independent Soviet and Socialist Ukraine!
Nadia Briante and Eliza Funes |
