The socialists who deny Ukraine's rights

IMT members in Brazil demonstrate alongside the Brazilian Communist Party in support of Russian nationalist rebels in Eastern Ukraine (2014)

On 24 January, after almost two months of silence since the new Russian threats to Ukraine began, the International Marxist Tendency website, run by the Socialist Appeal group and its co-thinkers, published an article by Jack Halinski-Fitzpatrick with the title “Will Russia invade Ukraine?”

As we’ll see, Halinski-Fitzpatrick’s article is blander, less overtly pro-Russian, than what SA has put out in the past. But in a way it is worse: in 3,677 words, it does not give even a sentence to nod towards Ukraine’s national rights, its right to self-determination or anything similar — or to opposing the threat of Russian action against Ukraine.

There is a back story. In 2013-14, during the upheavals in Ukraine which led to the overthrow of its pro-Russian government and Russian military intervention in the east of the country, there was an upsurge of pro-Russian politics on the British left. Various self-described Trotskyists cooperated with Stalinists to set up “Solidarity with the Anti-Fascist Resistance in Ukraine” (SARU), a campaign of apology for pro-Russian nationalist forces.

Perhaps the most enthusiastic “Trotskyist” backers of Putin’s camp in Ukraine were Socialist Appeal.

In a video put out by SA in May that year, the group’s most prominent leader, Alan Woods, described the Russian nationalist struggle in eastern Ukraine in glowing terms:

“It’s a popular mass insurrection of the people fighting for their rights… a revolutionary movement of the working class. This is a genuine mass movement of the workers of eastern Ukraine against fascism and in defence of their own interests... a magnificent movement of the working class… It’s a revolutionary popular movement the West is trying to destroy…”

At the June 2014 meeting which launched SARU, Woods struck the same note:

“What you have in the Eastern and Southern parts of Ukraine… is fundamentally a movement of the industrial working class… who are fighting to defend their interests against this monstrous offensive of fascism…”

In reality, regardless of some workers rallying to the pro-Russian separatist movement in eastern Ukraine, this was a reactionary, Russia-backed and Russia-dominated nationalist movement from the start — with a strong far-right component. Consistently exaggerating the strength of the Ukrainian nationalist far right, SA has consistently downplayed the role of the Russian-nationalist far right in eastern Ukraine.

At the same time as lauding the pro-Russian rebels, Woods went a long way to justify Russia’s role:

“… the main villains of the piece are not Putin, of course, it’s the west. Russia is in that sense acting out of self-defence… What the Russians are saying in effect is so far and no further… Russia was quite happy to leave things as they were… [The West] was treading on Russia’s toes… Putin doesn’t want to intervene… If however there are serious atrocities…” (May 2014 video)

It was apparently not Russia but the Western imperialists who tried to “grab Ukraine”; the solution Russia sought to impose was not ideal but not so bad:

“The West has been defeated in their attempt to grab Ukraine… The only winner will be Putin and the Russians… They will impose a federal solution, Ukraine can be independent, but it must be divided up into different autonomous groups, to defend the interests of the Russian population in the East. That will mean a weak government in Kiev, under the control of the Russians… The other possibility is not very nice, a very sanguinary solution...”

At the June 2014 SARU meeting Woods went even further:

“With 40,000 troops on the border they [Russia] have done nothing, while people in the East are being bombed and forced into submission… It’s not my business to criticise the Russian oligarchy, but if it were my business to criticise, it’s not because the Russians are intervening too much. It’s because they’re not intervening at all!”

This as Russia annexed Crimea and engineered a war in eastern Ukraine which has since cost 14,000 lives.

Woods produced a more socialist-sounding version of one of Putin's key arguments about Ukraine, that it is essentially part of Russia:

“It is criminal when you think about it. The Ukrainian and the Russian workers have always been united, they’ve always been brothers and sisters. They speak a similar language, they’ve got a common history, common language, common religion — for centuries, perhaps for thousands of years… therefore we stand for class unity.” (May 2014 video)

“I’ve got some experience of both Russia and Ukraine, I know these people — for the whole of their history, there were firm fraternal bonds, fraternal links, between the workers of Ukraine and the rest of the Soviet Union, and particularly Russia and Ukraine…” (June 2014 SARU meeting)

The history of Russian oppression in Ukraine — going back hundreds of years and as recent as 1991, even if you don’t count Russia’s recent intervention in and threats against the country — is not so much ignored as glossed up.

Contrast this to Trotsky’s attitude:

“The Second International, expressing the interests of the labour bureaucracy and aristocracy of the imperialist states, completely ignored the Ukrainian question… Hence the constant opportunist attempts [even among revolutionaries] to shy away from this question, to suppress it, to pass over it in silence, or to postpone it to an indefinite future.

“The Bolshevik party, not without difficulty and only gradually under the constant pressure of Lenin, was able to acquire a correct approach to the Ukrainian question. The right to self-determination, that is, to separation, was extended by Lenin equally to the Poles and to the Ukrainians… Every inclination to evade or postpone the problem of an oppressed nationality he regarded as a manifestation of Great Russian chauvinism.”

And Lenin's:

“What Ireland has become for England, Ukraine has become for Russia… 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 we allow others to be oppressed…”

Behind all this is the Socialist Appeal/Militant tradition’s softness on Stalinism. In the June 2014 SARU speech Woods made this very clear:

“… when the Soviet Union fell, there was not a single atom of progressive nature… Say what you like about the old Soviet Union. People had jobs, people had houses, people had health, in Ukraine also… the tragedy of the people of Ukraine is identical to the tragedy of the people of Russia… the problem is the abolition of the planned economy...”

“Not a single atom...” The fact there are now trade unions — yes weak and legally restricted, as in the UK — rather than just state labour fronts in Ukraine and even in Russia is irrelevant. The same for the fact of Ukraine and other nations oppressed by the Russian-dominated USSR gaining independence.

Woods does criticise Putin’s regime — sometimes quite sharply. But the political framework makes the criticism largely platonic.

Later in 2014, and in the years since, SA has toned down the message, but continued to pursue the same basic political line.

The draft theses on Ukraine for the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), published in July 2014, declare: “The tasks of Marxists in this complicated situation are clear. First of all we stand against the Kiev government”. While there was more criticism of the Russian nationalists in eastern Ukraine than in Alan Woods’ speeches, they were treated as confused or inadequate comrades in a common struggle.

Once again, while criticising Putin in a general way, SA/IMT defended Russia’s role — declaring airily, for instance, that “the annexation [of Crimea] did reflect the will of the majority of the people in Crimea which rejected the new authorities in Kiev and looked towards Russia with hope.”

In February 2015, the IMT website enthusiastically presented reactionary, misogynistic Russian-nationalist warlord Alexander Mozgovoy as an advocate “of a class war of the people against the oligarchs”.

They published a few more things over the years since, but continually ignoring, downplaying or justifying Russian intervention.