Communists and Ukraine - Part No. 1. Left "Euromaidan"
I was asked to write this article for a long time.
It could be written in different ways - one way was to flatter and to praise the accomplishments, closing the eyes at shortcomings or otherwise swing the blade and blame everything and everyone.
I'll write like it is, about the good and the bad. This will be a series of articles, which will come out 1 per day. Today is the first part.
Left Euromaidan
It is not a secret that from the onset of the events in Ukraine the Russian and Ukrainian left rapidly split over the line of supporting/not supporting the Euromaidan. A certain group of people openly proclaimed that the "Euromaidan" plays a progressive role, because it will finish off the corrupt and oligarchic regime and will establish democratic rule. Among them were anarchists, pacifists, the left intelligentsia, and certain Trotskyites.
They openly stood in support of what was happening, announcing that there's no fascism in Ukraine, there are no oligarchs-puppeteers, no american imperialism, which initiates all of this. There are simply honest people, which gathered and build the democratic rule and fight with the power of major capital like they can. This quite loud minority repeated the arguments of the times of Syrian and Libyan wars like a xerox, when the regimes of Assad and Gaddafi were proclaimed fascist and the revolutions against them were proclaimed democratic. It was supposed that after deposing the regime of military autocracy or the "wrong green socialism" a bourgeois-democratic regime will be established in these countries under the conditions of which the left and the communist parties will have an easier time fighting for establishment of a true communist democratic rule according to classic covenants.
When at the output a bloody mess was produced there, where no growth of the left or even of the bourgeois-democratic sentiment didn't happen, they rapidly forgot about these hapless countries that were destroyed by the global imperialism, because the actual result - tens of thousands of corpses and the bearded men marching to power with Quran at the ready was not the result that these types of characters envisioned when they proclaimed the democratic liberation from the oppression of tyranny of middle-eastern autocrats.
The story with Egypt is characteristic, where the Russian "left for Euromaidan" that supported Tahrir were off target systematically. When the protests against Mubarak began, Tahrir was greeted as a way to get rid of the military rule. The regime was deposed and it was first replaced by a bourgeois administration that was oriented on the USA. A part of censorship limitations was cancelled in the country and allowed a part of parties and apparently created the conditions for the development of socialist ideas. Actually, during the bourgeois-democratic elections, where the left simply had no chance, the recently banned "Muslim Brotherhood" was triumphant, a fundamentalist religious organization (which was persecuted under Mubarak much more strictly than the local left and the communists). The supporters of Tahrir weren't depressed and told us stories about how the left soccer fans are loosening the islamist regime in Alexandria and after they're done the progressive role of Tahrir will be clear. Everybody knows the end of that story. "Muslim Brotherhood" started to go out of control of the American imperialism, which let the very same military that were deposed on Tahrir to unleash carnage on Cairo in order to destroy the "Muslim Brotherhood". Eventually the very same military autocracy was established in Egypt, the "left soccer fans" are nowhere to be seen, what was the point of Tahrir in the light of replacing Mubarak with Al-Sisi isn't clear.
On the example of Egypt, Syria, and Libya, we see how easily certain left confuse true popular discontent and uprisings with mutinies arranged by the capital that are directed at regime change from one autocrat to another. In all of these countries the situation of the working class as a result of these "popular revolutions" significantly worsened and the are no perspectives of improvement. Just like there are no perspectives of socialist rise, which is now crushed by a heavy foot of either a military dictatorship or of islamic fundamentalism. A catastrophic deviation between the expectations and prognosis and the reality is evident. Do you think that lessons were learned? No way.
It would seem that one or two times would be enough to understand that something needs to be fixed in the theater, but no - once the events started in Ukraine we saw again the traditional jog over the rakes. Those who are against the "Euromaidan" are accomplices of the Russian imperialism, supporters of the criminal Yanukovich regime, supporters of the opportunists from the CPU (i.e., the Communist Party of Ukraine), sovoks, impertsy, kraskons, and so on and so forth. Again, with stubbornness worthy of a better cause, they started to present an obviously artificial protest, which was funded by the Ukrainian oligarchy and global imperialism, as if it were a purely popular uprising - Maidan gathered by itself, there are bright faces there, everyone is for freedom, democracy, and social justice. Berkut - fascists, the fascists - fighters for freedom. All excesses don't count. They were sincere in their righteous anger at those, who said that "Euromaidan" won't lead Ukraine to anything good, they sincerely rejoiced when the coup happened, which they viewed as a victory of desired ideals.
And so "Euromaidan" won. And of course just like in previous cases all of these characters put their foot in it, when it turned out that the power was seized by a different group of oligarchs with the support of fascist squads, which led a decisive struggle for eliminating the communist ideology, the Soviet history, and communist organizations. At some point these boys from the left intelligentsia and nihilists figured out that they were left with zilch, effectively falling out of the communist movement, because the achieved result spoke better than any words. After ending up in the same boat with the fascists they committed a political suicide, from which it will be impossible to wash away. This is not a far away Libya or Syria, here their ideological mating with the fascist regime (in full correspondence with Dimitrov's definition) turned out to be obvious, on the background of the unfolding general civilian resistance to the fascist coup.
They didn't immediately understand what kind of trap they got into. When the power in Ukraine ended up not just in the hands of the representatives of major capital, but in the hands of the major capital itself, it turned out that these strugglers for the democratic rule protect the regime, which led to power the richest Ukrainian vampires, the dollar multi-billionaires and sponsors of fascist squads. Such "left", which supported the coup to the benefit of such people, are real good.
And then there were Slavyansk, Odessa, and Mariupol, where the fascism already entered the stage without hiding, openly killing people, including communists. The predicted civil war and massive casualties became reality. Some of the "left for Euromaidan" freaked out, because they understood that this time their misconceptions led them completely astray, not at all where they wanted to be. Such people quickly fell out of public arguments preferring to live the shame of their misconception far away from those who they recently trampled for disagreeing with "Euromaidan".
Certainly, there were those who couldn't gather the strength to acknowledge their own misconception and fully passed to the side of the fascist dictatorship, accepting the main premises of the Ukrainian fascism - struggle against Russia in any shape or form, hatred for the USSR, hatred for the Great Patriotic War, hatred towards "vatniks and kolorads". Such left in the process simply stopped being the left, crossing over to a different flank. They may still preserve the residual left rhetoric and some left phraseology, but in essence they now speak a different language. Such metamorphosis isn't new. For example, the young Joseph Goebbels was engaged by socialist ideas, which he enjoyed in the company of Strasser brothers. But at certain moment he completely changed colors and became one of the most righteous nazis, betraying his colleagues.
This proximity to fascism is quite understandable - just like the Nazis in Germany during the early stages of their activity, the Ukrainian fascists use anti-capitalist rhetoric in their propaganda. Some are misguided by this, believing that the other fascist excesses aren't important, since they are against the oligarchs already. But in reality it turns out just like in Germany, where the party that had "socialist" in its name was the most faithful servant of major capital.
The behavior of such people is akin to as if a number of members of the communist party of Germany that was persecuted by the nazis would announce that Hitler is right in his thesis about the global jewish-communist conspiracy and the German communists who stand against the "popular german revolution" need to be sent into concentration camps for good, to fuel the ovens of crematoriums with "red wool" before they built their global Comintern.
The problem of such people, which in their majority are quite sincere in their misconception, that behind them there was and there is no anyhow positive project. They don't have a clear image of the future, which they may propose and build, they principally cannot muster the strength not only to joint the party directed at seizing power but simply into a group that would at least discuss it. The ultimate egocentrism and nihilism, multiplied by a principle that the most important is to get involved into a fight and then we'll see explains their systematic ideologic defeat in the attempts to join yet another revolution inspired by the global capital or the global imperialism revolution. For the global imperialism and the major capital, these are convenient travel mates (not even allies), which are attracted within the confines of constructing a generic civilian protest directed at overthrowing the inconvenient autocrat. Later the are no longer necessary, because the regime was changed as desired and such characters once again become marginal without drawing conclusions for themselves that they are used time and again in the interests of the capital, which strengthens pillaging of the working people. A characteristic example of the contemporary fascist Ukraine once again shows how such "left for Euromaidan" became the direct accomplices of the processes that led to mass impoverishment of common folk in the interests of a bunch of scrooges and appointees of the American imperialism.
The hopes that under the influence of devastation the recognition will emerge in the masses and such "left for Euromaidan" will lead something are even more naive than the hope of Russian impertsy that due to starvation in Ukraine everybody will understand everything and Ukraine will become fully "pro-Russian". The thought that the Ukrainian capital and its media servants will appoint not themselves as the guilty party and even not the fascists, but the Russian imperialism and the difficult legacy of the communist regime doesn't cross their minds. This is a classic of solving internal problems - the stronger the crisis the more you have to inflate the image of the external enemy, on which the ongoing madness can be blamed. As if people never read Orwell, who was writing not about the communist regime of Stalin times but precisely about the bourgeois-fascist society of ingsoc, with its doublethink and newspeak.
It is exactly this kind of society that is being built in Ukraine and if somebody thinks that without an external strike (like it happened with the fascist Germany) or without an internal revolution this regime will disappear anywhere, then they are deeply mistaken. Regimes built on open terror rarely go away at their own volition. Either a military defeat or an armed rebellion is required to depose it. Do the "left for Euromaidan" plan anything like that? Considering their success in "party buildup" there's even nothing to speak about here. Will the become the vanguard of standing against the regime of the Ukrainian oligarchy and the fascist dictatorship? The answer, I think, is obvious.
Anyhow there's not much pity for them, because such a political suicide will only cleanse the communist movement from altogether foreign characters, which only had two or three loud phrases out of communist ideology and some kind of avatar with a red flag. They got what they deserved. It is quite symptomatic that some Ukrainian "antifa" in the fever of fascist hysteria and struggle for the democratic rule led by the multi-billionaire Poroshenko are now fighting within the fascist punitive battalions. So to say, "for the covenants of bolsheviks and communists" along with their favorite "Hauptsturmfuhrer" Lyashko.
Original article: http://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/1730382.html (in Russian)