Workers' Liberty

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 we should support the banning of the CPSU
By Sean Matgamna

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.

The former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan is standing against Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in Blackburn. He was sacked after making complaints about the UK goverment using information obtained under torture by the Uzbekistan government. Stan Crooke reviews a new book by Shahram Akbarzadeh, Uzbekistan and the United States - Authoritarianism, Islamism and Washington's Security Agenda (Zed books). It won't he says, answer all your questions about this former Soviet republic.

Uzbek “Republic”

A fair election result was finally secured in the Ukraine over the Christmas period — although only after mass protests had secured a re-run.

There will be no such happy outcome in Uzbekistan where all five parties taking part in the 25 December parliamentary election supported the incumbent President, Islam Karimov. Additionally, two-thirds of potential candidates were not allowed to stand.

At the time of writing, the wave of protests which swept through Ukraine’s cities after the presidential elections on 20 November may be beginning to have an affect.

By Stan Crooke

Three weeks of popular protest in the Caucasian republic of Georgia culminated in the resignation of its president, Eduard Shevardnadze, on 23 November.

Shevardnadze was a Communist Party bureaucrat turned "democrat". He had joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1948 and rose steadily through its ranks. By 1972 he had become head of the CPSU in Georgia.

In 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev was forced by the political and economic condition of the dying 'Soviet Union' to withdraw Russian troops from the Warsaw Pact countries. These Stalinist satellite states rapidly collapsed, the regimes overthrown by their own people. The collapse of the 'independent' Stalinist states of Yugoslavia and Albania, and the USSR followed. It was a demonstration of the power of workers and ordinary people to change history.

It seems that the AWL has been a (relatively minor) victim of a scam being operated in the Ukraine by members of the Taaffe group's (CWI) section.

1953 was the year Stalin died, and a year of revolt in several Soviet bloc countries, in the first place, East Germany. This article by Jean-Michel Krivine, at the time a member of the French Communist Party, is from Rouge (2 January 2003), the paper of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire in France. In it he describes some of the momentous events that followed the - very partial - Soviet thaw after Stalin's death.

Chris Reynolds reviews Martin Amis's new book, Koba the Dread.
September 2002.

In the Stalinist labour camp of Vorkuta, in the freezing north of the USSR, there were in the late 1930s several thousand Trotskyists - partisans of the Russian Revolution of 1917 who opposed Stalin's rule in the name of socialism.