Workers' Liberty

Chronology

It is 20 years since the destruction of the Berlin Wall by the people of then divided Germany signalled that Russia’s control over Eastern Europe was collapsing. Russia had held Eastern Europe in a brutal grip for four and a half decades, since the end of the Second World War.

The system Stalin built in the old Tsarist empire has collapsed irretrievably. The USSR is collapsing, too: most of its republics have now declared themselves independent. In most of those republics the “Communist Party of the Soviet Union” has either been banned outright, or banned from activity in the army and the KGB, and in factories.

Immediately after the August coup in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin and his friends turned the Russian parliament into a veritable revolutionary committee which, backed by the people, took measures it had no legal power to take, to break up the old order.

What is happening in the former USSR now is a grotesque triumph of unreason. In its destructiveness and senselessness, it will rank in history with the carnage of the First and Second World Wars as an almost inexplicable piece of 20th century madness.

“In lawlessness, in the committing of crimes, the point must be remembered at which a man becomes a cannibal!” Statement of A. I. Solzhenitsyn in defence of Zhores Medvedev, June 1970

To date Russian troops remain in Georgia very close to the capital Tbilisi. As western diplomatic pressure on Russia gets stronger, Russia appears to want a semi-permanent presence in the de facto mini-states within Georgia’s borders — South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Parliamentary elections took place in Ukraine on 30 September; western pundits are proclaiming these may “have saved the Orange Revolution”, of 2004. The elections were an effort to resolve the political crisis in Ukraine, triggered by by President Viktor Yushchenko’s decree on 2 April dissolving parliament, after a protracted power struggle between rival blocs.

By Tom Unterrainer

The past few weeks have seen courageous actions by gay communities in Russia, Latvia and Poland.

A collection of articles

A collection of articles on solidarity with workers in Eastern Europe before the revolutions of 1989, and on those revolutions and the prospects they opened up

By Sean Matgamna

"The revolution... made its first steps toward victory under the belly of a Cossack’s horse", wrote Leon Trotsky, describing the start of the Russian Revolution of February 1917.

British workers and the Stalinist state 'unions'

By John O'Mahony

Sectarian lessons from afar

By Martin Thomas

The end of the USSR: in the beginning was the critique of capitalism
By Sean Matgamna

The left's verdict on the USSR: was August 1991 a capitalist counter-revolution against a workers' state?
By Martin Thomas

Market madness in the ex-USSR: the triumph of unreason

Why the workers want to restore capitalism: the legacy of Stalinism
By Sean Matgamna

Stalin's system collapses

Last week the system Stalin built in the old Tsarist empire collapsed irretrievably.

Hugo Chavez has made another friend on his international tour - none other than Aleksandr Lukashenko, president of Belarus. The latter is widely credited as "Europe's last dictator", his regime suppressing the press, rigging elections and using death squads against its opponents.

Dion D’Silva reviews “How to plan a revolution”, BBC2

Azerbaijan is situated alongside the Caspian Sea, and sandwiched between Russia and Iran. It is ruled by a brutal crypto-Stalinist regime.

Study Group on the Russian Revolution
XXXII ANNUAL CONFERENCE
University of Nottingham, 3-5 January 2006
Provisional Programme
The XXXII conference of the Study group will be held between 3 and 5 Jaunary 2006 at the University of Nottingham. Accommodation will be provided in Ancaster Hall, and the sessions will take place in the School of History.

“The role played by the young Ukrainian socialist movement is most significant. This movement has connected the national liberation question to all the problems of the liberation of the working class: it has raised this question to the level of those political problems which can be solved by no other means but democratic struggle, by the development of class conflict in Ukrainian society. Thus has progressed Ukrainian socialism always following the same route, confirmed by the undoubted truth that in all present day liberation movements, political or national, both being the result of the same evolution which has transformed feudal states into modern capitalist states, the working class appears as the sole revolutionary and democratic power. “
Lev Yurkevych, Ukraine and The War 1916

Read part 1 here.

Part 2: Restoration and decomposition of the ruling class

The ‘Orange revolution’ in the mirror of history, by Chris Ford

Stan Crooke looks at the background to the recent slaughter of up to 500 people by the Uzbek government during demonstrations in the eastern city of Andijan.

The Uzbek government claims that “only” 169 people were killed by troops in Andijan. Ten of the dead are police officers they say, the rest were all Islamic militants. However a local pathologist reported seeing more than 500 corpses in a makeshift morgue in Andijan. Human rights organisations have also put the figure of civilian casualties at about 500. And an Uzbek opposition party has compiled a list of more than 700 people it says were killed after troops moved in.

While George Bush hypocritically rails against nuclear proliferation in Iran, the US and Europe are colluding in extending nuclear energy in the countries affected by the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. This survey — we have edited it slightly for reasons of space — was published recently on the Schnews website.