Socialist Internationalism and the Ukraine War

Rohini Hensman

How do the working people of the world transform themselves from a plethora of groups waging a multitude of scattered struggles for survival and dignity to a revolutionary force capable of ending capitalism, governing the earth, and taking over production? They have innumerable tasks before them, but one of the most important is to overcome divisions among themselves resulting from ethnic supremacism and nationalism. Marxists have been debating this issue from the beginning, but it still plagues us today. The war in Ukraine offers a good opportunity to examine it more closely. 

The National and Colonial Question

Vladimir Putin’s address on 21 February 2022 was not by any means the first time he cursed V.I. Lenin, but it was perhaps his most extended attack on Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who, he claimed, had created the Ukrainian state

by separating, severing, what is historically Russian land… Lenin’s ideas of what amounted in essence to a confederative state arrangement and a slogan about the right of nations to self-determination, up to secession, were laid in the foundation of Soviet statehood. Initially they were confirmed in the Declaration on the Formation of the USSR in 1922, and later on, after Lenin’s death, were enshrined in the 1924 Soviet Constitution…

Going back to history, I would like to repeat that the Soviet Union was established in the place of the former Russian Empire in 1922. But practice showed immediately that it was impossible to preserve or govern such a vast and complex territory on the amorphous principles that amounted to confederation. They were far removed from reality and the historical tradition.

It is logical that the Red Terror and a rapid slide into Stalin’s dictatorship, the domination of the communist ideology and the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, nationalisation and the planned economy – all this transformed the formally declared but ineffective principles of government into a mere declaration. In reality, the union republics did not have any sovereign rights, none at all. The practical result was the creation of a tightly centralised and absolutely unitary state.

In fact, what Stalin fully implemented was not Lenin’s but his own principles of government. But he did not make the relevant amendments to the cornerstone documents, to the Constitution, and he did not formally revise Lenin’s principles underlying the Soviet Union. From the look of it, there seemed to be no need for that, because everything seemed to be working well in conditions of the totalitarian regime, and outwardly it looked wonderful, attractive and even super-democratic.

And yet, it is a great pity that the fundamental and formally legal foundations of our state were not promptly cleansed of the odious and utopian fantasies inspired by the revolution…1

Putin’s knowledge of the history of the Tsarist empire is not perfect: he seems not to know that the first stable state in Ukraine was Kievan Rus, established by the Scandinavian Varangians, who settled in Kiev in the late ninth century AD, the height of its prosperity occurring under Volodymyr the Great (980–1015 AD), who converted to Byzantine Christianity, and his son Iaroslav the Wise. Its existence as a state therefore predates the establishment of the Grand Principality of Moscow, which later developed into the Russian empire. But Kievan Rus was destroyed by the invasion of Genghis Khan’s Golden Hordes in the thirteenth century, and was subsequently fought over, divided and dominated by Lithuania, Poland, Austria and Russia, until most of it was colonised by Russia in 1654. Nonetheless, there was a revival of Ukrainian culture in the nineteenth century, in the latter part of which both nationalist and socialist parties grew as Ukraine was integrated more closely into the Tsarist empire as a provider of wheat and raw materials such as coal and iron, and as a market for Russian manufactured goods.2 Crimea was incorporated into the empire even later, in 1783, at which time the indigenous Crimean Tatars constituted the overwhelming majority of the population.

However, his recapitulation of post-revolutionary history is relatively accurate: the Soviet Union was indeed established on the territory of the Russian Empire; after the civil war, Lenin wanted it to be a voluntary union between equal Soviet socialist republics; Stalin staged a counter-revolution which Putin approves of, but he failed to cleanse the legal foundations of the state of the ‘odious and utopian fantasies inspired by the revolution’. Perhaps the reason Stalin failed to do so was, partly, as Putin comments, because ‘everything seemed to be working well in conditions of the totalitarian regime’; but another reason is that he was projecting himself as Lenin’s closest comrade and legitimate successor, and therefore could not afford to contradict Lenin openly.

Putin has done us a service by raising the issue of the national and colonial question in this uncompromising fashion, and it is worth going back to examine it again. But, before we do that, a word of caution. The Marxist debate on the national question is confused and confusing, and there are two main reasons:

1. Whereas the colonies of the West European imperialist powers were mainly overseas, the Mongol, East European and Ottoman empires colonised adjacent countries, so it was easy to slip into the error of blurring the distinction between the empire and the state. For example, no one would think of India as being part of the British state, but, when Putin sees Ukraine as part of the Russian state, he is by no means alone, nor is this the first time he has done so. As far back as April 2005, he deplored the demise of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century because it left tens of millions of Russians ‘beyond the fringes of Russian territory’.3
2. The terms ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ were used to refer both to a whole country colonised by an imperial power and to what we would today call an ethnic group, and the latter in turn could be based on religious community – for example Jews, whether they were believers or not – or language and national origin, as in the case of Czechs, Hungarians and so on. Even today, terms like ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic minority’ are used in a confusing manner because people who belong to the same ethnic group on one count (say religion) may belong to different ethnic groups on another (say language or national origin). To cut through this confusion, I propose to use ‘ethnicity’ to refer to all these differences: physical characteristics like skin colour, national origin, linguistic community, religious community/sect (whether believers or not), caste and tribe. I will refer to discrimination and violence against people on the grounds of any of these characteristics as ‘ethnic supremacism,’ of which racism is a sub-category. It should be obvious that imperialism presupposes ethnic supremacism: the belief that the people of the country that is subordinated are in some way inferior to the people of the foreign state that dominates them.

There were three main positions in the debate. The first was articulated by those whom Eric Blanc designates as ‘borderland socialists’ from the empire’s periphery: notably Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, the Caucasus and Ukraine, as well as the firmly anti-Zionist Jewish Bund, all of whom sought to tie national liberation and the struggle against ethnic supremacism to a class struggle orientation. For example, in an environment where many socialists took an ambivalent attitude to antisemitism, the Bund called for a joint struggle of Jewish and Christian workers against antisemitic pogroms and opposed Zionist efforts to use the pogroms as a pretext to divide them. In 1900, Lenin denounced Plekhanov’s racist comments about Jews, yet, after a pogrom in 1902, Lenin himself denounced the Bund’s claim that antisemitism had penetrated the working class, despite the fact that the Social Democrats in Odessa had banned Jews from membership in order to avoid alienating antisemitic Russian workers. Only in 1903 did the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP) pass a resolution calling for a resolute struggle against antisemitic pogroms. Borderland socialists also objected to the assumption that after the revolution, the state would remain centralised and Russian would continue to be the state language, as in the Tsarist empire.4

Jews were not the only ethnic group facing racism before and after the revolution. In his monograph on Engels and the ‘non-historic’ peoples, Roman Rosdolsky – chief theoretician of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine and survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was incarcerated for aiding Jews5 – develops a critique of the way this category was used by Engels during the revolutions of 1848–49 to designate certain East European peoples as counter-revolutionary by nature and doomed to extinction. In it, Rosdolsky cites a similar example from the Russian revolution, when in the cities of Ukraine in 1918–1919, it was not a rare occurrence for Red Guards to shoot inhabitants who spoke Ukrainian in public or admitted to being Ukrainian, because the Russian or Russified rank-and-file party members considered Ukrainian a ‘counter-revolutionary’ language. It was only the strenuous opposition of party leaders Lenin and Leon Trotsky to such conduct that made it possible for the Ukrainian left to form an alliance with the Bolsheviks.6 Marko Bojcun too describes complex interactions of class and ethnicity in his book The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine 1897–1918.7  

The opposite position was taken by Rosa Luxemburg, who belonged to a minority faction of Polish socialists which opposed Polish independence. She tore apart the ninth point of the RSDWP programme, which said that the party demands a democratic republic whose constitution would ensure, among other things, “that all nationalities forming the state have the right to self-determination,” as being ‘foreign to the position of Marxist socialism’. She agreed with the third clause of the programme, demanding wide self-government at the local and provincial level in areas where minority ethnic communities are concentrated; the seventh clause, demanding equality before the law of all citizens regardless of sex, religion, race or nationality; and the eighth clause, saying that minority ethnic groups would be entitled to schooling in their own languages at state expense and the right to use their languages on an equal level with the state language at assemblies and all state and public functions. But after a long historical exegesis, she came to her main point:

In a class society, “the nation” as a homogeneous socio-political entity does not exist. Rather, there exist within each nation, classes with antagonistic interests and “rights”… There can be no talk of a collective and uniform will, of the self-determination of the “nation” in a society formed in such a manner. If we find in the history of modern societies “national” movements, and struggles for “national interests,” these are usually class movements of the ruling strata of the bourgeoisie, which can in any given case represent the interest of the other strata of the population only insofar as under the form of “national interests” it defends progressive forms of historical development, and insofar as the working class has not yet distinguished itself from the mass of the “nation” (led by the bourgeoisie) into an independent, enlightened political class… Social Democracy is the class party of the proletariat. Its historical task is to express the class interests of the proletariat and also the revolutionary interests of the development of capitalist society toward realizing socialism. Thus, Social Democracy is called upon to realize not the right of nations to self-determination but only the right of the working class, which is exploited and oppressed, … to self-determination.8

In other words, Luxemburg did not see national self-determination as contributing in any way to the self-determination of the proletariat or realising socialism. This is not because she supported imperialist oppression or underestimated the importance of democracy for the working class; on the contrary, already in 1900, in her pamphlet Reform or Revolution, she had said that:

If democracy has become superfluous or annoying to the bourgeoisie, it is on the contrary necessary and indispensable to the working class. It is necessary to the working class because it creates the political forms (autonomous administration, electoral rights, etc.) which will serve the proletariat as fulcrums in its task of transforming bourgeois society. Democracy is indispensable to the working class because only through the exercise of its democratic rights, in the struggle for democracy, can the proletariat become aware of its class interests and its historic task.9

Lenin started out with a very similar position to that of Luxemburg, but, after 1905, started moving closer to the position of the borderland socialists. In his reply to Luxemburg’s objection to clause 9 of the programme, published in April–June 1914, he clarified that support for national self-determination would be only in those cases where bourgeois-democratic national movements existed, and pointed out that

In Eastern Europe and Asia the period of bourgeois-democratic revolutions did not begin until 1905. The revolutions in Russia, Persia, Turkey and China, the Balkan wars – such is the chain of world events of our period in our “Orient”. And only a blind man could fail to see in this chain of events the awakening of a whole series of bourgeois-democratic national movements which strive to create nationally independent and nationally uniform states. It is precisely and solely because Russia and the neighbouring countries are passing through this period that we must have a clause in our programme on the right of nations to self-determination.10

In October 1914, in a speech delivered in Zurich, he said, ‘What Ireland was for England, Ukraine has become for Russia: exploited in the extreme, and getting nothing in return. Thus the interests of the world proletariat in general and the Russian proletariat in particular require that the Ukraine regains its state independence, since only this will permit the development of the cultural level that the proletariat needs.’ However, the Bolsheviks did not develop these insights into a coherent strategy for the oppressed peoples of the Russian empire, leading to avoidable problems during the civil war, but Lenin and Trotsky learned from their mistakes, and, by the end of 1919, were committed to a free and independent Soviet Ukraine.11 Lenin was also influenced by the young Tatar Bolshevik Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, who argued that the revolution in the Western imperialist countries could not succeed unless it was linked to revolutions in their colonies in the East.12

By contrast with the complete centralisation of power in the Tsarist empire and Russification of its colonies, a series of treaties in 1920–21 recognised Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland and Poland as independent states. Byelorussia, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent Soviet Socialist Republics. In smaller minority ethnic enclaves, local and regional self-government and linguistic and cultural development were encouraged. On 30 December 1922, the First Congress of Soviets of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics approved the Treaty on the Formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which included the right to self-determination up to the right to secede.13

Before evaluating the positions in this debate, another clarification is necessary. In Part Two on ‘Imperialism’ in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, she laments that:

Whether in the form of a new republic or of a reformed constitutional monarchy, the state inherited as its supreme function the protection of all inhabitants in its territory no matter what their nationality, and was supposed to act as a supreme legal institution. The tragedy of the nation-state was that the people’s rising national consciousness interfered with these functions. In the name of the will of the people, the state was forced to recognise only ‘nationals’ as citizens, to grant full civil and political rights only to those who belonged to the national community by right of origin and fact of birth. This meant that the state was partly transformed from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation.14

‘Nation’ and ‘nationality’ here means ‘ethnic group’ and ‘ethnicity,’ and the distinction Arendt draws is between the state as guarantor of equality before the law and the state as an instrument of the dominant ethnic group, which can refuse full civil and political rights to other groups. This is indeed inevitable if the state is linked to any particular ethnic community. At best, people from subordinate ethnicities become second-class citizens suffering discrimination and exclusion, at worst, they could be subjected to ethnic cleansing or genocide. This would, by definition, be a state without equal rights for all, and therefore not a democratic republic. Uniting workers in anticapitalist struggles would face the kind of problems faced in South Africa under apartheid. Of course, ethnic supremacism can be rampant even in a democratic republic, but enshrining it in the state makes it exponentially harder to fight.

Coming back to the debate, it is important to start with the positions that all the participants share. They are all Marxist internationalists, who know that capitalism is global and can only be defeated by the working people of the world. They also agree that the working class needs democracy in order to develop the ability to carry out a socialist transformation of society, a position shared by Marx and Engels if we carry out a careful analysis of their writings on the subject.15 It is abundantly clear that Luxemburg opposes linkage of the state in the oppressed nations with any ethnic group, but, if we read carefully, it is clear that the borderland socialists and Lenin too are arguing that ‘national self-determination’ makes sense only where the people of a whole country, in all their diversity, are fighting for freedom from oppression by an imperialist state; today, the term ‘national liberation movement’ or ‘independence movement’ captures this struggle better than the old term ‘national self-determination’. They all agree that where there are enclaves of minority communities, they should have full legal equality with the majority community, linguistic and cultural rights, and rights to local and regional self-government in accordance with the other points in the social-democratic programme. So, there is a large area of overlap between the three parties.

Of course, Luxemburg is right to see nationalism as a bourgeois ideology, affirming as it does that all members of the nation have common interests – defined by the bourgeoisie – which override the common interests of workers of the nation with workers of other countries. What distinguishes her position from the other two is her assumption that the working classes of imperialist states and colonised states can unite in the struggle against capitalism without uprooting imperialism and establishing the independence of the colonies. She fails to realise that ethnic supremacism in the imperialist countries is too often shared not only by sections of the working class but even by self-professed socialists or communists, and can be replaced by respect for the agency and revolutionary potential of colonial peoples only when they have won their freedom. Paradoxical though it may seem, national independence is therefore a necessary step on the road to socialist internationalism.

What this debate reveals is that overcoming nationalism and ethnic supremacism in the working class in order to achieve socialist internationalism is by no means a simple process. Opposition to all imperialisms and support for national liberation struggles is an essential part of it. Combating ethnic supremacism in all imperialist countries is an obvious corollary of this. But what about the nationalism of oppressed peoples? Here, there is a line to be drawn between struggles to establish inclusive democracies in former colonies, which socialists should support because they provide the conditions in which working people can develop the ability to carry out a socialist transformation of society, and attempts by certain colonial elites to monopolise the state on behalf of their own ethnic groups after independence, which socialists should not support because they create enormous obstacles to working-class solidarity, not only with workers in other countries but even with workers from other ethnic groups in their own country. What makes this even more complicated is the fact that inclusive and ethnic nationalism are often intertwined.16 Rosdolsky is surely right when he writes that ‘Just as the working class cannot be socialist or revolutionary a priori, neither is it internationalist a priori … Far from being “by nature without national prejudice,” the proletariat of every land must first acquirethrough arduous effort the internationalist attitude that its general, historical interests demand from it.’17 What made this particularly important for Rosdolsky, and remains equally important for us today, is the potential for ethnic supremacism, when combined with authoritarianism, to become fascism.

From Stalin to Putin

There has been extensive Marxist debate on the characterisation of the state and relations of production in the USSR under Stalin, but much less on imperialism and racism. Yet this was one of Lenin’s greatest concerns when he wrote ‘The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation”’, which was part of what came to be called his ‘Last Testament’. After expressing anguish that Orjonikidze, one of Stalin’s close associates, had struck a Georgian communist who disagreed with plans to terminate Georgia’s independent status, he continued,

It is quite natural that in such circumstances the ‘freedom to secede from the union’ by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant.

[…] I think that Stalin’s haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious ‘nationalist-socialism’, played a fatal role here. In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles…

Here we have an important question of principle: how is internationalism

to be understood?

In my writings on the national question I have already said that an abstract presentation of the question of nationalism in general is of no use at all. A distinction must necessarily be made between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and that of an oppressed nation, the nationalism of a big nation and that of a small nation. In respect of the second kind of nationalism we, nationals of a big nation, have nearly always been guilty, in historic practice, of an infinite number of cases of violence; furthermore, we commit violence and insult an infinite number of times without noticing it. [He goes on to quote the racist epithets by which Ukrainians, Georgians and non-Russians in general are insulted.] …

I think that in the present instance, as far as the Georgian nation is concerned, we have a typical case in which a genuinely proletarian attitude makes profound caution, thoughtfulness and a readiness to compromise a matter of necessity for us. The Georgian [Stalin] who is neglectful of this aspect of the question, or who carelessly flings about accusations of ‘nationalist-socialism’ (whereas he himself is a real and true ‘nationalist-socialist’, and even a vulgar Great-Russian bully), violates, in substance, the interests of proletarian class solidarity, for nothing holds up the development and strengthening of proletarian class solidarity so much as national injustice…

The need to rally against the imperialists of the West, who are defending the capitalist world, is one thing. There can be no doubt about that and it would be superfluous for me to speak about my unconditional approval of it. It is another thing when we ourselves lapse… into imperialist attitudes towards oppressed nationalities, thus undermining all our principled sincerity, all our principled defence of the struggle against imperialism. But the morrow of world history will be a day when the awakening peoples oppressed by imperialism are finally aroused and the decisive long and hard struggle for their liberation begins.18

Lenin’s last testament, dictated while he was suffering from the aftermath of two strokes, was suppressed by Stalin, which is not surprising since, among other things, it recommends the removal of Stalin as General Secretary. What comes across is (a) Lenin’s concern that there should be no basis for allegations of double standards in the Soviet Union’s domination of its own colonies while advocating the liberation of Western colonies, and (b) his genuine horror at the imperialist, racist behaviour of Russians and Russified colonials like Stalin and Orjonikidze towards non-Russians. He uses a memorable term – ‘Great-Russian chauvinism,’ which, from the context, sounds like the Russian version of White supremacism – and throws back at Stalin the label he uses to persecute borderland socialists – ‘nationalist socialist,’ i.e., a nationalist pretending to be a socialist – and accuses him of being a racist (Great-Russian) bully.

Lenin’s apprehensions were well-founded. After his death in January 1924 and a brief interregnum, Stalin concentrated absolute power in his own hands, exterminated the rest of the Bolshevik leadership, crushed all dissidence, and launched genocidal assaults on the colonial peoples of the Russian empire, once more Russifying their countries and bringing them under the rule of Moscow. The secret protocols of the Hitler-Stalin Pact signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov on 23 August 1939 effectively made Stalin a Nazi collaborator supplying the Nazis with food and raw materials in return for the go-ahead to recolonise Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and part of Poland. It ended only when Hitler abrogated it by invading the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. The post-war Yalta Agreement allowed him to set up Moscow-dominated regimes in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and later East Germany. Stalin’s totalitarian state ruling Russia and its colonies was distinguished not only by its extreme brutality but also by a systematic war on the truth, analogous to the Nazi use of the big lie repeated over and over again.19

There is an unmistakeable convergence with fascism in all this, as Hannah Arendt points out in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Indeed, Stalin started collaborating with the Nazis even before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, sending hundreds of communists to be incarcerated and killed by the Nazis while killing thousands of them himself.20 Snyder describes how Stalin covered up his collaboration with Hitler with the fiction that the ‘Great Patriotic War,’ as he called it, started in 1941, and concealed the fact that Jewish civilians – less than 2 percent of the Soviet population while Russians were more than half – were killed in greater numbers than Russian civilians, thereby creating the impression that Russians were the main victims of the Nazis. Beginning in 1948, Soviet Jews were denounced as ‘Jewish nationalists’ and ‘rootless cosmopolitans,’ demoted, arrested, sent to the Gulag, tortured and executed.21 In fact, the Nazis referred to Ukrainians too in racist terms, as ‘Afrikaner’ and ‘Neger’; during their occupation, ‘roughly 3.5 million Ukrainian civilians, mostly women and children, were killed, and again, roughly 3 million Ukrainians died in the Red Army fighting against the Wehrmacht.’22 These numbers do not include Ukrainians – including Ukrainian Jews like Volodymyr Zelensky’s grandfather – who fought against the Nazis and survived the war. In other words, Soviet Ukrainians were targeted by the Nazis for extermination, and also played a disproportionately large role in fighting against the Nazis, but these facts were concealed by the assumption that ‘Soviet’ meant ‘Russian’.

However, the ideology Stalin espoused in public was Leninism. It was a twisted version – for example, he declared the Soviet Union to be a socialist state, whereas Lenin believed socialism could only be established internationally – but, as Putin complained, he retained elements of Leninist policy, like the right to self-determination, in the constitution. This was necessary to establish his claim to being Lenin’s rightful heir. Moreover, while Stalin and his successors retained a vice-like grip over Russia’s colonies and even invaded and occupied Afghanistan in 1979, they were able to pose as anti-imperialists by supporting liberation struggles in countries colonised by Western imperialism, thus gaining influence in these countries. It would, therefore, not be accurate to call the Stalinist regime fascist, despite the fact that it shared many characteristics with fascism.

Khrushchev and Brezhnev too used Lenin to bolster their claims to leadership, but unlike them, Mikhail Gorbachev was a genuine Lenin scholar, attempting to align his own policies of democratisation through glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) of Soviet society with the revolutionary Lenin, the Lenin who pursued the truth, the internationalist who encouraged development of the languages and cultures of Soviet peoples, and the Lenin who was willing to learn from past mistakes and correct them.23 Gorbachev withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan and did not intervene when the Berlin wall came down. He crafted a treaty for a more equal and democratic Soviet Union, but two days before it was due to be signed, hardliners staged a coup against him, put him under house arrest and cut off his communications. There was massive popular opposition to the coup and Boris Yeltsin put himself at the head of it. The coup collapsed and Gorbachev was freed, but he was side-lined by Yeltsin, who presided over the disintegration of the Soviet Union into fifteen independent republics, including the Russian Federation.24

Yeltsin chose Putin to be his successor in 1999, at a time when Yeltsin’s own popularity was in single digits and Putin was the powerful but unknown FSB director. Putin’s way of gaining popularity remains relevant. The Russian Federation still included colonies within it; one of them was Chechnya, which had declared independence in November 1991. Russian troops invaded in 1994, and in an operation directed by the FSB carpet-bombed the capital Grozny and killed the elected president, but guerrilla resistance continued. The new elected president signed a peace deal with Yeltsin, postponing determination of Chechnya’s status. In 1999, a series of apartment bombings in Moscow were blamed on Chechen terrorists but later were found to have been orchestrated by the FSB; they formed the pretext for a ruthless ‘war on terror’ against Chechen civilians including torture, systematic rape and mass murder, murder of its second elected president, and installation of a brutal puppet dictatorship allied to Putin. This was accompanied by a crackdown on human rights defenders and investigative journalists in Russia itself, while witnesses to and investigators of the apartment bombings were assassinated one by one.25 Putin moved rapidly to rebuild an authoritarian state, appointing former KGB and army allies to the security services and expanding their remit, rewriting the rules to give himself the power to appoint and dismiss judges, and gaining new powers to remove and appoint governors and dissolve regional legislatures, until ‘the security services answered solely to the Kremlin. And at the top of the new vertical power sat Vladimir Putin.’26

The Chechen playbook was repeated in Syria after Putin joined the war there in September 2015, the only difference being that Putin’s brutal ally – Bashar al-Assad – was already in power but facing imminent overthrow by a democratic uprising.27 And it gives us a clue what Putin was referring to when he quoted the lyrics from a punk-rock song, ‘Sleeping Beauty in a coffin,’ to tell Ukrainians, ‘Whether you like or not, put up with it, my beauty’:28the fate of Chechnya is what he intended for Ukraine when his armed forces invaded and headed straight to Kyiv in 2022. Apart from Assad, Putin also supports right-wing dictator Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, in return for his regime hosting a satellite monitoring system for intelligence gathering, as well as free use of its ports.29 His Wagner paramilitary has worked for and committed war crimes alongside would-be dictator Khalifa Hafter in Libya,30 and has moved into Sub-Saharan Africa in a big way, backing authoritarian dictators and military coups and committing horrific human rights abuses in return for gold and diamond mining concessions to a related Russian company.31 The left has rightly characterised such practices, when carried out by the West, as imperialism.     

Unlike Stalin, who concealed his counter-revolution behind the rhetoric of Leninism, Putin wants to dispense with the whole legacy of the Russian revolution and the ‘odious and utopian fantasies it inspired’. Stalin saw himself in Ivan the Terrible, the tsar who expanded the Russian empire and concentrated absolute power in his hands, and ordered Sergei Eisenstein to make a film about him; but he was angry that Eisenstein portrayed Ivan’s oprichniks – whom Stalin saw as the equivalent of his own secret police – as resembling the Ku Klux Klan, the epitome of American fascism.32 By contrast Putin, who also sees himself in Ivan the Terrible and built a statue of him,33 has no problem linking up with the Ku Klux Klan and other neo-fascists in the US;34 indeed, as Anton Shekhovtsov documents, he has links with neo-fascists throughout Europe.35 Shekhovtsov describes this as a ‘marriage of convenience,’ but there is a much deeper alignment here. Rafia Zakaria points out that ‘Putin’s Russian, or “russkii,” nation is… centered on White, Slavic ethnic Russian superiority’ and endorses discrimination, hate-speech and violence against ethnic minorities and immigrants. She concludes that ‘There are direct parallels here between Putin’s decades-long efforts to elevate white Russians as the leaders of his world order and Hitler’s pursuit of similar ideas of racial purity to realize his own “great nation.”’36 The difference is that Putin seeks to exterminate ethnic minorities only if they resist being subordinated.

The resemblance to Hitler’s ideology is not accidental: Putin is an admirer of the Russian anti-Bolshevik fascist philosopher Ivan Ilyin, who described the ‘spiritual quality’ of Russians as lying in their love for ‘God, motherland and the national vozhd’ [supreme leader], and in 1933 wrote that the ‘spirit’ of ‘German national-socialism’ aligns it ‘with Italian fascism’ and with ‘the spirit of the Russian White movement as well.’37 Putin’s advisor Aleksandr Dugin strategised Ilyin’s orientation for the post-Soviet Russian state in his 1997 book Foundations of Geopolitics, which became required reading in the General Staff Academy and other educational institutions. In it he advocates the recreation of a vast Eurasian empire [the Tsarist Empire/USSR] in which Orthodox Christian ethnic Russians would occupy a privileged position, and outlines a scheme for overcoming ‘Atlanticism’ and establishing global dominance, parts of which have been surprisingly successful. They include destabilising the US by supporting ‘extremist, racist, and sectarian groups’ within it and simultaneously supporting ‘isolationist tendencies’ [Trump]; Eurasian expansion into Latin America; absorbing the Balkans, especially Serbia and ‘Serbian Bosnia’; cutting Britain off from the rest of Europe [Brexit] and ‘Finlandising’ the rest with a strategic use of Russia’s raw material resources [oil, gas]; forming a ‘Grand Alliance’ with Armenia, the ‘Empire of Iran’ and Libya to counter Saudi Arabia and especially Turkey, which should be destabilized by encouraging minorities like the Kurds (whom he characterises as ‘Aryan’ like the Armenians and Iranians) to rebel [links with the PKK]. India and Japan are seen as allies in Russia’s efforts to contain China: the least successful of Dugin’s recommendations.38

In his pursuit of ‘God’, Putin has embraced the fundamentalist Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, passing misogynist and anti-LGBT+ legislation in accordance with his views. It is obvious why such ideas have made Putin an icon for White supremacists and Christian fundamentalists in the US and Europe: he shares their extreme right-wing rejection of democracy, socialism and feminism.39 In an online presentation, Russian socialist Ilya Budraitskis argued that 20^th-century fascists needed a mass movement to smash a strong labour movement and popular social-democratic parties before they could capture state power, and could therefore be characterised as ‘fascism from below’. By contrast, Putin was able to come to power through elections and then transform the state by undermining democratic institutions (for example free and fair elections) and taking away democratic rights (like freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly) – a process that has more or less been completed after the invasion of Ukraine – which could be characterised as ‘fascism from above’.40 Like 20^th-century fascism, it makes use of the military, police, secret police and neo-Nazi stormtroopers (whom Putin strategically unleashes and then reins in, instead of allowing them to get too powerful and then slaughtering them like Hitler) and paramilitaries both in Russia and abroad; it uses censorship and state-controlled mass media to propagate the ‘big lie’ (e.g., ‘there is no war in Ukraine, only a special military operation to de-Nazify it’) but also uses methods that were not available to Hitler and Mussolini, such as pro-Kremlin websites, cyberwarfare and troll factories.41 If we identify the core characteristics of fascism as ethnic supremacism, extreme authoritarianism (rejection of democracy), hostility to socialism and communism, social conservatism (hostility to feminism and LGBT+ rights), the cult of the leader and constant propagation of lies, Putin ticks all the boxes.

What this means is that the situation in 2022 is not a throwback to the Cold War as so many commentators have assumed, but more resembles World War II. Perhaps we should recognise it as World War III, a war between ethnic supremacist authoritarianism and democracy, which has engulfed every country in the world, not least the US, the UK and countries of the EU. Ukrainians, who started out fighting for national independence as a democratic republic, have had the misfortune to be thrust to the front lines of a war against genocidal fascism for the second time in living memory. It is true there are Ukrainian fascists, but they are tiny minority compared to the population as a whole waging a people’s war, whereas fascists dominate the Russian side. For socialist internationalists, it is therefore imperative to support a Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat, without which there will be no peace. This includes calling for arms for Ukrainians to defend themselves and sanctions to force Russia to end its aggression, because a victory for national liberation and democracy would create conditions for the advance of the working-class struggle, whereas the victory of imperialist expansionism and fascism would constitute an enormous setback for the working people of the world. Given this context, no one who fails to support the heroic struggle of the Ukrainian people against Putin’s neo-fascism can claim to be a socialist or on the left, because they support imperialism against national liberation, authoritarianism against democracy, barbarism against socialism.

Reactions to the war in Ukraine

While the Russian and Belarussian military forces were massed around Ukraine, a slew of Western commentators blamed NATO’s induction of East European countries, thereby encroaching on Russia’s ‘sphere of influence’, for the crisis. In their worldview, only imperialist powers matter. As Lithuanian socialists explained, the drive for NATO membership actually came from small countries afraid of being re-colonised by Russia,42but such commentators do not care if these countries are swallowed up by imperialism. Their suggestions for a roll-back of NATO to its pre-1997 position is echoed by pseudo-anti-imperialists who support their favourite imperialist and his brutal allies and come out with slogans like ‘Hands off Russia,’ some going so far as to call for blocking arms supplies to Ukraine.43 (By the same logic, the left should have called for Russian workers to block Soviet arms supplies to Vietnam!) Such demands, if implemented, would allow a fascist Putin regime to conquer and rule other East European countries after raping, torturing and killing thousands of civilians in Ukraine, wiping out democracy and setting back the class struggle by decades. They are therefore unambiguously counter-revolutionary and amount to collaboration with imperialism and fascism.

As for the argument that ‘we have to oppose only our own imperialism,’ this makes no sense for internationalists who understand that capitalism can only be defeated by the working people of the world. There may not be much we can do to support the anti-authoritarian struggles of peoples who are not oppressed by our own state, but, at the very least, we can seek and tell the truth about them, and avoid conceptual frameworks based on double standards. The indifference of these people to the bombing of Palestinians in Syria44 and now the bombing of Palestinians in Ukraine45 makes it doubtful that they really care even about Palestinian liberation, unlike Palestinian activists who have highlighted the similarities between the struggles of Palestinians, Syrians and Ukrainians.46 This stance is, above all, a betrayal of the incredibly courageous Russian anti-fascists, socialists, feminists, anti-imperialists and anti-war activists, one of whom said, ‘I now understand how the anti-fascists felt during the Third Reich’.47 Socialists have an obligation to oppose all oppression, regardless of who is the perpetrator and who is the victim.

Unfortunately, they are not the only ones to take retrograde positions on these two struggles (Syria, Ukraine). Artem Chapeye, a socialist who had translated Noam Chomsky’s work into Ukrainian, was aghast at Chomsky’s repetition of Kremlin lies to the effect that the Maidan uprising of 2014 ‘amounted to a coup with US support that… led Russia to annex Crimea, mainly to protect its sole warm-water port and naval base’.48 Syrian Marxist Yassin al-Haj Saleh, who had translated Chomsky’s work into Arabic, was equally critical of Chomsky’s statement that Putin’s intervention in Syria was not imperialist because ‘supporting a government is not imperialism’ – even if that ‘government’ is a dictatorship about to fall to a democratic uprising, and supporting it involves killing 23,000 civilians in six years and getting a port and military bases in return!49 (By that logic, the US intervention in Vietnam was not imperialism, because it was supporting the government of South Vietnam.) Not that Chomsky has any good words to say for Putin or Assad, but his endorsement of the Putin regime’s lies is also a form of support. And the shoddy scholarship of this eminent scholar when he relies on Kremlin propaganda and ill-informed Western commentators to come to his conclusions rather than the work of much more knowledgeable Syrians, Ukrainians and Russians is indeed disappointing, along with his inability to understand that Putin and Assad can manufacture consent for their monstrous crimes by pouring out a constant stream of lies on their captive media and social media while incarcerating and killing anyone who tells the truth. Most depressing of all is his Orientalist portrayal of non-Western peoples struggling against Putin and his allies as dupes of the West and devoid of all agency.

We now have some answers to the question we started with: how do we overcome divisions among working people resulting from ethnic supremacism and nationalism? First, oppose all imperialisms, because apart from their roots in ethnic supremacism they involve national oppression. Second, support struggles for national independence that are predominantly democratic; more authoritarian ones should receive only critical support provided they represent people of all ethnicities. Ethnic definitions of nationhood should never be supported. On the other hand, a socialist programme has to include the rights of ethnic minorities to full equality before the law and their right to have their own language and culture, as well as local and regional self-government, which is important in any democracy but even more so for enclaves where minorities predominate. If socialists are serious about the interests of working people everywhere, then they have to foreground struggles for democracy, which are also struggles against various forms of discrimination and persecution, and this not only in their own countries but in terms of solidarity with the class struggle of workers of all countries. Finally, in a world where hostility to refugees, immigrants and ‘foreigners’ is rampant, internationalists stand for open borders.

Image: "Free Palestine, free Ukraine, free Wi-Fi!" byin_ar23 is licensed underCC BY-SA 2.0.

• 1. Vladimir Putin, ‘Address by the President of the Russian Federation,’ 21 February 2022. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dlRDC7WGq_4J:en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0
• 2. Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) pp. 25; 32–41; 75–77; 134–35; 227–35; 268–69.
• 3. NBC News, ‘Putin: Soviet collapse a “genuine tragedy”’, 26 April 2005. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7632057
• 4. Eric Blanc, ‘Anti-imperial Marxism: Borderland socialists and the evolution of Bolshevism on national liberation,’ International Socialist Review, Issue No.100, Spring 2016. https://isreview.org/issue/100/anti-imperial-marxism/index.html
• 5. ‘Auschwitz 75th Anniversary: A memoir by Roman Rosdolsky,’ (First published in Oberona in 1956), https://ukrainesolidaritycampaign.org/2020/01/27/auschwitz-70th-anniversary-a-memoir-by-roman-rosdolsky/
• 6. Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the “Nonhistoric Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848, translated and edited by John-Paul Himka, Special Issue of Critique 18–19, 1986, p.165.
• 7. Marko Bojkun, The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine 1897–1918, (Leiden: Brill Publishers) 2021. The introduction is available at https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/workers-movement-and-national-question-ukraine-1897-1918-introduction
• 8. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,’ Chapter 1 of The National Question, 1909. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1909/national-question/ch01.htm
• 9. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Reform or Revolution,’ Chapter 8, 1900. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch08.htm
• 10. V.I. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,’ Chapter 3, April-June 1914. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/ch03.htm
• 11. Zbigniew Kowalewski, ‘For the independence of Soviet Ukraine,’ https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/for-independence-soviet-ukraine
• 12. Rohini Hensman, Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism, (Chicago: Haymarket Books), pp.59–61 (includes references).
• 13. Urs W. Saxer, ‘The Transformation of the Soviet Union: From a Socialist Federation to a Commonwealth of Independent States,’ Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review, Vol.14 No.3, 7.1.1992, pp.581–715.
• 14. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Harcourt Publishing Company) 1976, p.230.
• 15. Rohini Hensman, ‘Marx and Engels on Socialism and How to Achieve It: A Critical Evaluation,’ in Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson (eds.) An Inheritance for Our Times: Principles and Politics of Democratic Socialism, (New York: OR Books) 2020, pp.131–147.
• 16. Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, is an example of ethnic nationalism in a former colony, leading to a devastating civil war and the decimation of a once-strong labour movement; see Rohini Hensman, ‘Post-war Sri Lanka: Exploring the path not taken,’ Dialectical Anthropology 39, 2015, pp.273–293.
• 17. Rosdolsky 1986, pp.182–183, emphasis in original. The quotation which Rosdolsky is disagreeing with is from F. Engels, ‘Das Fest der Nationen in London,’ 1845.
• 18. V.I. Lenin, 1922, ‘The question of nationalities or “autonomisation”’, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm
• 19. Rohini Hensman, Indefensible, pp.35–37, 63 (references included).
• 20. Alex de Jong, ‘Stalin handed hundreds of communists over to Hitler,’ Jacobin, 22 August 2021, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/08/hitler-stalin-pact-nazis-communist-deportation-soviet
• 21. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Penguin Random House) 2010, pp.339–351, 363–368.
• 22. Timothy Snyder, ‘Germans must remember the truth about Ukraine – for their own sake,’ Eurozine, July 7, 2017 https://www.eurozine.com/germans-must-remember-the-truth-about-ukraine-for-their-own-sake/
• 23. Christopher Smart, ‘Gorbachev’s Lenin: The myth in service to “Perestroika”’, Studies in Comparative Communism, Vol.23, No.1 (Spring 1990), pp.5–21.
• 24. Bridget Kendall, ‘New light shed on anti-Gorbachev coup,’ BBC News, 18 August 2011. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-14560280
• 25. Rohini Hensman, Indefensible, pp.66–71 (including references.)
• 26. Chris Miller, Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press) 2018, pp.26–27.
• 27. Jackson Diehl, ‘Putin is going by a familiar playbook in Syria,’ Business Insider, 12 October 2015. https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-is-going-by-a-familiar-playbook-in-syria-2015-10?IR=T
• 28. Michele A. Berdy, ‘A Russian Sleeping Beauty,’ The Moscow Times, 11 February 2022. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/02/11/a-russian-sleeping-beauty-a76338
• 29. Octavio Enrìquez, ‘Ortega, the “anti-imperialist”, surrenders to Russian interests,’ Confidencial, I March 2022. https://www.confidencial.com.ni/english/ortega-the-anti-imperialist-surrenders-to-russian-interests/
• 30. Al-Monitor Staff, ‘Intel: EU sanctions suspected head of Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group,’ Al-Monitor, October 15, 2020 https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2020/10/eu-sanction-russia-wagner-yevgeniy-prigozhin.html
• 31. Peter Fabricius, ‘Wagner’s dubious operatics in CAR and beyond,’ Institute for Security Studies, 21 January 2022. https://issafrica.org/iss-today/wagners-dubious-operatics-in-car-and-beyond
• 32. Alexey Timofeychev, ‘“Disgusting thing!” Why Stalin couldn’t accept Eisenstein’s sequel of “Ivan the Terrible”’, Russia Beyond, 9 January 2018. https://www.rbth.com/history/327217-ivan-terrible-stalin-eisenstein
• 33. Howard Amos, ‘Russia falls back in love with Ivan the Terrible, Politico, 31 October 2016. https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-falls-back-in-love-with-ivan-the-terrible-statue-monument-oryol/
• 34. Natasha Bertrand, ‘“A model for civilization”: Putin’s Russia has emerged as “a beacon for nationalists” and the American alt-right,’ Business Insider, December 10, 2016. https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/a-model-for-civilization-putins-russia-has-emerged-as-a-beacon-for-nationalists-and-the-american-alt-right/articleshow/55913352.cms
• 35. Anton Shekhovtsov, ‘The Kremlin’s marriage of convenience with the European far right,’ OpenDemocracy, 28 April 2014. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/kremlins-marriage-of-convenience-with-european-far-right/
• 36. Rafia Zakaria, ‘White Russian Empire: The racist myths behind Vladimir Putin’s power grabs,’ The Forum, 10 March 2022. https://www.aapf.org/theforum-white-russian-empire
• 37. Anton Barbashin, ‘Ivan Ilyin: A fashionable fascist,’ Riddle, 20 April 2018. https://ridl.io/en/ivan-ilyin-a-fashionable-fascist/
• 38. John B. Dunlop, ‘Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics,’ Stanfod: The Europe Center, 2004. https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics
• 39. Carl Davidson and Bill Fletcher Jr., ‘Putin is attempting to center Russia as a hub of the global right wing,’ Portside, 30 March 2022. https://portside.org/2022-03-30/putin-attempting-center-russia-hub-global-right-wing
• 40. Presentation at an event called ‘Inside the Aggressor,’ 27 March 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpyzmIg7v5g Budraitskis’s presentation starts at 38.00.
• 41. Alexander Zemlianichenko, ‘Putin’s fascists: the Kremlin’s long history of cultivating homegrown neo-Nazis,’ The Conversation, 21 March 2022.
• 42. Alexander Zemlianichenko, ‘Putin’s fascists: the Kremlin’s long history of cultivating homegrown neo-Nazis,’ The Conversation, 21 March 2022.
• 43. Arguments pour la lutte sociale, ‘A bas l’union sacrée pour désarmer les Ukrainiens! Des arme pour la resistance ukrainienne!’ 3 April 2022. https://aplutsoc.org/2022/04/03/a-bas-lunion-sacree-pour-desarmer-les-ukrainiens-des-armes-pour-la-resistance-ukrainienne/
• 44. Budour Hassan, ‘A late obituary for the capital of the Palestinian diaspora,’ OpenDemocracy, 22 June 2018. https://www.opendemocracy.net/north-africa-west-asia/budour-hassan/yarmouk-late-obituary-for-capital-of-palestinian-diaspora
• 45. Amany Mahmoud, ‘Palestinians in Ukraine fear another exodus,’ Al-Monitor, 5 March 2022. https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2022/03/palestinians-ukraine-fear-another-exodus#ixzz7NBHFAONf
• 46. Budour Hassan, ‘Palestine and the Syrian revolution,’ ZNet, 25 November 2013. https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/palestine-and-the-syrian-revolution-by-budour-hassan/ ; Ghufrane Mounir, ‘Gigi Hadid to donate fashion month earnings to aid people in Ukraine and Palestine,’ Middle East Eye, 7 March 2022. https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/ukraine-palestine-gigi-hadid-fashion-earnings-donated-aid
• 47. Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer, ‘“Our voices are louder if we stay”: Russian anti-war activists refuse to flee,’ The Guardian, 27 March 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/27/our-voices-are-louder-if-we-stay-russian-anti-war-activists-refuse-to-flee
• 48. Johnny Diamond, ‘A Ukrainian translator of Noam Chomsky responds to his recent comments on the Russian invasion,’ The Hub, 3 March 2022. https://lithub.com/a-ukrainian-translator-of-noam-chomsky-responds-to-his-recent-comments-on-the-russian-invasion/ Chapeye is quoting from Chomsky’s comments in this blogpost: https://chomsky.info/20211223/
• 49. Yassin al-Haj Saleh, ‘Chomsky is no friend of the Syrian revolution,’ New Lines Magazine, 15 March 2022. https://newlinesmag.com/review/chomsky-is-no-friend-of-the-syrian-revolution/ Saleh is quoting from an interview given by Chomsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VumemUMSIBM

A Review of The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine, 1897–1918, by Marko BojcunOriginally published on Pirani’s website: https://peopleandnature.wordpress.com/2021/11/01/ukraine-1917-socialism-and-nationalism-in-a-world-turned-upside-down/

Simon Pirani

Honorary Professor, University of Durham, UK

simon.pirani@durham.ac.uk

Marko Bojcun, (2021) The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine, 1897–1918, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

October 1917: the climax of the revolution we have always called ‘Russian’, but was so much more than that. In Petrograd, the old empire’s capital, the provisional government that had ruled since February collapsed and Bolshevik-led workers’ and soldiers’ soviets (councils) took control. In Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, power fell to the Tsentral’na Rada (central council) that had, since the summer, pressed for Ukrainian autonomy within the Russian state.

The Rada, like all the parliamentary institutions emerging in the empire’s ruins, sat atop a furious movement – in the army and the countryside as much as the towns – that was beyond its control. In Ukraine, this movement sought an autonomous national government, but in a soviet, not parliamentary form.

In the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, Marko Bojcun writes,

there grew a powerful tendency, cutting across party lines, to support the formation of a government of Ukraine as long as it was based on the councils locally and nationally, and on the condition it maintained solidarity with the Russian Soviet government. It was not a question of simply adapting the Russian experience, but of attempting to build with indigenous social forces on the basis of the institutions of popular representation that the revolution in Ukraine had so far created. (p. 206.)

Ronald Grigor Suny

William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan, USA

rgsuny@umich.edu

Eric Blanc, (2021) Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882–1917), Leiden: Brill.

In the decade after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the history of Russian and Soviet labour and Social Democracy, once a subject of prodigious academic research, fell into a memory hole, as historians turned toward other topics. An engaged scholar and activist, Eric Blanc has not only revived exploration of a neglected subject but has delved deeply into the history of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and widened his lens to include the too often overlooked revolutionary Marxists of the borderlands of the tsarist empire. Blanc writes simultaneously sympathetically to the aims and aspirations of the revolutionary socialists but critically as well, which, from a Marxist perspective, following in the tradition of the founder of that approach, ought to be the essential methodology of empirical and theoretical investigations. Revolutionary socialist movements were powerful, even dominant, emancipatory efforts in the non-Russian peripheries. In Georgia, Finland, Latvia, Poland, and elsewhere, they were, to all intents and purposes, the national-liberation movements of the first two decades of the twentieth century.

As a historical sociologist, Blanc uses the natural experiment provided by the diversity of the tsarist political structure – in which the autonomy of the Grand Duchy of Finland allowed a legal labour movement and elections, a situation starkly different from the repression of independent politics in the rest of the empire – to argue that ‘successful insurrectionary movements [like the Bolsheviks] generally only arise under conditions of authoritarianism’, while ‘anti-capitalist rupture under parliamentary conditions [as in Finland] requires the prior election of a workers’ party to the state’s democratic institutions’ (p. 7). He then contends that the usual view that parliamentarianism inevitably leads to socialist moderation is belied by the experience of the Finnish Social Democrats, who became more militant after the revolution of 1905. His book, thus, advances beyond the usual Russocentrism and credence in Bolshevik exceptionalism evident in much of earlier scholarship and uses the comparative cases of borderland socialists to explain strategic choices as well as victory and defeat in insurrectionary moments.

Superbly equipped with linguistic skills in eight languages, and dedicated to reading in archival and published sources, Blanc brings a passion and energy that enables him to mine diligently the documentary evidence for his exhaustive exploration of the pre-Revolutionary workers’ movements in Russia. In line with work by Lars Lih and Erik van Ree, he connects the politics of tsarist Russia’s Social Democrats to Karl Kautsky, who, he claims, has been caricatured in Western liberal, and even Marxist, accounts as a reformist rather than a revolutionary. Kautsky’s commentary on the Erfurt Programme was a foundational text, the window into Marxism for Latvian, Ukrainian, Jewish, and other young activists. In parliamentary regimes, socialists could exploit the opportunity to build a mass workers’ party and work through available institutions and, as occurred in Germany, win large representations, even a majority, in the legislature in order to be ready for the revolutionary rupture with capitalism. Such a road to power did not exist in Russia proper, but it did in Finland, where the Social Democrats implemented Kautsky’s strategy. As Blanc puts it, ‘Both Kautsky and his peers under Tsarism insisted that Marxism was a method, not a dogma; tactics and strategy, therefore, always had to be based on a hard-nosed appraisal of a concrete situation’ (p. 14). Until the German Social Democrat appeared to take an equivocal position on his country’s entry into the Great War, Vladimir Lenin considered Kautsky the epitome of Marxist orthodoxy, after which he referred to him as a ‘renegade’ who once had been a Marxist.

Basing his analysis in the social context of late tsarism rather than giving us a simple intellectual history, Blanc contends that it was not Kautsky’s moderation but the entrenched bureaucracy of the SPD that determined its accommodation to the imperial regime in Germany. In Russia, on the other hand, instead of the integrative pressures of bourgeois democracy to work with liberals and the middle classes, autocracy’s erasure of alternative political possibilities and the absence of political outlets and solidified labour organisations led socialist parties to adopt intransigent positions vis-à-vis the regime. There was no other game in town. ‘At the turn of the century, political nationalism was extremely weak, Russian populism [peasant-oriented socialism] had virtually collapsed, and strong liberal-democratic currents were absent’ (p. 37). While Bolsheviks maintained their antipathy to collaborating with the liberals, Mensheviks, Georgian and Ukrainian SDs, and more moderate Marxists after the failure of the 1905 revolution sought alliances with liberals and even, in some cases, with nationalists. This was the great strategic divide that would lead into the final fatal schism in 1917. The Finnish Social Democrats were in a unique position, given Finland’s autonomy within the empire and the relative freedom that they enjoyed. The Finnish Marxists had their share of conciliationists and intransigents but, generally, tended toward party unity rather than schism and often sought cooperation with other parties within Finland. Blanc maintains that, after 1905, the party grew more militant, and while that is certainly true of important elements within Finnish Social Democracy, most historians of the movement, and Blanc’s own evidence, demonstrate that relative moderation characterised the party well into 1917. This posture conforms with Blanc’s principal argument that where parliamentarianism was possible, socialist parties tended to be more moderate, while in states where such institutions and possibilities for open organisation did not exist, as in Russia proper, socialist parties were more militantly revolutionary. In my view, he overestimates the radicalism of the Finnish Social Democrats, who were deeply divided right up to their fateful, in fact fatal, decision in January 1918 to make an armed bid for power.

The first Marxist party in the empire, founded in 1882, was the Polish ‘Proletariat’ Party, about which Norman Naimark produced a ground-breaking and comprehensive monograph in 1979. Jewish parties organised before the Russian and most others, and by 1905 significant Marxist parties worked among Latvians, Finns, Georgians, Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, and others. Muslims were latecomers but joined other parties or set up committees and organisations like Hummet, founded by Caucasian Muslims. The non-Russian parties, like Rosa Luxemburg’s Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPIL) and the Jewish Bund, were critical of Lenin’s notion of a centralised political party, and most non-Russian socialists did not accept his idea of a post-revolutionary Russian state with only regional rather than national cultural autonomy. Except for the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) of Józef Piłsudski and a few small parties, they were not for separation from Russia but wanted a federal structure that recognised ethnic nationality. Only in January 1918, at a moment when Russia was splintering into separatist states, did Lenin come around and accept both territorial national cultural autonomy and federalism as the basis for the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and, later, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Still, Bolsheviks were attractive to radical non-Russians given Lenin’s uncompromising support for national self-determination to the point of separation and his party’s stance in 1917 as ‘the empire-wide political current most supportive of the demands of dominated national groups’ (p. 65).

Blanc’s touchstone for understanding revolutionary Social Democracy in Russia is the evolving strategy of proletarian hegemony, that is, the original Plekhanovian synthesis which argued that, in the absence of a powerful liberal bourgeoisie in tsarist Russia, the working class would have to exercise leadership in the expected bourgeois-democratic revolution. This strategy was accepted by almost all Marxist leaders in Russia up to the winter of 1905, when the defeat of the December insurrection in Moscow led Mensheviks and others to contend that militance had led to the defection of the bourgeois liberals and that Social Democrats must moderate their tactics and seek an alliance with them. Blanc shows that not only the Russian but the Georgian Mensheviks, along with the Jewish Bund, the PPS-Revolutionary Faction, the Ukrainian USDRP, to an extent, and other peripheral parties adopted this more moderate stance to the chagrin of Lenin, who was appalled by class collaboration and banked on the peasantry instead of the bourgeoisie. The Bolsheviks were joined in their stance by the Latvian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (LSDSP), the SDKPIL, the PPS-Left, and many of the Finnish Social Democrats.

A distinction between the practice of historical sociologists and that of some overly empirical historians appears to be that the former tends to see the forest while the latter often gets lost in the trees. But heeding Marx’s formulation of the agency-versus-structure problem – ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’ – Blanc’s analyses combine both structural and actor-centred factors. ‘The divergent trajectories of socialist organisations across the empire after 1905’, he writes, ‘are hard to explain without taking into account the political choices made by party leaders, especially following the first Russian Revolution’s defeat’ (p. 198). Once those choices of strategy were made, however, they remained in place well into the next revolution and determined which side of the barricades a party would find itself during and after October 1917. As Blanc even more pointedly asserts, ‘the result of the revolutionary struggle was by no means preordained by the social structure. Deep social crisis, state collapse, and labour insurgency were necessary but insufficient conditions for anti-capitalist rupture in imperial Russia. At least one other factor was needed: socialist parties that were sufficiently influential, radical, and tactically flexible to help the working-class majority effectively unite to break with capitalist rule’ (p. 222). Bolsheviks in the two Russian capitals, Petrograd and Moscow, proved to be ‘sufficiently influential, radical, and tactically flexible’ to exploit the deep social divisions that widened through 1917 to gain vital support among urban workers and soldiers to take and hold power. I should note that Blanc’s focus is so sharply on the workers that he misses discussing at all the important role of the soldiers, men with guns, without which the Bolsheviks could never have taken power. Both the February and the October Revolution were worker and soldier revolutions, and it is regrettable that Blanc notes in his bibliography only Allan Wildman’s first book on the origins of Russian Social Democracy but neglects to mention his magisterial and indispensable two volumes on the soldiers in 1917.

Blanc is very critical of the existing scholarship on Russian Social Democracy, finding fault with many who have made significant contributions to the literature. His aim is to provide socialists in the present and future with possible strategies for making the needed rupture with capitalism. ‘The main reason’, he says, ‘why there has never been a socialist revolution in an industrial democracy is not that socialists have lacked resolve, patience, radical leaders, or grand strategies. Capitalism has survived primarily because the power of employers, combined with the intractable strategic dilemmas facing leftists under capitalist democracies, makes winning socialism very difficult…. Workers, above all, need to dramatically scale up their organised power’ (p. 315). While he shows that Marxists often differ on strategies, Blanc identifies the correct strategy with what he labels ‘orthodox Marxism’, that is, the position of Kautsky, which expounded flexibility while always keeping the need for revolution in mind. The Bolsheviks got it right by sticking to a strategy of working-class hegemony, that is, rejecting collaboration with the liberals and the bourgeoisie. Mensheviks and other ‘class collaborationists’ broke with the Social-Democratic strategy that rejected alliances with the liberal bourgeoisie after 1905. Moreover, moderate socialists generally turned inward and neglected the importance of the international and anti-colonial revolution that Kautsky emphasised.

Blanc holds up Finland as an example where parliamentarianism spawned a radical, not an accommodationist, socialist movement, a ‘long-overlooked example’ of ‘the potential viability of a non-insurrectionary strategy for building working-class power and moving toward anti-capitalist rupture’ (p. 407). But, in my research and reading, much of his story, as well as the research of others, indicates that moderation and a sincere commitment to parliamentary democracy and universal suffrage had such an extraordinarily powerful hold in a divided party that it prevented the radicals from instigating a revolution until January 1918, which turned out to be too late for success. The structuralist part of his argument, that is, ‘the causal importance of governmental regimes’, appears to be confirmed in Finland: authoritarian conditions lead to worker and socialist intransigence, as in Russia proper, but ‘the presence of democratic freedoms and parliamentary institutions’ encourages moderation, ‘union organising and electoral politics – i.e., “the democratic class struggle”’ (p. 406). What is murkier is how strong the militancy of the Finnish party was after 1905. Here, the historical sociologist may have lost his way in the forest, not noticing that there are many different trees in quite distinct groves that require more specific consideration of the variety of circumstances in which socialists operate.

Blanc minimises the role of Lenin in 1917 but forcefully demonstrates that the major concern of the Bolsheviks was for the party and the workers to carry out the democratic – not socialist – revolution as far as possible, something that was impossible in coalition with the bourgeoisie. As Lenin wrote in October 1915, and on other occasions, the ‘task confronting the proletariat of Russia is the consummation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia in order to kindle the socialist revolution in Europe.’ The fatal mistake of the moderate socialists in Petrograd was to maintain their ties to the liberals long after that alliance had become toxic. In addition to extracting Russia from the world war, the soviet seizure of power in October was meant to carry on the democratic revolution without the bourgeoisie, not to move to socialism immediately in Russia, but to stimulate revolution abroad that would make possible transition beyond capitalism. ‘And as the year dragged on,’ Blanc sums up, ‘establishing soviet power increasingly came to be seen as a necessary step to defend political freedom and the revolutionary process against the Right. In this sense, Russia’s revolution had more in common with Finland – and traditional Marxist orthodox strategy – than has usually been assumed’ (p. 386). For the workers, October was a defence of February.

Reading this dense, detailed, compelling analysis of Russian Social Democracy was a heady reintroduction to a subject with which I have spent much of my career. While I have some reservations about some of Blanc’s conclusions, I learned a great deal and was impressed by his erudition, his commitment to socialist possibilities, and his reassessment of some of the crustier readings of this history. He ends by lamenting the Bolsheviks’ post-October reassessment of 1917 as a socialist rather than democratic revolution, the Comintern’s rejection of parliamentarianism, and the ebbing of the revolutionary wave after the world war that led to ‘the revolution’s defeat abroad and its degeneration in Russia’ (p. 393). Turning his gaze back to the imperial borderlands of Russia, Blanc shows that international revolution stopped short when radical regimes in Baku, Latvia, Belarus, Estonia, Finland, and elsewhere lost to liberals and conservatives backed by foreign interventionists. In Poland and Ukraine, the most decisive regions for carrying the revolution westward, not only foreign forces but intransigence and precipitous actions by ultra-leftists undermined the export of Bolshevism. The Red Army secured Ukraine for the Soviets but was decisively defeated at the gates of Warsaw.

In an epilogue, he concludes that an opportunity for socialist victory existed in Europe after the war, but ‘At this critical historical juncture, while a majority of workers attempted to use parliaments to push through radical transformation, Marxist anti-electoralism and denunciatory approaches toward political rivals led to missed opportunities to winning over moderate workers, premature clashes with the state, and repeated political defeats’ (p. 399). Leninists and Communist parties mistakenly gave up on winning in parliamentary elections. As a Marxist would suppose, ‘Social structure sets the parameters for political conflicts, but it does not directly determine their results’ (p. 406). The agency of parties, collective and individual actors, and their strategic choices must also be accounted for. Costly mistakes can be made.

Christopher Ford

Published here is a series of rare texts of the debates of the Ukrainian Marxists of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party at the crucial turning point of the revolution in January 1919. Christopher Ford is author of UKAPISME - Une Gauche perdue, Le marxisme anti-colonial dans la révolution ukrainienne 1917 – 1925 (Ibidem verlag, 2021), and of a forthcoming study in English of this party during the revolutionary era.

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Within a few weeks of the ending of the First World War on 11 November 1918, a revolutionary wave arose surpassing even the climactic years of 1789 and 1848. This affected not only the metropolis but colonial countries of the European empires with mounting movements for national emancipation. This was the setting for the ‘Ukrainian November Revolution’ of 1918 against the conservative regime of Hetman Skoropadsky, who was placed in power by a coup d'état sponsored by Germany on 29 April 1918. This restored the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) founded in October 1917.

The primary organisational initiative to reconstitute the UNR came from a coalition headed by the Directory of the UNR, led by two opposing figures - Symon Petlyura and Volodymyr Vynnychenko.1 Both member of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. The “November Ukrainian Revolution” was conducted exclusively by local forces and, from the start, it was clear the subjective forces were radically to the left of the Directory. The “Sovietophile” majority of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (UPSR), the Borotbisty, already declared their opposition and large sections of the army - the red militias - supported soviet power. With the hoped-for socialist resurgence underway in Europe, the pro-Soviet left of the USDRP organised into a faction, the Organising Committee of the USDRP Nezalezhnyky, (Independents or Independentists) established in early December 1918.2 They made their first challenge at the State Conference convened by the Directory in Vynnytsia on 12-14 December where Myhailo Avdiyenko argued it was necessary:

1: to recognise that a profoundly socio-economic, as well as political, revolution is taking place in Ukraine; 2. to recognise that its engine is the proletariat and the toiling peasantry, and 3. in accordance with this, to declare the principle of the dictatorship of the toiling masses in the form of councils of workers' and peasants' deputies.3

The moderate and conservative leaders of the UNR, viewed the Nezalezhnyky faction with increasing suspicion.4 The Nezalezhnyky also differentiated themselves from the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine (KP(b)U). Considering that it was not genuinely Ukrainian but a subordinate of the Russian Communist Party, RKP(B), they took issue with the Bolsheviks' view of the workers' and peasants' councils and the character of the dictatorship of the proletariat:

It is a party that aims not for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the revolutionary peasantry, but for the dictatorship of a section of the proletariat and of its own party. It is, therefore, profoundly violent and it will replace proletarian dictatorial violence against the bourgeois order with the violence of a small group.5

It had proven itself “a hypocritical party which continually violates its own principles” and in view of this “cannot be trusted until it is transformed organisationally and merges with the interests of the Ukrainian toiling people”.6

The revival of the Ukrainian People’s Republic was also accompanied by an extreme regressive trend. Some of its administration and military were inherited directly from the previous Hetmanate regime. These conservative elements engaged in pogroms and indiscriminate repression of the labour and peasant movement.7 The middle class and moderate elements, though favouring a parliamentary democracy, found themselves political prisoners of this element on whom they were reliant.8

After the initial success of the November Revolution, there arose an intense dispute over what was to happen after, of the nature of the revolution and the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Centre stage in the debates was the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (USDRP) which had played a leading role in the revolution since 1917 and held leading posts in the new government, the Directory and its Council of Ministers.9

The debates took place at the Sixth Congress of the USDRP followed by the All-Ukrainian Labour Congress convened by the Directory to ratify the form of government and establish a solid foundation for the Republic. These debates are set out in the following texts translated here; they are still little known in the English speaking world and greatly neglected elsewhere.

Andriy Richytsky moved the Nezalezhnyky theses; the task it was stated was “the transformation of the sovereign and independent Ukrainian People's Republic into the sovereign and independent Ukrainian Socialist Republic”.10 Power would be organised on the “principle of the dictatorship of the urban and rural proletariat and the poorer toiling peasantry, organised in worker-peasant councils”.11

A majority of the Central Committee spoke in favour of the Nezalezhnyky position, the opposition was a combination of the centrists and the right wing “Katerynoslav group” of Issak Mazepa, Panas Fadenko and Ivan Romanchenko, joined surprisingly by Mykola Porsh.12 It is debatable how representative the conference was in a situation where members of the Central Committee could not sleep in their own beds for fear of arrest.13

After their resolution was defeated, the Nezalezhnyky walked out and launched Chervony Prapor [Red Banner] on 22 January.14 It included a Declaration written by Tkachenko and Richytsky stating it was now time to move from a “passive waiting state to an active and creative struggle for the reconstruction of the whole socio-political and economic order of Ukraine”. At the Sixth Congress, the question was sharply posed “either the old or the new - and the official party stood between them”.15 Responding to the fear of the dominance of the “non-Ukrainian urban element” they pointed out that the “proletariat was not entirely foreign” and emphasised that in “Ukraine can and must come to power together with the revolutionary peasantry”.16 In the course of the revolution, the non-Ukrainian workers would be drawn more and more into all forms of internal life in Ukraine and “rid themselves of the remnants of old Russia and will join the Ukrainian people and proletariat”.17

The left-wing leader of the Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionaries Pavlo Khrystiuk considers the Nezalezhnyky were bound for too long a time to the Directory.18 In practice, their approach during the period December 1918 to January 1920 involved a combination of tactics of reform and revolution. The Nezalezhnyky did not possess sufficient strength to overthrow the Directory on their own, nor was it necessarily desirable from the standpoint of their pluralist objective of a “provisional worker-peasant government composed of representatives of parties and groups that stand for the power of the soviets”.19 In an attempt to establish a more unified approach, a meeting of the Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian socialists was held in the middle of January attended by the Nezalezhnyky, the Bund, the United Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party and the Menshevik Internationalists.20 The meeting produced no concrete results beyond resolving to maintain in contact “in order to defend the worker-peasant revolution in Ukraine, to mollify the national struggle and to correct the political line and the tactical errors of the Russian Bolsheviks in Ukraine”.21

The Nezalezhnyky also attempted to utilise their posts within the UNR to broker peace with Soviet Russia.22 Yurko Mazurenko headed a diplomatic mission to Moscow on 15 January 1919:

I declared that I would go on the condition that decrees on the transfer of local power to the Soviets and a call for a congress of Soviets (and not a Labour Congress) to be published immediately, as well as on the condition that the communist party would be legalised. For this, of course, I was ostracised by the Directorate.23

The left claimed the mission was sabotaged by the right wing of the UNR which secured a declaration of war on Soviet Russia on 16 January 1919.24 By this time, Chekhivsky and Vynnychenko had resigned from the government over its pro-Entente turn.25 The Nezalezhnyky turned to the establishment of soviet power by force through the red militias.26 Its main centre of strength was in the Kyiv region; at a congress in Hryhoriv, the Dniprovska Division of the UNR army renamed itself the First Kyiv Soviet Division along with a Revolutionary Committee joined by the Nezalezhnyky.27

On 4 February 1919, the Directory of the UNR withdrew from Kyiv in the face of the advancing soviet forces, Chervony Prapor concluding “the Directory's positive role was finished”.28 Yurii Lapchynsky wrote that in 1919 the “communist movement and Soviet power in Ukraine were built in a political situation, which was totally different to the first period”.29 Peasant brigades defected en masse to parties adhering to a soviet platform; the situation could not have been more favourable for a convergence between the Ukrainian and the Russian revolutions and the creation of a republic based on the councils with a plurality of pro-soviet parties was more viable than at any other time.

The USDRP (Nezalezhnyky) would continue to play a significant role in the life of Ukraine during the tumultuous period of the second Soviet Government, under Khristian Rakovsky.  Their struggle for truly self-governing Soviet Ukraine, with a coalition of the soviet parties gained international significance winning the support of Bela Kun’s Soviet Hungary.  In 1919, commanding a section of the Red Army, the Nezalezhnyky led a pro-soviet rebellion larger and far more serious than the Kronstadt uprising. Following the catastrophe of the Rakovsky government and collapse of the Ukrainian SSR, the Nezalezhnyky would re-launch on 21 December 1919 as the Ukrainian Communist Party.30 The independent UKP, known as the Ukapisty would play an important role in Soviet Ukraine, holding government positions in 1920-21. They were one of the last legal-opposition parties until their disbandment under pressure in March 1925.31

The Texts

The texts outline the key positions of the two main currents which emerged in the USDRP. The first are of the Congress of the USDRP held in Kyiv in 10-12 January 1919. The Resolution on the Current Moment was supported by Isaak Mazepa, Panas Fedenko of the Katernynoslav current and subsequently adopted by the congress. This was published in a special supplement of the USDRP paperRobitnycha Hazeta and translated into German and circulated to parties of the Socialist International.32

            The alternative position proposed by the Fraction of the Nezalezhnyky, the Independents or Independentists, was published in the first issue of their paperChervony Prapor on 22 January edited by Mykhaylo Adviyenko, previous editor ofRobitnycha Hazeta. The formalDeclaration the Fraction of Nezalezhnyky written by Mykhaylo Tkachenko and Andriy Pisotsky (Richystky) appeared in the same issue ofChervony Prapor and also inKharkivsʹky Proletar, paper of the Kharkiv committee of the Nezalezhnyky.

The Declaration of the USDRP was published in Robitnycha Hazeta and also submitted to the Socialist International. The Resolution adopted by the Labour Congress on 28 January 1919 was published inChervony Prapor, on 30 January, drawing upon the points made in the Declaration of the Fraction of the USDRP to the Labour Congress on 26 January.33 This was issued officially by the UNR as a proclamation of the Law passed by the Labour Congress Onthe Form of Government in Ukraine, signed by Congress Chairman Semen Vityk a leader of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Party in Galicia and the Congress Secretary Serhey Bachinksy, of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, Central Current.34

            The Declaration of the Fraction of the Nezalezhnyky was submitted to the Labour Congress on 26 January 1919. The declaration of the left-bloc of parties favouring a soviet platform was published by Chervony Prapor on 30 January. TheReport on the Activities of the USDRP was made to the International Socialist Bureau in Amsterdam in February 1919 in French. This was their last report to the International whilst USDRP was still organised in central Ukraine. The congress was attended by IvanRomanchenko. The report originally in French is published here in English translation.

RESOLUTIONS

Sixth Congress of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers Party

10-12 January 1919

Resolution on the Current Moment adopted by the VI Congress of the USDRP35

1. The VI Congress of the USDRP recognises that the capitalist world is already on the path of socialist revolution. This revolution is unavoidable in all countries, but distinct in each separate country, both in its tempo and in the forms and methods of socialist reconstruction of present society. It is distinct because of the differences in the degree of capitalist development, the class structure of society and the national composition of the states, and dependent on the extent of the destruction caused by the war on all aspects of the economic and political life of a country.

2. By its history and by the present state of its own revolution, as well as by the development of the revolution in the West, Ukraine comes under the powerful influence of the inevitable world revolution, which must be marked in the whole economic and socio-political life of the Ukrainian people. But Ukraine occupies a special position in the capitalist world both in terms of economics and national politics. Ukraine is a country of small peasants, which were its mighty foundation throughout the Ukrainian revolution, for whom the Ukrainian revolution meant, first of all and mainly, an agrarian revolution. The role of the industrial proletariat in the economy is very limited and its political influence on the revolution and its direction was and is extremely insignificant: the small development of industrial capitalism and therefore the small size of the proletariat.

The dominance in industry of mining and agriculture and therefore the low consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, the national conflict between town and village, and thus between the proletariat and the peasantry - such are the main reasons for this phenomenon. The current imperialist war, which has economically debilitated even the most developed countries, has brought agricultural countries, including Ukraine, to economic catastrophe. Final ruin of the feeble Ukrainian industry (lack of materials and machinery), the ruin of agriculture (livestock and property), billions of paper dollars, the unprecedented destruction of transport, frenzied inflation - such are the severe and catastrophic consequences of the world war in Ukraine. And, as a result of this, the severe competition between town and village, peculiar to the capitalist world, reached the most severe and threatening proportion for the fate of the revolution. The Ukrainian nation, broken into pieces among various countries (in Galicia, Bukovina, Hungary, Bessarabia, Kuban and the Don) advances amid the most difficult financial, economic and international circumstances, surrounded by imperialist and counter-revolutionary enemies (Polish, Romanian, Don, [Russian] Volunteer, Entente and Soviet attack Ukraine), advances toward union in the national-sovereign forms of political life.

3. On the basis of these internal and international circumstances, the Ukrainian proletariat cannot now and does not, without endangering the revolution, have the right to take the national economy in its hands in order to socialise it decisively and without principle by means of a workers' dictatorship. Its task at the present moment is - taking part in state power and building, supporting with all its strength the national-political union of the parts of the Ukrainian nation - to construct the road to the rule of labour democracy in the Ukrainian republic, to spread workers' organisations, to carry out a careful and solid socialisation of the mature branches of the national economy and to draw the peasantry into the process of socialising the whole economy.

Taking all of this into consideration, the VI Congress of the USDRP has resolved:

On the problem of power:

1. In view of the fact that socialist revolution is a long process, which can be realised only by the organised and conscious proletariat with the help of revolutionary democracy generally, the congress believes that in the given initial moment of the socialist revolution central and local power must be such as to guarantee completely the free development of the democratic forces. The present revolution in Ukraine is only the beginning preparatory stage of the socialist revolution, a stage of realizing first all general democratic reforms, a stage of the rule of genuine democracy, on the basis of which and through which the successful transition to socialism is possible. On this basis, the congress supports the convening in the near future of an organ of all-national representation, a parliament, elected on the basis of a general electoral law. Taking into account the important transitional moment through which Ukraine is now passing, and also considering the urgent need for the government to have for its activity an organi,ed base with representatives of revolutionary democracy, the congress supports the immediate convening of the All-Ukrainian Labour Congress, with the participation of the workers and peasants, as a provisional legislative organ.

Until the Labour Congress is convened, all power will belong to the Directory, whose work must be directed toward consolidating the gains of the revolution and toward the immediate implementation of a series of reforms directed to the initial stage of socialist transformation.

The congress supports holding immediately new elections to the organs of Zemstvo self-government. Until the re-election of local self-governments, local authority will belong to the commissars, who work in contact with and under the control of local labour councils as organs of the united revolutionary democracy, organised from proportional representation of workers and peasants. Commissars are elected by local labour councils and ratified by the central government. Power must be centralised and military power must be subordinate to civilian political power.

On the program of internal politics

The congress believes that, in the present transitional moment, it is more necessary that ever to have a strong organisation of workers to carry out such great tasks as those that face the proletariat of Ukraine, toward the preparation of socialist reforms. In order to accelerate the preparation for the transformation of the Ukrainian People's Republic into a socialist republic, the tasks of the proletarian party are:

1. the destruction of all vestiges of the autocratic landowner order in all its manifestations and above all a resolute purge of all counter-revolutionary and anti-state elements from the government apparatus, both locally and centrally, in all branches of administration;

2. the immediate implementation of all worker and peasant reforms in the direction of the party's programme, first of all the immediate introduction of the land reform in accordance with the party's programme adopted by the VI Congress of the USDRP;

3. the immediate nationalisation of the most advanced and prepared branches of industry, such as railroads, sugar refineries and others;

4. the immediate introduction of broad financial reforms toward transferring the burden to the owning classes and, as a first priority, the creation of our own currency; the immediate organisation of a strong popular army on the basis of firm discipline for the defence of the Ukrainian People's Republic from attack by external enemies.

On the programme of international policy

On the basis of recognising the sovereignty of the Ukrainian nation, the VI Congress of the USDRP defends the complete independence of the Ukrainian People's Republic.

On the basis of this, the congress resolves to support the aspirations of the Ukrainian people to complete self-determination and to fight any attempt on the independence of Ukraine, whether by the Soviet Russian Republic or by any other state.

The VI Congress of the USDRP recognises that the states of the Entente are pursuing only imperialist aims in Ukraine and that the occupation of Ukraine by the Entente would be the beginning of the restoration of the monarchy and reaction in Ukraine.

In relation to the Soviet Russian Republic and its policy toward Ukraine, the VI Congress of the USDRP must say a word of condemnation of the usurpation plans, so harmful for the party of the proletariat and socialist power that the Soviet government is making against the Ukrainian People's Republic. The Soviet government, unable to repair the rift it caused between the workers and peasants of Russia, in order to continue its rule even by openly plundering the Ukrainian peasantry to satisfy the needs of the unemployed Russian workers, and this explains the Soviet army's attack on Ukraine. Protesting against the attack of the Soviet army, the congress allows for peaceful relations and trade with the Soviet Republic only when the Russian army's attack on Ukraine is stopped and when foreign Soviet troops are withdrawn from Ukraine.

The VI Congress of the USDRP recognises as the desired goal for all states that have taken the path of revolution the closest economic union in the struggle against the imperialism of the states of the Entente. Therefore, the policy of the government of the Russian Soviet Republic, aimed at the conquest of Ukraine, breaks all agreements, destroys mutual understanding and undermines the hope of the international proletariat's success in the struggle against imperialism and capitalism.

Ukrainian workers have already once lived through the most fierce monarchist reaction (the Hetmanate) because of the aggressive policy of the Soviet government, and now, at an hour of danger for the existence of what the Ukrainian proletariat and revolutionary democracy have created - the Ukrainian People's Republic - the VI Congress of the USDRP declares that the organised Ukrainian workers will fight with all their strength hostile reactionary attacks, whether by the states of the Entente or by the Russian Soviet Republic.

The Ukrainian workers will spare no effort to save the foundation of their normal development - the Ukrainian People's Republic - from all imperialists, no matter what fine words they use to conceal their avaricious attempts on the independence of the Ukrainian people and of the Ukrainian proletariat.

***

Resolution of the Fraction of Nezalezhnyky, proposed at the VI Congress of the USDRP36

On the current moment

1. The IV Congress of the USDRP recognises that all Europe is today living through the epoch of socialist revolution, prepared by the whole preceding development of the capitalist economy and the world imperialist war.

2. The present Ukrainian revolution is one of the phases of the socialist revolution in national Ukrainian forms, and as such presents the proletariat of Ukraine with the following tasks:

a) the transformation of the sovereign and independent Ukrainian People's Republic into the sovereign and independent Ukrainian Socialist Republic;

b) the organisation of power on the principle of the of the dictatorship of the urban and rural proletariat and the poorer toiling peasantry, organised in worker-peasant councils, with the complete removal of the bourgeoisie, landowners and wealthy peasants from political power. The power of the councils must be planned and organised from the centre, constitutionally, without disorganised and anarchic seizures of power by separate local councils;

c) the organisation of Ukraine's entire national economy on a socialist basis, for which there must be a planned nationalisation of land, credit for all means of production and transport, subject to the general plan of the state economy.

On the matter of reorganisation of power

1. Since, in accordance with the course of the world revolution and its own internal development, Ukraine must be a socialist republic, where power belongs to the proletariat and the revolutionary peasantry, the Congress of the USDRP resolves that the present government must be reorganised on the basis of representation from revolutionary Ukrainian parties which stand for, a) the independence of the national Ukrainian Socialist Republic, and b) the power of the worker-peasant councils. This government is transitional until the organisation of the government by the All-Ukrainian Congress of Worker-Peasant Councils.

On the matter of international politics

1. On the basis of the independence of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic and the beginning of the world socialist revolution, the USDRP defends the independence of the Ukrainian Republic with all means and demands from the Ukrainian government:

a) a rapprochement with the Russian Soviet Republic, on the basis of mutual recognition of the sovereignty of both socialist republics, complete and mutual non-interference in the internal affairs of the neighbouring republic,

b) the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops from the territory of Ukraine (including the Crimea), their non-interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine and, in the case of refusal, an active defence of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic against imperialist attack.

Organizing Committee,

Fraction of Nezalezhnyky of the USDRP

***

Declaration the Fraction of Nezalezhnyky

Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party37

Comrades, workers of the towns and villages,

More than a year ago, the IV Congress of the USDRP indicated that the world war, having brought about the complete ruin of the capitalist economy, caused the total collapse of capitalism’s organising abilities and aspirations. As a result, capitalism and imperialism are bankrupt and the world imperialist war is being transformed into a world socialist revolution.

But, during the IV Congress, the moment for liquidating the war was not yet apparent. The ripening of the revolution in the highly developed capitalist countries was unclear and, therefore, at the IV Congress the USDRP did not clearly take the path of socialist revolution, but assumed a waiting position, setting itself the task of organising the Ukrainian republic internally as a necessary condition for the successful course of the socialist revolution in Ukraine.

The further internal development of Ukraine and a whole series of international circumstances more and more drew Ukraine into the vortex of the international struggle and placed its fate in close connection with the sharply defined transition of the world war to the process of social revolution, with the breakup of old states into national organisms. this breakup of the old, violently built multi-national states and the creation of new national republics is necessary beginning stage of the socialist revolution, which can take place only on an international scale and, from now on, only within the forms and boundaries of national political-economic organisms.

The beginning of the socialist revolution in Germany and all the signs of its possibility in other countries determined the further course of the Ukrainian revolution as a social revolution. The more so since during the rule of the Hetmanate the bourgeoisie showed its complete bankruptcy and its inability to manage the economic life of the country; it is now clear Ukraine, in spite of its agrarian character and economic backwardness, can come out of the state of economic ruin only by organizing the national economy on a fully socialist basis.

In the epoch of the world's division into two hostile camps - the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, which is already ending its rule, at a time when throughout the whole world new waves are growing and rolling, it is not possible to retain the old forms of economic and political life. From today, every attempt to reform them without destroying the basis of this economy - private ownership of the means of production - will inevitably bring with it the destruction of Ukraine and its subjugation by stronger states.

So, life itself has placed before the Ukrainian proletariat and the USDRP the task of going from a passive waiting state to an active and creative struggle for the reconstruction of the whole socio-political and economic order of Ukraine, according to a definite plan based of the aims, tasks and understanding of a process that embraces all of Europe.

These new tasks of the party have been felt most keenly by the group of Nezalezhnyky of the USDRP. Under its influence, the VI Congress of the party, which was held recently, had to stand for the socialist revolution. But, unfortunately, it went only half way, without drawing the necessary conclusions, without resolutely taking the path of the new creativity, of continually building the economy, but on a new, genuine socialist principle. The majority of the VI Congress stayed with the hopeless attempts to maintain the old bourgeois order, to patch it up somehow, failing to understand the unity of the state’s economy, at once trying, not to shake the old order, but to strengthen it. Such work leaves life at a dead end and neither allows the old order to strengthen itself nor the new to achieve its destined course. This introduces and will introduce disorder, anarchy and decay into economic life and leaves the new reformist patches hanging in the air without real implementation, without their organic inculcation into life itself. The party faced the question with all its sharpness: either the old or the new - and the official party stood between them. Therefore, its creative activity has been stopped and will continue to be stopped. Its influence on the workers and peasants is being undermined. They cannot be satisfied with the standstill that the USDRP offers.

We, the fraction of Nezalezhnyky of the USDRP, stand clearly and unequivocally on the new path in this our first tactical split with the rest of the party. We must take the new path if we want to save the economic and social life of Ukraine, that is, its national-political life, for the one is closely connected with the other. In principle, as it were, both the fraction ofNezalezhnyky and the official section of the party stand for socialist revolution, both sections of the party recognise that the socialist revolution in Ukraine can take place only in the form of an independent Ukrainian Republic. But the dead end reached by the IV Congress is a heavy blow, first of all to the independence of the Ukrainian Republic, because it does not allow Ukraine to stand firmly in the middle, that is, at a time when the world war is breaking up into a whole series of partial wars, on the basis of the necessity for the socialist revolution of being introduced in national-political forms.

Basing itself on a common understanding of Ukraine's autonomy and independence as an essential and necessary form for carrying out the socialist revolution, the fraction of Nezalezhnyky, however, sharply splits with the official party on the forms of power, capable of bringing about a socialist revolution. While the only form of power for the socialist revolution that the fraction ofNezalezhnyky recognises, at least in its present stage, is the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry in the form of workers' and peasants' councils, the official party admits complete confusion: The Labour Congress and a parliament with four tails, and locally - the organs of self-government, and the commissars, and the labour councils. By its tactic, the official party ruins the only organs it can rely on - the workers' and peasants' councils.

We, the fraction of Nezalezhnyky, cannot take responsibility for this. We believe that, if the USDRP cannot sharply change the direction of the government's course, then it must recall its representatives from the government and begin to fight for a genuine people's government, for a government of worker-peasant councils.

The official party thinks it can save the revolution by seizing on democratic formulas, afraid clearly to take the path that is unavoidable for a party of the proletariat at the present moment. Democracy does not and will not provide the strong centralised power that alone can carry out the revolution. Democracy in Ukraine will inevitably be transformed into the dictatorship of the middle classes, which, of course, cannot be the agents of a socialist revolution. In a parliamentary order the popular masses will be excluded from creative action. The socialist revolution demands a centralised government, both centrally and locally, but a government based on the active participation of the working masses. The form of such a government is the government of the councils.

Fear of a victory by non-Ukrainian urban element played no small role in the vague and ambiguous position taken by VI Congress. But a government of councils does not at all mean the dictatorship of the proletariat in its pure form, and the proletariat is not entirely foreign. It is possible to organise a government of councils without giving workers a majority in these organs, the more so in Ukraine where the working peasantry plays a basic role. Only as the class that is alone destined to bring socialism to full fruition must the proletariat be guaranteed a strong influence, appropriate to its strength, in future socialist action. But, for now, during the transitional epoch, until the struggle between socialism and capitalism is world-wide, the proletariat in Ukraine can and must come to power together with the revolutionary peasantry. True, a large section of the proletariat in Ukraine is still blinded by the chauvinism and imperialism of Russian Bolshevism, but, objectively, this proletariat must, in the course of the Ukrainian revolution's development, be drawn more and more into all forms of internal life in Ukraine. And we are certain that all non-Ukrainian workers will soon rid themselves of the remnants of old Russia and will join the Ukrainian people and proletariat. But for this a strong position is needed. We, the Ukrainian Social Democratic Nezalezhnyky, provide such a clear and firm proletarian position.

During the revolution in Ukraine, the Bolsheviks demonstrated all the inconsistency and worthlessness of their anti-Ukrainian tactic which brought the workers to utter defeat. By the very development of events the non-Ukrainian workers must be drawn into work of the social-political construction of the independent Ukrainian Republic. A repetition of the Bolsheviks' anti-Ukrainian experiments would be very quickly defeated by the course of the national movement itself. But the workers must not suffer a new defeat. We believe that the time has come for the non-Ukrainian workers to be drawn into the work of the social-political construction of the independent Ukrainian Republic, and that this can take place most quickly and best through a government of councils, in which the workers are guaranteed not less than one their representation in the appropriate organs of the councils.

Such are the differences between the fraction of Nezalezhnyky and the rest of the party. A different understanding of the socialist revolution and the methods of implementing it force us to create a fraction ofNezalezhnyky within the USDRP with an independent political line and tactics. We do not take responsibility for the policy adopted by the VI Congress of the USDRP and we consider it harmful for the Ukrainian revolution. The fraction ofNezalezhnyky of the USDRP will work among the masses on the basis of its resolution under the slogan of the struggle for a worker-peasant government of councils in an independent and autonomous Ukrainian Socialist Republic. But our fraction does not make a final break with the party because it believes that the entire party will be compelled to take our position in the course of the revolution. We are also convinced that the Ukrainian worker masses will be with us and not with the official leadership of the party that thinks it can save Ukraine by putting socialist patches on the bourgeois base.

Our attitude toward the Ukrainian government is determined by our general position. We do not support the present government of Ukraine - the Directory. By means of our clear criticism, we push it onto the path of liberation from bourgeois fetters, while at the same time we reveal to the masses it’s every error, its every betrayal of the people's interests.

Our understanding of the socialist revolution sharply distinguishes us from the Bolshevik-Communist party, whose work harms the workers of Ukraine, because it draws them toward Russia and does not seek its support in the centre of Ukraine. Therefore, the work of the party in Ukraine is imperialist and it leads to Ukraine's subjugation to Russia, which we, the Nezalezhnyky Ukrainian SDs, cannot permit because we are, first of all, that political group that sees the success of the revolution only in the Ukrainian worker-peasant masses and relies only on them. What differentiates us from the Bolsheviks is also the fact that we do not now recognise the possibility of a pure dictatorship of the proletariat, but we put forth, as a present necessity, the dictatorship of the proletariat together with the revolutionary peasantry - in the form of a government of worker-peasant councils.

We, the Nezalezhnyky Ukrainian SDs, going out to the worker-peasant masses, use every opportunity to influence the masses. Therefore, we do not refuse to take part in the Labour Congress, although we do not place great hopes in it. We cannot make use of this surrogate, because its days are short: it must yield power either to the right or to the left. We, theNezalezhnyky, do not accept assertions about the apolitical nature of the army. The army is the workers and peasants and they are fighting for their own worker-peasant interests.

We demand, therefore, that the army be represented in political organs, including the Labour Congress and the councils. But we do not distinguish the political role of the army from its strategic and operative roles. There must be strict discipline here and complete submission to the military authorities, established by the worker-peasant government.

So, having indicated its political line, the fraction of Nezalezhnyky calls on all comrade workers, revolutionary peasants and soldiers of Ukraine to organise and fight for socialism and the international under our red banner.

Long live the Ukrainian autonomous and independent socialist Republic!

Long live the power of the workers' and peasants' councils!

Long live harmony among socialist republics!

All to the struggle against reaction and imperialism!

Organising Committee,

Fraction of Nezalezhnyky of the USDRP

***

The All-Ukraine Labour Congress

23-28 January 1919

Statement of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party delegation at the Congress of Working People of Ukraine.

26 January 1919

The delegation from the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, which, together with all other Ukrainian socialist parties, has successfully led to victory the national revolution against all enemies of the social and national liberation of the working masses of Ukraine, now makes the following statement on behalf of the organised and class-conscious body of Ukrainian workers:

As a result of the war and the unparalleled crisis of the capitalist economy, Ukraine, as an overwhelmingly agricultural country, became to a growing extent a country with an innumerable proletariat where work on the land and the processing of the agricultural goods produced by the peasant population play the greatest role. The results of the World War in the international context have led to the states of Europe entering the path of revolution which, in its further development, will unquestionably flow into a socialist revolution. While socialist transformation will be the task of the near future in the economically more-developed countries, Ukraine should not be left behind in relation to her future, basing her development exclusively on the capitalist order, which must collapse in the face of the forces it has called forth. The prerequisites for the development of agriculture, the basis on which economic policy must be structured, which differs from socialist reforms in relation to its tempo, the forms it takes and the manner in which it is carried out, are however different in different countries. The sharp economic contradiction between town and country and Ukraine’s territorial dismemberment at the hand of reactionary imperialist states oblige us to adopt a negative attitude towards the (illegible) of the immediate socialisation of the whole national economy and against the attempts of certain groups to seize power for the purpose of carrying out this socialisation by way of a proletarian dictatorship in the form of councils of workers’ and peasants’ deputies.

Only the socialist and democratic front is able to preserve and consolidate the achievements of the revolution in Ukraine. Entirely rejecting the organisation of power in the form of councils of workers’ and peasants’ deputies at the centre and in the provinces at this given moment, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party delegation upholds only that principle of power based on universal, direct, equal and proportional suffrage in a secret ballot and conceives the power of the working masses of Ukraine in the form of the democratically-elected Parliament of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. In the countryside, too, power should belong to organs elected by universal suffrage.

In relation to the uncertain state of war the republic is currently experiencing, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party delegation believes that it is possible and indeed essential that, until a Parliament is convened, supreme power in our republic should lie in the hands of the Directory of the Ukrainian Peoples’ Republic with the addition of a representative of Western Ukraine. Moreover, the Congress should establish standing commissions from its own ranks with supervisory powers etc: Commissions for agrarian, administrative, political, military, international, financial, educational, and labour matters.

The state of war which fully takes the attention all the forces of the leading centre makes necessary the greatest centralisation of power. Therefore, until local self-government organs can be re-elected, commissars with full powers from the government should exercise power in the provinces, who would have to work under the control of and in contact with local district and Guberniya councils elected proportionally by workers and peasants.

For the purpose of consolidating the revolutionary forces, the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic should tirelessly continue the annihilation of feudal and absolutist order. And undertake the most important of the reforms, i.e. land reform and the reform of labour in the interests of the workers and the peasantry of Ukraine as well as purging the official apparatus of counter-revolutionaries and elements hostile to the state. At the same tim,e the government has the duty to be vigilant in defence of the civil rights of all members of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and take energetic steps to foil a repetition of the pogroms against Jews organised by counter-revolutionaries.

In the economic sphere, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Party delegation is in favour of the government taking steps towards the planned nationalisation of the most highly-developed businesses such as railways, sugar refineries, mines, etc.

While still committed to the organisation of the army as a people’s militia, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party delegation nevertheless believes it necessary, for the purpose of the current defence of Ukrainian independence, for the government to take steps to organise a well-disciplined regular army, without which, at the present moment, our Republic cannot possibly exist.

The Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party delegation salutes, as absolutely essential for the republic’s normal development, the unification of the two parts of the today indivisible, sole, independent and sovereign Ukraine and approves all decisions and mutual commitments of the united parts.

Standing for the Ukrainian people’s right to full self-determination, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party delegation declares that all hostile attempts, from whatever source, to impose a foreign will, hostile to her independence, by force of arms, will encounter energetic resistance on the part of the Ukrainian proletariat and peasantry.

The Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party delegation believes that a military alliance with and dependence on the part of Ukraine on the Entente Powers as arbiters of international politics is impermissible, and protests against foreigners intervening in Ukraine’s internal affairs in pursuit of their imperialist goals.

On the other hand, the Soviet Army’s campaign against Ukraine, the aggressive attack by the Don Cossacks and [Russian] volunteer hordes, the Polish offensive in Galicia and the Romanian invasion of the Bukovyna and the Ukrainian parts of Bessarabia make it necessary to put on the agenda the organisation of the defence of the nation against the incursions on all sides of counter-revolutionary foes.

Representing the organised proletariat of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party delegation calls on the Directory Government to act energetically to ensure that not a single drop of Ukrainian peoples’ blood is shed in vain. Notwithstanding its efforts to achieve good mutual relations with foreign powers, the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic should value its relations with the Ukrainian people greater. It should not allow itself to be moved from its democratic and socialist course either by threats or by tempting and treacherous promises. It should be guided purely and simply by the interests of the working masses of the Ukrainian People’s Republic.

***

Declaration of the Fraction of Nezalezhnyky USDRP at the Labour Congress38

The mighty uprising of the Ukrainian toiling peasants and workers obliterated the Hetmanate-landowner reaction in Ukraine that was forcibly planted here by German imperialism. The popular working masses began to fight oppression, exploitation and slavery with unprecedented strength.

This great Ukrainian revolution, taking place in nationally Ukrainian forms and limits, is at the same time closely connected with the course of world events and with the West European revolution. The overthrow of German imperialism by the revolution in Germany and its weakened force in Ukraine provided favourable conditions for the success of the Ukrainian revolution.

Closely connected with the European socialist revolution that has seized a large part of the world, the Ukrainian revolution is taking on the aspects of a socialist revolution and is assuming the task of fundamentally transforming the economic and political relations on the socialist principle.

In its first stage, the socialist revolution leads to the disintegration of the old imperialist states and to the creation of new national-political organisms by the liberated peoples. The further process of transforming the national revolution into a social revolution and of reconstructing economic life takes place within the forms and limits of these organisms and, therefore, for its successful and even development the Ukrainian socialist revolution demands that its national-political Ukrainian forms be safeguarded.

Thus, in the present moment of the socialist revolution, the Ukrainian Republic, without excluding treaties and alliances for common aims with other socialist republics, must in the interests of revolution maintain its independence as a definite national and economic organism.

The Directory of the UNR had to choose correctly the moment for raising the slogans of the uprising among the Ukrainian popular masses; it provided the organisational cells of that nucleus whose circle produced the mighty popular force. The Directory played its own great organisational role in the Ukrainian revolution.

But it could not stay on the path by which the Ukrainian socialist revolution must develop, it could not appreciate the tasks and aims put forth by the world revolution, it could not stand firm on the social basis and caused the social foundation, which alone could strengthen the revolution, to loosen.

The reasons for this are both the very structure of the Directory's power and the circumstances in which it managed to carry on its activity. The character of the Directory's composition as a coalition of national revolutionary Ukrainian parties and the absence a clearly defined class character (only class power can carry out a socialist revolution) determined the vacillating and indecisive character of both its internal and external policy.

 Having raised the slogan of the dictatorship of the working people, the Directory, at the same time, instead of relying on the organisation of this dictatorship, instead of giving the energies of working masses an organised input, to calling these bodies into power, began to persecute and destroy them.

Instead of becoming a ground for restructuring all life on a socialist basis, the Directory took the path of mending the bourgeois system with social patches, trying to hold up the bourgeois system, and even these patches hang in the air, because it does not have the force to translate them into life.

The Directory entered into conflict with the working masses, and it disorganised and ruined the revolutionary forces, it turned this conflict into a civil war engulfing almost the whole of Ukraine.

In the course of this conflict, the Directory turned more and more to the right, workers' organisations were persecuted, revolutionary parties and leaders were plagued with repression and terror, and the Directory’s authority became a military-bourgeois dictatorship.

To a great extent, this course of events was fostered by Ukraine's international position. Finding itself between two foreign powers - Soviet Russia on the one hand and the imperialist Entente on the other - the Directory did not take a decisive attitude toward the Entente out of fear. At the same time, the attack of the Soviet Russian army and the Pyatakov government's adventure caused government policy in Ukraine to go to the right rather than to the left as might have been expected. As a result, we have a war with Socialist Russia and the possibility of an alliance with the imperialist Entente.

We cannot allow this. The only way out of this situation that can maintain the revolution and prevent it from being strangled, that can provide the revolutionary masses with organising slogans and lead them to the struggle, is the quickest possible transfer of power to the worker-peasant councils.

The Labour Congress is the fruit of the Directory's vacillating and ambiguous policy. In convening the Labour Congress, the Directory intended to satisfy both the social and imperialist forces and satisfied neither.

We cannot consider the Labour Congress a genuine representative of the revolutionary masses of Ukraine either in its construction or in the way elections to it were carried out. The representation of workers does not correspond to their significance in the national economy; the revolutionary army was deprived of the right to participate in the Labour Congress. The Labour Congress was convened simultaneously with the destruction of the organs of the working people, or the prevention of their local existence; elections were held under government pressure, without freedom of agitation; the bunching up and speed of the elections in unfavourable military conditions - all this deprives the Labour Congress of true representation of the revolutionary masses and gives no force to its work, because it lacks the organs that might support it.

Therefore, if the Directory transfers all power to it, the Labour Congress lacks the right to keep it in its own hands and must transfer this power to the true representative of the revolutionary masses, the only one capable of carrying out the great tasks of the Ukrainian social revolution - the worker-peasant councils.

In view of all the above, the independent faction of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Party at the Labour Congress demands the following:

1. Having received full power in the Ukrainian republic from the Directory, the Labour Congress does not keep it in its own hands, but transfers it to the only true representative of the force and will of the revolutionary peasants and workers - the councils of workers' and peasants' deputies.

2. The Labour Congress proclaims Ukraine an independent Socialist republic.

3. The Labour Congress proposes that the Soviet Russian government enter peace negotiations and agreements between the two socialist republics.

4. The Labour Congress demands the withdrawal of foreign imperialist troops from Ukraine and the non-interference of imperialist states in Ukrainian affairs.

5. The Labour Congress puts together a provisional worker-peasant government composed of representatives of parties and groups that stand for the power of the soviets. On specific instructions of the congress, this government will be charged with transferring power to the worker-peasant councils and convening a congress of worker-peasant councils in Ukraine, which is to create the normal order of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic of Councils and organise a permanent government.

6. After this, the Labour Congress must be dissolved.

Fraction of the Nezalezhnyky U.S.D.

***

Resolution adopted by the Congress of Working Peoples of Ukraine at the session of 28 January 191939

The Congress of the Working People of Ukraine, having heard the reports of the Directory and its ministries and bearing in mind the declaration of the Directory on its readiness to relinquish its authority, has resolved:

1. To express its full trust in and thanks to the Directory for its great work for the liberation of the Ukrainian people from landowner-Hetmanate power.

2. Considering the threatening internal and external position of our republic, to cease our meetings and create a commission from among ourselves, with legislative and control functions, which are to draft bills for the next session of the Labour Congress and help the government in curing the administrative apparatus of counter-revolutionary and anti-state elements. New commissions on the following must be created: 1. defence of the state, 2. land, 3. budget, 4. foreign affairs, 5. provisions, and 6. culture and education. The general composition of the commissions will be determined by elections on the basis of proportional representation from all factions of the congress:

1 representative for 15 members of the congress. The division among individual commissions and their agendas will be established in meeting of all deputies elected to the commissions.

3. In view of the dangerous military situation, to charge the Directory of the UNR, supplemented with representatives from Dnieper Ukraine, with the authority to defend the country until the next Labour Congress becomes the supreme power, and to pass laws necessary for the defence of the republic, which laws are to be ratified at the next meeting of the Labour Congress.

The executive power of the UNR belongs to the Council of Ministers, which is formed by the Directory and during the first session of the congress is responsible to the Directory.

4. To charge presidium of the Labour Congress to convene the next session of the Labour Congress, in agreement with the Directory, as soon as normal work is possible.

5. The Congress of the Working People of Ukraine stands against the organised dictatorship of the workers and for a democratic order in Ukraine. In order to strengthen the democratic order, the government of the UNR together with its commissions must prepare a law for elections to the all-national parliament of the Great Pan-Ukrainian Republic.

6. On the basis of all-national voting, new local organs of government are to be convened and, in the interests of national defence, local authority will belong to the confidants of the government of the UNR - the commissars, who must work in contact with and under the control of the local labour councils, elected proportionately from peasants and workers.

7. Regarding the seizure of Ukrainian territory by the states of the Entente, by the Soviet, Polish, Don, Volunteer and Romanian armies, the Congress of the Working People of Ukraine resolutely protests attempts on the unity, autonomy and independence of the Ukrainian People's Republic. The Ukrainian people want to be neutral and to have friendly relations with all other peoples, but it will not tolerate any state's imposing its will on the Ukrainian people by armed force.

8. The Congress of the Working People of Ukraine issues its Universal on its resolutions to the Ukrainian people and a memorandum to the peoples of the whole world.

Supported by the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (official) and part of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (central tendency).

***

Left Bloc statement leaving the Labour Congress40

Not recognising the competence of the congress from the very beginning, as we have noted in our declaration, we have seen it as our sole task to use the tribune of the congress to proclaim the demands of the toiling peasantry and proletariat, who are fighting for socialism and the power of the soviets. In the two days of the congress's work, this task has been accomplished. On the other hand, from the declaration of the factions that make up the majority of the congress it is evident that: 1. the congress completely approves of the policy of the Directory, which carries on a struggle against the revolutionary masses, 2. the congress approves of the war with Soviet Russia and the agreement with the imperialist governments of the Entente, hiding behind a mask of neutrality. The government, which convened this congress on uncertain grounds and under conditions of repressions against the revolutionary socialist parties, attained its aims and won an obedient majority. Once again, we declare that this government has no right to speak in the name of the toiling masses of Ukraine. Fulfilling the order of their electors, the above mentioned factions leave the congress and reject all responsibility for the resolutions of the congress and their consequences.

Ukrainian Social-Democrat Nezalezhnyky

Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (Left)

S.R.-Internationalists

General Jewish Labour Bund

***

Report on the Activities of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party to the International Socialist Bureau in Amsterdam

February 191941

The Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party came into being in 1900. It was called the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party from 1900 to 1905. In 1905, the party’s second congress adopted a social-democratic programme and took the name of “Social-Democratic Workers’ Party”.

The party has already presented reports on its activities to various International Socialist congresses – in Amsterdam, in 1905; in Stuttgart, in 1907; in Copenhagen, in 1910 and at the International Socialist Conference in Holland in 1916. There is therefore little point in discussing the party’s activities from the time it changed until 1907. We shall only discuss the recent period, from the time of the Russian Revolution to date. In common with all other socialist organisations, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was terribly oppressed by the Tsarist regime and the war had increased the number of repressive acts. Newspapers were outlawed and the Ukrainian proletariat had no opportunity to get any information on events in their own language. From the very outbreak of hostilities, almost the entire territory of Ukraine was declared to be in a “State of Siege” and all the Ukrainian press offices were closed down by order of the military authorities. Moreover, the party was seriously weakened by the departure of a great number of its members for the front. Despite this, the organisations continued to function in the large cities of Ukraine where the largest numbers of the proletariat lived and also in Petrograd and Moscow and other Russian cities. For military reasons, the Petrograd garrison had been reinforced from within the regiments of the Imperial Guard who made up the largest part of the garrison. The Ukrainians, men of great presence, were still very numerous and the organisers of the party in Petrograd were able to disseminate their revolutionary work among the soldiers. It was the Ukrainians who, assisted by other socialist organisations, made the Volyn regiment and other regiments in the Guard rise up in rebellion. These uprisings made the Duma Committee stop their hesitating and resulted in the development of the events that are already well-known.

After the victory of the revolutionaries, the “underground” doors opened and work was done in the light of day.

The party conference which took place at the beginning of April 1917 already recorded the existence of five newspapers, in Kyiv; Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, Petrograd and Moscow. The conference decided to produce a Central Publication of the party, Robitnycha Hazeta. At the same time, books were beginning to be published, organisations, libraries and Community Centres were established in different areas of Ukraine. The party was heavily involved in the union and cooperative movements and also in the workers’ councils which were created in Ukraine in order to coordinate the activities of democracy.

The Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party has struggled from the very beginning of its existence for democracy in order to free the proletariat and all citizens from all kinds of oppression, including from national oppression. This is why the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party became very active in the national movement which spread throughout the entire territory of Ukraine during the first days of the revolution. Conferences, meetings and demonstrations supporting Ukrainian democracy all took place in order to complete national, territorial autonomy. The party took an active role in all the above. In order to crown the efforts of the party in its fight in favour of socialism and in order to give all the Ukrainian people forms of free and democratic life, an institution to represent the people had to be created – a Constituent Assembly elected by a universal, secret and direct vote which would be both equal and proportional. Since the Revolution and the war were not yet over, it was impossible to realise these aspirations. Before convening the Constituent Assembly, it was therefore of the utmost importance to create a temporary, representative institution which would bring together the different forces of Ukrainian democracy. Together with other political parties, the USDRP therefore took the initiative to create the Central Rada which was made up of representatives from all the political parties in the country, whatever their nationality. The party had 142 out of 800 representatives in the Central Rada. There were also several party members in the General Secretariat which was responsible to the Rada.

The party believed that the Russian Constituent Assembly should not limit the rights of the people in Russia, but should rather give them the freedom to decide their own fate, even going so far as to envisage complete separation; that the representatives of the largest nation should no longer decide on any matter concerning the fate of the smaller countries. The party thought that the only task of the Russian Constituent Assembly should be to establish the principal laws of the Russian Federation. All matters relating to establishing democratic regimes in the parties of the former Russian Empire should be decided by the local Constituent Assemblies. The party took part in the elections for the Pan-Russian Constituent Assembly, together with other Ukrainian parties, and won around 550,000 votes. The party also took part in the elections for the Ukrainian Constituent Assembly, this time with no alliance with the other parties, and obtained 700,000 votes. When it took part in the local elections, the party won 800,000 votes. It is necessary to point out that the party’s influence on political life in Ukraine has been more important than the figures would seem to indicate. This can be explained by the social-democratic method followed by the party in its activities and also by the large numbers of very popular politicians, such as Petlyura, Vynnychenko, Porsh, etc. As far as relations with the other political parties in Ukraine are concerned, we shall merely mention the social-democratic parties of other nationalities in Ukraine and also the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party.

The USDRP is divided from the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party over the national question. In a country made up of so many nationalities, the USDRP believed that it was essential to create proletarian organisations in respect of each nationality and to bind them together by means of federative links. The steps taken by the party in this regard never had any success because the Russian Social-Democratic party refused to recognize not only these principles but also the national, territorial autonomy of Ukraine. This independent position of the Ukrainian party did not stop it from contributing to the proletariat’s struggle on a practical level – political demonstrations, strikes, etc. Relations with the Polish and Jewish Social-Democratic parties were closer because the latter contributed to the proletariat’s national claims.

The Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party differs, not because of the national but rather the agricultural question. It should be remembered that Ukraine is an agricultural country and peasants make up 85% of the population. For the peasants, the revolution was simply an agricultural matter. In its programme, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party restricted individual property to a specific number of hectares (40 deciatines42). The party also demanded that large agricultural properties should be expropriated, that assets belonging to the Crown and the Church, etc. should be confiscated, that these assets should be nationalised and used by the communes and small landholders.

The Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries took the socialisation of the land as a slogan for its programme. This slogan which, for the peasants, meant sharing land, brought the Socialist Revolutionary Party a large number of followers.

As mentioned above, the Social-Democratic Party entered the 1917 revolution putting Ukrainian autonomy in its programme. When, at the second congress in 1905, the party put Ukrainian autonomy in its programme, it acted according to the following considerations:

1. National oppression in contemporary bourgeois society is the cause of the cultural, economic and political decadence of the oppressed people. This impedes the development of proletarian consciousness
2. National oppression causes the stirrings of nationalism and solidarity and confuses the interests of the proletariat with those of the bourgeoisie in different groups of the ruling nation and the oppressed nation.
3. The process of economic centralisation is only one facet of economic development. The other facet is economic decentralisation which leads to political decentralisation.
4. The democratisation of state control requires the decentralisation of legislation, of government and also of the law.
5. The second congress of the USDRP included Ukrainian national territorial autonomy in its programme, with a legislative parliament. The congress considers Ukraine within its ethnographic borders.

In order to understand the evolution of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party which replaced Ukrainian autonomy with independence in its programme, we must take a look at the series of events which took place in Ukraine. The history of the party during this period is inextricably linked to all life in Ukraine and to the activities of her government which included, as it had previously, a number of party members. The aim of all the demonstrations, congress, meetings etc., which took place in Ukraine at the beginning of the 1917 Revolution, was Ukrainian autonomy. The Central Rada, born of the people and of all the democratic parties, including the USDRP, demanded that the Provisional Government should recognise Ukrainian autonomy and stated the same demand in the First Universal. Given the number of different nationalities in Russia, the Provisional Government, was unable to appreciate how important it was for it to resolve the national question out of everyone’s best interests, published the Order, dated 4^th August 1917, in which it granted Ukraine limited autonomy and only in respect of fiveguberniya (Kyiv, Volhynia, Podolia, Poltava and Chernihiv, without including the districts of the North).

This autonomy was so limited that the appointment of the commissars/commissioners (who replaced the governors of the previous regime) was made without giving prior notice to the General Secretariat of the Central Rada and these commissars/commissioners received their instructions directly from the Provisional Government in Petrograd. It was the same centralising system, under a change of name. The Order of 4^th August 1917, cutting a piece of Ukrainian territory and leaving the most industrial part of Ukraine outside the power of the General Secretariat (Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, steel factories and collieries) clearly revealed to the Ukrainian people the imperialism that fed Russian power did not wish to take into account the national claims made by other peoples. A general malaise among the masses was the result of such a policy. And, when the order came without any discussion in the Central Rada, the majority of these members demanded that the General Secretariat should refuse to obey the order, immediately break with the Provisional Government and declare the independence of Ukraine.

 The USDRP believed this decision to be premature and, through its representatives at the Central Rada, demanded that the order be accepted in order to serve as the basis for the future development of the gains of the revolution. This opinion prevailed and the Central Rada adopted the motion of the USDRP.

Life is stronger than the piece of paper by which the Provisional Government intended meeting Ukrainian national claims. Indeed, events showed that only the USDRP had understood the steps to be taken since the Central Rada and the General Secretariat, while keeping to the 4^th August Order, would become the government organs of power which would lead all Ukraine and would assume the responsibilities of Parliament and of the Ukrainian ministries.

 The coup d’état in Petrograd on 25^th October 1917 which brought the Bolsheviks to power, at the same time, made the organs with which the General Secretariat would have been able to lay down their conditions, disappear. In effect, the Central Rada accepted neither the tactics of the Bolsheviks nor their program of socialisation as they understood it. On 7^th November 1917, it also declared the independence of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic. It should be emphasised that, while declaring the independence of Ukraine, this Universal also expressed the desire to forge federative links with the Greater Russian Republic at some later point. The USDRP agreed with the Central Rada and recognized that, in order to break this impasse, there was no other issue.

 The Lenin government which, from the very beginning, wanted to do the exact opposite of the Kerensky government and to create a large number of partisans in the masses officially recognised the independent Ukrainian Republic on 4^th December 1917. At the same time, the Bolsheviks and their official newspapers began spreading propaganda and stirring up unrest against the government and the Central Rada, accusing them of being bourgeois. A congress of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ representatives, in the spirit of the leaders of Smolny, took place in Kyiv on 5^th December, at the instigation of and on the initiative of Russian Bolshevik organisations to which the independent Ukrainian Republic had guaranteed free existence. This Congress was to overturn the Central Rada and its General Secretariat and give power to the Soviets. This Congress had assembled 2,000 representatives, who with fifty votes less than a unanimous vote, stated their confidence in the Central Rada and its activities. These 50 members of the congress left Kyiv for Kkarkiv and, appealing to Russian Bolshevik elements of the garrison and after having received several detachments from the centre of Russia, began an offensive against Ukraine. Until that time, the Ukrainian government had been unable to form a strong and well-disciplined army because of the obstacles put in its way by the Provisional Government in Petrograd. On the other hand, the general morale of the Ukrainian soldiers was not strong enough to resist the charms of the Bolshevik slogan “Everything for everyone” and, finally, there was a great feeling of weariness prevalent among all the military officers due to three hard years at the front. After bitter fighting, the forces of the Ukrainian army had to fall back when faced with the Bolshevik masses and ten days of fierce fighting having shown that all resistance was impossible, the Ukrainian Government and most of the members of the Rada abandoned Kyiv to the Bolsheviks and withdrew to Zhytomyr.

Members of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic party took part in the fighting, weapons in hand, and many of them died, massacred by the Bolsheviks both in Kyiv and in other villages of Ukraine, in the face of the International, we the Ukrainian Social-Democrats, must state that, in this struggle, the masses of Russian peasants and workers, dressed in their grey greatcoats have not marched against the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, but only against the Ukrainian proletariat which is also made up of workers and peasants. We must also point out that a large part of the Bolshevik troops was made up of elements which, with much assistance given by the Bolsheviks have entered the Red Guard as a stopgap. The regime established in Kyiv instigates terror and suppression against anyone suspected of having any sympathy with Central Rada. Some Ukrainian newspapers were suppressed and those that were able to be published were severely censored. Robitnycha Hazeta, our party paper, was only published five or six times under the Bolshevik regime and, even then, secretly.

The Bolsheviks, being unable to maintain their administrative apparatus and finding no support among the masses, in their turn, had to withdraw in the face of superior forces: Ukrainian regiments, trained in Volhynia and reinforced by German troops entered Ukraine by means of the Brest-Litovsk treaty.

On returning to Kyiv, the Central Rada and its General Secretariat were unable to remain in power for long. Thanks to the assistance given by German troops, the large Russian landholders, unhappy about agrarian reform which had taken away their land, gave support to the government under the name of the Hetman, General Skoropadsky, a great favourite of the imperial court. This was the beginning of the Ukrainian reaction.

 The government called to power by General Skoropadsky was largely made up of the party of Cadets. The other Ukrainian political parties refused to participate and joined the opposition. The agrarian law voted in by the Central Rada was repealed and the rights of the large property owners were restored. An offensive against democracy began, with arrests, imprisonments, firing squads, denunciations; freedoms of speech and meetings, etc., were outlawed under the pretext of stopping Bolshevism.

The Ukrainian Social-Democratic Party returned to the underground, but with difficulty as the number of its supporters had increased, the revolutionary movement continued to evolve and the struggle continued. In Ukraine, as in the Don and Kuban, reactionary organised under the standard of the Volunteer Army.

On the other hand, the Skoropadsky government called for assistance of tsarist bureaucrats from Petrograd and from Moscow, who came very willingly to find shelter from the Bolshevik regime in Kyiv. When reactionary elements began to suppress the national and social gains of the Ukrainian people, the USDRP, shoulder to shoulder with the other Ukrainian parties, entered a decisive war against the Skoropadsky regime.

The specific insurrections continued throughout all of Ukraine. The German troops, who made up more than 500,000 men on Ukrainian territory, energetically defended the interests of the Hetman. The blood of Ukrainian peasants and workers flowed and the German artillery razed entire villages. At last, when the Skoropadsky government openly broke with the Ukrainians and appealed to the Russian monarchist circles, the Ukrainian National Union, made up of representatives of all the democratic parties, including the USDRP, organized a general uprising. A Directory of 5 members was elected and two of the Representatives of the USDRP, Vynnychenko and Petlyura joined.

 Beginning on 14^th November, this movement was followed by a mobilisation of the Ukrainian people who, within a few days, provided 800,000 recruits, of whom 200,000 were kept back through a lack of clothes and munitions, and in less than three weeks, a popular army was organised. The necessary weapons were obtained by disarming Skoropadsky’s detachments of voluntary officers and especially from the German troops. This movement concluded in the complete victory of the revolutionary people, village by village, town by town, all of Ukraine came into the hands of the Committee. Petlyura’s troops entered Kyiv on 14^th December. The Hetman, together with several of his ministers, sought asylum in Germany. The officers from the voluntary detachments dispersed in all different directions and many were taken prisoner.

The Directory formed a democratic government and four members of the Ukrainian Social Democratic party joined it. Once again, many different activities were undertaken. The agrarian law that the Central Rada had voted in but not yet enforced was revived. The Directory signed the decree by which the Labour Congress, made up of peasants, workers and democratic intellectuals, was convened.

However, the government’s position and the position of the parties who had given it their support became serious. Ukraine had to withstand war on several fronts: in the Donets basis and the region of Odessa, against the Volunteer Army who had seized the Katerynoslav mines and put in place a regime of terror, also seizing nine hundred truckloads of coal which the Ukrainian railways desperately needed; in Galicia, against the Poles who had seized Lviv. Ukraine was forced to fight a difficult war in the north where Bolshevik detachments had already begun an offensive in the guberniya’s of Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Kursk.

Furthermore, there were many bands of brigands throughout all Ukraine, the most important of which was Makhno’s (the current general of the Bolsheviks in Crimea), who carried out his misdeeds in the region of Katerynoslav.

It had not been possible to organise an army with reliable foundations during the German occupation, under the Hetman regime. This popular army which had given back power to the Committee needed to consolidate the lack of coal resulting from the occupation of Donets stopped all traffic and did not allow the Committee to position its troops in the areas where they would have been necessary.

However, the Bolsheviks in the north massed their forces in the guberniya of Kharkiv and of Kursk and unleashed their offensive against the Ukrainian troops. The Ukrainian troops who, from the beginning, fought the Bolsheviks and who, for the reasons outlined, were not able to receive reinforcements, had to sustain attacks by superior Bolshevik forces, commanded by the tsarist general Glagolev, and others.

Some Ukrainian political groups, among them the extremist Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, believed that, given the impossibility of withstanding fighting on several fronts, it was necessary to come to terms with some elements of the enemy. Since a peace treaty with the Volunteer monarchists or with the imperialist Poles who wanted to seize eastern Galicia could not be signed, they said that a peace treaty could be entered into only with the Bolsheviks.

Negotiations began and Ukraine included an indispensable condition that Bolshevik troops should withdraw from Ukrainian territory following the negotiations. Lenin’s refusal led to Ukraine declaring war. On the other hand, the same Ukrainian groups began to disseminate propaganda about putting power back into the hands of the Ukrainian soviets, believing that this was the only way to safeguard the independent Ukrainian Republic. The 6^th party Congress which met towards the middle of January, unanimously less 10 votes decided that it was premature to give power to the Soviets and that the Ukrainian proletariat, united with all the people, had to defend, weapons in hand, their territory against any invasion and against any kind of violence, from wherever these would come: imperialist, Bolshevik, etc.

The Labour congress convened by the Committee met in Kyiv towards the end of January 1919 and was made up of only representatives from the workers’ party; the bourgeois having no right to vote. Many representatives of Ukrainian Democracy were unable to attend, Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Poltava, being already in the hands of the Bolsheviks. The congress unanimously ratified recognition of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The congress made several amendments to the draft agrarian law and approved the rights of small landowners over land already in their possession. Unfortunately, the congress did not have the calm conditions required in order to give itself over to its work; the evacuation of Kyiv began. It moved to Vinnytsia, in Podolia where the Ukrainian government also came to be installed.

Today, Ukraine continues its bitter struggle against Bolshevik invasion and if the lack of weapons forces the army to withdraw to the western border, the workers’ party has confidence in the cause it is defending and is firmly resolved to achieve the triumph of the democratic Ukrainian Republic, whatever the cost, and will spare no effort nor no blood to ensure that democratic Ukraine has the right to create in her own territory whatever form of government it wishes for the victory of democracy, the basis of the triumph of socialism.

• 1. The Directory members were: Vynnychenko, as Chairman, Petliura, F. Shevets of the Peasant Union, P. Andriievsky, Independent Socialists, and A. Makarenko representing the rail workers trade union.
• 2. The Nezalezhnyky counted a number of prominent figures in its ranks: Mykhaylo Tkachenko, their main theorist, had been Minister of Internal Affairs of the Central Rada; Volodymyr Chekhivsky, the Head of the Council of Ministers of the revived UNR government. The other leading theorist was Andriy Richytsky; he was one of the editors of the USDRP central organ Robitnycha Gazeta in 1917. Mykhaylo Avdiyenko was the most active practical figure, originally from the strong Petrograd USDRP organisation where he was soldier; later in Kyiv he was close to Vynnychenko. Another prominent member was Antin Drahomyretsky, a Kyiv functionary and Yurko Mazurenko; he was in command of the USDRP Revolutionary Committee and in 1917 played a key role in blocking the passage to Petrograd of Kornilov.
• 3. Khrystiuk Pavlo Zamitky i materiialy do istori ukrains'koi revoliutsia 1917-1920, Vol. IV Chapter III 52.
• 4. When the Dniprovska Division entered Kyiv on the defeat of Skoropadsky it was under red banners and slogans of “All power to the Soviets!” and “All land to the peasants”. Fearing they would make an attempt to take power, Petlyura transferred them from the city. Petrichenko, KB — “Malovidomi Fakty z Zhyttya ta Diyalnosti Danylo Ilkovicha Terpylo (Otaman Zeleny)”. Unpublished paper, Institute of Ukrainian Studies Kyiv, December 2006
• 5. Ukrainian People's Socialist Republic December 1918 (Robitnycha Hazeta, 7 January 1919, Khrystiuk. Zamitky i materiialy, Tom. IV, pp. 55-56).
• 6. Ukrainian People's Socialist Republic December 1918 (Robitnycha Hazeta, 7 January 1919, Khrystiuk. Zamitky i materiialy, Tom. IV, pp. 55-56).
• 7. An illustration was Colonel Bolbochan, the former Hetmanate commander of the Zaporozhian Division, who was appointed the Directory's commander in chief in Left-Bank Ukraine. Bolbochan instituted a reign of terror against the resurgence of the agrarian revolution and the workers' councils (Baker “Peasants, Power and Revolution in the Village” 167-8).
• 8. Assessing what had arisen in the UNR, “Andr. Mykh” of the Nezalezhnyky wrote: “Whatever was alive and popular in it has passed to the masses where it works. But remnants of the nationalist bourgeoisie and intelligentsia cling to the blue and yellow banner, arrange buffoonery, meetings to the sound of church bells, prayer services and other attributes of national sentimentalism, which only serve to discredit the popular movement and its leaders. Our task and the task of the Directory at the present moment is to break completely with remnants of the national front” (Robitnycha Hazeta, December 1918, pp. 55-56).
• 9. The Council of National Ministers was re-established on 26 December 1918, members of the USDRP included: Prime Minister .V. Chekhivsky, Minister of Finance V. Mazurenko; Minister of Food Supplies B.Martos; Minister of Arts D. Antonovych; Minister of National Health B. Matiushenko; Minister of Labor L.Mykhailiv.
• 10. Khrystiuk. Zamitky i materiialy, Tom IV, p. 69
• 11. Khrystiuk. Zamitky i materiialy, Tom IV, p. 69
• 12. The discussions that Porsh held with Mazepa on their own do not explain such a volte-face by Porsh. One can only surmise that the experience of the Bolshevik rule in Ukraine had seriously disillusioned Porsh, as it had others. It was his last speech to a USDRP audience in Ukraine after which he was dispatched as UNR ambassador to Germany. In January 1921 he began to adopt a more sovietophile politics; he made a speech at a student meeting calling on the émigrés to recognise the Soviet Ukrainian government and return to the Ukraine. Porsh applied to return to the Ukraine himself in 1922 and in January 1923 the Ukrainian Politburo decided to allow him to return though he never took up the offer. He started to drift away from political activity and suffered a tragic death in Germany in 1944.
• 13. Vynnychenko Vidrodzhennia natsii, Kyiv-Vienna, 1920,Vol. 3 242.
• 14. Chervony Prapor 22 January 1919.
• 15. Chervony Prapor 22 January 1919.
• 16. Chervony Prapor 22 January 1919.
• 17. Deklaratsiya Fraktsii Nazalezhnykh USDRP, Chervony Prapor, 22 January 1919.
• 18. Khrystiuk. Zamitky i materiialy, Tom IV p.13.
• 19. Chervony Prapor 22 January 1919.
• 20. Khrystiuk. Zamitky i materiialy, Tom IV, pp. 49-54.
• 21. Khrystiuk. Zamitky i materiialy, Tom IV 12.
• 22. There is speculation that it was without Lenin's knowledge that the Red Army advanced into Ukraine in late December 1918 (Adams 82-5).
• 23. Mazurenko Dokymenti Trahichnoi Istorii Ukrayini 248-53.
• 24. An act complemented by Red Army commander Antonov also lobbying Moscow against an agreement stating there was “nobody in Ukraine with whom we should negotiate” (Stachiw 258).
• 25. Mazurenko's efforts are considered to have been sabotaged by the new head of the Directory of the UNR. (Vynnychenko Vidrodzhennia natsii Vol. 3 279-80).
• 26. Most successfully in Left-Bank Ukraine in Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Katerynoslav guberniya the Directory was overthrown. On the Right Bank attempted risings occurred in Volhynia, Zhytomyr and in the Obruch district where the Otamanshchyna responded with pogroms. In Vynnychenko's estimation in the territory under their control: “There was neither punishment, nor justice, nor trials, nor control over these criminals and enemies of the revolution and the national movement. The whole system of military authority was constructed and consciously based, by the chief otamany, on the principle that there would be no control” (Vynnychenko Vidrodzheniia natsii Vol. 3 188).
• 27. Petrichenko.
• 28. Chervony Prapor 6 February 1919.
• 29. Chervony Prapor Kharkiv 11 July 1920.
• 30. Chervony Prapor 21 December 1919.
• 31. Halahan, Mykola (1925) Likvidatsiya UKP. Nova Ukraine (Prague) 1 , pp. 26-38.
• 32. Resolutionen Des VI Kongresses Der Ukr.Sozialdemokr.Arbeiterpartei, Institute of Social History Amsterdam, 815/- 816, Robitnycha Hazeta, 5, 14, 16 January, 1919, Kyiv.
• 33. Deklaration der Fraktion der Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterpartei der Ukraine auf dem Kongress der arbeitenden Völkes der Ukraine, Institute of Social History, 8116/12-15.
• 34. Zakon, ukhvalenyy Konhresom Trudovoho Narodu Ukrayiny na zasidanni, 28 January, 1919 , ‘Pro formu vlady na Ukrayini’, Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, SAI, 816/6
• 35. Rezolyutsiyi po suchasnomy momentu VI Kongresy USDRP, (Institute of Social History, 015/1)
• 36. Chervony Prapor , No.1, 22 January 1919
• 37. Chervony Prapor , No.1, 22 January 1919
• 38. Chervony Prapor, No.2, 1919
• 39. Chervony Prapor, No.3, 30 January, 1919. The Resolution was proposed by S Bachinsky of the UPSR (Central Current) and based on the Declaration of the USDRP (official) to the Congress.
• 40. Chervony Prapor No.3, 30 January, 1919
• 41. Rapport sur les activités du parti social-démocrate au Bureau socialiste international D’Amsterdam, (The International Institute of Social History - IISH/IISG), this report was submitted by to the Socialist and Labour Conference at Berne in February 1919. The conference was to make arrangements for the resumption of the previous socialist international which broke up during the war. This was organised by a revived International Socialist Commission based in Amsterdam. The initiative rivalled the Russian Bolshevik Communist International centred in Moscow.
• 42. 1 deciatine = 2.70 acres’; a measurement of land in the Russian Empire, equivalent to 1.09 hectares’.

Christopher Ford

Ukraine has been the victim of invasion several times during the tragic history of that country. On each of those occasions invasion has been accompanied by movements of resistance and a radicalisation amongst the populace. One such movement was the Borotbists, who were the radical left of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries during the revolution of 1917-1921. They went on to form the Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbists) and seek membership of the Third International and played a leading role during the national and cultural revival of Ukraine in the 1920s.

Published below are three rare texts of the Borotbists, the Platform of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (1918), Draft Decree on Encouraging the Development of Culture of the Ukrainian People (1920), and Memorandum of the Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbisty) to the Executive Committee of the Third Communist International, (1920).

Introduction

With the overthrow of the autocracy in 1917 the Ukrainian Revolution soon differentiated itself from the wider Russian Revolution, setting as its task the achievement of national emancipation through the creation of a Ukrainian Republic.

This period was one of unprecedented self-organisation and mobilisation of the masses, the Ukrainian movement comprised a bloc of the middle class, peasantry, workers and the revolutionary-democratic intellectuals, centred in the Ukrainian Central Rada [Council]. The Rada was a mass assembly consisting of councils of peasants’, soldiers’ and workers’ deputies, it included all the socialist parties, Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish and Polish.1

This movement transformed the situation from one where officially within the Russian Empire Ukraine did not exist, to one in which, by July 1917, the Russian Provisional Government was forced to recognise the Rada as a ‘higher organ for conducting Ukrainian national affairs’.2 In historical terms, the Rada represented for Ukraine what the Easter Rising and First Dáil did for the Irish Republic.

The leaders and parties at the forefront of the Ukrainian movement were exclusively socialist, ranging from the moderate Ukrainian Party of Socialist-Federalists to the Marxist Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (USDRP), to the mass Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (UPSR). The autonomous government of Ukraine, the General Secretariat and ‘Mala Rada’, were not exclusively Ukrainian, but included Mensheviks, Bundists and Russian SRs.

The UPSR was the largest political party and central to repeated mobilisations of the peasantry in 1917 and during the civil war. It played a key role in the agrarian revolution, millions of rural workers and peasants enrolled in the Ukrainian Peasants’ Union (Spilka) organised by the UPSR.

The Rada faced burning questions of ending the war, the agrarian revolution and the drive to workers' control, encapsulated in the slogan ‘land for the peasants and factories for the workers’. By late 1917, leadership of the Rada began to lag behind the pace and aspirations of the popular movement from below.3 Relations strained between those moderate and centrist elements and the radicalised rank and file of the movement.

After the October Revolution, a new Ukrainian People’s Republic was proclaimed with widespread support, the conjuncture also saw increasing support for a more radical turn. This was reflected in growth of the left currents in both the Ukrainian Social-Democrats and Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionaries – an aspect downplayed by both Stalinist and nationalist historiography.

But, whilst in Russia this radicalisation saw the different strands of the popular movement coalesce in the Bolshevik-Left SR leadership in the soviets, which caught up with the changed mood, in Ukraine the chief characteristic of the situation was one of fragmentation. The overwhelmingly Ukrainian peasantry did not automatically find allies and leaders in the urban working class which also contained a large Russian and Russified element.4

Those wishing to give the emerging socialist revolution a Ukrainian character and form were unsuccessful in the vortex of the winter of 1917-1918. The Bolshevik organisations in Ukraine were unprepared for the anti-colonial dimension of the revolution. In his later analysis of the Russian Constituent Assembly elections, Lenin emphasised that it was the Ukrainian socialists who had not only secured large votes in the army but that, in Ukraine as a whole, “the Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionaries and socialists polled a majority”, concluding that “to ignore the importance of the national question in Ukraine ... is a great and dangerous mistake.”5

The results illustrated the popular base of the Ukrainian movement, illustrating that frustration with the Rada did not automatically translate into a rejection of the Ukrainian cause itself. Whilst some historians point to the lower vote for the Bolsheviks in Ukraine, it is important to recognise just who was elected.

Of the 120 deputies elected from Ukraine, the UPSR formed a faction of 81 deputies in the Russian Constituent Assembly.6 In their ranks, it was the radical left-current, the “Internationalist” group which linked national emancipation to the world revolution who predominated. After the dissolution of the All-Russia Constituent Assembly, these Left UPSR deputies returned to Kyiv and sought to replace the General Secretariat with a new government with the left-wing of the USDRP, and seek peace with the Bolsheviks. Their plan was discovered and six UPSR leaders arrested and the UPSR Left excluded from the Rada.7

None of this this strengthened the position of the Rada, which was facing an existential crisis. Soviet power was established in one town after another. To see this solely as a Russian ‘invasion’ is an erroneous portrayal. Local Red Guards, workers’ militias and Ukrainian soldiers actively carried through uprisings of the local population.

In Kharkiv, the delegates from a third of the soviets in Ukraine ‘assumed full state power in the Ukrainian People's Republic’ and declared a rival government, the People's Secretariat. It was largely Bolsheviks allied with the USDRP (Left) who had split from their party.

The People’s Secretariat, having proclaimed itself the government of the Ukrainian republic, soon discovered this was not a view shared by Russia or its emissaries. The views harboured by some leading Bolsheviks towards Ukraine are revealed in a telegram sent by Stalin the Peoples Commissar for Nationalities: ‘Enough playing at a government and republic. It’s time to drop that game; enough is enough’.8

Russia deployed to Ukraine a ten thousand strong force under the command of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko. The commander of soviet forces that advanced on Kyiv was the Russian Chauvinist N.A. Muravyov, who refused to accept the authority of the Peoples Secretariat which he viewed as guilty of ‘narrow nationalism’. Antonov recorded that Muravyov adopted ‘the tone of a conqueror, and entered into a sharp conflict with the local soviet and roused all the Ukrainians against him.’9

As Kyiv was poised to fall, on 17 January a new government was formed there dominated by the centre-right of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries. Lured by the appeal of the Germans, the delegation representing the Rada signed a separate peace treaty at Brest Litovsk on 27 January 1918. There was a price for the 200,000 German and Austrian troops driving the Bolsheviks out of Ukraine, and it was measured in grain and raw materials.

The Germans soon deposed rival governments claiming authority of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, first the People’s Secretariat, then their hosts of the Rada, who they saw as unreliable ‘left opportunists’. The Germans installed the Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky an aristocratic landlord and former Tsarist officer who established an authoritarian ‘Ukrainian State’ – the Hetmanate.10

The Hetmanate set about reversing the gains of the revolution, with the occupying Austro-German forces granted “a free hand in trade and raw materials procurement,” they set about extracting all they could by force of arms from the countryside.11 The retrogression that gripped Ukraine in 1918 was soon met by a wave of resistance as insurgency spread across the countryside in May and a workers’ strike wave that broke out in July. During 1918, this popular resistance to the occupation would cost the German Imperial Army 20,000 dead.

The experience of the first year of the revolution in Ukraine saw significant developments in the main Ukrainian parties – it reflected the fact that, in the eyes of many workers and peasants, an alternative articulation of national emancipation was now necessary. A diverse current took shape within the Bolsheviks, the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries and Social-Democrats, that that stood on a soviet platform and sought to realise it within an ‘independent Ukrainian socialist republic’.

In mid-May 1918, at the Fourth Congress of the UPSR, the Internationalists achieved a control over the entire party, which now split. Named after the party's paperBorotba [Struggle], the Internationalists, the left wing, adopted the name “Borotbisty.”

In the period of the second Soviet Government in Ukraine, (February – August 1919, led by Khristian Rakovsky, the Borotbists would also play a leading role, a number taking positions in the government of the new Ukrainian SSR. Following the fall of that government in in August 1919, they re-launched as the Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbisty).

During the period of the White Russian Army’s occupation of Ukraine under Denikin, the Borotbists played a leading role in the resistance. Mykhailo Hrushevsky former leader of the Central Rada wrote in 1920 of the Borotbisty that when ‘they led an uprising under the slogan of a Ukrainian Republic that would be independent yet Soviet and friendly toward the Bolsheviks and Soviet Russia, the masses flocked to their banner….’12

The Ukrainian Communist Party (Borot’bisty), fought for an independent Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic allied through federation with the Russian Soviet Republic. It sought membership as an independent party in the Third (Communist) International.

In the spring of 1920, the Borotbisty merged, with the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine. Providing the latter with many outstanding leaders, figures such asOleksander Shumsky, they would play a prominent role during the period of Ukrainisation, the national and cultural renaissance of the 1920s in Soviet Ukraine. Their influence lasted until the onset of the Stalinist terror in in Ukraine.

These texts are republished with permission from the leading work in English language on the subject: Ivan Maistrenko, Borotbism: A Chapter in the History of the Ukrainian Revolution, Edited by Christopher Ford, 2019.

Platform of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries:

The Present State of Affairs and Party Tactics

(approved by Central Committee on June 3, 1918)13

I.In appraising the present state of affairs, the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries affirms the following:

1. The Revolution in the Ukraine is today deep in crisis and

In this interview for textum's special series on neoliberalism, Kübra Altaytaş and Ozan Sisospoke with Pınar Bedirhanoğlu about "neoliberalism and the state", in a broad intellectual exchange, which touched on issues ranging from the capitalist state to the modern state form, from the political Islamist transformation of society in Turkey to corruption across the globe, from class relations transformed by financialisation to labour struggles. We hope that this in-depth discussion will serve to clear up confusion about the state-market-society triangle, on which there has been much debate but no consensus has yet been reached.

KÜBRA ALTAYTAŞ, OZAN SİSO and PINAR BEDİRHANOĞLU*

*Who is Pınar Bedirhanoğlu?                                                    

Having lately placed the neoliberal transformation of the state security apparatus at the centre of her scientific inquiries, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pınar Bedirhanoğlu stands out for her extensive research, spanning a wide spectrum from global political economy to Marxist theory of the state, from financialisation processes to neoliberal policies against corruption in the Global South. Bedirhanoğlu’s work, published in both English and Turkish, and also translated into other languages, involves profound analyses of such crucial phenomena as the transformation of the state, state-capital relations, and privatisation and financialisation, in particular, in Turkey. Bedirhanoğlu, who conducted research as a visiting professor in the Department of Politics at York University during the 2019-2020 academic year, continues her scholarly work in the Department of International Relations at the Middle East Technical University. She is the co-author of Turkey’s New State in the Making: Transformations in Legality, Economy and Coercion, published by ZED Books in August 2020.

**This interview, originally held in Turkish, was first published by textum on January 26, 2021. The interview was translated into English by Ozan Siso, and revised by Pınar Bedirhanoğlu.

Detail from the frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, designed by Abraham Bosse and dated 1651. The quote in Latin, at the top of the image, is taken from the Bible (Iob 41: 24) and reads: “There is no power upon earth to be compared to him”

In one of his speeches, in November 2020, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the current President of Turkey, stated that the fate of his party has merged with that of the country. He emphasised that “Turkey will roll into a pit of uncertainty, instability, political and financial headlock” in the event of the defeat of the Justice and Development Party (Turkish: Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). Erdoğan argues that this merger is a result of the present conjuncture. Provided said conditions, is it really possible to identify the future of the country with that of the AKP?

Pınar Bedirhanoğlu: We observe that this kind of rhetoric has become part of Erdoğan’s discourse especially since 2014. From that year onwards, he started making statements about a rather ambiguous ‘finance lobby’ and its conspiracies against Turkey. Erdoğan gradually enriched this rhetoric with an emphasis on the unity of the country against the operations by Western actors aimed at weakening Turkey. On the one hand, Erdoğan’s discourse is a by-product of his efforts to hold the reins of power. On the other hand, his recourse to such a rhetoric after 2014 should also be duly considered. In order to apprehend his discursive break in 2014, it is pertinent to concisely recall the dynamics of financialisation that the AKP implemented until then. In the aftermath of the 2008 global capitalist crisis, the United States (US) gave a new impetus to monetary expansionist policies, which were already on the agenda after the 2001 dot.com crisis on a global scale. We see by 2013 that, for the first time, the US Federal Reserve System (also known as the Fed) made an effort to contain monetary expansion. In the world markets, this effort resulted in a tendency of hot money flowing back to developed capitalist countries from 2013-2014 onwards. This process naturally had a devastating effect on the Southern countries. Largely indebted countries such as Turkey, which were in fact locked into debt-cycling to manage their economy during the period of 2001-2013, have been directly affected by the monetary contraction experienced following 2013. As the Covid-19 pandemic shook the world in March 2020, the Fed has returned to monetary expansion once again. This time, however, the uncertainties of the pandemic conditions force finance capital to be cautious in steering for the Southern countries.

We witnessed monetary expansion in global markets systematically triggering private debt in Turkey during the post-2001 period. Since 2001, not only business groups but also households have rapidly become indebted or, to put it more precisely, encouraged by the state to borrow. During this time, government indebtedness also increased despite the decrease in its share in the general debt ratio. Just to remind the reader, the state we’re talking about here is the state that has been ruled by AKP governments since November 2002. In sum, the subordination of the state, enterprises and labour – in other words, social relations in general – to capital in Turkey gradually deepened through indebtedness during the AKP’s rule. We can say that Erdoğan’s rhetoric that the AKP is fighting a war of independence has been developed against the concrete implications of this subordination.

In the most general sense, the subordination to capital is reflected in the imposition of the capitalist market on the totality of social relations as an imperative. This imposition manifests itself by rendering the state, enterprises and labour unable to reproduce themselves outside of the market. Given the increasing pressure indebtedness creates on social relations, it can be said that financialisation processes have, furthermore, deepened the subordination to capital on a global scale. Therefore, financialisation cannot be reduced to such phenomena as increased debt of companies or the financial markets becoming more complex through derivatives and securitisation. At another level of abstraction, financialisation is the expression of the increased subordination of social relations, labour and the state to capital.

When evaluated from the perspective of labour, financialisation corresponds to being subject to a novel, generalised and deepened mechanism of market discipline which no longer allows labour to live without debt. Until the 1990s, labouring classes were trying to sell their labour power for a certain wage and live on it. That is to say, the subordination to capital or capitalist market discipline was experienced by labour as a pressure to find employment. The class discipline that has been engendered by financialisation since the 1990s began to take shape through indebtedness. The violence of the capitalist market on labour has since increased with financialisation. Perhaps a more nuanced discussion is needed for Western capitalism; however, if we are to interpret financialisation with reference to Lapavitsas’s work, we can say that the indebtedness of the labouring classes has emerged not only in the global Southern countries but throughout the world as a new phenomenon.C. Lapavitsas (2009) “Financialised Capitalism: Crisis and Financial Expropriation”, Historical Materialism, 17(2), 114-148.I therefore argue that there has been a general historical transformation in the subordination to capital along with financialisation. Today, financialisation is a class dynamic that must be taken into account when considering the domination of capital in a particular social context or over a state.

The financialisation of world capitalism has also changed the conditions of reproduction for the Turkish state. During the first twelve years of its rule, the AKP government rapidly and robustly integrated the country’s economy with that of global capitalism through financialisation. The AKP realised this integration quite recklessly for it sought not to give up the opportunities provided by financialisation at the time. The outcome of this policy has been a country where everyone is in debt and dependent on debt rollover, one that is directly affected by the direction of money flow in world markets. Erdoğan’s rhetoric against the “finance lobby” is aimed at concealing his responsibility in this matter. On the flipside, attracting money to the country is essential for the reproduction of all social sections; this discourse also creates the illusion that government and society share common ground through indebtedness, and it probably resonates with the debtors. However, we need to combine this analysis with a political one in order to understand why the AKP’s crisis has become Turkey’s crisis.

Even though you explain the outbreak of the current crisis as a consequence of processes of financialisation, you still underline the particular role the AKP played as well. Can you explain the reasons for this?

Pınar Bedirhanoğlu: I’ve already said that in an environment of monetary abundance that marked world markets in the 2000s, Turkish capitalism had articulated with world capitalism through financialisation. Throughout the process that began in 2002 and lasted until 2013-2014, the AKP had the opportunity to implement a range of policies to accelerate the neoliberal transformation of capitalism in Turkey on relatively comfortable grounds, with the funds received from both the EU and the wide monetary opportunities offered by the global markets. In other words, the AKP made the most out of the extraordinary expansion of international credit opportunities during these years in order to consolidate its power in Turkey. This was something that previous governments could not do. For example, it legislated the Labour Law, which was approved in 2003 and laid the legal basis for the flexibility of labour markets, and privatised large-scale and profitable state enterprises. Among the products of this period are also the neoliberal transformation of agriculture and the commercialisation of land. Following this agricultural transformation, large rural populations were relocated in urban zones and this process was economically managed in this global environment of abundant money and credit.

An important opportunity that monetary expansionism offered to AKP was an improvement in the quality of life of the subordinate classes. Here, it should be noted that tight monetary policies, which are subject to many seminal debates within Europe, have not been rigorously applied in Turkey. To the contrary, the 2000s were a decade of general enrichment, especially for the subordinate classes. One should definitely add to this the mechanisms of redistribution managed by the AKP. As a result, the poor got better off in the 2000s thanks to the AKP. Of course, this was a period of loss of rights for the relatively better off segments of labour, which until then had job security, benefited from the health services provided by the state and were able to make retirement plans. However, for those who could not even dream of employment with job security, or enter through the doors of a hospital until then, it was a time of real change for the good, even if through indebtedness. This is, in fact, the material basis of the AKP’s ability to continue getting the majority of the votes of the lower classes in the eighteenth year of its neoliberal rule.

In the period between 2002 and 2013, AKP strengthened its power by combining this material base with a vigorous political-ideological discourse. I think that the principal driving force of the AKP as a political party in this process has not been neoliberalism but Islamism. In my opinion, the political agenda applied and defined by the AKP is shaped by Islamism. Neoliberalism and especially financialisation gave AKP cadres enormous opportunities to implement its agenda. The political Islamist transformation of society was carried out in an environment of increased prosperity through indebtedness. It is also true that the leading figures among AKP cadres, Erdoğan first and foremost, share a mercantile mentality; nonetheless, I do not believe that this autogenously makes AKP cadres neoliberal. For AKP cadres, neoliberalism was a tool that was seamlessly adopted to attain the goal. However, along with the implementation of neoliberal policies, most notably those facilitating financialisation, the entirety of the state and society found itself under massive pressure of monetary discipline. It was in this way that the conditions for the present crisis of Turkish capitalism as well as that of the AKP were put in place.

To explain briefly, the subordinate classes, which were defined by the AKP as the “periphery” against the “Kemalist core,” were integrated into the party’s political line by means of both the expansion of their consumption capabilities through indebtedness, and this centre-periphery rhetoric, which together turned them into the loyal voting base of the AKP. In the eyes of these poor sectors, they have been saved by the AKP from many predicaments – predicaments which are also indispensable to the state of indebtedness – throughout the 2000s. In my judgement, it is not easy to shake this myth of the “saviour” constituted during the AKP’s protracted rule. Notwithstanding, it seems also unlikely that they will be able to readily reproduce this myth of salvation in the new crisis environment, which might easily lead to a crash, within the context of the clearance period in the making in financial markets. Capital demands high returns, and accordingly high interest rates, in order to settle in the country today. Capital’s demand for high interest rates, by directly complicating the conditions of debt rollover for the subordinate classes, implies also that the Ponzi scheme established so far has finally come to an end. Therefore, we have now entered a new era of financialisation, where the demands for profit of capital and the political concerns of the AKP stand in conflict.

Why does this conflict signify a crisis for Turkey as a whole? To answer this, it is necessary to emphasise the alterations made to the historical class equilibria of Turkish capitalism by the AKP, through financialisation. Social segments that the AKP is politically bound up with, through material means provided by financialisation, are also those who had been pacified in Turkey’s uneven modernisation process, through various political-cultural strategies until the AKP’s ascendance to power. The AKP has politicised these segments with its Islamist concerns to such an extent that no other conservative party would perhaps dare to. Put in other words, by turning them into politically active and demanding people, the AKP has constituted Turkey’s “dangerous classes.” In today’s market conditions, where the demands of these poor people can hardly be met and, therefore, serious decline in their living conditions are predicted, it seems that the question of how to control these AKP-revived “dangerous classes” is no longer solely the AKP’s concern. What is interesting is that the AKP, with its hitherto “saviour myth,” seems to be still the only political force capable of managing the social reactions of these classes. Therefore, today, the AKP has not only transformed its own crisis into the crisis of Turkish capitalism, but also made Turkey’s political establishment dependent on its rule.

On the other hand, it would not be appropriate to explain the post-2014 period through Islamism alone. The process we are going through is a state of complete crisis. In this crisis, the AKP tries to stay in power by trying all kinds of strategies. This very reflex itself demonstrates that the party we are faced with is in fact not an ordinary party of the establishment. As the AKP resorts to manifold strategies, ordinary political cycles of the parliamentary system do not function as they should do, preventing a stable change in government, as exemplified in the aftermath of the June 2015 general elections and, thereby, the political crisis deepens. Today, the economic crises in Turkey take mostly the form of currency crises. In addition to this, there is the ongoing debt crisis. This implies that the crisis we encounter today is at the same time a class crisis. Taking into account all of this, I think we are going through a political crisis that emerged as a result of the historical ruptures financialisation has engendered within capitalist relations of production. This crisis also became a state crisis when the government tried to overcome it through the transition to the Presidential System of Government (Turkish: Cumhurbaşkanlığı Hükümet Sistemi, CHS). Consequently, the AKP’s crisis has become Turkey’s crisis in every respect.

Nonetheless, let us not leave out that capitalism is also in crisis on a global scale. Compared to the previous periods of major crisis, US hegemony today is going through one of its most fragile phases ever. This is, as far as I am concerned, a rather unique phase in which US hegemony is both very strong and very weak. From one perspective, this crisis is an inherent product of capitalism, and part of this has to do with the very fact that world capitalism today is very strongly financialised. As a matter of fact, operations by all large conglomerates of capital today are financialised. It is crucial for these groups that the financial markets experience only predictable shocks. In this environment, the US stands out as the sole political force that can steer and direct the immense, self-multiplying and increasingly more and more complex financial markets. On the flip side, financialisation, as a process actually instigated by the US itself, has redefined the hegemonic power of the US. In this relationship of mutual dependence, global markets take sudden new directions just with a statement made by the Fed. We will watch and see how the COVID-19 pandemic will affect this process. To sum up, turning back to Turkey in the shadow of such hegemonic crises, we observe that modern bourgeois politics has attained its limits in coping with the current crises of the capitalist relations of production. To what extent are these limits a product of the developments that arose particularly in Turkey and as a result of the Islamist preferences of the AKP? To what extent do these limits point to the inability of the modern state form to handle the contradictions of financialised capitalism? We need time to answer these questions.

What do you mean by the concept of “modern state form”? If we are to speak from within the framework of Marxist state theory, does this concept offer an analysis that goes beyond those predominantly confined within the boundaries of liberal ontology? Moreover, what strategic importance can the concept of “modern state form” have for us in struggles over the state today?

Pınar Bedirhanoğlu: What I mean by the modern state form is the parliamentary form of the capitalist state that reproduces itself in a class-neutral institutionality and tries to fulfil its claim to popular sovereignty through periodic general elections. I do not think that Marxists have sufficiently discussed this state form, which historically emerged during the transition process of European feudal monarchies to capitalism, via complex and multi-layered class and interstate struggles. One notable exception to this is Heide Gerstenberger’s 2007 book, Impersonal Power: History and Theory of the Bourgeois State.H. Gerstenberger (2007) Impersonal Power, History and Theory of the Bourgeois State, Leiden and Boston, Brill.Even though Gerstenberger does not rethink the concept of the modern bourgeois state within the framework of Marxist state theory, she helps us to understand that this particular state form did not emerge as a necessity in the historical development of capitalism. In other words, capitalism and the modern bourgeois state form are not indispensable pairs. In Marxist state theory, the concepts of capitalist state and modern bourgeois state are often used synonymously. This will maybe sound very speculative, but had the modern state form been defined on the example of the English constitutional monarchy tradition only, which sanctified the rule of law without necessarily coming any closer to the claim of equality of all before the law, we might have been speaking of a form of capitalist state that preserved or revised some of the basic feudal political institutions to date.

Nevertheless, the universalised historical form of the capitalist state in today’s world, which was shaped by the long-term development of European capitalism, is the state model in which all citizens are considered equal before the law and stipulated to partake in its administration by the way of elections. Marxists have so far rightly deemed it a political goal to reveal the class content of the capitalist state, which reproduces itself thus in an apparently class-neutral way, and attempted to identify by which mediations the state and capital are interconnected. I think the fundamental flaw in this vital political effort has been leaving the analysis of the modern bourgeois state to Weberian theories by failing to address it within a class-based and historical analysis.

However, the “modern bourgeois” state form is not a form of state produced by the bourgeoisie alone. To the contrary, we see upon historical investigation that the modern bourgeois state is a necessary bourgeois class response to the social struggles of the 19th century, and it bears the hallmark of those struggles. This state form, which emerged for the first time with the French Revolution, is the product of a very specific historical process. Let us not forget that the essential intent of the Vienna agreement of 1815 was to bring the post-revolutionary political and class relations back under ruling-class control in Europe. This process, which was triggered by the French Revolution and not yet tamed through powerful market discipline, was shaped in response to the destructive anger of the lower classes, who took to the streets at every opportunity with anti-establishment demands. We speak of a terrifying destructiveness that openly threatened the ruling classes of that period. The modern form of the state was established in such a historical period when these angry masses struggled to death against capital trying to expropriate them. This state form was not a functional requirement of capitalism; it is rather a form of state that has been formed incidentally, in the course of history, through struggle. Otherwise, why would the ruling classes spontaneously offer equality, even if only before the law, to the classes they strived to dominate?

We trace the historical development of the modern bourgeois state form from the Jacobin period of the French Revolution to the present. It is difficult to properly discuss this whole process of political development here. Nevertheless, it should be emphasised that this process has been a lengthy one, determined by trial and error by inter-state relations as well as class and political struggles. Two important points should not be overlooked in this discussion. First, the modern bourgeois state emerged as a response to the robust social struggles that marked Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Second, the universalisation of this state form was made possible through its adoption as a model in the former colonies, which gained their political independence from European powers in the post-1945 period. This historical reading tells us that the modern state form has been established not only by the bourgeoisie but also by the struggles of the working masses and the exploited peoples of the world. Of course, this state form is also one that is intertwined with nationalism, which has been quite effective in absorbing and/or pacifying these struggles. However, I think that the critical space that the irresolvable tension between the class-neutral appearance and the class content of the modern bourgeois state form has opened up for emancipatory social struggles is not one that could be easily discarded today.

I think it is very important to remember this, especially today, when the processes of authoritarianism observed in many countries of the world target the political institutions that are identified with this state form. These authoritarian processes are the result of the neoliberal transformation of the state, to the advantage of capital, since the 1980s. Notwithstanding this, we need to also consider that the assault against modern parliamentary state practices, which are intensifying today, take place in a period in which labour has already been extraordinarily weakened against capital from a historical point of view. I think that these transformative tendencies are not limited to Turkey. The basic institutions of the modern bourgeois state, which have, over the years, been the main object of criticism for Marxists, are being simultaneously destroyed today in many countries of the world. In an era when labour has little power to preserve its historical gains provided by the modern state form, let alone its ability to radicalise the class contradictions engraved in the modern bourgeois state, the prospect for the development of a new pro-labour state seems extremely unlikely. If the form of the state is historically determined by class struggles, it is more likely that the form in the making today bears the stamp of capital rather than that of labour. Consequently, contemplating the modern bourgeois state in such a historical process of change can provide us with a new vision in identifying pro-labour strategies in political struggles over the state.

You define the modern state as a state form that has engraved class neutrality in its institutional form and has in due course become universal; so, how does its character change today? Can we say that the modern state form, which stands out with its class-neutral appearance, is under threat in today’s capitalism?

Pınar Bedirhanoğlu: To begin with, the class-neutral form of the state and class struggles are changed, transformed, and experienced in diverse ways across the globe, because of the tension between this class-neutral form of the state and the capitalist relations of production within which it exists. This process should be examined at different levels of abstraction. By definition, the capitalist state is a state that is defined by the separation of the political and economic spheres and reproduces itself within capitalist relations of production. In defining the capitalist state as such, Simon Clarke does not actually assert anything about the institutional content or the class neutrality of this state.Clarke, S. (1991) “State, Class Struggle and the Reproduction of Capital” in S. Clarke (ed.) The State Debate, Macmillan: London, 183-203. Rather, this definition implies that the capitalist state emerges as a social relationship that reproduces itself within the capitalist relations of production– that is, within all the contradictions of these relations. Different forms that the capitalist state has taken historically, through class struggle, bring about its reproduction in different institutional configurations. Diverse political forms that the capitalist state has taken so far within the historically specific class dynamics of different countries are already important objects of analysis in Marxist debates about the state. The modern bourgeois state is another long-term historical class form, which I propose to be included in these debates. In my opinion, different state forms in different countries need to be taken into consideration within the political boundaries drawn by this long-term and generalised historical form of the capitalist state.

It is possible to better grasp the development of the modern bourgeois state in Turkey, as an institutional form determined by class struggle, by tracing the alterations within the legal field. For instance, it is often stressed today that the difficulties we face within the field of law are beyond those during the 1980 coup d’état period, infamously remembered for mass torture and executions. What is meant by this is that there existed even back then the possibility of getting a fair decision from the courts within the institutional set up of the modern bourgeois state, defined by its claim to class-neutrality, despite the dire conditions of the 1980 coup, such as torture. What is being rapidly lost in contemporary Turkey, where the law is privatised, is this possibility per se. The counter-argument to this, i.e. that the rule of law is a necessity for capital, is gradually losing its meaning today. Indeed, many of the problems that directly concern global capital, in particular, have long been resolved by international courts. That being the case, we are passing through a phase where equality before the law evidently ceases to exist for individual persons in Turkey. As we assume that this situation cannot be legalised, we want to believe that this is only a temporary period.

The public character of the state, which the state assumes in the context of its modern bourgeois historical form, and its reflections in the legal arena have been subjected to serious modifications, even transformations since the 1980s. I am speaking of a change beyond the much-discussed privatisations or public-private partnerships. For instance, state security apparatuses are getting rapidly privatised all over the world today. This dynamic does not only imply the opening of the security space to capital accumulation; it also illustrates that capital has begun to directly get involved in the safe reproduction of the capitalist relations of production. This question has been discussed extensively in the works of Funda Hülagü and Çağlar Dölek, with whom I have been working on the modern bourgeois state.Ç. Dölek (2011) “Privatisation of Security and Transformation of the Modern Bourgeois State in the Neoliberal Era: The Case of Turkey”, Unpublished MSc Thesis, METU Ankara; Ç. Dölek (2015) “Privatisation of Security as a State-Led and Class-Driven Process: The Case of Turkey”, Science and Society, 79(3): 414-441; F. Hülagü (2017) “Post–Cold War Police Reform and the Transformation of the Modern Political Field: Reflections from Turkey”, Science and Society, 81(1): 98-123; F. Hülagü (2021) Police Reform in Turkey: Human Security, Gender and State Violence Under Erdogan, IB Tauris/Bloomsbury Publishing.The police and local powerholders today build relations that are more intimate than ever before, and that clearly bypass the public organisation of the state. It is within this context that the security structures of states are getting transformed simultaneously on a world scale.

To give a direct answer to your question, the class-neutral appearance shaped within the public institutional set up of the state in such areas as security and law is a product of centuries-long processes. Moreover, this state form has also created its own politics throughout this process. Therefore, this form cannot be expected to disappear easily from one day to the next. In our scholarly studies, with Funda and Çağlar, we focus on the dimensions of class struggles today that revolve around the modern bourgeois form of the state, and draw attention to the class tensions and contradictions that arise within these struggles.P. Bedirhanoğlu, Ç. Dölek and F. Hülagü (2016) “The Transformation of Internal Security and of the State in Turkey during the AKP Rule: A Class-Based Analysis”, JEP: Journal für Entwicklungspolitik, XXXII (1/2), in Ilker Ataç and Joachim Becker (ed.), Turkey: The Politics of National Conservatism, 21-41; P. Bedirhanoğlu, Ç. Dölek, F. Hülagü and Ö. Kaygusuz (ed.) (2020) Turkey’s New State in the Making: Transformations in Legality, Economy, and Coercion, London, ZED Books. I also try to draw attention to a blind spot in Marxist theories of the state by emphasising that the modern bourgeois form of the capitalist state with its class-neutral appearance is historical and that there is no necessary overlap between them.

Can we say that the alliances of different power groups formed within capitalist relations, and the reflection in the state of social struggles against capitalism, serve to hide the class nature of the state?

Pınar Bedirhanoğlu: This is, on the one hand, true. The struggles of different power alliances, even those of labour fought through the state, serve to reproduce the class-neutral appearance of the modern bourgeois state. Nonetheless, the same struggles can also strain the conditions of its reproduction. After all, the modern bourgeois form of the capitalist state, historically determined by class struggle, may change and get transformed again through class struggles. The democratic possibilities in this form may be radicalised or the democratic claim of this form may be abandoned altogether. This situation reminds us that the positions obtained within the state should not be easily jettisoned. This is also a warning to those who take for granted the modern bourgeois parliamentary form of the capitalist state either in its liberal or authoritarian versions.

At this point one could justifiably ask this question: will not the disappearance of the modern bourgeois state form along with its claim to democracy, which has successfully concealed the class essence of the capitalist state up until now, open up more space for emancipatory social struggles? I don’t have an answer to this question, but let me draw attention to an important point that we should take into account while thinking over this question: capitalism marks only a very short period in human history marked by class inequalities. Before capitalism, there was a social order in which all class antagonisms were experienced face to face and with utmost harshness. The subject of exploitation was known, and violence was evident. It wasn’t until the 18th century that these oppositions evolved into a generalised demand for equality. Therefore, there is no guarantee that the manifestation of inequalities will have good results, that a liberating struggle will rise from the crises created by the deepening inequalities, and that a more egalitarian system will thereby be established. However, there are concrete historical examples of how naked class inequalities before the 18th century could be managed through overt violence and religious repression.

Nonetheless, we should also remember that in the short history of capitalism, the universalisation of the modern bourgeois state in the nation-state form is also a very recent development. I believe that we should understand the dissatisfaction expressed by neoliberal ideologues such as Hayek or Buchanan against democracy, as an extension of this form. To put it in the historical class context, Hayek’s concerns about the tyranny of the majority F. Hayek (1992/1979) “Majority Opinion and Contemporary Democracy” in A. Levine (ed.) The State and Its Critics, Vol.I, Aldershot, England, Edward Elgar, 231-249. and Buchanan’s warnings that democracy without being reinforced by a constitution would threaten, rather than protect, individual freedoms – and, of course, his expressive silence about who would set these constitutions –J. M. Buchanan (1985) “Chapter 23: Constitutional Democracy, Individual Liberty, and Political Equality” in J. M. Buchanan, Liberty, Market and State, Political Economy in the 1980s, New York, New York University Press, 248-260. demonstrate that the neoliberals’ only concern has not been the welfare state of the post-1945 era. The German Ordoliberal aspiration for an authoritarian liberal state, as Bonefeld reminds us, should be reconsidered in this context.W. Bonefeld (2017) The Strong State and the Free Economy, London, Rowman and Littlefield.

In fact, it seems that financialisation processes have provided an effective pro-capital solution to such concerns raised by Hayek, Buchanan and German Ordoliberals in the neoliberal era. One of the most fundamental class dynamics that prevents states from threatening “individual freedoms,” which can be read as the freedom of capital, is financialisation. By advising, in its own language, regarding which freedoms should preferably be restricted, neglected, or even violated, financialisation prompts states to seek creative solutions in managing crises that arise in different conditions. It can be said that the search for an “authoritarian liberal state,” which capital has always longed for, has entered a new phase owing to neoliberal financialisation. Political experiments on how such a state is going to be institutionalised are carried out under the conditions determined by the global common pressure of financialisation processes in many countries of the world today. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the solid constitution, which Buchanan demanded, is no longer needed from the viewpoint of capital.

You assign a dominant role to financialisation in drawing the capitalist boundaries of the state. What are the terms through which you discuss the relationship of the state with different sections of capital?

Pınar Bedirhanoğlu: We need to reconsider the relations of different sections of capital to the state within the historical specificities of the global process of capital accumulation and take into account how the state in question reproduces itself in this process. Simon Clarke defines these relations as political class relations and assigns them a critical role in determining the political form of the state. S. Clarke (1992) “The Global Accumulation of Capital and the Periodisation of the Capitalist State Form” in W.Bonefeld, R.Gunn and K.Psychopedis (ed.) Open Marxism, Vol.I, Dialectics and History, London, Pluto Press, 133-150. But, as I also said before, he asserts that the capitalist form of the state is determined, not by these relations, but by money, which is one of the main mediations between the state and the process of global capital accumulation.

I find this formulation very important in terms of understanding AKP-capital relations in Turkey. In the face of the politically strained relations between the AKP and Istanbul-based large and internationalised capital, what I have found very problematic, from the very beginning, is to shift the debate to the relationship of the AKP with small and medium-sized “Anatolian” capital in order to demonstrate that the AKP is a party serving capital. I do not hesitate to define this latter relationship as one of mutual dependence in which the state dominates. These business groups need the support of the AKP government in order to survive fierce global competition, and to the extent that they receive this support, they support the AKP government politically. On the other hand, this relationship is of political significance for the AKP. These enterprises employ more than 70 percent of the working population in Turkey and control the (undissolving) electoral base of the AKP. This relationship does not prove to us that the AKP is either a pro-capital or a pro-labour party. This relationship basically describes how the AKP government manages its own class contradictions within the capitalist boundaries drawn by financialisation – which implies employing conservative strategies due to the conservative nature of both the AKP and this section of capital. The AKP strives to stay in power by managing the perpetual crises of financialised Turkish capitalism with Islamist conservative and repressive political strategies.

The AKP has ruled Turkey in the last eighteen years as an Islamist party with an anti-Western rhetoric. One of the most politically striking aspects of the AKP-led neoliberal transformation process of the state in Turkey, in my opinion, is that despite this anti-Western rhetoric, the AKP has further deepened the state’s dependence on the West in parallel with the increase of financial domination over the state. The AKP will probably – and ironically – go down in the history of Turkey as the government which attached the country the most to the West. This alone testifies to the limits of all political dreams, rigidly imposed by financialisation today.

International financial institutions, identified with the West, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), which play a driving role in the financialisation processes, repeatedly bring up the issue of corruption by emphasising the principles of “transparency” and “accountability”. Corruption also stands out as a fundamental object of political criticism in the internal debates of countries. What are the implications of these criticisms of corruption for the transformation process of the public institutional character of the state?

Pınar Bedirhanoğlu: It is inevitable that the transformation of the public character of the state will raise the issue of corruption, which is generally defined as the use of public power for private interests. At this point, however, rather than saying that there is a real debate on corruption, it is more suitable to state that the struggles over the transformation of the state’s public character are conducted via corruption. Let me broach the subject this way: on the one hand, corruption is inevitable due to the bourgeois class content of the capitalist state, given the relations of capitalist production, which reproduce themselves within the constantly changing conditions and struggles the define the process of capital accumulation, also require the constant redrawing of the boundaries between the public and private spheres. On the other hand, the preservation of the modern, class-neutral and public appearance of the state requires the legal fixation of the public-private divide, which is indeed constantly redefined in practice, and the definition of some acts as corruption. These tensions and contradictions, inherent in the modern bourgeois state, become easily visible, especially in times of critical changes in the processes of capital accumulation. In fact, it is during these times that states have to manage the new de facto borders imposed by such changes on the public-private divide, despite the existing laws. In relation to this, it would be appropriate to remind ourselves of Bonefeld’s remark that order is not established by law but instead establishes law.W. Bonefeld (2006) “Democracy and Dictatorship: Means and Ends of the State”, Critique, 34(3), 237-252. In the process of instituting the new order, states become both the domains of this change and the targets of criticisms of corruption by those who lost due to the change of affairs. Therefore, it is not surprising that the issue of corruption has always been on the agenda in the neoliberal era, which indeed caused significant changes in both capital-labour and intra-capital relations.

Moreover, even stressing the inevitability of corruption in capitalism on the basis of the general definition of corruption based on the public-private divide is not sufficient to examine the relationship between corruption and capitalism. As anthropological studies have well demonstrated, corruption is what the system itself is for the broad masses of people, who constantly experience the direct results of class practices inherent in capitalism. Seeing corruption in this way is an indication that the people are aware of the reality they live in and do not take the modern state’s claim to class-neutrality seriously. In other words, the modern definition of corruption, which narrows down the term to the use of public office for private purposes, finds no echo in the popular masses. For them, a world without corruption is a world with justice – something that has never happened anyway. For this reason, it would be more accurate to see the current situation as the further unfolding of class relations, rather than as corruption caused by the erosion of the public domain.

If we return to the issue of corruption, as a strategy of struggle that marks critical periods of change and transformation, such as the one under neoliberalism, it is imperative to underline that there are indeed power relations within these struggles that determine what is going to be defined as corruption and at what point.For details of the examples below on this subject, see also: P. Bedirhanoğlu (2007) “The Neoliberal Discourse on Corruption as a Means of Consent-building: Reflections from Post-crisis Turkey”, Third World Quarterly, 28(7), 1239-1254.To give an example from Turkey, no one was unaware of the corruption during the Özal period in the 1980s, for instance, when neoliberalism was first popularised. Nevertheless, no one in the international arena discussed corruption in Turkey at that time. The fact that international actors, such as the IMF and the World Bank, raise the issue of corruption as a problem is mostly a reflection of their concern about finding solutions to the burning problems of the West. To give an example, the international agreement opened for signature by the OECD, in the name of anti-bribery in 1994, aimed to regulate competition among Western companies in a period when the former Eastern Bloc was opened up to the looting of these companies, following the collapse of the USSR. As an IMF official explicitly remarked at the time, the pioneers of said agreement were US companies, which did not have the ability to account for their bribes as expenses, and thereby deduct them from their taxes, due to US law – a benefit which their European counterparts did enjoy.

It is not surprising that the argument for “crony capitalism” was first put forward by the IMF in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. With this concept, the IMF tried to attribute the responsibility of the crisis to the once “miraculous” Asian tigers, and to the corrupt relations in these countries, which remained somehow unnoticed until then. Let us recall that this conception made its entrance onto the Turkish scene in 2001, when Kemal Derviş was running negotiations with the IMF. Going back to a more recent period, we should ask ourselves whether there was no problem of corruption in the first period of the AKP government. We see indeed an extremely corrupt government in the first period of the AKP’s rule as well, even though this period is renowned as one of great democratic achievements. However, nobody discussed the AKP’s malpractices of corruption during this time. In sum, we should perhaps interpret the rise of corruption in Turkish political debates today as a quest for a politics “without the AKP but still neoliberal.”

It is also possible to take a step further and say that corruption itself has sometimes been used as a carrot to enable neoliberal transformations. Today, liberals also admit that the capitalist transformation process in Russia was a process of neoliberalisation and that the shock therapy policies of the time were equivalent to neoliberal programs in other countries. In that period, we witnessed Yeltsin’s advisors clearly saying that opposition against privatisation had to be bought off somehow or the privatisation policies would be interrupted. This means that in the neoliberal era, corruption was also used, and is still being used, as an effective way to dissolve, or neutralise, political opposition groups and, thereby, weaken their opposition.

In conclusion, I believe there is merit in discussing corruption at a higher level of abstraction if we are to debate corruption. Questions regarding who bribed whom and how, or the level of corruption in politics and state-capital relations can, on the one hand, serve to delegitimise some existing governments, and may also very well be really important and on-point in overthrowing them. However, let us not forget that the inquiries into corruption at this level also reproduce the illusion that a non-corrupt state is possible within capitalist relations of production. Capitalist relations, which are intrinsically based on labour exploitation, are genuinely unjust, corrupt relations. It is a fact that the modern bourgeois state form serves to render this basic injustice invisible through its claims about a public-private divide. This is something I wished to especially underline because this debate on corruption has also allowed me to vocalise something I had emphasised earlier, namely the differentiation between the capitalist state and the modern bourgeois state. What I propose is not an unconditional defence of the modern bourgeois state but the need to reveal and radicalise the emancipatory possibilities, which social struggles have engraved within this state form.

Works Cited in the Interview

Bedirhanoğlu, P. (2007) “The Neoliberal Discourse on Corruption as a Means of Consent-building: Reflections from Post-crisis Turkey”, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 28, No.7, October 2007, 1239-1254.

Bedirhanoğlu, P., Ç. Dölek and F. Hülagü (2016) “The Transformation of Internal Security and of the State in Turkey during the AKP Rule: A Class-Based Analysis”, JEP:Journal für Entwicklungspolitik, Vol.XXXII, Issue 1/2, Ilker Ataç and Joachim Becker (eds.), Turkey: The Politics of National Conservatism, 21-41.

Bedirhanoğlu, P., Ç. Dölek, F. Hülagü and Ö. Kaygusuz (eds.) (2020) Turkey’s New State in the Making: Transformations in Legality, Economy, and Coercion, London, ZED Books.

Bonefeld, W. (2006) “Democracy and Dictatorship: Means and Ends of the State”, Critique, Vol.34, No.3, 237-252.

Bonefeld, W. (2017) The Strong State and the Free Economy, London, Rowman and Littlefield.

Buchanan, J. M. (1985) “Chapter 23: Constitutional Democracy, Individual Liberty, and Political Equality” in J. M. Buchanan, Liberty, Market and State, Political Economy in the 1980s, New York, New York University Press, 248-260.

Clarke, S. (1991) “State, Class Struggle and the Reproduction of Capital” in S. Clarke (ed.) The State Debate, Macmillan: London, 183-203.

Clarke, S. (1992) “The Global Accumulation of Capital and the Periodisation of the Capitalist State Form” in W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn and K. Psychopedis (eds.) Open Marxism, Vol.I, Dialectics and History, London, Pluto Press, 133-150.

Dölek, Ç. (2011) “Privatisation of Security and Transformation of the Modern Bourgeois State in the Neoliberal Era: The Case of Turkey”, Unpublished MSc Thesis, METU, Ankara.

Dölek, Ç. (2015) “Privatisation of Security as a State-Led and Class-Driven Process: The Case of Turkey”, Science and Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis, 79(3): 414-441.

Gerstenberger, H. (2007) Impersonal Power, History and Theory of the Bourgeois State, Leiden and Boston, Brill.

Hayek, F. (1992/1979) “Majority Opinion and Contemporary Democracy” in A. Levine (ed.) The State and Its Critics, Vol.I, Aldershot, England, Edward Elgar, 231-249.

Hülagü, F. (2017) “Post–Cold War Police Reform and the Transformation of the Modern Political Field: Reflections from Turkey”, Science & Society, 81(1): 98-123.

Hülagü, F. (2021) Police Reform in Turkey: Human Security, Gender and State Violence Under Erdogan, IB Tauris/Bloomsbury Publishing.

Lapavitsas, C. (2009) “Financialised Capitalism: Crisis and Financial Expropriation”, Historical Materialism, Vol.17, No.2, 114-148.

A Review of Memoirs of a Critical Communist: Towards a History of the Fourth International by Livio Maitan

Daniel Gaido

National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Argentina

danielgaid@gmail.com

Abstract

This work, based on the premise that ‘Trotskyism’ in Trotsky’s lifetime was nothing but the name given to Marxism in its fight against the Stalinist bureaucracy, offers an overview of the history of Trotskyist tendencies after Trotsky’s assassination which highlights the need not only of addressing programmatic and strategic issues (above all, the long-standing and growing accommodation to bourgeois democracy of most of the Trotskyist tendencies) but also of taking an in-depth look at a series of organisational practices that the Trotskyist tendencies have inherited from Zinovievism and Stalinism and that have greatly contributed to their current weakness.

Keywords

Trotskyism – socialism – workers’ party – sectarianism – parliamentarism

Livio Maitan, (2020) Livio Maitan: Memoirs of a Critical Communist: Towards a History of the Fourth International, translated by Gregor Benton, London: The Merlin Press.

Introduction

The history of the Trotskyist tendencies after Trotsky still is, more than 80 years after Trotsky’s death, largely terra incognita, or rather a bazaar in which all kinds of sects peddle their myths. Only from time to time does a work emerge that takes the history of Trotskyism out of the realm of mythology and provide us with the elements we need to reconstruct the actual experience of the Trotskyist militants in a particular time and place, such as Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson’s two volumes on the history of British Trotskyism from 1924 to 1949,Richardson and Bornstein 1986a and 1986b. Gary Tennant’s history of Cuban Trotskyism from 1932 to 1965Tennant 1999. and Jean Hentzgen’s dissertation on the Lambertist current in France until 1963.Hentzgen 2019.

This is regrettable because ‘Trotskyism’ in Trotsky's lifetime was nothing but the name given to Marxism in its struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy: the Transitional Programme adopted by the Fourth International in 1938 was merely the development of the programmatic debates that took place in the Communist International (particularly in its third and fourth congresses), which were interrupted by the rise of Stalinism.Gaido 2018. Those who believe, as the first Congress of the Socialist International held in Paris in July 1889 affirmed, ‘that the emancipation of labour and humanity cannot occur without the international action of the proletariat – organized in class-based parties – which seizes political power through the expropriation of the capitalist class and the social appropriation of the means of production’, cannot, therefore, but take ‘Trotskyism’ as an obligatory reference point.Taber 2021, p. 22. This inheritance, however, is buried under a whole series of unfortunate events experienced by the political tendencies stemming from the Fourth International, most of which were not accompanied by any serious political balance-sheet, so the recovery of Trotsky’s socialist and revolutionary legacy requires a work of historical reconstruction that has yet to be done, and to which the present work aims to contribute.

The works available so far fall into two main categories: monographs such as those mentioned above, restricted to a country and often to a specific Trotskyist tendency for a limited period of time, or general reviews written from the point of view of one of those tendencies, generally of an apologetic character, even if such apology is not without self-criticism (for example, the books of Frank and Moreau, written from the point of view of the ‘United Secretariat of the Fourth International’).Frank 1973 and Moreau 1993. An exception to this rule is Robert J. Alexander’s monumental academic reconstruction International Trotskyism 1929–1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement (Alexander 1991). Unfortunately, Alexander's book is not organised chronologically but alphabetically, making it difficult reading for the uninitiated, to which should be added the fact that, having been written 30 years ago, it does not include an analysis of the involution of Trotskyism after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. To this last category belongs the most recent ‘history of the Fourth International’ written by Livio Maitan, published in Italian under the title Per una storia della IV internazionale:La testimonianza di un comunista controcorrenteMaitan 2006. and recently translated into English by Gregor Benton as Memoirs of a Critical Communist: Towards a History of the Fourth International.Maitan 2020. Since the title of the Italian original has been shifted to the subtitle, it also should be pointed out that this is not Livio Maitan’s autobiography, which is entitled La strada percorsa: Dalla Resistenza ai nuovi movimenti: lettura critica e scelte alternative, and which has not yet been translated from the Italian (Maitan 2002).

Maitan’s book tells the Historia Calamitatum of the Fourth International from the point of view of its official leadership (to which Maitan belonged) until the split in 1953, then from the point of view of the International Secretariat led by Michel Pablo and, from its creation in 1963, from the point of view of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International until the death of the author. Given that the United Secretariat was, for better or worse, the dominant Trotskyist current for most of the period under consideration, and that it continues to exist to this day, a critical reading of Maitan’s book is a good introduction to the subject of the history of Trotskyist tendencies after Trotsky.

The Second World War and the Democratic Counterrevolution in Western Europe

The first chapter of Maitan’s book deals cursorily with the ‘Dramatic battles of the 1930s and the early 1940s’, without explaining why the European Trotskyist organisations emerged very weakened, both numerically and programmatically, from the Second World War. In the paradigmatic case of France, this was due to the policy of sectarian abstentionism in the face of resistance to the Nazi occupation adopted by the French Trotskyists after the arrest of their main leader, Marcel Hic, by the Gestapo in October 1943. This policy, which continued during the liberation process, was carried out with the support of the European Secretariat of the Fourth International led by Michel Pablo. The Stalinist parties, on the contrary, were transformed into mass organisations of the working class in countries like France and Italy primarily because of their role in the resistance, even though that participation had a chauvinist, popular-frontist and pro-imperialist character. Their sectarian policy turned the postwar Trotskyist organisations into groups of at most a few hundred people confronting Stalinist parties often comprising hundreds of thousands of workers, as in France and Italy.Luparello and Gaido 2020.

A concomitant factor that turned the Trotskyist organisations in Europe, and particularly the French section, into sects in the immediate postwar period, while the Stalinist organisations became mass working-class parties, was their inability to foresee the coming of a democratic counterrevolution under the aegis of American imperialism. The outbreak of the Second World War found US Trotskyism divided into two organisations: the Socialist Workers Party led by James Cannon, and the Workers Party led by Max Shachtman. The downfall of Mussolini on 24 July 1943 resulted in the appearance of a third current: a minority within the SWP led by Felix Morrow, Jean van Heijenoort and Albert Goldman. Confronting the SWP leaders’ line, according to which US imperialism would operate in Europe through ‘Franco-type governments’, the minority argued that imperialism would use democratic regimes to stem the advance of the revolution, propping them up with economic aid, and that it would be helped in this task by the Socialist and Communist Parties, which would revive the policy of class collaboration known as the Popular Front. The task of the European Trotskyists was therefore to wrest control of the masses from those parties through democratic and transitional demands (a democratic republic, a constituent assembly, etc.) that would help the workers discover the anti-socialist agenda of their mass organisations through their own experience. The Morrow–Goldman–Heijenoort tendency's inglorious ending precluded any serious analysis of the consequences of the policies pursued by the SWP leadership, which were extended to Europe by the European Secretariat of the Fourth International now led by Michel Pablo.Luparello and Gaido 2014.

Morrow’s swan song in the SWP was the ‘International Report’ submitted on behalf of the minority to the June 1946 plenary, which asserted:

What hair-raising nonsense the majority has defended in the name of the unchanging program! In the name of the unchanging program, Comrade Cannon, you taught the following things: That our proletarian military policy means that we should telescope together overthrow of capitalism and defence of the country against foreign fascism. That the Polish revolutionists should subordinate themselves to the Russian Army. That there is an objectively revolutionary logic brought about by the Russian victories. That naked military dictatorships are the only possible governments in Europe because it is impossible to set up a new series of Weimar republics in Europe. That American imperialism is at least as predatory as Nazi imperialism in its methods in Europe. That it is theoretically impossible for America to help rebuild or feed Europe. That there are no democratic illusions in Europe. That there are no illusions about American imperialism. That amid the revolutionary upsurge it is reformist to call for the republic in Greece, Italy and Belgium or the Constituent Assembly. That to speak of a Stalinist danger to the European revolution is only possible for a professional defeatist. That the fate of the Soviet Union would be decided by the war but only careless people think the war is over.Morrow 1946, pp. 28–9.

Daniel Gaido

National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Argentina

Mario Kessler, (2020) A Political Biography of Arkadij Maslow, 1891–1941: Dissident Against His Will, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

This scholarly and well-written biography can be read both as an independent book and as a companion volume to Mario Kessler’s massive biography of Maslow’s life-long companion, Ruth Fischer: Ein Leben mit und gegen Kommunisten (1895–1961).Kessler 2013. Both books are the result of many years of research on the early history of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), particularly of the ultra-left wing led by Fischer and Maslow, which also included prominent intellectual and political figures such as Arthur Rosenberg, Werner Scholem, Karl Korsch, Hugo Urbahns and Josef Winternitz.

Both Arkadij Maslow and Ruth Fischer belonged to a generation that awoke to political life amid the butchery of the First World War, the collapse of the Second International and its national sections (first and foremost, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, SPD) and the way out of the relapse into barbarism offered by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In other words, none of them had roots in the traditions of the Second International such as Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Levi, or Lenin and Trotsky did, and therefore they were unable to grasp what Lenin meant when he wrote that Karl Kautsky (its main theoretician) was a renegade: namely that he, and the party and union bureaucracy, whose spokesman he had become, hadbetrayed the legacy of the Second International and the SPD. Maslow and Fischer’s political project, along with the rest of the ultra-left wing, was thus one of throwing the baby out with the bathwater: unable to separate the Marxist wheat from the parliamentarist chaff, they embarked on a one-sided crusade against Social Democracy which helped pave the way for the rise of Stalinism as well as for their own elimination by Stalin and his minion Ernst Thälmann.

Arkadij Maslow was the party name of Isaak Yefimovich Chemerinsky. Born in 1891 in Yelisavetgrad, Ukraine (then part of the Russian empire), in 1889 he moved with his family to Germany, where the gifted Isaak studied music. As a young man, he performed in piano concerts throughout Europe, Japan, and Latin America. At age twenty-three, however, he abandoned his career as a musician and enrolled in mathematics and physics at the University of Berlin in 1914, where he studied with exceptional figures like Max Planck and Albert Einstein. But war and revolution radicalised Chemerinsky, shifting his interest from art and music to politics. He began working illegally for the SPD in 1916, and he established contacts with the Spartacus League, especially with August Thalheimer, at the beginning of 1918. He joined the Spartakusbund on 5 December 1918, in order to agitate among Russian prisoners of war, and also worked as a translator for the newly established KPD, of which he was a founding member, where he adopted the party name Arkadij Maslow. He cooperated closely with Max Levien, one of the leaders of the Bavarian Soviet Republic that emerged in the wake of the German November Revolution of 1918, and stayed a close friend until Levien was executed in the Soviet Union on Stalin’s orders in 1937, in the framework of the Great Purge.

In 1919, Maslow met his life partner, the young Austrian Elfriede Friedländer, who became known under her party name Ruth Fischer. The couple never married, but their relationship lasted until Maslow’s death in 1941. If Fischer was the best-known public figure, Maslow was the polyglot intellectual of the couple. During the critical years of their political activity, public attention focused on Fischer, not least because, from May 1924 to July 1926, Maslow was imprisoned by the German state on fabricated charges.

Kessler’s book recounts many fascinating anecdotes, some not directly related to Maslow’s life. For instance, we learn ‘that the SPD daily Vorwärts printed a hate “poem” by Arthur Zickler on January 13, 1919 that called for the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Karl Radek’, and that ‘In 1933 Zickler joined the Nazi Party’ (p. 16, n. 27). Since the entire run of theVorwärts from 1891 to 1933 has been digitised by theBibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, the ‘poem’ in question can be read online; it was entitledDas Leichenhaus: ‘The Morgue’.<https://fes.imageware.de/fes/web>.

Describing the German revolution that broke out in November 1918, from the Spartacist Uprising and the subsequent murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919, to the Kapp Putsch in March 1920, Kessler recalls that ‘The counter-revolution was forced to assume a democratic form until the putsch’ (p. 23).

Maslow and Fischer were united in their opposition to Rosa Luxemburg’s political heir Paul Levi, particularly to the united-front policy that Levi outlined in his ‘Open Letter’ of 8 January 1921, and they joined hands with Zinoviev’s envoy Mátyás Rákosi to depose Levi as leader of the KPD in February 1921. Maslow even called Levi the ‘German Serrati’ (p. 28). Kessler points out that ‘Levi’s fall strengthened the ultra-leftists, among them Fischer and Maslow’ (p. 35).

This paved the way for the disastrous putsch known as the ‘March Action’ of 1921. Kessler points out that the unification of the KPD with the left wing of the USPD, engineered by Levi, had resulted in a significant gain for the Berlin district organisation: ‘membership rose to 45,000 by the end of 1920, only to fall back to roughly 2,300 after the fiasco of the March Action’ (pp. 36–7). KPD membership as a whole shrank from 359,000 in December 1920 to around 157,000 in August 1921 (p. 40, n. 40).

Since the ultra-left gathered around Fischer and Maslow rejected the united front – i.e., it ‘opposed the idea of joint action with other forces of the labor movement’ (p. 46) – they also rejected the slogan of a ‘workers’ government’ with the Social Democrats raised in 1922 by the KPD under the leadership of Ernst Meyer. The same polemics continued when Heinrich Brandler was elected new party chair and his supporters August Thalheimer and Walter Stoecker became members of the new KPD Zentrale at the beginning of 1923. Brandler was the main proponent of the Guidelines on the Tactics of the United Front and of the Workers’ Government (Leitsätze zur Taktik der Einheitsfront und der Arbeiterregierung) adopted at the third KPD congress convened in Leipzig from 28 January until 1 February 1923, also rejected by Fischer and Maslow.

In ‘A Letter to the German Communists’ dated 14 August 1921, Lenin wrote that ‘Maslow, who is playing at Leftism and wishes to exercise himself “hunting Centrists”’ had ‘more zeal than sense’.<https://fes.imageware.de/fes/web>. Within the KPD, Clara Zetkin was one of Fischer and Maslow’s harshest critics. In a letter dated 23 February 1923, she wrote to the Executive Committee of the Communist International [ECCI]: ‘The [ultra-left] opposition does not recruit its followers from the party’s mass constituency but rather from some circles of sophisticated functionaries possessing mere smatterings of knowledge.’ Their supporters were ‘clueless politically’ and exhibited ‘a mere “emotional” revolutionary sentiment’. Such comrades, Zetkin argued, ‘are strongly impressed by Maslow’s cynical brashness, Ruth Fischer’s booming rhetoric and [Werner] Scholem’s muddleheaded impudence’ (pp. 56–7).

After the Ruhr crisis and the fiasco of the ‘German October’ in 1923, which was the last chapter in the German revolution that had begun in November 1918, a bitter controversy ensued within the KPD between ‘the “rightist” party leadership around Brandler and Thalheimer on the one hand, and Fischer, Maslow, Arthur Rosenberg and Werner Scholem, as well as Ernst Thälmann, the Hamburg party leader of the left opposition, on the other’ (p. 83). For Zinoviev, as Chairman of the Communist International, ‘The easiest way to escape responsibility for the failed policy was to blame Brandler, Thalheimer as well as Radek’ (p. 82). As a result, the ultra-left in the KPD once again received considerable support from Zinoviev and the Comintern apparatus. As early as January 1924, Zinoviev denounced ‘the leaders of German Social Democracy’ as ‘fascists through and through’ and concluded that only the ‘slogan “unity from below”’ –  which excluded the leaders of the SPD –  ‘must become a living reality’ (p. 85).

At Zinoviev’s initiative, control of the KPD passed into the hands of Fischer, Maslow and their followers (which included the jurist Karl Korsch) in April 1924. Zinoviev’s backing of the KPD ultra-lefts made all the more sense since they were ardent supporters of the new policy of ‘Bolshevisation’. As a letter from Zinoviev to the KPD Zentrale of 26 February 1924 attests, the term ‘Bolshevisation’ was ‘most likely coined at a session of the KPD leadership on 19 February 1924. In the letter he considered the term to be a “wonderful expression”’ (p. 85).

The policy of ‘Bolshevisation’ was officially adopted by the Fifth Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow during June and July 1924. There, Zinoviev described it as follows: ‘Bolshevisation is the creation of a firmly established, centralised organisation as if carved out of a stone that harmoniously and fraternally dispenses with the differences in their ranks, as Lenin has taught’.Fünfter Kongress der Kommunistischen Internationale 1924, p. 508. In actual fact, ‘Bolshevisation’ meant

that the promotion or expulsion of party functionaries was no longer determined by internal factors but instead by the demands of Soviet party leaders. It soon became obvious that the term also implied that any criticism of Soviet policy could be denounced as anti-Bolshevist deviation and therefore as essentially anti-communist. The result was a dramatic curtailment of freedom of discussion inside every party. (p. 94.)

Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski

Abstract: Written in 1989, this article tells the true but unknown and dramatic story of Bolsheviks faced during the civil war with an unexpected national revolution of the oppressed Ukrainian people, the conflict-ridden relationships between Russian and Ukrainian communists and the great dilemma of what should be Ukraine: a part of the Soviet but, as in the imperial past, “one and indivisible” Russia or an independent Soviet state?1

Despite the giant step forward taken by the October Revolution in the domain of national relations, the isolated proletarian revolution in a backward country proved incapable of solving the national question, especially the Ukrainian question which is, in its very essence, international in character. The Thermidorian reaction, crowned by Bonapartist bureaucracy, has thrown the toiling masses far back in the national sphere as well. The great masses of the Ukrainian people are dissatisfied with their national fate and wish to change it drastically. It is this fact that the revolutionary politician must, in contrast to the bureaucrat and the sectarian, take as his point of departure. If our critic were capable of thinking politically, he would have surmised without much difficulty the arguments of the Stalinists against the slogan of an independent Ukraine: “It negates the position of the defence of the Soviet Union”; “disrupts the unity of the revolutionary masses”; “serves not the interests of revolution but those of imperialism”. In other words, the Stalinists would repeat all the three arguments of our author. They will unfailingly, do so on the morrow. (...) The sectarian as so often happens, finds himself siding with the police, covering up the status quo, that is, police violence, by sterile speculation on the superiority of the socialist unification of nations as against their remaining divided. Assuredly, the separation of Ukraine is a liability as compared with a voluntary and equalitarian socialist federation: but it will be an unquestionable asset as compared with the bureaucratic strangulation of the Ukrainian people. in order to draw together more closely and honestly, it is sometimes necessary first to separate.2

The quoted article by Trotsky, “The Independence of Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads” (July 1939), is, in a number of ways, much more important than the article of April the same year, “The Ukrainian Question”. First of all, it unmasks and disarms the pseudo-Marxist sectarians who, in the name of defending proletarian internationalism transform it into a sterile abstraction, and reject the slogan of national independence of a people oppressed by the Kremlin bureaucracy. In this article, Trotsky places himself in the continuity of the ideological struggle waged by Lenin against the “tendency to imperialist economism”, a tendency which was active in the ranks of Bolshevik Party as well as in the far left of international social democracy. It should be clear that the adjective “imperialist” that Lenin attributes to this form of economism in the revolutionary movement in relation to the national question, is justified by the theoretical reasons evoked by the author of the term. A sociological examination would show that this tendency is mainly based among revolutionary socialists belonging to the dominant and imperialist nations. The sectarians denounced by Trotsky, are only a new version of the same tendency that Lenin fought against at the time of the discussion on the right of nations to self-determination in the context of an anti-capitalist revolution.

Second, Trotsky’s article contains theoretical and political considerations which are indispensable for understanding the correctness and the need for a slogan such as that of independence for the Soviet Ukraine as well as for a national revolution of an oppressed people as a factor and component of the anti-bureaucratic revolution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. To fully appreciate the richness of this contribution, readers are invited to study the article themselves.

Third, Trotsky explains that in a case like that of Ukraine, real internationalism and a real search for the international unity of the working class are impossible without clear and resolute support for national “separatism”.

To make possible a genuine brotherhood of the peoples in the future, the advanced workers of Great Russia must even now understand the causes of Ukrainian separatism as well as the latent power and historical lawfulness behind it, and they must without any reservation declare to the Ukrainian people that they are ready to support with all their might the slogan of an independent Soviet Ukraine in a joint struggle against the autocratic bureaucracy and against imperialism.3

It goes without saying that this task is the responsibility of the vanguard of the international workers’ movement even before being that of the Russian proletariat. The defence of the slogan of Ukrainian independence adopted by the World Congresses of the Fourth International in 1957 and 1979, is a task of enormous political importance today. The rise of national mass movements of the oppressed peoples of the USSR demands that. the slogan of national independence should be a part of our general propaganda and agitation. If this is not done, the socialist opposition in the USSR will leave the field open to the bureaucracy, which hopes to isolate the anti-bureaucratic struggles waged in the non-Russian republics from the fight of the workers in Great Russia. They thus omit one of the basic transitional tasks of the anti-bureaucratic struggle.

Fourthly, Trotsky contributes an essential clarification to the historical discussion on the right of nations to self-determination while eliminating from this Leninist slogan its abstract and politically redundant features. Trotsky explains that, if the oppression of a people is an objective fact, we do not need this people to be in struggle and to demand independence in order to advance the slogan of independence. At the time when Trotsky raised this slogan, nobody in the Soviet Ukraine could demand such a thing without having to face execution or becoming a prisoner in the Gulag. A wait-and-see policy would only lead to the political and programmatic disarming of revolutionaries. An oppressed people needs independence because it is oppressed. Independence, states Trotsky, is the indispensable democratic framework in which an oppressed people becomes free to determine itself. In other words, there is no self-determination outside the context of national independence. In order to freely determine her relations with other Soviet republics, in order to possess the right to say yes or no, Ukraine must return to herself complete freedom of action, at least for the duration of this constituent period. There is no other name for this than state independence. “In order to exercise self-determination – and every oppressed people needs and must have the greatest freedom of action in this field – there has to be a constituent congress of the nation. But a ‘constituent’ congress signifies nothing else but the congress of an independent state which prepares anew to determine its own domestic regime as well as its international position.”4

Faced with the implacable rigour of this explanation, any other discourse on the right of oppressed nations to self-determination can only be sustained by sleight-of-hand. This right cannot be defended without fighting for the oppressed people to have the means of exercising it; that is to say without demanding the state independence necessary for the convocation of a free constituent assembly or congress.

Finally, and this is a question of signal importance, Trotsky recognised that the October revolution did not resolve the national question inherited from the Russian empire. Isolated in a backward country, it could only bring it to resolution with great difficulty. But was it equipped for that? In the perspective of a new, anti-bureaucratic, revolution, we have to decide whether the same means can be reused or if a totally new approach is necessary. I think that Trotsky was convinced that the second option was correct. This is a question of the first importance that seems never to have been taken up by the Trotskyist movement, although it is a necessary starting point for any discussion on the relevance of Trotsky’s slogan of 1939.

The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic – formally (and fictively like Byelorussia) a member of the United Nations – is the most important of the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union. It is also the biggest country in Europe after Russia in surface (603,700 square kilometres), and one of the biggest in population (more than 50 million, 74% of whom are Ukrainian). The Ukrainian people form the largest oppressed nation in the USSR and Europe. The urban working class constitutes more than 50% of the total population and more than 75% of the Ukrainian population of the republic. The liberation of the enormous potential that this class represents from the dual burden of bureaucratic dictatorship and national oppression is a fundamental task and a condition for the development of the anti-bureaucratic revolution in the USSR and Eastern Europe, as well as for the social revolution on the entire continent. It is impossible to imagine any advance in building socialism in the USSR and in Europe without the victory of the Ukrainian national revolution which has, as Trotsky explained, an international strategic dimension. What the sectarians ignore in taking up this question is the fact that the national revolution, one of the most important and most complex forms of the class struggle, cannot be avoided by simple references to the anti-bureaucratic revolution in the USSR as a whole or the future European and world revolution.5

Bolshevism faced with an unexpected national revolution

Considered by many people – including Marx and Engels at one time –as a “people without history”,6 the Ukrainian people constituted itself as a nation in a “historical” manner par excellence, that is heroically. In 1648, the community of freemen and of military democracy, known as the Cossacks, formed a people’s liberation army, and launched a huge peasant uprising against the Polish state, its ruling class and its church. The nation state established during this rising did not manage to stabilise but the Cossack and peasant revolution crystallised a historical nation even before the shaping of the modem nations through the expansion of capitalism.7 Since the end of the 18th century, the bulk of Ukrainian territory had been transformed into a province of the Tsarist empire, known as “Little Russia”. On the eve of the Russian revolution, it was a “European”-type colony.8 Compared to the general level of socio-economic development in this empire this region was one of the most industrialised and characterised by a strong penetration of capitalism in agriculture. Ukrainian was synonymous with peasant because around 90% of the population lived in the countryside. Among the 3.6 million proletarians (12% of the population), 0.9 million worked in industry and 1.2 million in agriculture. As a product of a very uneven development of capitalism, half of the industrial proletariat was concentrated in the mining and steel enclave of the Donbas. Because of the colonial development and the Tsarist “solution” to the Jewish question, only 43% of the proletariat was of Ukrainian nationality, the rest being Russian, Russified and Jewish. The Ukrainians constituted less than a third of the urban population.9 The western part of Ukraine, Galicia, belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empire. The two central demands of the renascent national movement were the independence and unity (samostiinist´ i sobornist´) of Ukraine.

The 1917 revolution opened the road to the Ukrainian national revolution. It was the most powerful, the most massive and the most violent of the all the revolutions of the oppressed nations of the empire. The masses demanded a radical agrarian reform, independence, the constitution of a Ukrainian government and independence. The opportunist petty bourgeois and workers’ parties of the Central Rada (council) which led the national movement opposed the demand for independence. They only proclaimed it after the October revolution to which they were hostile. By authorising the passage of counter-revolutionary military units, the Central Rada provoked a declaration of war by Soviet Russia against the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The Bolsheviks were very badly prepared to deal with the Ukrainian national revolution.

The right to national self-determination put forward by Lenin was a slogan that had not been very well assimilated by the party. It was even challenged by a sizeable current, characterised by Lenin as “imperialist economism”. This challenge was particularly dangerous as it appeared within a proletarian party of a nation that was traditionally an oppressor and had become imperialist, in an empire characterised by Lenin as an enormous prison of peoples. Apart from Lenin’s writings, the only overall work on the national question at the disposal of the Bolshevik Party was the confused, indeed largely wrong study by Stalin. Written in 1913, it did not even take up the national question in the framework of imperialism.10 Lenin himself expressed confused and ill-thought out positions such as the excessive inspiration that he drew from the example of the American melting-pot and a categorical rejection of a federalist solution. He condemned this as contradicting his idea of a centralised state and demanded that each nationality choose between complete separation and national-territorial autonomy within a centralized multi-national state. He educated the party in this spirit for more than ten years. After the revolution, and without giving any explanation for his turnaround, he proclaimed the federation of nations as the correct solution and compatible with state centralism – a shift that many Bolshevik leaders did not take seriously. Over and above the democratic slogan of the right to self-determination, Bolshevism had neither a programme nor a strategy of national and social permanent revolution for the oppressed peoples of the empire.

In Ukraine, apart from a few exceptions, the Bolshevik Party (like the Menshevik Party) was only active within the most concentrated and modern section of the proletariat, which was not of Ukrainian nationality. The spread of communism within the proletariat followed the dynamic of the development of a colonial industrial capitalism. Political action within the national proletariat was the domain of Ukrainian social democracy which placed itself outside the Bolshevik/Menshevik split and was accused by the former of capitulating to Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalism”. The “national” bourgeoisie hardly existed. At this period, the distinction between the nationalism of the oppressors and that of the oppressed was already present in Lenin’s writings but both were considered bourgeois. The notion of revolutionary nationalism had not yet appeared. Social Revolutionary populism, which was becoming national and autonomous from its Russian equivalent represented another active political force within the Ukrainian masses. The Bolshevik Party in Ukraine used only Russian in its press and propaganda. It ignored the national question and did not even have a leadership centre in the territory. It is not surprising that when the national revolution broke out it was caught unarmed.

In Ukraine, the Bolshevik Party only tried to organise as a separate entity after the Brest-Litovsk treaty, that is during the first Bolshevik retreat and at the beginning of the occupation of the country by the imperialist German army. At the ad hoc conference in Taganrog in April 1918, there were several tendencies present. On the right, the “Katerynoslavians” with Emmanuiil Kviring. On the left, the “Kievans” with Yury Pyatakov, but also the “Poltavans” or “nationals” with Mykola Skrypnyk and Vasyl Shakhrai, strengthened by the support of a group from the extreme left of Ukrainian social democracy. The right, basing itself on the Russian industrial proletariat proposed to form the Russian CP(B) in Ukraine. The “Poltavans” and the “Kievans” wanted an entirely independent Bolshevik party. A section of the “Poltavans” wanted to settle the national question in a radical way through the foundation of an independent Soviet Ukraine. Shakhrai, the most radical, even wanted the party to be called the Ukrainian CP(b). The “Kievans” were for an independent party (and perhaps a state) while denying the existence of the national question and considering the right to national self-determination an opportunist slogan. With Pyatakov they represented the most extreme proponents of “imperialist economism”. However, at the same time, they identified with Bukharinist “left communism” and were hostile to the Brest-Litovsk peace and to Leninist centralism. In order to assert themselves in opposition to Lenin they needed an independent Bolshevik party in Ukraine. Moreover, they considered that a particular strategy was necessary in Ukraine directed towards the peasant masses and based in their insurrectional potential. It was for this reason that the “Kievans” allied with the “Poltavans”. And it was Skrypnyk’s position that won out. Rejecting Kviring’s approach on the one hand and Shakhrai’s on the other, the conference procaimed the Communist Party(b) in Ukraine as the Ukrainian section, independent of the Russian CP(b), of the Communist International.11

Skrypnyk, a personal friend of Lenin, and a realist always studying the relationship of forces, was seeking a minimum of Ukrainian federation with Russia and a maximum of national independence. In his opinion, it was the international extension of the revolution which would make it possible to resist in the most effective fashion the centralising Greater Russian pressure. At the head of the first Bolshevik government in Ukraine he had had some very bitter experiences: the chauvinist behaviour of Muraviev, the commander of the Red Army who took Kiev, the refusal to recognize his government and the sabotage of his work by another commander, Antonov-Ovseyenko, for whom the existence of such a government was the product of fantasies about a Ukrainian nationality. In addition, Skrypnyk was obliged to fight bitterly for Ukrainian unity against the Russian Bolsheviks who, in several regions, proclaimed Soviet republics, fragmenting the country. The integration of Galicia into Ukraine did not interest them either. The national aspiration to sobornist´, the unity of the country, was thus openly flouted. It was with the “Katerynoslavian” right wing of the party that there was the most serious confrontation.12 It formed a Soviet republic in the mining and industrial region of Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih, including the Donbas, with the aim of incorporating it into Russia. This republic, its leaders proclaimed, was that of a Russian proletariat “which does not want to hear anything about some so-called Ukraine and has nothing in common with if.”13 This attempted secession could count on some support in Moscow. The Skrypnyk government had to fight against these tendencies of its Russian comrades, for the sobornist´ of the Soviet Ukraine within the national borders set, through the Central Rada, by the national movement of the masses.

The first congress of the CP(B) of Ukraine took place in Moscow. For Lenin and the leadership of the Russian CP(B) the decision of Taganrog had the flavour of a nationalist deviation. They were not ready to accept an independent Bolshevik party in Ukraine or a Ukrainian section of the Komintern. The CP(B) of Ukraine could only be a regional organisation of the pan-Russian CP(B), according to the thesis “one country, one party”. Is Ukraine not a country?

Skrypnyk, considered responsible for the deviation, was eliminated from the party leadership. In this situation, Shakhrai, the most intransigent of the “Poltavans” went over to open dissidence. In two books of inflammatory content, written with his Ukrainian Jewish comrade Serhii Mazlakh, they laid the foundations of a pro-independence Ukrainian communism. For them, the Ukrainian national revolution was an act of enormous importance for the world revolution. The natural and legitimate tendency of this revolution and its growing over into a social revolution could only lead to the formation of a workers’ and peasants’ Soviet Ukraine as an independent state. The slogan of independence was thus crucial to ensure this growing over, for forming the workers’-peasants’ alliance, to make it possible for the revolutionary proletariat to take power and to establish a real and sincere unity with the Russian proletariat. It was only in this way that Ukraine could become a stronghold of the international proletarian revolution. The contrary policy would lead to disaster. This was the message of the Shakhrai current.14

And it was indeed a disaster.

The reasons for the failure of the second Bolshevik government

In November 1918, under the impact of the collapse of the central powers in the imperialist war and the outbreak of revolution in Germany, a generalised national insurrection overthrew the Hetmanate, a fake state established in Ukraine by German imperialism. The opportunist leaders of the former Central Rada of the Ukrainian People’s Republic who, a short while before, had made a compromise with German imperialism, took the head of the insurrection to restore the Republic and its government, this time called the Directory. Symon Petliura, a former social democrat who had become a rightwinger swearing ferocious hatred of Bolshevism, became the de facto military dictator. But this unprecedented rise of a national revolution of the masses was also the rise of a social revolution. Just as they had previously done faced with the Central Rada, the masses rapidly lost their illusions in Petliura’s Directory, and turned again to the social programme of the Bolsheviks. The far left of the Ukrainian Social Revolutionary Party, called the Borotbists, which was increasingly pro-Communist, affirmed its ideological influence among the masses.15

In a situation favourable to the possibility of a convergence between the Russian revolution and the Ukrainian revolution, the Red Army again entered the country, chased out the Directory, and established the second Bolshevik government. Pyatakov was at the head of this government before being rapidly recalled to Moscow.

Although continuing to ignore the national question – for him the Ukrainian revolution was not a national but a peasant revolution – the Pyatakov government, sensitive to the social reality of Ukraine, wanted to be an independent state power. It considered such power indispensable in order to ensure the growing over of the peasant revolution into the proletarian revolution and to give proletarian leadership to the people’s revolutionary war. Moscow appointed Christian Rakovsky to take Pyatakov’s place. Recently arrived from the Balkans, where the national question was particularly complicated and acute, he declared himself a specialist on the Ukrainian question and was recognised as such in Moscow, including by Lenin. In reality, although he was a very talented militant and completely devoted to the cause of the world revolution, he was completely ignorant and dangerous in his so-called speciality. In Izvestia, the Soviet government newspaper, he announced the following theses: the ethnic differences between Ukrainians and Russians are insignificant, the Ukrainian peasants do not have a national consciousness, they even send petitions to the Bolsheviks to demand to be Russian subjects; they refuse to read revolutionary proclamations in Ukrainian while devouring the same thing in Russian. The national consciousness of the masses has been submerged by their social class consciousness. The word “Ukrainian” is practically an insult for them. The working class is purely of Russian origin. The industrial bourgeoisie and the majority of the big landowners are Russian, Polish or Jewish. In conclusion Rakovsky did not even recognize a national entity in Ukraine and for him the Ukrainian national movement was simply the invention of the intelligentsia that supported Petliura, who were using it in order to hoist themselves into power.16 Rakovsky understood perfectly that the Bolshevik revolution in Ukraine was the “strategic knot” and the “decisive factor” in the extension of the socialist revolution in Europe.17 However, unable to place his vision within the context of the Ukrainian national revolution or recognise that this latter was an unavoidable and indispensable active force, Rakovsky condemned his own strategy to shipwreck on the rocks of the Ukrainian question. A tragic but relative error if compared with that of Lenin eighteen months later, which plunged the European revolution into the quagmire of the Polish national question by giving orders to invade Poland.

In opposition to the demands of Pyatakov, Rakovsky’s government – which was on paper that of an “independent republic” – considered itself a simple regional delegation of power from the Russian workers’ state. But objective reality is implacable. Faced with Rakovsky’s attempt to impose a Greater Russian communist centralism, the national reality, already explained by Bolsheviks like Shakhrai, and also in their own way by Bolsheviks like Pyatakov, made itself felt. This centralism unleashed powerful centrifugal forces. The proletarian revolution did not lead the national revolution; nor did a proletarian military leadership impose itself at the head of the armed national and social insurrection of the masses. In order to achieve class consciousness, the masses of an oppressed people have first to pass through the stage of achieving a national consciousness. Having alienated and even repressed the bearers of this consciousness, recruitment to the administration was restricted to the often reactionary Russian petty bourgeoisie, who were accustomed to serving under whoever was in power in Moscow. Things were the same for the army; recruitment took place amongst people with a very low level of consciousness, not to say lumpen elements. The result was a conglomerate of disparate armed forces, with commanders ranging from Nestor Makhno (presented by the central press in glowing terms as a natural revolutionary leader of the poor peasants in revolt, overlooking entirely his anarcho-communist beliefs, totally at odds with Bolshevism)18 and straightforward adventurers such as Matvii Hryhoryiv. This latter was promoted to the rank of plenipotentiary Red commander of a vast region by Antonov-Ovseyenko.

The leftist agrarian policy, that of the commune, transplanted into Ukraine from Russia on the principle of a single country and a single agrarian policy, inevitably alienated the middle peasants. It drove them into the arms of the rich peasants and ensured their hostility to the Rakovsky government while isolating and dividing the poor peasants. Power was exercised by the Bolshevik Party, the revolutionary committees and the poor peasants’ committees, imposed from above by the party. Soviets were only permitted in some of the large towns and, even then, had only an advisory role. The most widely-supported popular demand was that of all power to democratically-elected Soviets – a demand of Bolshevik origin that now struck at the present Bolshevik policy. On the national issue, the policy was one of linguistic russification, the “dictatorship of Russian culture” proclaimed by Rakovsky and the repression of the militants of the national renaissance. The Great Russian philistine was able to wrap himself in the red flag in order to repress everything that smacked of Ukrainian nationalism and defend the historical “one and indivisible” Russia. Afterwards, Skrypnyk drew up a list of some 200 decrees “forbidding the use of the Ukrainian language” drawn up under Rakovsky’s rule by “a variety of pseudo-specialists, Soviet bureaucrats and pseudo-communists.”19 In a letter to Lenin, the Borotbists were to describe the policy of this government as that of “the expansion of a ‘red’ imperialism (Russian nationalism)”, giving the impression that “Soviet power in Ukraine had fallen into the hands of hardened Black Hundreds preparing a counter-revolution”.20

In the course of a military escapade, the rebel army of Hryhoryiv captured Odessa and proclaimed that they had thrown the Entente expeditionary corps (in fact in the process of evacuating the town) into the sea. This fictional exploit was backed up by Bolshevik propaganda. Sensing a shift in the wind, the “victor over the Entente”, Hryhoryiv, rebelled against the power of “the commune, the Cheka and the commissars” sent from Moscow and from the land “where they have crucified Jesus Christ”. He gave the signal for a wave of insurrections to throw out the Rakovsky government. Aware of the mood of the masses, he called on them to establish Soviets from below everywhere, and for their delegates to come together to elect a new government. Some months later, Hryhoryiv was shot by Makhno in the presence of their respective armies, accused of responsibility for anti-semitic pogroms. Even the pro-communist extreme left of the social democracy took up arms against the “Russian government of occupation”. Whole chunks of the Red Army deserted and joined the insurrection. The elite troops of “Red Cossacks” disintegrated politically, tempted by banditry, plunder and pogroms.21

These uprisings opened the way for Denikin and isolated the Hungarian Revolution. From Budapest, a desperate Béla Kun demanded a radical change in Bolshevik policy in Ukraine. The commander of the Red Army’s Ukrainian front, Antonov-Ovseyenko, did the same. Among the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, the “federalist” current, in effective agreement with the ideas of Shakhrai and Borotbism, started factional activity. The Borotbists, protective of their autonomy, although still in alliance with the Bolsheviks, formed the Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbist) and demanded recognition as a national section of the Comintern. With large influence amongst the poor peasantry and the Ukrainian working-class in the countryside and the towns, this party looked towards an independent Soviet Ukraine. They even envisaged armed confrontation with the fraternal Bolshevik Party on this question, but only after victory over Denikin and on the other fronts of the civil war and imperialist intervention.

Both the Hungarian and Bavarian revolutions, deprived of Bolshevik military support were crushed. The Russian revolution itself was in mortal danger from Denikin’s offensive.

“One and indivisible” Russia or independence of Ukraine?

It was under these conditions that Trotsky, in the course of a new and decisive turn in the civil war – as the Red Army went over to the offensive against Denikin – took a political initiative of fundamental importance. On 30 November 1919, in his order to the Red troops as they entered Ukraine, he stated:

Ukraine is the land of the Ukrainian workers and working peasants. They alone have the right to rule in Ukraine, to govern it and to build a new life in it. (...) Keep this firmly in mind: your task is not to conquer Ukraine but to liberate it. When Denikin’s bands have finally been smashed, the working people of the liberated Ukraine will themselves decide on what terms they are to live with Soviet Russia. We are all sure, and we know, that the working people of Ukraine will declare for the closest fraternal union with us. (...) Long live the free and independent Soviet Ukraine!22

After two years of civil war in Ukraine, this was the first initiative by the Bolshevik regime aimed at drawing the social and political forces of the Ukrainian national revolution – that is the Ukrainian workers and peasants –into the ranks of the proletarian revolution. Trotsky was also concerned to counteract the increasingly centrifugal dynamic of Ukrainian communism whether inside or outside the Bolshevik party.

Trotsky’s search for a political solution to the Ukrainian national question was supported by Rakovsky, who had become aware of his errors, and closely coordinated with Lenin, who was also now conscious of the disastrous consequences of policies that he had himself often supported, or even promoted. At the Bolshevik Central Committee Lenin called for a vote for a resolution that made it “incumbent on all party members to use every means to help remove all barriers in the way of the free development of the Ukrainian language and culture (...) suppressed for centuries by Russian Tsarism and the exploiting classes.”23

The resolution announced that in the future all employees of Soviet institutions in Ukraine would have to be able to express themselves in the national language. But Lenin went much further. In a letter-manifesto addressed to the workers and peasants of Ukraine, he recognised for the first time some basic facts. “We Great Russian Communists (have) differences with the Ukrainian Bolshevik Communists and Borotbists and these differences concern the state independence of Ukraine, the forms of her affiance with Russia and the national question in general. (...) There must be no differences over these questions. They will be decided by the alI-Ukraine Congress of Soviets.” In the same open letter, Lenin stated for the first time that it was possible to be both a militant of the Bolshevik Party and a partisan of complete independence for Ukraine. This was a reply to one of the key questions posed a year earlier by Shakhrai, who was expelled from the party before his assassination by the Whites. Lenin furthermore affirmed: “One of the things distinguishing the Borotbists from the Bolsheviks is that they insist upon the unconditional independence of Ukraine. The Bolsheviks will not (…) regard this as an obstacle to concerted proletarian effort.24

The effect was spectacular and had a strategic significance. The insurrections of the Ukrainian masses contributed to the defeat of Denikin. In March 1920 the Borotbist congress decided on the dissolution of the organisation and the entry of its militants into the Bolshevik Party. The Borotbist leadership took the following position: they would unite with the Bolsheviks to contribute to the international extension of the proletarian revolution. The prospects for an independent Soviet Ukraine would be a lot more promising in the framework of the world revolution that on a pan-Russian level. With great relief Lenin declared: “Instead of a revolt of the Borotbists, which seemed inevitable, we find that, thanks to the correct policy of the Central Committee, which was carried out so splendidly by comrade Rakovsky, all the best elements among the Borotbists have joined our party under our control. (...) This victory was worth a couple of good tussles.”25

In 1923, a communist historian remarked: it was largely under the influence of the Borotbists that Bolshevism underwent the evolution from being “the Russian Communist Party in Ukraine” to becoming the “Communist Party of Ukraine.”26 Even so, it remained a regional organisation of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) and did not have the right to be a section of the Comintern.

The fusion of the Borotbists with the Bolsheviks took place just before a new political crisis – the invasion of Ukraine by the Polish bourgeois army accompanied by Ukrainian troops under the command of Petliura, and the resulting Soviet-Polish war. This time the Great Russian chauvinism of the masses was unleashed on a scale and with an aggression that escaped all restraint by the Bolsheviks.

To the conservative elements in Russia this was a war against a hereditary enemy, with whose re-emergence as an independent nation they could not reconcile themselves – a truly Russian war, although waged by Bolshevik internationalists. To the Greek Orthodox this was a fight against the people incorrigible in its loyalty to Roman Catholicism, a Christian crusade even though led by godless communists.27

The masses were moved by the defence of the “one and indivisible” Russia, a mood fanned by propaganda. Izvestia published an almost unbelievably reactionary poem glorifying the Russian state. Its message was that “just as long ago, the Tsar Ivan Kalita gathered in all the lands of Russia, one by one, (…) now all the dialects, and all the lands, all the multinational world will be reunited in a new faith” in order to “bring their power and their riches to the palaces of the Kremlin.”28

Ukraine was the first victim of the chauvinist explosion. A Ukrainian left social democrat, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, who had been the leader of the Central Rada and who had broken with Petluira’s Directory to negotiate alongside Béla Kun a change in Bolshevik policy in Ukraine, found himself in Moscow at the invitation of the Soviet government at the time when many white officers were responding to the appeal of the former commander in chief of the Tsarist army to “defend the Russian motherland” and were joining the Red Army. Georgy Chicherin, at that time Commissar of Foreign Affairs, explained to Vynnychenko that his government could not go to Canossa over the Ukrainian question. In his journal, Vynnychenko writes: “The orientation towards Russian patriotism of the ‘one and indivisible’ variety excludes any concession to the Ukrainians. (…) When one is going to Canossa in front of the white guards (…) it is clearly impossible to have an orientation towards federation, self-determination or anything else that might upset ‘one and indivisible’ Russia.” Furthermore, under the influence of the Great Russian chauvinist tide that was flowing through the corridors of Soviet power, Chicherin resuscitated the idea that Russia could directly annex the Donbas region of Ukraine.29 In the Ukrainian countryside, Soviet officials asked the peasants: “Do you want to learn Russian or Petliuraist at school? What kind of internationalists are you, if you don’t speak Russian?”

In the face of this Great Russian chauvinist regression, those Borotbists who had become Bolsheviks, continued the fight. One of their main leaders, Vasyl Ellan-Blakytny, wrote at the time:

Basing themselves on the ethnic links of the majority of the Ukrainian proletariat with the proletariat, semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie of Russia and using the argument of the weakness of the industrial proletariat of Ukraine, a tendency that we describe as colonialist is calling for the construction of an economic system in the framework of the Russian Republic, which is that of the old Empire to which Ukraine belonged. This tendency wants the total subordination of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine to the Russian party and in general envisages the dissolution of all the young proletarian forces of the “peoples without history” into the Russian section of the Comintern. (…) In Ukraine, the natural leading force of such a tendency is a section of the urban and industrial proletariat that has not come to terms with Ukrainian reality. But beyond that, and above all, it is the Russified urban petty bourgeoisie that was always the most important support for the domination of the Russian bourgeoisie in Ukraine.

And the Bolsheviks of Borotbist origin concluded:

The great power colonialist project that is prevailing today in Ukraine is profoundly harmful to the communist revolution. In ignoring the natural and legitimate national aspirations of the previously oppressed Ukrainian toiling masses, it is wholly reactionary and counter-revolutionary and is the expression of an old, but still living Great Russian imperialist chauvinism.30

Meanwhile the far left of the social democrats formed a new Ukrainian Communist Party, called “Ukapist”, in order to continue to demand national independence and to take in those elements of the Borotbists who had not joined the Bolsheviks. Coming out of the theoretical tradition of German social democracy, this new party was far stronger at the theoretical level than Borotbism, which had populist origins and where the art of poetry was better understood than the science of political economy. But its links with the masses were weaker.31 The masses were, in any case, growing increasingly weary of this revolution that was permanent in both a mundane and theoretical sense. Trotsky’s theoretical conception of permanent revolution was not, however, matched, in reality, by a growing over, but by a permanent split between a national revolution and a social revolution. One of the worst results of this was the inability to achieve a united Ukraine (the demand for sobornist´). Lenin’s fatal error in invading Poland exacerbated the Polish national question in an anti-Bolshevik direction and blocked the extension of the revolution. It resulted in a defeat for the Red Army and the cession to the Polish state of more than a fifth of national Ukrainian territory; some other Ukrainian territories were absorbed by Romania and Czechoslovakia.

Every honest historian, and all the more every revolutionary Marxist, must recognise that the promise made by the Bolsheviks during the offensive against Denikin – to convoke a constituent congress of soviets in Ukraine able to take a position on the three options (complete independence, more or less close federal ties with Russia or complete fusion with the latter) put forward by Lenin in his letter of December 1919, was not kept. According to Trotsky, during the civil war, the Bolshevik leadership considered putting forward a bold project for workers’ democracy to resolve the anarchist question in the region under the control of Makhno’s insurrectional army. Trotsky himself “discussed with Lenin more than once the possibility of allotting to the anarchists certain territories where, with the consent of the local population, they would carry out their stateless experiment.”32 But there is no record of any similar discussions on the vastly more important question of Ukrainian independence.

It was only after bitter struggles led at the end of his life by Lenin himself as well as by Bolsheviks like Skrypnyk and Rakovsky, by former Borotbists such as Blakytny and Oleksandr Shumsky, and by many of the leading communists from the various oppressed nationalities of the old Russian empire, that the 12th congress of the Bolshevik Party in 1923 formally recognised the existence in the party and in the Soviet regime of a very dangerous “tendency towards Great Russian imperialist chauvinism”. Although this victory was very partial and fragile, it offered the Ukrainian masses the possibility of accomplishing certain tasks of the national revolution and experiencing an unprecedented national renaissance in the 1920s. But this victory did not prevent the degeneration of the Russian revolution and a chauvinist and bureaucratic counter-revolution that, in the 1930s, was marked by a national holocaust in Ukraine. Millions of peasants died during a famine provoked by the Stalinist policy of pillaging the country, the national intelligentsia was almost completely physically wiped out, while the party and state apparatuses of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic were destroyed by police terror. The suicide of Mykola Skrypnyk in 1933, an old Bolshevik who tried to reconcile the national revolution with allegiance to Stalinism, sounded the death knell for that revolution for a whole historical period.

Tragic errors that should not be repeated

The Russian revolution had two contradictory effects on the Ukrainian national revolution. On the one side the Russian revolution was an essential factor for the overthrow of bourgeois power in Ukraine. On the other, it held back the process of class differentiation amongst the social and political forces of the national revolution. The reason for this was the lack of understanding of the national question. The experience of the 1917-1920 revolution posed in a dramatic fashion the question of the relations between the social revolution of the proletariat of a dominant nation and a national revolution of the toiling masses of the oppressed nation. As Skrypnyk wrote in July 1920: “Our tragedy in Ukraine is that in order to win the peasantry and the rural proletariat, a population of Ukrainian nationality, we have to rely on the support and on the forces of a Russian or Russified working class that was antagonistic towards even the smallest expression of Ukrainian language and culture.”33

In the same period, the new (so-called “Ukapist”) Ukrainian Communist Party tried to explain to the leadership of the Comintern:

The fact that the leaders of the proletarian revolution in Ukraine draw their support from the Russian and Russified upper layers of the proletariat and know nothing of the dynamic of the Ukrainian revolution, means that they are not obliged to rid themselves of the prejudice of the “one and indivisible” Russia that pervades the whole of Soviet Russia. This attitude has led to the crisis of the Ukrainian revolution, cuts Soviet power off from the masses, aggravates the national struggle, pushes a large section of the workers into the arms of the Ukrainian petty bourgeois nationalists and holds back the differentiation of the proletariat from the petty-bourgeoisie.34

Could this tragedy have been prevented? The answer is yes if the Bolsheviks had had at their disposal an adequate strategy before the outbreak of the revolution. In the first place, if, instead of being a Russian party in Ukraine, they had resolved the question of the construction of a revolutionary party of the proletariat of the oppressed nation. Secondly, if they had integrated the struggle for national liberation of Ukraine into their programme. Thirdly, if they had recognised the political necessity and historical legitimacy of the national revolution in Ukraine and of the slogan of Ukrainian independence. Fourthly, if they had educated the Russian proletariat (in Russia and in Ukraine) and the ranks of their own party in the spirit of total support for this slogan, and thereby fought against the chauvinism of the dominant nation and the reactionary ideal of the “gathering together of the Russian lands”. Nothing here would have stood in the way of the Bolsheviks conducting propaganda amongst Ukraine workers in favour of the closest unity with the Russian proletariat and, during the revolution, between the Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Russia. On the contrary, only under these conditions could such propaganda be politically coherent and effective.

There had been an occasion when Lenin tried to develop such a strategy. This is revealed by his “separatist speech” delivered in October 1914 in Zurich. Then he said:

What Ireland was for England, Ukraine has become for Russia: exploited in the extreme, and getting nothing in return. Thus the interests of the world proletariat in general and the Russian proletariat in particular require that Ukraine regains its state independence, since only this will permit the development of the cultural level that the proletariat needs. Unfortunately some of our comrades have become imperial Russian patriots. We Muscovites, are enslaved not only because we allow ourselves to be oppressed, but because our passivity  allows others to be oppressed, which is not in our interests.35

Later however, Lenin did not stick to these radical theses. They re-appear, however, in the political thinking of pro-independence Ukrainian communism, in Shakhrai, the Bolshevik “federalists”, the Borotbists and the Ukapists.

We should not, however, be surprised that the Bolsheviks had no strategy for the national revolutions of the oppressed peoples of the Russian Empire. The strategic questions of the revolution were in general the Achilles heel of Lenin himself, as is shown by his theory of revolution by stages. As for Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, implicitly adopted by Lenin after the February revolution, it was only worked out in relation to Russia, an underdeveloped capitalist country and not for the proletariat of the peoples oppressed by Russia, which was also an imperialist state and a prison house of nations. The theoretical bases of the strategy of permanent revolution for the proletariat of an oppressed nationality appeared during the revolutionary years amongst the pro-independence currents of Ukrainian communism. The Ukapists were probably the only communist party – even if they were never recognized as a section by the Comintern – that openly made reference to the theory of permanent revolution. The basic idea, first outlined by Shakhrai and Mazlakh, then taken up by the Borotbists before being elaborated by the Ukapists, was simple. In the imperialist epoch, capitalism is, of course, marked by the process of the internationalisation of the productive forces, but this is only one side of the coin. Torn by its contradictions, the imperialist epoch does not produce one tendency without also producing a counter-tendency. The opposite tendency in this case is that of the nationalization of the productive forces manifested, in particular, by the formation of new economic organisms, those of the colonial and dependent countries, a tendency which leads to movements of national liberation.

The world proletarian revolution is the effect of only one of the contradictory tendencies of modern capitalism, imperialism, even if it is the dominant effect. The other, inseparable from the first, are the national revolutions of the oppressed peoples. This is why the international revolution is inseparable from a wave of national revolutions and must base itself on these revolutions if it is to spread. The task of the national revolutions of the oppressed peoples is to liberate the development of the productive forces constricted and deformed by imperialism. Such liberation is impossible without the establishment of independent national states ruled by the proletariat. The national workers’ states of the oppressed peoples are an essential resource for the international working class if it is to resolve the contradictions of capitalism and establish workers’ management of the world economy. If the proletariat attempts to build its power on the basis of only one of these two contradictory tendencies in the development of the productive forces, it will be divided against itself.

In a memorandum to the 2nd congress of the Communist International in the summer of 1920, the Ukapists summed up their approach in the following terms:

The task of the international proletariat is to draw towards the communist revolution and the construction of a new society not only the advanced capitalist countries but also the backward peoples of the colonies, taking advantage of their national revolutions. To fulfil this task, it must take part in these revolutions and play the leading role in the perspective of the permanent revolution. It is necessary to prevent the national bourgeoisie from limiting the national revolutions at the level of national liberation. It is necessary to continue the struggle through to the seizure of power and the installation of the dictatorship of the proletariat and to lead the bourgeois democratic revolution to the end through the establishment of national states destined to join the international network of the emerging union of Soviet republics.

These states must rest on “the forces of the national proletariat and toiling masses as well as on the mutual aid of all the detachments of the world revolution.”36

In the light of the experience of the first proletarian revolution, it is precisely this strategy of permanent revolution that needs to be adopted, to resolve the question of the oppressed nations in the framework of the anti-bureaucratic political revolution in the USSR.

As Mykola Khvylovy, Ukrainian communist militant and great writer put it in 1926, Ukraine must be independent “because the iron and irresistible will of the laws of history demands it, because only in this way shall we hasten class differentiation in Ukraine. If any nation (as has already been stated a long time ago and repeated on more than one occasion) over the centuries demonstrates the will to manifest itself, its organism, as a state entity, then all attempts in one way or another to hold back such a natural process block the formation of class forces on the one hand and, on the other, introduce an element of chaos into the general historical process at work in the world.”37

• 1. Published in International Marxist Review, vol. 4, no. 2, 1989, pp. 85-106, and in: M. Vogt-Downey (ed.), The USSR 1987-1991: Marxist Perspectives, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993, pp. 235-255.
• 2. Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40), New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977, pp. 47-48.
• 3. Ibid., p. 53.
• 4. Ibid., p. 52.
• 5. Ibid., p. 50.
• 6. See one of the most important works on the national question, that of the Ukrainian Marxist R. Rosdolsky, Engels and the “Nonhistoric” Peoples: The. National Question in the Revolution of 1848, Glasgow: Critique Books, 1987.
• 7. See two Marxist interpretations of this revolution, both still banned in the USSR because of their radical incompatibility with the Stalinist Great Russian interpretation of history: M. Iavorsky, Narys istorii Ukrainy, vol. 2, Kiev, Derzhavne Vydavnytstvo Ukrainy, 1924); and M. I. Braichevsky, Priiednannia chy vozzyednannia?, Toronto: Novi Dni, 1972. The latter can be considered as complementary to I. Dzyuba’s famous book Internationalism or Russification?, New York: Monad Press, 1974.
• 8. See the study by M. Volobuiev, which appeared in 1928 and was viciously attacked by the Stalinists: “Do problemy ukrainskoi ekonomiky” in Dokumenty ukrainskoho komunizmu, New York: Prolog, 1962.
• 9. See J. M. Bojcun, The Working Class and the National Question in Ukraine, 1880-1920, Graduate Programme in Political Science, Toronto: York University, 1985, pp. 95-118 [The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine, 1897-1918, Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2021]; B. Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth Century Ukraine, London: Macmillan, 1985, pp 1-45.
• 10. On the Marxist debates at the time on the national question, see C. Weil, L’Internationale et l’autre, Paris: L’Arcantère, 1987.
• 11. The classic study – although marked by anti-communist bias – on the establishment of Bolshevik power in Ukraine is that of J. Borys, The Sovietization of Ukraine, 1917¬1923: The Communist Doctrine and Practice of National Self-Determination, Edmonton: CIUS, 1980. See also T. Hunczak ed., Ukraine 1917-1921: A Study in Revolution, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977. The classic studies on the history of the CP(b) of Ukraine are M. Ravich-Cherkassky, Istoriia Kommunisticheskoi Partii (bo-ov) Ukrainy, Kharkiv: Gosizdat Ukrainy, 1923, and that of M.M. Popov, Narys istorii Komunistychnoii Partii (bilshovykiv) Ukraiiny, Kharkhiv: Proletarii, 1929.
• 12. V. Holubnychny, “Mykola Skrypnyk i sprava sobornosty Ukrainy”, Vpered, no. 5-6 (25- 26), 1952.
• 13. M. M. Popov, op. cit., pp. 139-140, 143-144. The level of tension between the Ukrainian Bolsheviks and the Soviet Russian government can be seen by the following exchange of telegrams from the beginning of April 1918. Stalin, the People’s Commissar for Nationalities to the Skrypnyk government: “Enough playing at a government and a republic. It’s time to drop that game; enough is enough.” Skrypnyk to Moscow: our government “bases its actions, not on the attitude of any commissar of the Russian Federation, but on the will of the toiling masses of Ukraine. (…) Declarations like that of Comrade Stalin would destroy the Soviet regime in Ukraine. (…) They are direct assistance to the enemies of the Ukrainian toiling masses.” (R.A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, New York: Alfred A. Kopf, 1972, p.16.
• 14. V. Skorovstansky (V. Shakhrai), Revolutsiia na Ukraine, Saratov: Borba 1919; S. Mazlakh, V. Shakhrai, Do khvyli, New York: Prolog, 1967. For a (not wholly accurate) English translation of the second book see S. Mazlakh, V. Shakhrai, On the Current Situation in the Ukraine, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970. Here are some of the questions that these two militants put to Lenin: “Prove to us the necessity of uniting Ukraine and Russia, but do not use the Katerynoslav arguments: show us where we are mistaken, in what way our analysis of the real conditions of life and development of the Ukrainian movement is incorrect; show us on the basis of this concrete example, how paragraph five of the 1913 resolution, that is, paragraph nine of the Communist Program, should be applied – and we will openly and publicly renounce the independence of Ukraine and become the sincerest supporters of unification. Using the examples of Ukraine, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Byelorussia and Estonia, show us how this principle of proletarian policy – the right of nations to self-determination – has been implemented. Because we do not understand your present policy, and examining it, are apt to seize our heads and exclaim: why did we offer our silly Cossack heads? (…) Now only two answers are possible: either, (1) an independent Ukraine (with our own government and our own party), or (2) Ukraine as Southern Russia. (…) Can one remain a member of the Russian Communist Party and defend the independence of Ukraine? If it is not possible, why not? It is because one is not supposed to defend Ukrainian independence, or because the way we do it is not permitted? If the way we defend Ukrainian independence is not permitted, how may one defend Ukrainian independence and be allowed to remain in the Russian Communist Party? Comrade Lenin, we await your answer! Facts have to be reckoned with. And your answer, just as your silence, will be facts of great import.”
• 15. See I. Majstrenko, Borot´bism: A Chapter in the History of Ukrainian Communism, New York: Research Program on the USSR, 1954.
• 16. Ch. Rakovsky, “Beznadezhnoe delo: O petliurovskoi avantiure”, Izvestia, no. 2 (554), 1919. See also F. Conte, Christian Rakovski (1873-1941): Essai de biographic politique, vol. 1, Lille: Universite Lille III, 1975, pp. 287-292.
• 17. “Tov. Rakovsky o programme Vremennogo Ukraiinskogo Pravitelstva”, Izvestia, no. 18 (570), 1919.
• 18. See A. Sergeev, “Makhno”, Izvestia, no. 76 (627), 1919.
• 19. M. Skrypnyk, Statti i promovy z natsionalnoho pytannia, Munich, Suchasnist, 1974, p. 17.
• 20. F. Silnycky, “Lenin i borotbisty”, Novyi Zhurnal, no. 118, 1975 pp. 230-231. Unfortunately the disastrous policy of the Rakovsky government of 1919 is passed over in silence by P. Broué, “Rako”, Cahiers Leon Trotsky, nos. 17 and 18, 1984, and is hardly touched on by G. Fagan in his introduction to Ch. Rakovsky, Selected Writings on Opposition in the USSR, 1923-1930, London-New York: Allison and Busby, 1980.
• 21. See A. E. Adams, Bolsheviks in Ukraine: The Second Campaign 1918-1919, New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1963, and J. M. Bojcun, op. cit., pp. 438-472.
• 22. L. Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, vol. 2, London: New Park Publications, 1979, p. 439.
• 23. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 30, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974, p. 163.
• 24. Ibid., pp. 294-296.
• 25. Ibid., p. 471.
• 26. M. Ravich-Cherkassky, op. cit., p. 148.
• 27. I. Deutscher, Trotsky: The Prophet Armed, New York: Vintage Books, 1965, pp.459-460.
• 28. M. Kozyrev, “Bylina o dcrzhavnoi Moskve”, Izvestia, no. 185 (1032), 1920.
• 29. V. Vynnychenko, Shchodennyk 1911-1920, Edmonton-New York: CIUS, 1980, pp. 431¬432.
• 30. Quoted by M.M. Popov, op. cit., pp. 243-245.
• 31. On the history of Ukapism and on pro-independence Ukrainian communism in general the best work is that of J.E. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine 1918-1933, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983 [see also Ch. Ford, “Outline History of the Ukrainian Communist Party (Independentists): An Emancipatory Communism 1918-1925”, Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, vol. 17, n° 2, 2009.]
• 32. Writings of Leon Trotsky (1936-1937), New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978, pp. 426-427. In the period of Gorbachev’s glasnost, it has been stated that this was not only a subject for discussion but also a formal promise – made in bad faith from the start – by the Bolshevik leadership to Makhno. See the article “rehabilitating” the Makhnovist movement by V. Golovanov: “Batka Makhno ili ‘oboroten’ grazhdanskoi voiny”, Literaturnaia Gazeta, no. 6, 1989.
• 33. M. Skrypnyk, op. cit., p. 11.
• 34. Memorandum of the Ukrainian CP in Ukrainska suspilno-politychna dumka v 20 stolitti, vol. 1, New York: Suchasnist, 1983, p. 456.
• 35. This speech is not in the Complete Works of Lenin. It was reported by the press at the time. See R. Serbyn, “Lénine et la question ukrainienne en 1914: Le discours «séparatiste» de Zurich”, Pluriel-débat, no. 25, 1981.
• 36. Memorandum of the Ukrainian CP, op. cit., pp. 449-450.
• 37. M. Khvylovy, The Cultural Renaissance in Ukraine: Polemical Pamphlets, 1925-1926, Edmonton: CIUS, 1986, p. 227.

Eric Blanc

In the face of Russia’s deplorable invasion of Ukraine, we are publishing excerpts on the history of early Ukrainian Marxism, Bolshevism, and the national question from Eric Blanc’s recently published monograph Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across Imperial Russia, 1882-1917. Of course, one cannot find solutions to today’s crisis among the stances taken by Marxists a century ago — vast differences in historical context and national development preclude any such copy-and-paste political approach. Nevertheless, the history outlined by Blanc is crucially important for helping make sense of the current conjuncture and its historical roots —

The Editors

National Relations in Imperial Russia

Covering one sixth of the world’s landmass by 1897, Tsarist Russia’s population was the third largest in the world, after the British Empire and China. The empire’s ethnic Russian geographic core was surrounded by a largely non-Russian periphery, making the latter geo-politically important as a gateway to both the West and East.

Russians were a minority: non-Russian peoples made up roughly 58 per cent of the population. Yet because the Russian state viewed Ukrainians and Belarusians as subsets of a single ethnic-national ‘Russian people’, most Russians felt that they constituted a numeric majority in the empire.

The Russian Empire’s Ethnic-Linguistic Groups, 1897

Group 12th Mar 2022 New evidence of an early Korean Trotskyist organisation in the late 1940s: Research note on the ‘Bill Morgan Report’ Owen Miller,  SOAS, University of London In the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I came across a post on Facebook that caught my eye immediately: images of a newly-discovered article from a Chinese Trotskyist journal of the 1940s containing news of a Trotskyist organisation in US-occupied South Korea.1 This was astonishing because I’d never previously seen or even heard of any evidence of Korean Trotskyists in the 1940s. The closest thing that came to mind were one or two Korean communist intellectuals of the time who seemed to hold positions similar to those espoused by Trotsky, whether by distant influence or coincidence. But, here it was, in black and white, in the Chinese-language journal New Banner:2 an article about a Trotskyist seaman of unidentified nationality who had recently called into a port in Korea and encountered a substantial Trotskyist organisation called the Internationalist Communist Party of Korea. The report claimed that the party had split from the Korean Communist Party six years previously and saw itself as politically aligned with the Fourth International, although its leading members knew little about the FI and were eager for news about Trotskyists around the world and their positions on major current events. The Chinese article relates that the foreign sailor spent time with the leaders of the organisation and learned about political events in South Korea and the current situation of the non-Stalinist left there before leaving the country. This newly-discovered article immediately raised a series of questions about who the mysterious sailor was and whom he had met in Korea in 1946, but, above all, it begged for corroborating evidence. It seemed highly unlikely that an article from a Chinese Trotskyist journal would be entirely fictional, so it had to be based on another source. But it also seemed unlikely that everything in the article could be correct, as the organisation described had never been heard of before. Moreover, the idea that the Korean Communist Party – which barely existed in 1940 – had suffered a Trotskyist split while under the most repressive period of Japanese colonial rule seemed far-fetched. Based on a few clues in the text, I had a hunch that the sailor mentioned in the article was likely to be American, or at least from an English-speaking country. So, on the off-chance I would find something, I began looking at issues of the US Trotskyist newspaper The Militant from around the time that theNew Banner article was published in the first half of 1947. Quite quickly, I found something promising: an article in the 15 March issue of the newspaper headlined: ‘What I Saw In Korea Under American Rule’ by a man named Bill Morgan.3 This article is written by a Trotskyist sailor from the US and describes his recent sojourn in US-occupied southern Korea. Morgan provides considerable detail and colour about the three weeks he spent in the southeastern seaport of Pusan, describing the poverty, black marketeering and the brutality of the police under US occupation. However, there is no mention of Korean Trotskyists and almost no discussion of the Korean left at all, until the enigmatic final sentences: Korean Marxists have had a long and militant history. They are stronger today than ever. Only the reactionary policy of the Stalinists prevents the Korean workers from coming to open revolutionary grips with Wall Street’s oppression. The official Stalinist party in Southern Korea is disintegrating, however. Many thousands of workers have organized into new groups and are carrying on a militant class struggle.4 It struck me immediately after reading this article that there was little chance of this being a coincidence: Bill Morgan had to be the foreign sailor mentioned in the Chinese article on Korean Trotskyists and he had most likely written a more detailed private report which had informed that article. Presumably, security considerations prevented Morgan and The Militant from publishing anything about his encounters with Korean revolutionaries, but there are clear hints in the lines quoted above that the author knew about ‘new groups’ that were opposed to the policy of the Stalinist communist party in southern Korea. There seemed to be the slightest glimmer of hope that an internal report by Bill Morgan on his stay in Korea might still exist in an archive somewhere, so I began to look at the catalogues of archives relating to US Trotskyists and Trotskyist organisations held at places like the Tamiment Library at New York University and the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford. The latter archive holds both the Joseph Hansen Papers, which contain a folder of correspondence with ‘Bill and Ada Morgan’, and also the Papers of the Socialist Workers’ Party (the American Trotskyist organisation that published The Militant newspaper). Tantalisingly, in the finding aid for the SWP papers,5 I found reference to a folder marked simply, ‘Korea, 1946’. With the help of David Palumbo-Liu at Stanford University, I was able to obtain a scan of the contents of this folder and it turned out to be exactly what I had been looking for: Bill Morgan’s account of his visit to Korea. Curtly headed ‘Report on Korea’, and presumably intended only for the central committee of the Socialist Workers’ Party, the report runs to seven pages of typescript and contains much more detail than either the New Banner article or the report inThe Militant. Moreover, it became obvious from reading the Bill Morgan report that the Chinese article consisted almost entirely of excerpts translated verbatim from the report. Before delving more into the content of the report and the further questions it raises about Trotskyism in 1940s Korea, it is necessary to pause for some historical context. Until now, the documented history of Korean Trotskyism only goes back to the late 1980s, when some of the works of Trotsky first began to be translated into Korean by activists and scholars. At the same time, Trotskyist ideas began to break through the stranglehold of varieties of Stalinism on the Korean left since socialist politics had re-emerged in the late 70s and early 80s, after decades of dictatorship. The first work of Trotsky to appear in South Korea was The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, which was translated and published in 1988.6 The first Korean organisation espousing Trotskyist and Third Campist positions – the International Socialists of South Korea – emerged in the early 1990s and it was not until the mid 1990s that some of the well-known works of Trotsky, such as The Revolution Betrayed,7 were finally translated. The emergence of new evidence that there was a Korean Trotskyist organisation more than four decades before the first work of Trotsky was ever published in Korean was therefore quite surprising. However, if we look at the objective conditions of US-occupied Korea in the late 1940s, the emergence of a Trotskyist current there does not seem so surprising. During WWII, many Trotskyists predicted that the war would give rise to a global wave of revolution on a scale last seen immediately after WWI. While this prediction proved to be wrong in a general sense, many colonial or former colonial countries did experience a revolutionary situation in the postwar period, usually aimed at achieving independence and implementing modernising social reforms. In Korea, there was also a revolutionary feeling in the air as the country was liberated from 35 years of Japanese colonial occupation in August 1945. Koreans expected not only a return to independence but also substantial social change, including land reform, labour reform, nationalisation of industry and democracy.8 In effect, they anticipated changes in their society that at the time came under the general rubric of ‘socialism’. However, at the very moment Korea was liberated from the Japanese in August 1945, it was divided between the two superpowers, the US and the USSR. Stalin readily agreed to this partition of the peninsula in order to gain a bigger foothold for Russia in East Asia, ordering his advancing troops – who had already entered Korea on August 12 – to halt at the 38th parallel, just north of the capital Seoul. There were attempts in early September to form an independent national government on the basis of the ‘people’s committees’ that had sprung up all over the country after August 15, but this ‘Korean People’s Republic’ was swept aside by the US Army after it arrived at the port of Incheon on September 8 and instituted its military occupation government under General Hodge. Thus, from September 1945, Korea had replaced one hated colonial power with two occupying armies, and the new occupiers set out from early on to find reliable allies in their sector and begin the process of ensuring a ‘friendly’ regime on the peninsula once they had left. In the northern occupation zone, the Soviets took a somewhat different approach to the Americans in the south, co-opting the people’s committees rather than outlawing them. They also moved swiftly to put their trusted Stalinist allies from various parts of the disparate Korean communist movement into positions of power. Most prominent among them was a certain former anti-Japanese guerrilla named Kim Il Sung, who had spent most of WWII as a Soviet Army officer in far eastern Russia. In 1946, the Soviets and their Korean allies quickly initiated a series of social reforms that went some way to fulfilling the hopes of liberated Koreans: completely overhauling the land tenure system, nationalising formerly Japanese-owned industry and enshrining formal gender equality in law.9 Thus a substantial gap opened up between the northern and southern zones, and the frustration in the US zone at the lack of democracy or social reform and the worsening economic situation exploded into a series of mass strikes, violent demonstrations and peasant uprisings in the autumn of 1946.10 All this created much potential for a revolutionary uprising in the south, but the policies of the Korean Stalinists tended to work directly against the revolutionary tendencies in Korean society. The Korean Communist Party, which re-formed in the autumn of 1945 and in August 1946 fused with another party to become the Korean Workers’ Party (with separate sections in north and south), was close to Moscow from early on, even in the south away from the direct control of the Soviets. As a result, when the question of a four-power trusteeship over the Korean peninsula became a major issue during the winter of 1945-46, the Korean Communists toed the official Moscow line of supporting trusteeship negotiations between the US and Soviet Union, making them instantly unpopular among swathes of the population. Not only this, but the Stalinists in southern Korea took a generally passive or even at times supportive position with regards to the US military occupation, no doubt following instructions from Stalin that they should not rock the boat and upset the US-Soviet Joint Commission. As Bill Morgan notes in his report (interestingly, a point that is repeated in the New Banner article), the Korean Communists stood candidates for the US military government’s ‘Interim Legislative Assembly’ elections in the autumn of 1946, until they were forced to withdraw them by popular demand.11 Taken together, the revolutionary situation and the lack of leadership from the Stalinist left show that there was a clear political space in US-occupied south Korea for a revolutionary socialist organisation that would oppose the US military occupation as well as the Soviet occupation of northern Korea and the Korean Stalinists who were beholden to Moscow. But, until now, there has been little evidence of such an organisation to the left of the Stalinist Communist party, let alone an organisation that identified itself with Trotskyism.12 Turning to Bill Morgan’s report, I will draw out some of the most interesting elements within the document and then conclude by looking at the big questions it leaves unanswered. First, it’s worth noting that there is very little contextual information about the document, such as who exactly it was written for and when it was written. The document heading contains only the title ‘Report on Korea’ and a note that outlines the other places Morgan’s ship called in at besides Korea. However, it can be assumed that the report was meant only for the internal use of the SWP and perhaps to be shared with other organisations within the Fourth International, since it clearly made it in some form to Trotskyists in China. The first part of the report describes Morgan’s arrival in the south-eastern port of Pusan (often called Fusan at the time, according to Japanese pronunciation) and his encounters with local black marketeers. He quickly set about trying to find Korean political contacts and struck lucky when he found a bookshop that had a single Marxist book on the shelves in English. This led to a conversation with the owner of the bookshop and a further meeting with him and a friend where they began to discuss socialist politics and the Trotskyist leaders in the US. According to Morgan, the two Koreans then took him into their confidence and told him that they knew of the Fourth International and were waiting to be contacted by comrades from the organisation. They also told him that they had split from the Korean Communist Party six years previously and that there were now four Marxist parties in Korea, including the official Stalinist party. The claim that there had been a split in the Korea communists six years before – e.g. in 1940 – is one of the most puzzling things in the whole document, since, in 1940, all communists in Korea itself were either in prison or living underground and there was no Korean Communist Party to speak of.13 It seems possible that there was a misunderstanding here and Morgan actually misheard ‘six months’. There was much political turmoil on the left in Korea during late 1945 and 1946 and it is very likely that a number of new socialist parties were formed during this period. After this, Morgan describes how he was introduced to more of the men’s comrades and learned that their programme was “substantially the same” as the Trotskyist one he outlined and that their organisation was formally called the ‘International Communist Party of Korea’.14 On the following day, Morgan was taken to address a mass meeting of the party’s followers in a warehouse five miles from the centre of Pusan.15 At the meeting, he was told that “three thousand workers and intellectuals were present”. In a moment of some levity, Morgan says that he was introduced to the meeting as “Comrade from country which is the monster imperialist” and given the temporary pseudonym “Comrade Kim Boy”. After the mass meeting, Morgan continued to spend time with the leaders of the organisation and came to know the leader by the initials L.B.S. He apparently had a publishing house in Seoul that published textbooks by day and printed Marxist works at night. Although he had published works by Lenin and Engels since liberation in 1945, he did not have access to works by Trotsky and was keen to read and publish his writings, especially on the Soviet Union. From L.B.S. Morgan learned that the International Communist Party of Korea was not the only organisation in the country that agreed with the Fourth International and that there were multiple groups based in different regions who needed to be united around a common programme. Apparently, there was even a Korean organisation with a ‘third camp’ position close to that of the US Workers’ Party, which rejected the mainstream Trotskyist position of defence of the Soviet Union. The Korean comrades were most anxious for support from the Fourth International and apparently “begged for assistance on political work”, including not only the despatch of books and papers to Korea but also a comrade who could “stay with them for a few months or more”, whom “they could support … and teach enough Korean to speak and write in about six or eight weeks of constant study.” In addition, they asked to be put in touch with Trotskyists in Japan as soon as possible.16 In the final paragraphs of the report, Morgan describes meeting some Koreans who had come down from the Soviet-occupied zone north of the 38th parallel and hearing their “horrible stories of looting, murder, rape and wholesale removal of villages and towns by the Russian Army”. Not only did these refugees from the north prefer to live in the American zone because they had the opportunity to organise there but, according to Morgan, many of them also held a defeatist position on the Soviet Union, like the third campists. On the last page of the report, Morgan briefly discusses the current political situation in US-occupied south Korea, mentioning the failures of the Stalinist Communists in south Korea with regards to the US military government’s interim legislative assembly elections. Morgan records that he left Korea for Japan on 30 December 1946. If we note the period of ‘three weeks’ that he mentions in his article forThe Militant it would appear that the whole of Morgan’s visit to Pusan fell within the month of December. The Bill Morgan report is undoubtedly an important document for the history of the Korean left. It opens up the intriguing possibility of a Trotskyist current in Korean politics 40 years earlier than previously known and the existence of an organisation that, had it been more successful and not disappeared into oblivion, might have had a profound effect on the course of Korea’s history in the post-liberation period. Since discovering the report at the end of 2020, I have attempted to find corroborating evidence for the existence of the organisation described in the document in other places, including in Korean-language research on the period, but so far to no avail. The authenticity of the document seems unquestionable, but this still leaves some fundamental questions about the accuracy of Bill Morgan’s report. Did he actually witness a substantial, functioning Trotskyist organisation in Pusan in the winter of 1946? It is noticeable that Morgan does not explicitly call the organisation he encountered ‘Trotskyist’. He notes that the leaders were interested in reading and publishing the works of Trotsky, that the programme of their organisation was aligned with that of the FI and that they requested direct assistance from the FI, but this was clearly not an ‘official’ Trotskyist organisation. It seems that it was a spontaneous anti-Stalinist split from the official communist organisation that had similar criticisms of Stalinism to the global Trotskyist movement and had a vague awareness of its existence, presumably through the media rather than direct contacts. This raises the further question of when and how such a split came about and what the other non-Stalinist communist organisations were that Morgan is told about by his Korean contacts. As I noted above, the idea of a split from the Korean Communist Party in 1940 seems unlikely, not least because such a party did not really exist at that time. But, during the tumultuous period of 1945-48, it is quite feasible that there were a multitude of competing minor left-wing parties that have been largely forgotten by history. Even for a minor party though, the International Communist Party of Korea sounds quite impressive from Morgan’s description: an organisation that could muster thousands of workers for a rally and had an armed militia patrolling the neighbourhood. For an organisation that no-one has heard of, this sounds astonishing, but it is worth remembering the context in which Morgan visited Korea. He arrived at Pusan only two months after an armed uprising of workers and peasants had swept the southeast of Korea, which could help to explain both the level of fervour and mobilisation that Morgan witnessed and the fact that security was such an important consideration for left-wing organisations during the post-uprising period of repression. Finally, there is the question of who the leaders of this organisation were and whether they can be traced in the historical record. Bill Morgan left a handful of important clues in his report, making this one of the most promising avenues for discovering more about the Korean Trotskyists of 1946-1947. Most intriguingly there is the appearance of the initials L.B.S. for the name of the man who was the leader and Morgan’s main contact in the party. It looks very much like it stands for the three characters of a Korean name, probably with the surname Lee (or Yi), although I have not found a good candidate in my searches so far. There is also the fact that L.B.S. was the proprietor of a publishing company in Seoul. The years immediately after liberation in Korea saw an explosion of left-wing publishing after decades of Japanese repression and there have been some detailed studies of the numerous new publishing companies that sprang up, offering the possibility of identifying the textbook publisher mentioned by Morgan. Another route might be to look at local histories of the left and left-wing bookshops in Pusan to see if the bookshop that Morgan mentions can be identified or possibly even a locally-based left-wing organisation that has been overlooked by nationally-focused histories. Perhaps, due to the vicissitudes and destruction of mid-twentieth century Korean history (civil war and repressive states north and south) we may never know more about the International Communist Party of Korea. But I’m hopeful that more material could come to light and we might even find out what happened to the party and its leadership. Did the Fourth International ever get in contact with them after Bill Morgan’s visit? Were the Korean Trotskyists crushed by the repression of the US Military Government and their allies in the South Korean right-wing? Or did they escape to the North, only to be purged by the formidable security apparatus of the Kim Il Sung regime? Perhaps they simply faded into obscurity in the maelstrom of the late 1940s? Any of these possibilities would help to explain why this early Korean encounter with Trotskyism was lost to history for the next 75 years. owenski@gmail.com     1. The discoverer of this article in the Chinese archives was Yan Chaofan, a scholar based at Wuhan University. 2. The article appears in New Banner, issue 16, p15. The journal was the monthly publication of the minority faction led by Wang Fanxi and Zheng Chaolin within the Chinese Communist League and a total of 20 issues were published in the period 1946-1948. Details can be found on the Marxists’ Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/reference-books/new-banner/index.htm 3. Bill Morgan wrote frequently for The Militant on trade union issues and had apparently been a “leading militant in the unemployed movement”. See: Cannon et al. 2004, The Fight Against Fascism in the USA, p121. 4. The Militant, March 15, 1947, p3. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1947/v11n11-mar-15-1947.pdf 5. The finding aid can be found here: http://pdf.oac.cdlib.org/pdf/hoover/socworpa.pdf 6. Published as Yŏnsok hyŏngmyŏng, p’yŏngga wa chŏnmang by the socialist publisher Sinp’yŏngnon. 7. The Revolution Betrayed was translated into Korean by Kim Songhun and first published in 1995. 8. These aspirations are well represented in the platform and policies of the People’s Republic of Korea proclaimed on September 6, 1945 (see Chung 1956, Korea Tomorrow: Land of the Morning Calm, pp304-305). They were also expressed in spontaneous revolutionary actions on the ground: the seizure of factories by workers’ committees and the seizure of land from landlords by peasants soon after liberation (see Chang 2020, ‘Independence without Liberation: Democratization as Decolonization Management in U.S.-Occupied Korea, 1945-1948’, pp81-84). 9. For more on the social reforms of 1946 see: Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, chapter 3. 10. The best English-language account of the 1946 ‘Autumn Harvest Uprisings’ is in Cumings 1981, The Origins of the Korean War, vol 1, chapter 10. 11. While the Moscow-aligned communists in South Korea tended to hold back the radicalism of the Korean masses in the earlier period of the US occupation (1945-1946), they shifted left and became more confrontational in the later period (1947-1948) when the US-Soviet Joint Commission collapsed and the US military government became more repressive towards the left. See Han Kyuhan, ‘Haebang konggan esŏ chwap’a ŭi chŏllyak’, in Han Kyuhan et al 2018, Marŭk’ŭsŭjuŭi ro pon han’guk hyŏndaesa, Seoul: Ch’aekkalp’i. For more on the interim legislative assembly see: Cumings 1981, The Origins of the Korean War, vol 1, pp260-262. 12. Factionalism within the Korean communists during the period after liberation has been quite well studied, including the story of the ‘Changan Faction’ who tried to re-found the Korean Communist party in August 1945 but were quickly defeated by Pak Hŏn-yŏng’s more pro-Moscow faction. Some of these non-mainstream Korean Communists, such as Im Hae, seem to have been quite close to Trotskyists on issues such as the nature of the Korean revolution (espousing a ‘permanent revolution’ position), but they have not been identified as Trotskyists as such. See: Sim Chi-yon 1987, Chosŏn hyŏngmyŏng non yŏn’gu, chapter 2. 13. Between 1939 and 1941, there was an attempt to re-found a Korean Communist Party in Seoul, usually referred to as the ‘Kyŏngsŏng K’om Group’, but it was crushed by the colonial police. There were also many diasporic Korean communists in the Soviet Union, China and Japan during the late 1930s and early 1940s and so it is possible that the split referred to here happened outside of Korea. They sometimes formed separate Korean communist organisations but they were usually members of the local parties in their respective host countries, as was decreed by Comintern policy. Kim Il Sung, for example, was a member of the Chinese Communist Party during the 1930s. 14. This is how Bill Morgan rendered the name of the organisation, although, in the Chinese article, it is changed to ‘Internationalist Communist Party of Korea’, a subtle but significant change. Without finding any of the organisation’s own documents, there is no way for us to know which was correct. 15. It is worth noting that the Chinese article in New Banner incorrectly identifies the city that Morgan was visiting as Seoul. It is a mystery how such a mistake came about in the course of translation because Morgan is very clear in his original report that he only visited Pusan. 16. Although writings by Trotsky had been translated into Japanese by this time, the first known Trotskyist organisation in Japan was the Japan Revolutionary Communist League which was founded more than 10 years later in 1957. 5th Mar 2022 Intellectual Journey to the Scientific Core of Marxism: An Obituary for Thomas T. Sekine Richard Westra 1. Introducing Thomas T. Sekine’s Academic Journey While it was with extreme sadness and sense of loss that I learned of the passing of Thomas T. Sekine on 16 January 2022, I am honoured to be able to celebrate his extraordinary contribution to Marxian economic and political economic thought in this short article. Sekine’s academic journey commenced in 1953 when he entered the undergraduate programme in Social Science at Hitotsubashi University in Japan. By his own admission, he was not drawn to economic studies specifically. Yet he found himself caught up in a controversy raging at that time in Japanese academia between bourgeois and Marxian economics, forcing him to publicly declare which side of the divide he stood on. That Sekine was proficient in reading French, German and English at that time greatly aided him in his quest to achieve knowledge in Marxian economics to which he felt most disposed toward. To offer a brief contextualisation here, many readers will certainly be surprised to learn of a contestation between Marxian and bourgeois economics in Japanese universities in the 1950s! After all, across much of the western academy bourgeois economics in its neoclassical mode had largely achieved hegemony early in the twentieth century. In the post-war period, its growing sense of triumphalism empowered it to begin a process of expelling non-neoclassical, “heterodox” research and teaching foci, such as economic history, from economic departments. Yet, in Japan, by the 1960s it was estimated that a full 50 percent of all economists in economics departments were Marxian. As summed up by Hoff,1 ‘it is still safe to assume that there is scarcely another capitalist country in the world where scientific interest in the Marxian critique of political economy is greater than in Japan’. Within this fecund milieu for Marxian economic studies, the work of Kozo Uno, and the ‘school’ he established, arguably gained prominence.2 Uno, a professor of economics at Japan’s prestigious Tokyo University, also gave weekly lectures on Marxian economics at Hitotsubashi University. Attending Uno’s lectures is where Sekine first learned about Marxian economics. Not only did Uno inspire Sekine academically but also deeply impressed him on a personal level. On the one hand, for Uno’s seeming inscrutability. On the other hand, for his approachability and warmth notwithstanding the fact that Uno was a venerated academic in Japan. What particularly struck Sekine as a student of Uno was Uno’s claim that he learned over 90 percent of his economics directly from Marx by going head-to-head, so to speak, with the three volumes of Marx’s Capital, rather than participating in this or that study group as was generally the fashion in Japan.3 Influenced by Uno, Sekine proceeded to delve further into Marxian economics. As Sekine turned to graduate studies, however, he felt a compulsion to study bourgeois economics as well. Not because it excited him, but for the simple reason that it constituted the predominant rival theory to Marxian economics. Sekine, at this time, in his early graduate studies, took the opportunity to attend McGill University in Montreal Canada, in 1958. From there, with his mind made up to study bourgeois economics, Sekine went to Britain, completing his Ph.D. at the London School of Economics in 1966. Sekine then secured employment firstly in the economics department at Simon Fraser University in Canada, then in economics at York University in Toronto. However, Sekine soon tired of academic writing related to his teaching in bourgeois economics and rekindled his contact with Uno. From that juncture, which, in the early 1970s, coincided with renewed academic interest in the West in Marx’s economic thought (the English translation of the Grundrisse appeared in 1973, for example), Sekine embarked upon a journey that would consume his life, to reinvigorate Marxian economics by reconstructing Marx’s theory inCapital in the vein opened by Uno. Sekine’s initial major publication detailing the signal constituents of Uno’s approach to Marxist theory in contrast with what Sekine dubs ‘conventional Marxism’ appeared in Journal of Economic Literature.4 This was followed up by his English translation of Uno’s single volume abridged version of the two volume Principles of Political Economy Uno published in the early 1950s.5 During the time Sekine was engaging in the translation and following its publication, he cultivated contacts with scholars in Japan similarly working in the Uno School tradition. Yet Sekine maintained what he saw as a healthy intellectual distance from them. The reason for this was that he viewed them as proceeding far too cautiously in seeking to be super faithful to the letter of what Uno wrote in this or that context. Sekine well knew that Uno’s writings were anything but transparent and this issue was amplified, Sekine learned, when translating Uno’s work into English. Hence, Sekine concluded that he had to be courageous in transposing Uno’s economic writings on Marx in a more graspable form. One that was close to Uno’s thought and person to which Sekine felt a kindred spirit, whatever the risks or criticisms he might face in that endeavour.6 By 1986, Sekine had written his magisterial two volume Dialectic of Capital which simultaneously dialogued with Uno’s two volumePrinciples of Political Economy, Marx’s three volumeCapital, G.W.F. Hegel’sLogic, and offered a critique of bourgeois economics in its neoclassical mode. Much to Sekine’s disappointment, a major university press that his magnum opus was destined for baulked at the last-minute, likely for fear of its devastation of bourgeois economics, criticism of ‘conventional Marxism’ and robust defence of Marx’s scientificity, prompting Sekine to self-publish a limited edition of the volumes which he distributed to close colleagues. Ultimately, it is in the Historical Materialism Book Series that this work has been published decades later.7 A ‘shorter’ two volume version of the foregoing also appeared in print in the hands of another publisher.8 Selection of Sekine’s articles and book chapter contributions are collected in an accessible edited volume.9 Most recently, Sekine published a translation of Uno’s major writing on stages of capitalist development.10 Importantly, while at York University, Sekine inspired a generation of scholars to bring his approach to Marx and Uno into debates over Marxism. He was also instrumental in cultivating interest in Japanese studies more broadly at York. My initial meeting with him was in 1981 when he came to lecture in an advanced undergraduate course taught by Robert Albritton on the three volumes of Marx’s Capital. I had, fortunately, readCapital by 1978 along with theGrundrisse and parts of Hegel’sLogic enabling me to better comprehend the nuanced approach I was being exposed to. Sekine was always extremely giving with his thoughts and time. Between Sekine and Albritton who was strongly influenced by Sekine as well in the shaping of his thinking on Marx, I emerged a different Marxian thinker from that class, being previously a subscriber of Ernest Mandel’s approach to Marxian economic theory. 2. Sekine in the Pursuit of Science As Uno before him, Sekine recognised Marx as a genius and extraordinary human being who could write voluminous scientific tracts, op-eds and journalistic articles, speak exaltingly at working class meetings and engage in revolutionary activism. Like Uno, Sekine always respected those participating in direct revolutionary struggle. But Sekine understood his own limitations in this world and realised that mere mortals attempting to duplicate everything Marx accomplished would at best amount to ‘mini-Marxs’ leading to impoverished renderings of all that Marx excelled in. Where Sekine believed his forte within the Marxian fold resided was in defending Marx’s project in Capital as the preliminary attempt to set forth a new science and to refine Marx’s oeuvre in a fashion that definitively established Marxian economic theory as the foundation for modern social science (with what that entails to be addressed below) and as the basis for critique of bourgeois economics in all its forms. Science, to be clear, is used by Sekine, as he believed Marx adverts to it, in its strong sense as objective knowledge or truth of its subject matter. Marx’s and Sekine’s subject matter is the capitalist mode of production withcapital as its causal force. For Sekine, why Marx devoted so much of his own life to analysis of the capitalist mode of production through Capital and its ‘workbooks’ theGrundrisse andTheories of Surplus Value, rather than drawing up blueprints for socialism, as undertaken by the ‘utopian socialists’, or writing grand tomes on human history in toto (as Marx hinted at attempting in his 1845The German Ideology), stemmed from Marx’s apprehension of the unique ontological properties of capital. After all, as recent economic history demonstrates, prior to the dawn of the capitalist era no one ever refers to such a thing as ‘an economy’ because economic life was always enmeshed with other social practices and indistinguishable from them. Because it is only in the capitalist era that economic life appears to ‘disembed’ from the social (to use Polanyi’s term) or, as Marx captures it, for the economic substructure to tend toward self-subsistence, separate from the ideological, legal and political superstructure, the very possibility of economic theory constitutes the historical existence of capitalism. What makes Marxian economic theorising of capital an objective social science, according to Sekine, returns us to the ontological properties of capital. That is, underpinning the appearance of economic life levitating from the social in the capitalist era is the material tendency of capital toward self-abstraction or self-reification. Capital, in other words, is the only object of study in the social world that objectifies social relations. But such objectified social relations are never directly visible on the ‘surface’ of capitalist society. Rather, they recede behind that which they constitute the basis of – relations between material things that, to paraphrase Marx, appear, then, ‘to take on a life of their own’. Given how human economic life first becomes visible in history in its capitalist form, bourgeois economics was led to the exciting, but egregiously erroneous, conclusion that forms of appearance of capitalism were ‘natural’ instead of socially and historically constituted and proceeded with their enterprise in the false belief that they could study substantive economic life directly in an ‘economics’. For Sekine, it is precisely such an ‘inversion’ of reality that constitutes the true meaning of fetishism.11 To fully expose the fetishism of capital in its manifold guises on a scientific, rather than ideological, basis, Sekine argues, is the primary role of Marxian economic theorising of capital. The scientificity of Marxian economic theory is established by following or ‘copying’ the ontological object’s own method of self-abstraction or self-reification. This methodological procedure brings to bear the epistemological resource of the materialist dialectic. As Marx had made crisply clear, the initial, most unspecified or ‘cell form’ of capital is the commodity. It is the internal opposition or contradiction existing within the commodity between its material substance as a use value and historically constituted social substance as value which drives the dialectic forward. Objective theorising of capital is arrived at through disciplined thought tracking capital’s own inner motion to unfurl all the categories of capital in their logical immanence, thus demonstrating what capital, in its most fundamental incarnation, is anddoes. Besides further elaborating Marxian economics on the foundations erected by Marx and Uno, Sekine always viewed one of his greatest contributions to be something neither Marx nor Uno were able to accomplish. It was this problematic which ultimately led to the dissolution of the classical school, supplanting of value theory within bourgeois economics by utility theory and serves as the differentiating marker for neoclassical economics. Calculus and the margin principle, as tools of quantitative analysis, were simultaneously deployed by Isaac Newton in his formative physics of the cosmos to treat potentially infinite shifts of infinitesimal quantities. Where neoclassical economics claimed its scientificity rested was never that its theory corresponded to the logic of any ontological object, but that its axiomatic modelling of price movements utilising calculus and the margin principle produced copies of models in theoretical physics.12 That neoclassical marginal artistry has absolutely nothing to do with capitalist prices does not mean that tools it relies upon to bolster its ideological subterfuge cannot be otherwise marshalled. What Sekine demonstrates, in a language understandable for neoclassical economists and Marxian economists mesmerised by the latter’s artifice, is that there was never any need to abandon the labour theory of value. The law of market value, the law of average profit and the so-called transformation problem, areas of Marxian economics which Marx left undeveloped, and that Uno treated only with basic numerical examples, Sekine shows pose no difficulty for Marxian economics nor does their treatment compromise value theory.13 It is simply the case that the margin principle enlarges the ambit of value theory to deal with the formal operations of the capitalist market. During my final personal meeting with Sekine at a dinner I hosted for him at my hotel in Tokyo in late Fall 2018, Sekine expressed his hope that Marxian economic theory as he reformulated it in his Dialectic of Capital would become the basis for teaching economics world-wide. 3. From Science to the ‘Real World’  An oft heard refrain is that economics needs to resemble the ‘real world’. The first question that arises here is that the real world of human history and its societies is always composed of an ensemble of social practices. The very historicity of economic theory, as noted above, is the capitalist era because it is only capitalism which evidences an ontological tendency for the economic toward self-subsistence or separation from superstructure. Recognising that economic theory is only directly applicable to the study of capitalism and that Marxian economic theorising of capitalism is economic theory par excellence is thus one step in forging such a ‘resemblance’.  A second problematic is that constructing economic theory on an objective foundation, as Sekine following Uno avers, demands the appropriate cognitive resources to follow the very ontological motion of the object – capital – as it objectifies social relations. In this way, economic theory is set on objective foundations. That in no capitalist society are social relations found completely reified does not invalidate the procedure. The ‘real world’ correspondence is between the logical structure of the object and the logical structure of the theory that captures what it is and does. When Sekine adverts to erecting social science on objective foundations, what he means is that bringing Marxian economic theory to bear upon specifically capitalist history it is necessary to reset social sciences of the superstructure such as politics, sociology and law on a non-bourgeois basis. This conceptual process unfolds at other ‘levels’ of theory which factor in a third question of the relation between economics and the ‘real world’. That is, while the economic in capitalism tends toward separation from the superstructure, the ontological condition from which its scientific study derives, it never actually achieves complete self-subsistence in history necessitating the consideration of other social practices. Sekine conceptualises this broader study foci in terms of Marxian political economic study of capitalism as a whole. Finally, Sekine maintains that, because in non-capitalist societies there is no ontological tendency toward the separation and self-subsistence of the economic from the superstructure, thus excluding the direct applicability of economic theory, Marxian political economy in a comprehensive sense, akin somewhat to the research agenda of historical materialism, is charged with studying myriad economic and non-economic practices across the sweep of human history in the comparative light of Marxian economic science and political economy of capitalism.  Even the possibility of socialism, for Sekine, is confirmed by Marxian economic theorising of capital through the way it demonstrates how capital manages to meet what Uno referred to as ‘general norms of economic life’ to reproduce material life of an entire society as a byproduct of profit-making. Thus, these same general norms will be met by concrete designs of free associations of free people reproducing material life of their societies for purposes of human flourishing. But all such economic knowledge hinges upon the objective theorising of capital justifying, for Sekine, his life’s endeavour to perfect that science References Bell, John ed. 2013, Towards a Critique of Bourgeois Economics: Essays of Thomas T. Sekine,  Berlin: Owl of Minerva Press. Hoff, Jan 2017, Marx Worldwide: On the Development of the International Discourse on Marx Since 1965, Chicago: Haymarket. Sekine, Thomas T. 1975, ‘Uno-Riron: A Japanese Contribution to Political Economy’, Journal of Economic Literature, 13, 3, pp. 847-77. Sekine, Thomas T. 1997, An Outline of the Dialectic of Capital, 2 Vols., London: Macmillan Press. Sekine, Thomas T. 2019. ‘The Legend of Unoism in Japan’, The Japanese Political Economy, 45, 3-4, pp. 132-60. Sekine, Thomas T. 2020, The Dialectic of Capital: A Study of the Inner Logic of Capitalism, 2 Vols., Leiden: Brill. Uno, Kozo 1980, Principles of Political Economy, Sussex: Harvester Press. Uno, Kozo 2016, The Types of Economic Policies Under Capitalism. Leiden: Brill. Westra, Richard 2021, Economics, Science and Capitalism, London: Routledge.     1. Hoff 2017, p. 98. 2. Hoff 2017, p. 101 3. Sekine 2019, p. 133. 4. Sekine 1975. 5. Uno 1980. 6. Sekine 2019, p. 135. 7. Sekine 2020. 8. Sekine 1997. 9. Bell 2013. 10. Uno 2016. 11. Sekine 2020, p. 33. 12. Westra 2021, 50-2. 13. Sekine 2020, 559-69.