02.12.2004

A curious sort of revolution

The head of the Ukrainian army, Alexander Kuzmuk, has said that troops would not use force to disperse the Kiev protesters, and the head of the SBU secret police has appeared on a platform with Yushchenko. The state appears paralysed, and Ukraine’s central bank has imposed limits on withdrawals from bank accounts. On the other side, governors in the eastern part of the country have called for local referendums to establish a federal system with autonomy for their regions, and threatened more or less openly to secede and join Russia.

On the face of things Ukraine appears to be in the grip of revolution: crowds on the streets, the military unwilling to restore order, threats of break-up of the state ...

But it is a curious sort of revolution. The autonomous creativity of the broad popular masses, characteristic of social revolutions, is some way from appearing. Instead, in Kiev what we have is well funded and controlled events: the opposition aims to repeat the “velvet revolutions” which have happened or been attempted in several eastern European countries. The US think-tank Global Security comments: “The campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated exercise in branding and marketing that, in four countries in four years, was used to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes. They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning ‘resistance’. Officially, the US government spent $41 million on the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevic in 1999. Experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus was used in the effort to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma. In the so-called ‘velvet revolutions’ in these three countries, US ambassadors played a leading role. In Ukraine, the US budget is said to be around $14 million” (http://www.global-security.org/military/world/ukraine/politics.htm).

In eastern Ukraine, the spontaneity of the demonstrations is equally questionable. In cities still dominated by Soviet-model industries and Soviet-model patron-client chains, the oligarch patrons have called their clients onto the streets to support their presidential candidate.

Oligarchs, interests and ideologies

The two sides in this struggle are singularly unattractive. An opposition supporter is quoted in The Guardian as saying: “Nobody who has been in the business climate of Ukraine over the past decade can say they are totally clean” (November 30).

Yushchenko was prime minister in 2000-2001, when President Kuchma’s regime is said to have organised the murder of a journalist who exposed murky dealings; his deputy Yulia Tymoshenko was arrested on corruption charges in January 2001 and is currently wanted for extradition for bribery by the Russian government. Several commentators have remarked that leaders of the opposition desperately want political power to protect them from various criminal charges which might otherwise come to trial. The ‘Our Ukraine’ bloc they lead is unambiguously a centre-right formation, which includes elements of the far right; one of their newspapers saw fit to publish the remarkable flight of fantasy that the 1941 German invasion of Ukraine (part, in reality, of the invasion of the USSR) was organised by the Jews and that there were 400,000 Jews in the SS! Before he was prime minister, Yushchenko was president of the central bank. He represents finance capital. He is supported by the ‘west’ not because he is a democrat - he is not - but because he proposes to re-impose on Ukraine the IMF ‘shock therapy’ which stalled in 2001, join Nato and seek EU membership.

Yushchenko’s opponents, however, are no more attractive. The Ukrainian Communist Party (KPU) is a red-brown Russian nationalist formation like the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Other groups which pretend to be ‘left’, like the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine, are simple political expressions of oligarchs who made their fortunes in the partial privatisations following the fall of the USSR (see Christopher Ford ‘Ukraine’s Counterfeit Left’, http://www.spectrezine.org/resist/Ukraine.htm). The oligarch parties supported the 2000 repeal of the law protecting trade union rights. Since 1999 President Kuchma has balanced Bonapartistically between the oligarchs which demand preservation of subsidies and monopolies to protect their interests and the advocates, like Yushchenko, of a fuller opening to western capitalism. His regime has been increasingly characterised by a turn to murder and intimidation of oppositionists and the exploitation of media control.

Great power manoeuvres?

The hand of the USA is unambiguously present in the Yushchenko campaign and the Kiev demonstrations. It is neither doubted by anyone except blind ideologues, nor denied by the US. Equally, Russian president Vladimir Putin poured funds and resources into the Yanukovich campaign and gave it political support. Commentators for various reasons hostile to US foreign policy, like Jonathan Steele (The Guardian November 26) and John Laughland (The Guardian November 27, and elsewhere) have played up the US involvement: what is going on is nothing but great-power rivalries playing out in Ukrainian politics, they say. Other authors in that paper have criticised them; and similar debates have occurred elsewhere in the British media.

The ‘great-power rivalries’ interpretation is largely followed in two recent left accounts of the crisis - Niall Mulholland’s on the website of the Taaffe Socialist Party’s Committee for a Workers’ International (http://www.socialistworld.net/index2.html?/eng/2004/11/24ukraine.html); and Peter Schwarz on the US Northite Socialist Equality Party’s World Socialist Web Site (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/ukr-n25.shtml).

For commentators in the mainstream media hostile to Russia, Putin’s activity is merely a continuation of the long tradition of Great Russian imperialism (not in the Marxist sense of this term) extending back to the Muscovite acquisition of Ukraine as a subordinate fief in the 17th century: the US is defending democracy and Ukrainian national self-determination. For those hostile to US policy, what is involved is either US imperialism (also in a non-economic sense) meddling in other countries’ internal affairs (Laughland), or the continuation of a cold war policy of encircling Russia (Steele). On the left, Schwarz tends to an untheorised pro-Russian line, while Mulholland explains the crisis as resulting from the competing imperialist interests of the US and Russian capital - this time in a Marxist sense.

Figuring out what the US and Russian regimes are up to behind the ideological smokescreens is not wholly straightforward. The current US regime certainly does intend to create in eastern Europe regimes committed to the ‘free market’: ie, both fully open to penetration by global finance capital and opposed to the social democratic regulatory policies which remain common in continental western Europe.
The Washington neo-conservatives see this as part of a global mission which will secure US global dominance in the 21st century. Nailing down control of Eurasia is strategically central. But this utopian fantasy is in the process of coming apart in Iraq.

The US has more immediate strategic interests which also point in the direction of the course the US has followed in Georgia and Ukraine. Creating ‘free-marketeer’ regimes in eastern Europe tends as much to ‘encircle’ the Franco-German axis in the EU as it does to encircle Russia. Immediately, the outbreak of crisis in Ukraine forces the French and German regimes to choose between the eastern enlargement of the EU and its ‘democratic’ ideology, and the tentative Chirac-Schröder-Putin axis formed round the Iraq war. The issue reportedly poisoned the November 25 EU-Russia summit meeting.

Steele’s idea of a continuing policy of encircling Russia seems more remotely but still possibly relevant. Given the deep crisis of the Russian economy and society, Russia does not seem to present any sort of short-term threat to US dominance. That very crisis, however, might conceivably lead to a return of full Stalinism in Russia - in which case the integration of Ukraine into Nato would be a substantial strategic advantage to the US.

From the Russian side, the very debility of the economy must cast serious doubt on the idea that what is involved is imperialism in the Marxist sense. What is true, however, is that Ukraine was not just another eastern European glacis state with its own ‘planned economy’ like Poland or Czechoslovakia. Its infrastructure, economy and politics were fully integrated into the USSR. This fact creates both an interest of the Ukrainian oligarchs in good relations with Russia, and a Russian interest in a friendly Ukraine. Further, conventional foreign and military policy analysis must imply that Russia as a ‘perhaps capitalist’ state, just as much as the USSR, would be threatened by direct US control of Ukrainian politics and integration of Ukraine into the US-led alliance systems. Finally, the ideology of Russian nationalism points Moscow in the same direction: Ukraine was for 300 years not merely a colony but a part of Russia, and a substantial part of its population is Russian-speaking.

Third camp?

It would be plainly worthless for the working class in the Ukraine or internationally to support either the ‘democratic’ camp of Yushchenko or the pseudo-left camp of Yanukovich. It would be equally worthless to support either the manoeuvres of Washington or those of Moscow in this struggle. The CWI correctly called for workers to support neither side in the presidential election run-off, and is now - equally correctly - calling for the whole election to be rerun and for a struggle for an independent workers’ candidate (Rob Jones, ‘Neither Yanukovich or Yushchenko’, http://www.socialist-world.net/).

Mulholland’s article adds at its end a brief action programme. Schwarz, similarly, calls in the abstract for “an independent political movement of the working population, based on a socialist programme, not only in Ukraine, but throughout Europe”.

The trouble is that there is not such a third camp of class independence. The workers’ movement in Ukraine is still paying the price for its political expropriation by Stalinism - and the ideology that the party as the ‘most advanced part’ represents the working class; and the leadership as the ‘most advanced part’ represents the party. The same is true elsewhere in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, and, indeed, in a less catastrophic form throughout the world.

The usual starting point for a struggle for class independence is the trade union struggle. But in a society emerging from Stalinism and its collapse, the trade unions are not merely subject to repression, but massively weakened by economic crisis and ideologically disabled by the past. A political ‘left’ which clings to the defence of the Stalinist past as representing a better economic situation for the workers will inevitably become, as has the Ukrainian ‘left’, an expression of the interests not of the workers but of oligarch groups.

The starting point for the struggle for class independence therefore needs to be in relation to the current political struggle. This implies two cardinal points: the struggle for political democracy, and a clear approach to the national question.

Political democracy

The Yushchenko camp is not one of democrats. But it has raised the political banner of democracy and an independent workers’ movement would need to say: yes, we want democracy; we are utterly opposed to vote-rigging in all its forms, to the murder of independent journalists, party leaders, and so on, and to the abuse of government media to campaign for one side in this election. But we are also opposed to the whole idea of the direct election of presidents and other government officials. That is not democracy, but elective monarchy. The Yushchenko/Yanukovich play-off is a fine example of how undemocratic it is: just like Chirac-Le Pen in France and Bush-Kerry in the US.

Yes, let us begin to have democracy. That means democracy from top to bottom of the society. Down with the secret police and other arms of government control: let us have a popular militia. Down with the oligarchs who control state enterprises and media: let us have election and compulsory term limits on officials and managers and a duty, as in Athens, to show that when you leave office you are no better off than when you started in post.

The national question

The Yanukovich camp has raised the national question in the form of suggestions that the Russian-speaking eastern regions should have autonomy and might secede. Those fine ‘democrats’, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, have demanded that those regional governors who raised this issue should be prosecuted.

The communist view of this question is that we are in general opposed to fragmenting the working class into ever smaller units along national lines; but if national groups do demand to secede, we are for allowing peaceful secessions - ‘the right to self-determination’ - as far as possible.

For these reasons we would have opposed Ukraine’s 1991 secession from the USSR. The USSR had an integrated, albeit chaotic, economy, and its break-up merely fragmented the working class. The price can be seen in the national contradictions within the fragments. We would be for a reconfederation of the states of the former USSR, on the basis of the equality of nationalities.

It might be said that Ukraine voted to secede and the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine are now ‘bound’ by that decision. Or it might be said - it has been said by some supporters of the Yushchenko camp in the western media - that the Russian speakers are merely colons or tools of Great Russian imperialism. Neither of these arguments is valid. If, as the Ukrainian crisis plays out, the Russian speakers of the east wish to secede - either to join Russia or to set up their own state - they should have the right to do so. Again, it must be stressed that communists should not advocate such an outcome.

This is an important matter, because it is quite possible further down the line that Yushchenko with the backing of the US will become president, that the eastern oligarchs will resist, using Russian nationalist rhetoric, and that a Yushchenko regime will use or attempt to use force and appeal to the ‘west’ for support against Russia. The workers’ movement in this country and elsewhere needs to stand ready if necessary to oppose the actions our own governments might take in this situation.