It is anti-imperialist!

Submitted by Matthew on 5 February, 2014 - 10:56

Yes, as Luke Hardy says (Solidarity 311), the rights of the Russian-speaking minority in Ukraine should be respected. For example, Russian should be recognised as an official language.

Luke is also right that the leadership of the opposition in Ukraine is bourgeois and, much of it, right-wing.

He could legitimately add that the EU and the USA are fishing in troubled waters.

But I think he’s wrong to deny the anti-imperialist dimension of the struggle.

A book by an Ukrainian dissident, Ivan Dzyuba, translated into English in the 1970s, recounts how in Lenin’s day the Bolsheviks deliberately promoted “Ukrainisation” in Ukraine to counteract the fact that “the people had lived for 450 years under colonial oppression (Polish for over 150 years, Russian for about 300)”.

Stalin reversed that policy and “Russified” even more brutally than the Tsars.

Revolt against Russification was especially strong in western Ukraine. “The western regions (with [a few] exceptions) had never been part of the Tsarist empire... When the Soviet authorities seized this region [in World War 2], they met with a widespread popular resistance.

“Until the early 1950s, this part of Ukraine was in fact governed as an occupied enemy territory, with a massive military and police presence...”

It is not just history. Russia is trying to dominate Ukraine now. Whatever you think of the EU, the trade links between Ukraine and the EU whose breaking-off sparked the current upheavals do not involve comparable political domination.

Socialists can win Ukrainians away from the right-wing leaders of the opposition only on the basis of clearly siding with Ukrainian rights.

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