Trotsky on Ukraine: lessons for today

By Frank Brenner

We are reposting Leon Trotsky's article from 1939, “Problem of the Ukraine”, from the Marxist Internet Archive, as a useful starting point in trying to make sense of the current crisis in Ukraine.

It is notable that very few of the groups claiming to be Trotskyist make any reference to this article, in particular to its central demand for a free, independent Soviet Ukraine. No doubt such groups would argue that the article was written 75 years ago, and a lot has changed. Marxism isn't a dogma, and not every word, even of someone of Trotsky's stature, is holy writ. Nonetheless, it is striking that groups which otherwise venerate Trotsky (sometimes with a degree of hero-worship he would have found appalling) make not a single reference to this article, let alone offer up an explanation as to why it may no longer be relevant.

And the more one learns about the Ukraine crisis, the more one is impressed by how the dead past has come back to life, how the supposedly out-of-date is very much up-to-date. Vampires like Stepan Bandera, a Nazi collaborator who ran a fascist puppet state in Ukraine during the war that butchered thousands, have become undead, politically if not literally. Stalin, too, is much in vogue these days in the Kremlin. And ancient disputes – the Crimean Tatars – are suddenly front-page news. All sides in this crisis are embracing 'their' history fervently ... except, it would seem, the Marxist left.

Which is a serious problem because this crisis has unfolded with a speed and violence that make it hard to get one's political bearings. All the more reason to consider carefully Trotsky's article, especially as this is his fullest statement on the issue. In the parade of historical ghosts that is Ukraine today, he deserves a prominent place.

What follows are some observations on the current crisis and what I believe the fundamentals of a Marxist standpoint should be. I want to depart from the usual practice of tiny grouplets issuing statements awash in overheated rhetoric that pretend to have everything worked out, along with a heavy dose of denunciations for anyone who might disagree with them. The crisis in Ukraine is complicated and confusing, and probably the first principle to keep in mind is skepticism towards anyone who claims to have all the answers. I also don't have any special access to information about the facts on the ground apart from what's available to everyone on the net and in the mass media, so the best I can offer is a gleaning of what I feel are useful insights from a variety observers, not all of whom I necessarily agree with politically. Nonetheless I think such an approach can be helpful if it makes up in clarity what it lacks in rhetorical 'fervor'.

First point: Marxists should oppose the dismemberment of Ukraine. That means opposing any and all annexations, whether by Russia or by other 'players' like Poland and its imperialist partners in NATO. The dismemberment of Ukraine would be a disaster on the same order as that which befell Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This would be a calamity for the working class, and not just of the countries involved.

Trotsky argued strongly for the right of Ukraine to self-determination, and that right still has political significance. Ukraine was an oppressed nation under czarism and that oppression resumed under Stalinism, with genocidal results in the Thirties.

For Marxists, the right to self-determination is NOT an endorsement of Ukrainian nationalism. Rather it means one thing only: the right to separate, to establish an independent state. The distinction is crucial to the Marxist position on this issue, most clearly spelled out by Lenin: the right to self-determination is akin to the right to divorce (or to an abortion, an analogy Trotsky once drew): upholding that right doesn't mean you make a virtue of the thing itself. When you do make a virtue of Ukrainian nationalism, you can only end up in a reactionary dead-end. That's evident from the glaring contradictions in the Maidan movement, which I'll get to later.

But now I want to consider a possible objection to Trotsky's position. Since Ukraine already got its independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it could be argued that the right to self-determination no longer applies. To which my reply would be that in the current crisis that independence is on the brink of collapse. So, translated into 21st century terms, self-determination in Ukraine means no annexations.

Why is this important? I think no annexations has to be a bedrock policy for Marxists on Ukraine BECAUSE WHAT IS AT STAKE IS THE UNITY OF THE UKRAINIAN WORKING CLASS. To support the carve-up of Ukraine into ethnic enclaves means giving up on any possibility of achieving class solidarity across national lines. Ukrainian-speaking workers and Russian-speaking workers would be under the thumb of reactionary nationalist forces on both sides of the ethnic divide. This is what happened in Yugoslavia, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. So, an indispensable pre-condition for fighting nationalist ideology is to oppose annexation; otherwise, it will be impossible to get a hearing for socialist policies that can unite workers in Ukraine.

The same considerations apply to linguistic rights of minorities, particularly Russian-speakers. When the interim government in Kiev took over after Yanukovych fled, one of its first actions (later withdrawn) was to outlaw Russian as an official language. In the reactionary logic of nationalism, the 'victory' of one linguistic group can only come at the expense of another. For Marxists, the crux is always the unity of the working class, and anything that gets in the way of that unity, that builds up resentments and creates fissures along linguistic or national lines, has to be opposed. Marxists should support full linguistic rights for Russian-speakers, including the right to educate their children and to work in their language. (Incidentally, Russian speakers in Ukraine are not Russians, they are Ukrainians who happen to speak Russian, just as Hispanics in Texas or California are not Mexicans but Americans. For its own reasons, the Russian government has deliberately blurred this distinction, and much of the radical left has followed suit.)

Second point: No crisis in Ukraine is ever just about Ukraine. Like the Balkans, like the Kurds, Ukraine is a conundrum that capitalism has never been able to resolve or get past. The current crisis has elements of Cold War redux, with a US-led NATO squaring off against the evil empire run from the Kremlin.

In that confrontation, one's first instinct as a revolutionary should be hostility towards one's 'own' government. The term American imperialism may seem outdated rhetoric, but only to those suffering from historical amnesia. A recent summary of US foreign policy since 1945 shows that “the US tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders” (1). Drone warfare, an Obama specialty, can be added to that list. All of which should make it plain, mass media hype notwithstanding, that the power elite in Washington, and its counterparts in London and Berlin, couldn't care less about the welfare of the people of Ukraine. Their real interest is a strategic one, long expressed by such gurus of Great Game politics as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, which is to encircle Russia with a network of hostile states occupied by NATO forces.

The crisis in Ukraine is a major opportunity to weaken Russia, to say nothing of the immense economic spoils Ukraine has to offer Western business. So there is no doubt that the CIA et al. are up to their usual sinister machinations. It's not that clear, however, to what extent they are fomenting events or, instead, reacting to them. Too often what passes itself off as Marxist analysis is just a reductive view of a crisis like Ukraine as a chess match between Obama and Putin. Imperialism is a reality but the elites aren't omnipotent. There are other 'players' in such a crisis, including a rather important one for Marxists – the masses.

The campaign to demonize Putin in the Western media has been pretty unrelenting, but as is all too often the case, the truth and the hype turn out to be opposites: think Iraq. The Western powers are the aggressors and Putin is reacting defensively, desperate to maintain what the Russian elites have always considered their 'sphere of influence'.

That being said, opposing Western imperialism doesn't mean giving a pass to Russian imperialism. The annexation of Crimea, the troop build-ups on the Russian-Ukrainian border, the appeals to Russian patriotism, are clearly aimed at building a Greater Russia, bound together by what Trotsky called Great Russian chauvinism. And another point of no small importance: for all the confusion of the Maidan movement, it still was a mass movement that toppled a regime, and how could the Kremlin not see that as a dangerous precedent? It's notable that as the Ukraine events have unfolded, the nascent opposition movement to Putin inside Russia has largely been silenced, drowned out by a torrent of Russian patriotism.

The events in Ukraine have also brought a more aggressive Polish capitalism on to the scene. Reportedly the Polish foreign minister Sikorski has been the leading voice inside NATO pushing for military intervention in Ukraine. The government of Premier Donald Tusk combines free market zealotry and Catholic social reaction, and now the country's political culture is awash in militarist rhetoric and anti-Russian nationalism. There is a long history to this conflict: Poland and Russia have fought over Ukraine for centuries. In the event Ukraine disintegrates, Poland would quickly seize its western territories, which were part of Poland before the Second World War. Even if this doesn't happen, the orientation of the Kiev political elite towards the EU and NATO would mean that a so-called independent capitalist Ukraine would really be an economic and political vassal of Poland and ultimately of an even bigger 'player' to the west, Germany. It would probably last about as long as a hunk of meat in a tank of sharks.

Third point: We need to pay careful attention to role of the masses in this crisis. Here the picture gets dense and tangled. Workers seem to have joined the Maidan occupation and protests against Yanukovych, and workers in the Donbas are now also part of the 'separatist' groups seizing city halls and police stations. In both cases they seem to play no independent role but instead function as recruits to the banners of contending nationalisms, and perhaps just as importantly, to the machinations of competing oligarchs. The role of the oligarchs is, it seems to me, a key to the real story behind the current crisis in Ukraine. In large areas of the country, they are virtually a law unto themselves, controlling not only finance and factories but armed gangs as well. But their activities go largely unreported, and so it becomes a guessing game to figure out to what extent spontaneous movements are truly spontaneous.

I can't claim any independent knowledge of the mass movements in Ukraine so what I'm going to do is summarize the most insightful comments I've found from others. The first such summary is from an article in the Workers International Journal by Balazs Nagy. Again a disclaimer: I don't agree with the political tendency Nagy belongs to or even everything in this particular article. (Apply the same disclaimer to the other sources that follow.) But this much I do agree with. Nagy argues that in the aftermath of such an epoch-changing event as the collapse of the Soviet Union, it would be nonsense to imagine that mass movements in the old Soviet bloc countries are going to be class conscious; instead they are going to be marked by “howling contradictions” in their political outlook, for the simple reason that you don't dispense with 75 years of crap that easily. Nagy gives a striking example of a miners' strike in Ukraine in 1993 that brought down the government of Leonid Kravchuk: besides typical union demands the workers “advanced the demand for a market economy against the bureaucracy's monstrous planning system. That was how they were duped and their movement exploited by bourgeois formations.” Another famous example is the Solidarność movement in Poland, and the way in which it got sucked in by the Catholic church. Nagy is right when he says that these examples of what he calls “this spectacular lack of any political clarity of vision” by the working class are “entirely due to the heritage of the Stalinist dictatorship.”(2)

I think what happened with the Maidan protests is best understood as another example of such howling contradictions, and if anything this time the outcome was even more extreme. The spark that set those protests off was the sudden refusal by Yanukovych to sign a trade pact with the EU, but along with that came a welling up of hatred of government corruption, the power of the oligarchs and grinding poverty. But very quickly this movement was co-opted by extreme right-wing and neo-Nazi forces (Svoboda, Right Sector). Leftists and unionists who tried to join the Maidan occupation were driven out violently. The fascists became 'heroes' in the eyes of many protesters, as the most militant opponents of the government. Given how much Stalinism did to discredit socialism in the eyes of the masses, it's not surprising that fascists came to fill the political vacuum in a mass movement without any clear idea of where it was going.

Now the fascists have important positions inside the interim government, the first time in postwar history that neo-Nazis are in power anywhere in Europe. There is also strong evidence that the fascists manipulated the protests by posing as government snipers who killed 19 people in late February. Up to then Yanukovych had been desperately trying to hold on, offering to share power with the protest leaders; the outrage over the shootings, which everyone blamed on the government, forced him out. In April, Right Sector thugs were responsible for the worst outrage of the crisis so far, killing 46 pro-Russian protesters in Odessa. A movement that doesn't know where it's going can be a very dangerous thing.

But it's wrong to see Maidan as nothing other than a movement FOR fascism. In a crisis like this it's wrong to overestimate the power of the enemy, while underestimating the power of the masses. Fascism is not yet triumphant in Ukraine, or even in Kiev: the government there is a reactionary amalgam of oligarchs, mainstream politicians and fascists, but it is also a highly unstable regime, and the fascists themselves are still far from being a mass movement. Denunciations of fascism are easy to make, but it's much harder to find a way to appeal to the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian masses. If there was nothing more to Maidan than fascism, then any prospect for uniting Ukrainian workers goes out the window. In my view, fascists are not the main danger, at least for now, in Ukraine. Much more important are the oligarchs. Focus fire on them and it becomes possible to counter nationalist hysteria (on both sides) with an appeal based on class. A Ukrainian oligarch is no less an exploiter and a thief than a Russian one.

Once you begin looking at Maidan from that perspective, some clarity emerges. Here is a quote from a manifesto by a group called the Left Opposition Collective, which provides an important context to the protests:

Euromaidan’s popularity has nothing to do with Ukrainians finding the question of free trade with the European Union so significant that it emboldened them to survive sleepless nights on the square. The country’s socioeconomic problems, which are much more acute than those of its neighbors to the East and West, gave the protest its meaning. The average salary in Ukraine is 2 to 2.5 times lower than in Russia and Belarus, and much lower than in the EU. The worldwide economic crisis affected the Ukrainian economy much more drastically than almost any other economy in Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals. Economic growth after the crisis nearly froze, and industry will most likely continue to decline in 2013. Furthermore, Ukraine’s economic system more or less exempts oligarchs from paying taxes. One can completely legally export tens of billions of dollars worth of minerals, metals, ammonia, wheat, and sunflowers, and report no profit. All earnings are stashed in offshore jurisdictions, where almost all of Ukraine’s functioning enterprises are formally located. Any profits earned by an enterprise inside the country can be legally and effortlessly transported to offshore locations by reframing them as a fictitious loan, for example. (3)

I should add that the manifesto comes with a program of socialist policies (nationalization of primary industries, workers' control) and policies aimed at the oligarchs (a luxury tax, prohibition of offshore transfers, separation of government and business) that seems to me in the spirit of what Trotsky thought a program should be – a bridge to socialist consciousness. Beyond that I know nothing about the group.

“Ukrainians, “ wrote Slavoj Žižek in a recent article, “ are far from blind about the reality of the EU. They are fully aware of its troubles and disparities: their message is simply that their own situation is much worse. Europe may have problems, but they are a rich man's problems.” (4) That seems to me about right when it comes to understanding what Maidan was about. And that ultimately can pit the masses against their homegrown fascists, who like the extreme right in other countries, are hostile to the EU and have nothing else to offer except nationalism, more misery and eventually war. Socialists, on the other hand, do have an alternative: a united socialist states of Europe. Which means that the issue of Europe can be a wedge into class consciousness, without giving in to illusions about the EU.

I read somewhere that as many as 16 statues of Lenin were torn down all over Ukraine. It's one of the sad ironies of these events that Lenin is identified with the hated oppression of Stalinism. But as Žižek rightly points out, “the golden era of Ukrainian national identity” was “the first decade of the Soviet Union, when Soviet policy in a Ukraine exhausted by war and famine was 'indigenization'. Ukrainian culture and language were revived, and rights to heath care, education and social security introduced.” Doubtless very few people in Ukraine know that history. The Kremlin, though, is well aware of it. “The Bolsheviks,” declared Putin in a recent speech, “for a number of reasons – may God judge them – added large sections of the historical south of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. This was done with no consideration for the ethnic make-up of the population, and today these areas form the south-east of Ukraine.” It seems that Lenin is very unpopular with nationalists on both sides of this divide. That's the kind of unpopularity Marxists should embrace. It's the same spirit that animates Trotsky's article.

Notes:

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/13/ukraine-us-war-russia-john-pilger

[2] http://workersinternational.info/wp-content/uploads/WIRFI-Journal-May-2014.pdf

[3] http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/manifesto-left-opposition-in-ukraine/

[4] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n09/slavoj-zizek/barbarism-with-a-human-face

The quote from Putin at the end is from Žižek ‘s article.