The continuing Ukrainian nationalist movement

Scan page 13

'comrades' because I live in a 12-square-meter space that I share with another person. / don't have an official car at my —jailed Ukrainian nationalist Ivan Makaı national rights in Armenia and the Baltic countries naturally raises the question of the Ukraine, the largest of the non-Russian republics and where, especially in its western region, there has been a long and heroic tradition of resistance to the Great Russian chauvinism of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The following article examines the first signs of a resurgence of the Ukrainian national "The bureaucracy strangled and plundered the people within Great Russia too," Leon Trotsky wrote about the Stalinist system. "But in the Ukraine matters were further complicated by the massacre of national hopes. Nowhere did restrictions, purges, repressions, and in general all forms of bureaucratic hooliganism assume such murderous sweep as they did in the Ukraine against the powerful, deeply rooted longings of the Ukrainian masses for greater freedom and independence."1 Stalin and the Moscow bureaucracy saw these Ukrainian national aspirations as the most dangerous obstacle to rebuilding and maintaining Russian domination. In order to crush them, in the 1930s they condemned millions of Ukrainian peasants to death by famine, exterminated almost all the creative intelligentsia, and destroyed the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party and state apparatuses by police terror.

However, this massive terror, of an extent rarely seen in history, "has led the toiling masses of the Ukraine, to an even greater degree than the masses of Great Russia, to look upon the rule of the Kremlin as monstrously oppressive," Trotsky wrote.

The situation of the local Ukrainian ruling bureaucracy, headed by Volodymyr Shcherbytsky is paradoxical. Although it is resisting the central authorities' Gorbachevite course, the latter are leaving it a lot of leeway, because it is rendering them an important service. It is keeping a heavy lid on the potential for national ferment in the major non-Russian republic of the U.S.S.R.

National fight is spreading This year the people in the small Armenian republic engaged in gigantic mass mobilizations. On Aug. 23, the anniversary of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, hundreds of thousands of people in the still smaller Baltic republics went into the streets to demand the historic truth, political democracy, and national freedom. Imagine what would happen if national mobilizations assumed proportional dimensions in the Ukraine.

The fight in defense of the national language and culture, as well as the struggle against nuclear power inspired by the Chernobyl disaster and the battle for the truth about the national holocaust of the 1930s, are spreading to broader and broader social strata. But these struggles are running up against tenacious resistance.2 The weakest link in the bureaucratic system in the republic-and it is one of the weakest links in the U.S.S.R.—is the western part of Ukraine. Annexed in the same circumstances as the Baltic countries, the Kremlin fought hard to subjugate it.

Under the Nazi occupation, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) built up an armed force of 40,000 fighters to resist German imperialism. Once the war was over, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) waged an armed struggle and carried on determined underground activity, which was crushed only at the beginning of the 1950s.

However, those years of state terrorism on a grand scale did not break the spirit of the masses. Their passive resistance, as soon as Stalin was dead, led to the Moscow-appointed governor being ousted by the national bureaucracy, which for the first time put one of its own into the post of chief of the republic.

The nationalist fighters who lost the battle in their lands mounted a surprise attack from the rear. Having filled the "Gulag Archipelago" in 1953 and 1954, they launched multinational mass strikes in the concentration camps, from Norilsk and Vorkuta north of the Arctic Circle to Kinguir in central Kazakhstan.3 German prisoners released from Vorkuta testified: "They say that their program is democratic, that they do not want the return of the landlords and the capitalists. They want only one thing-the Ukraine's independence.... Their program very much resembles a socialist program—they say that they are against the existence of classes, and that in this respect the Ukrainian people are different from the Russian people, its magnates in the Kremlin."

Heated up quickly

It was foreseeable that if anything got started in these lands of an indomitable people, it would heat up very quickly. That is exactly what happened this summer in Lviv, the historic capital of western Ukraine.4 The first slogan that took hold among the masses called for democratic election of delegates to the all-Union conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) summoned by Gorbachev.

On June 21, 1988, a crowd of 50,000 people tried to intervene in this process. On July 7, over 20,000 inhabitants of the city came out into the streets. On Aug. 4, after the spontaneous street demonstrations had been banned by the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., a subsequent demonstration was the object of extremely brutal repression by the police, who loosed police dogs on the crowd.

"The sounds of barking dogs, the cries of children, and the screams of women should be the last details of a film called, 'Democracy and Restructuring Lviv-style," a statement of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union said.

"The first drops of blood were shed on Lviv streets on Aug. 4, 1988, together with the last illusions of the people of Lviv, whom the ruling apparatus treated as enemies. All was in its place: The people tried to exert their lawful rights-the ruling apparatus responded with repression.... It remains to be seen what the second stage will bring."

Leaflets circulating in Lviv proclaimed: "The Stalinists have declared a pitiless war on us. Down with 'the democracy of police dogs,' down with the dictatorship and the violence of the bureaucrats!"

The tone of the demonstrations was set by Bohdan Horyn, a Helsinki Union activist, who described the entire history of the Soviet Union from 1929 to the rise of Gorbachev as "counterrevolutionary and anti-Soviet." He demanded the elimination of the bureaucracy's privileges, the expropriation of the enormous property of the KGB and its diversion to socially useful projects, and the granting of real state powers to the institutions of the republics.

New mass front formed In the midst of the demonstrations, the Democratic Front in Support of Perestroika was formed, bringing together the Helsinki Union, the discussion clubs, along with the peace, environmentalist and cultural groups (including Jewish ones), among others.

The Democratic Front was also joined by the supporters of the rights of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which survives underground and has a broad social base.

The initiative committee for the mass mobilizations was presided over by Ivan Makar, a young engineer from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In his fiery speeches, Makar hurled a sharp challenge at the bureaucracy. Besides threatening to call a general strike in the city if the demonstrations were repressed, he demanded that the guerrillas of the UPA be recognized as anti-Stalinist fighters and that monuments be erected to their memory.

Immediately, the Communist Party and the KGB apparatuses ordered the press to open fire and to focus on Makar. He was accused of wanting to rehabilitate the worst "criminal enemies uf the people" and of trying to make the region into another Nagorno-Karbakh, a reference to the agitated Armenian enclave in Azerbaidjan.

But Makar was not intimidated by the media campaign. The horrible crimes that were committed in the Ukraine in the 1940s, he said, were the work of the Soviet security forces. All that was necessary to see this and to identify the guilty ones was to open up the archives that have been kept secret to this day.

Makar "Walking city, sporting medals on their chests, are no few of those who perpetrated real crimes against humanity. They are those who fought not at the fronts of the war but against a peaceful population, shooting people and deporting people to Siberia. They are not saying out loud the whole truth about their 'heroic acts' on our lands.

"They are part of those 'fighters of the Stalinist phalanx' who are always ready, without being asked, to 'offer fraternal aid' and 'liberate' people (robbing them if necessary of the last crust of bread and even their lives), to 'raise' the level of the culture of others and introduce 'limited contingents' into foreign territories."

Portrayed by the official press as an outsider in the service of foreign powers and a self-proclaimed ringleader of the masses, Makar replied:

'It is true that I do not belong to the 'comrades' because I live in a workers' hostel, in a 12-square-meter space that I share with another person. I don't have an official car at my disposal.

"I don't get treatment in the special medical centers reserved for the party regional committee, nor do they send me food at home. I live from a wage. That is my 'trough,' to use your picturesque expression (because you suggest that all of us are feeding out of the 'troughs' of the CIA and similar Western institutions)."

Makar has been jailed, thus becoming the Ukrainian perestroika's first political prisoner.

Vanguard of mobilizations

In the vanguard of the mobilizations has been the Ukrainian Helsinki Union (UHS). This organization was smashed by the KGB at the end of the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, it lost several of its activists in what is known as the Perm "death camp." Among them was a brilliant poet and admirer of the struggle of Solidarnosc, Vasyl Stus.

In March 1988 the UHS revived. In June, it organized a conference in Lviv. Together with dissident groups in Armenia, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, it established the Coordinating Committee of the Patriotic Movements of the Peoples of the U.S.S.R.

The statement of principles of the UHS published in July was surprisingly radical in comparison with the positions of similar dissident organizations in Eastern Europe.

Centering on the defense of the right to self-determination of the oppressed nationalSOCIALIST ACTI ities in the U.S.S.R., the UHS considers that its task is to "activate" the popular masses in all areas, with the aim of forming mechanisms of popular participation in the exercise of the state power and in real supervision of the state apparatus.

It continues: "For a genuine democratization of Soviet society, limited changes are not enough. It is necessary to break up the existing state system.... The UHS calls for the transfer of real power in the republic from the hands of the Communist Party to soviets of democratically elected people's delegates.... All parties, unions and informal associations, and even simple citizens' initiative groups must have the right to run candidates for deputies." Trade-union freedom was also indispensable.

not one of the from a wage.

The demand for deep-going political democracy was accompanied by the call for deep-going national democracy. On both levels, the UHS proclaimed "it is essential to abolish completely the antidemocratic, centralist, Stalinist, and Brezhnevist constitutions of the U.S.S.R. and draw up constitutions for the U.S.S.R. and the republics on new bases....

"In the future, in our opinion, the nations of the U.S.S.R. Will be able to live together in the framework of a confederation of independent states. A stepping stone to this may be the formation of a federation of sovereign democratic republics."

The rights of national minorities living in the Ukraine had to be guaranteed by establishing their national-territorial autonomy, and in cases where they did not live in compact territories, through national-cultural autonomy.

The deported Tartars had to be allowed to return to their native land, the Crimea, and reestablish the autonomous republic abolished by Stalin.

Continuity of historical memory The radicalism of the UHS is amply explained not only by the Ukraine's great traditions of national resistance but also by the continuity of the historical memory passed on in an unbroken way from generation to generation of fighters for freedom.

Alongside young activists such as Makar are older dissidents like Vyacheslav Chornovil, Iryna Kalynets, the brothers Mykhailo and Bohdan Horyn, and many others. Sent to the Gulag Archipelago in the 1960s and 1970s, they met activists of the nationalist old guard who fought arms in hand in the ranks of the UPA and later organized the strikes in the forced labor camps.

The UPA's strategy called for "toppling the dictatorship of the parasitic class of Stalinist magnates and the destruction of the Great Russian prison of the nations" through "an all-union social revolution, combined with national revolutions by the oppressed nationalities." On the ruins of Russian domination, the UPA aspired to establish a system of free national states.

The independent Ukraine was to be a people's democratic republic governed by a democratically elected people's power and guaranteed by respect for human and civic (continued on next page)

IN JANUARY 1989 13

Scan page 14

The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic contains over 20 percent of the Soviet population and supplies 25 percent of the The Ukrainian people have a long history of resistance 14 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 1989 ... Ukraine (continued from previous page) rights, political pluralism, and trade-union freedom.

in the free state would be built a "classless society," defined as "a society of workers, peasants and intellectual workers without capitalists, landlords and Stalinist parasites." The foundation would be social ownership of the basic means of production, workers' participation in the management of the production processes and a planned economy.5 With respect to this, the program of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union represents a step backward. It supports the so-called "market economy values" that today characterize the "dominant ideology" both of the reform sections of the bureaucracy and the democratic oppositions in the U.S.S.R. and in the Soviet bloc.

"To stimulate the economic prosperity of the republic," the UHS states, "[we] consider it indispensable to give the maximum encouragement to private initiative, which can be expressed in the conversion of a part of the state industrial plants into stock companies or cooperatives.... What must dominate is a market economy, with its mechanism for freely setting prices....' The authors of the program do not realize that at the same time they are demanding altogether just and absolutely necessary measures for eliminating the gigantic social inequalities that mark Soviet society, they are proposing the introduction of other mechanisms that generate no less grave inequalities.

A retreat from best traditions But it is not only on this ground that the authors of the UHS program are retreating from the best traditions of Ukrainian revolutionary nationalism.

Vyacheslav Chornovil, the leader of the UHS and one of the most outstanding Ukrainian dissidents, has put forward a thesis on the nationalities question in the U.S.S.R. In it he states that the roots of the national oppression established by the Stalinist system have to be sought in Marxist theory itself.

Chornovil states: "One of the weakest areas of Marxism is the theory that the nation is a unity which arose under capitalism, premise about the total subordination of national interests to class interests, [and] the prognosis not only of a classless but also of a nationless society in communism...

"It is Marxism which produced the infamous 'theory about the fusion of nations' at some unspecified time in the future ('fusion', 'total unity', 'a single Soviet people'); it has been adopted in various versions by all programs of the CPSU and has caused much damage-for without waiting for the 'future' it is being carried out today.... Stalin's solution to the national question was definitely not a deviation from Marxist-Leninist theory ... it was just carried out with inhuman and despotic methods."

According to Chornovil, the definition of nations developed by Stalin in 1913 was the crystallization of Marxist thought in this area. Inasmuch as Stalin's definition maintained that there were no nations not characterized by territorial unity, the Soviet regime could deny • the existence of nationalities such as the Crimean Tatars and many others that were expelled from their lands by Stalin.

Chornovil considers that "Lenin began as an orthodox Marxist for whom the national question was of secondary importance and subordinate." He argues that Lenin had to revise his orthodoxy under the pressure of the acute national question that existed in the Czarist empire, and work out his theses on the right of nations to self-determination.

But in reality, Chornovil states, Lenin defended "the inexpediency of self-determination vis-a-vis communist interest (unity of class interest, advantage of larger states in building up socialism)."

At the same time, however, Chornovil pays homage to the proposals on the nationalities question that Lenin presented in his testament in opposition to the great-power chauvinism that was growing at the time. He writes:

"The first steps taken by the national movements during Russia's revolutionary years and also the growth of national liberation movements in the whole world forced Lenin to rethink his own centralistic concepts, he began drawing up a new nationalities policy....

"Lenin even thought that the dissolution of Latvian ithuanian Estonian Ukrainian Moldavian Byelorussian BLACK Georgian Armenian Asserbaijan Uzbek to Great Russian chauvinism.

the united socialist state was possible and that the union of independent Soviet republics should be preserved only in the military and diplomatic fields. Unfortunately Lenin did not have enough time to elaborate his new nationalities policy, and the article mentioned above was concealed from the people up to 1956 and still kept secret later on."6 A position rooted in Marxism It does not require much effort to demonstrate the complete absurdity of the thesis according to which the origin of national oppression by the Great Russian Stalinist bureaucracy is rooted in some definition of Marxist theory.

I need only recall that in the Ukraine itself, for more than two decades, various rival Marxist tendencies confronted each other in sharp ideological struggles around the national question and the solution to it.

From 1918 on, within the Bolshevik Party itself tendencies arose, as well as parallel Communist parties outside it, that on the basis of Marxist theory tenaciously defended the idea of an independent socialist Ukrainian state. A non-Bolshevik pro-independence Ukrainian Communist Party existed legally in the U.S.S.R. up until 1925, although its founders had resisted the advance of the Red Army in the Ukraine arms in hand.

In the second half of the 1920s, a powerful radical current in the Bolshevik Party in the Ukraine defended national rights against the chauvinist degeneration of the Russian revolution. Its most outspoken representative was the writer Mykola Khvylovy, a convinced Marxist, who called for Ukrainian national independence as a means of resisting this degeneration, which he denounced with all the power of his extraordinary talent.?

Among the most radical spokespersons for national rights, including advocates of separation, there were always many Marxists. And many of them were in the vanguard of the successive processes of Ukrainian national revival.

In the mid-1960s, Dzyuba, a Marxist, was the most militant public defender of the national rights of the Ukrainian people.8 Revolutionary nationalists The Ukrainian revolutionary nationalists of the 1940s who rejected Marxist theory, at the same time opposed equating it with Stalinism. They thought that in order to orient correctly the course of the revolution in the U.S.S.R. it was essential to demonstrate that the Stalinist regime had in fact broken all ties with Marxism, and that it feared genuine Marxism like the devil fears holy water. They denounced Stalin's reactionary theories about building socialism in one country based on the Russian nation as "the leading, preeminent nation."

They recognized that Marxism was the JANUARY 1 MOSCOW EUROPEAN Kirghiz Tajik nation's theory that made it possible to show that socialism had not been built in the U.S.S.R. and to unmask the antisocialist, oppressive, and exploitative character of the dictatorship of the Stalinist parasites.

UPA commander Osyp Diakiv-Hornovy wrote: "It is becoming more and more difficult for the Stalinist masters to manipulate Marxism because it is precisely Marxism which is the theory that constitutes their most dangerous foe, for it is completely at odds with ... and unmasks their policies. Today Marxism looms up equally as a danger for Bolshevism as once it was for Czarism."

Commander Yakiv Busel, another leader of the Ukrainian liberation movement of the time, explained that Stalinism was not a product of Marxism but of a process of great-power chauvinist degeneration of the Russian revolution. He wrote:

"The slope on which Bolshevik propaganda has slipped since the emergence of the Soviet state goes from the ideas of world revolution, which raised the proletariat to the rank of the dominant force in international political life, to ideas of the nation and fatherland, holding that patriotism 'has become the decisive force in the development of the society.' This slope is a reflection of another that goes from the idea of building a world workers' state to that of building a Russian empire."

The "Soviet patriotism" promoted by the ruling clique in the Kremlin, Busel wrote, "is in no way different from bourgeois patriotism—to the contrary it is identical to the official patriotism of every multinational Men introduction and articlo by Cart Finamoro order, and for list of 17 Socie 3435 Army St., Rm. 308, SF, CA 94110 imperialist state." "Marx said that the workers have no fatherland. Convinced that the workers would win simultaneously in all countries, Marx looked toward to a future world workers' state, or more precisely, a future world society. He did not foresee that this society would have special corners or any 'holy lands.' Contemporary soviet patriotism has nothing to do with Marxism. It is the product of a new Bolshevik empire."

Trotsky's genuine Marxism The struggle for national and social liberation in the U.S.S.R. cannot be waged effectively if Stalinism is equated with Marxism, if the extraordinary explosive force that lies in the contradiction between them is not understood. That was the conviction of the UPA commanders. Today this idea retains all its validity.

In one of his last messages, Leon Trotsky Clearly defined the fundamental difference between the Stalinists and real Marxists with respect to the Ukrainian question.

The position of the Stalinists, according to Trotsky, was the following: "Inasmuch as the socialist revolution has solved the national question, it is your duty to be happy in the U.S.S.R and to renounce all thought of separatism (or face the firing squad)."

But what Marxists had to say to the Ukrainian people, Trotsky believed, was this: "Of importance to me is your attitude toward your national destiny and not the 'socialistic' sophistries of the Kremlin police; I will support your struggle."

Trotsky explained also that the advanced workers of Russia and the world "must even now understand the causes for 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."9 It is important that the freedom fighters who are taking the lead today in the mass national movements in the Ukraine and other republics of the U.S.S.R. understand that this is the only genuine Marxism.

1. L. Trotsky, Writings: 1938-39, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1974, pp. 302-303. 2. More news about these developments can be found in the magazines Soviet Ukrainian Affairs and Soviet Nationality Survey; as well as in the bulletins of the Ukrainian Press Agency. The address of all these publications is 78B Kensington Park Road, London W11 2PL, England. 3. One Ukrainian leader of the strike in Norilsk published his memoirs. See D. Shumuk, Life Sentence: Memoirs of a Ukrainian Prisoner, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), Edmonton, 1984. 4. Lviv is the Ukrainian spelling for Lvov. 5. See A. Wilkings, "Revolutionary Nationalism and Anti-bureaucratic Revolution," International Viewpoint, No. 73, April 8, 1985. 6. V. Chornovil, "Topics for Discussion in the Area of Nationalities Policies," Ukrainian Press Service, No. 5, 1988, pp. 6-9. 7. Some of his works are available in English. See M. Khvylovy, The Cultural Renaissance in Ukraine: Polemical Pamphlets, 1925-1926, CIUS, Edmonton 1986. 8. See I. Dzyuba, Internationalism or Russification?, Monad Press, New York, 1974. 9. L. Trotsky, Writings: 1939-40, Pathfinder Press, New York 1973, pp. 48, 53. pamphlet! "Poland: Solidarnosc and the with an introduction and article by Carl Finamore This 52-page pamphlet contains an abridged translation of three chapters from Kowalewski's 1985 book, "Give Us Back Our Factories: Solidarnosc and the Struggle for Workers' Self-Management in Poland," as well as three articles by Kowalewski on the meaning of the current events in Poland. Price: $1.50. (Please send additional 65 cents for postage.)

list Action pamphlets,

----- pull-quotes -----

"It is true I am workers' hostel, in a disposal. I live from

SEA CASPIAN

New Socialist Action POLAND: The fight for workers' demoovacy

fight for workers' democracy" By Zbigniew Kowalewski,