Volume 14, No. 18, 8 May 2015

In this Issue: Kiev government bans Communist Party of Ukraine, rewards and protects fascists Umsebenzi, May 2015 (Print Edition): Fighting to reclaim our organisations from capitalist infiltration (Accessible at: www.sacp.org)

Red Alert Kiev government bans Communist Party of Ukraine, rewards and protects fascists

By Mark Waller

On 9 April this year, the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, passed a new law banning the public use of all communist symbols and “propaganda”. This includes their “production”, “utilisation” and “public circulation”. It also banned any “public denial of the criminal nature” of communism, and for good measure banned the playing of the national anthem of the former Soviet Union. The main aim of the new law is to destroy the Communist Party of Ukraine and silence its supporters.

The move has been on the cards since the US-EU-backed coup that ousted the President Victor Yanukovich in February 2014 amidst the bloody protests and clashes in the Maidan square in central Kiev (soon dubbed “Euromaidan”). In June last year justice minister Pavel Petrenko instigated a lawsuit to ban the Communist Party. This did not make it through the courts. So a little later the party was ousted from parliament, ostensibly because it did not have enough MPs.

However, in a sop to opponents who allege that they are too closely connected to ultra-right (extreme nationalist and fascist) parties, Ukraine’s rulers showcased the ban on communists as a ban on “communist and national-socialist (or Nazi) totalitarian regimes”.

By lumping together communists and fascists as “totalitarian regimes”, and banning all their symbols and activities, the government in Kiev hopes to achieve two things: eliminate communists and appear to eliminate fascism, and by implication the new elite’s extensive links to the ultra-right.

The clunking clumsiness and duplicity of the legislation, which the government clearly thinks is a master class in nuance and subtlety, is clear from a number of things.

On the same day that parliament passed its “anti-totalitarian” law, it also adopted an act “On the legal status and to commemorate fighters for Ukraine’s independence in the 20th century”.

This legislation carries the names of dozens of far right organisations, all singled out for special protection. They include the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the paramilitary Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), whose veteran members are to receive social benefits.

The UPA and OUN were active in Ukraine in the 1930s and 1940s, and closely allied to Nazi Germany. For a while, the OUN had its headquarters in Berlin, the capital of the Nazi state. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, in 1941, and set about eliminating Jews and communists in Ukraine, then a Soviet republic, the OUN was an auxiliary force of the Nazi army, and joined in the killing of 200,000 Jews and about 100,000 Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Gaicia, a region straddling Ukraine, Poland and Belarus.

Though the Nazis were happy enough to co-opt the OUN to eliminate populations it considered racially inferior, they did not intend to allow Ukraine to become an independent state. The Nazis wanted Ukraine all to themselves to be part of a Greater Germany. So they turned against the OUN leadership, though its ordinary members continued to collaborate with the Nazis in fighting the Soviet forces.

Last January, in the run-up to the coup, 15,000 OUN supporters marched through Kiev to honour Stepan Bandera, the OUN’s wartime leader. In 1992, the OUN had reconstituted itself as the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (CUN). Since about 2010, the CUN has tried to clean up its anti-Semitic image and legacy, has expressed admiration for Zionism and directs its ire at everything connected to the Soviet past.

That the CUN and other far-right groupings have performed poorly at the polls since the coup in Kiev doesn’t mean that they lack influence or presence within the ruling oligarchy. It’s an exaggeration simply to label the Kiev government a “fascist junta”, as its vociferous opponents in the East of the country and Russia do. But neo-Nazis and other far-right brands are everywhere in local and national government. The last thing they are is marginalised.

They include paramilitary style fascists, such as the Azov battalion, and Nazi-style national socialists, such as the Social-National Party of Ukraine, which toned down its image and name to become the All-Ukraine Union-“Svoboda”. There are also groups within groups, such as the umbrella organisation Right Sector, comprising the paramilitary Patriot Ukraine and the Social National Assembly, itself an assemblage of far right and neo-Nazi groups.

There are some 13 far right and neo-Nazi MPs in the current parliament. But the larger parties also include many fascist activists who have swapped their uniforms for suits. The Radical Party, which has 54 seats in parliament and whose leader proposed the law banning the Communist Party, is one such outfit.

Another is Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front. This was formed in September 2014, in the run up to the second post-coup elections. The party receives strong financial support from the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who owns Privat, Ukraine’s largest bank. Kolomoisky also funds fascist paramilitary groups deployed in the East to fight separatists opposed to the Kiev government. Several commanders of these groups were present for the launch of the People’s Front.

Maybe one reason that the new political oligarchs in Kiev are keen to go through the motions of appearing anti-fascist is a wish to seem more presentable to their European Union and US paymasters and the outside world generally.

The US-EU agenda since the 1990s has been to set the stage for Ukraine to be brought firmly into the imperialist camp through membership of the EU and NATO, the Western military bloc. And the point of that has been to hem in Russia as much as possible, restrict its influence in central-eastern Europe and stare it down militarily.

As Andrew Murray of the UK movement Stop the War Coalition wrote recently: “the EU primarily expresses the German bourgeoisie’s outer drive, while NATO is above all an instrument of US global power and its aspiration for domination by, in part, corralling all other powers under its wing... They have a common interest in removing the Ukraine once and for all from Moscow’s orbit, no matter what view the people of the country itself, particularly those in its eastern and Russian-speaking regions, may feel about it.”

Western leaders of liberal capitalist democracies have few qualms about doing business with fascists and dictators whenever necessary. That said, in its rhetoric the EU likes to present itself as a flagship of enlightened democratic values, and if Ukraine is to join it, as both sides plan, Kiev should at least appear to have reigned in its more undisguised neo-fascist elements.

The new law outlawing “totalitarian regimes” fits neatly into this scheme of things, while getting down to the real business of annihilating the Communist Party of Ukraine, which is something the West would be all too happy to see. Only a few years ago, the CPU had millions of supporters. In the 2012 elections, it won over two and a half million votes, 13% of the total and had 32 seats in parliament. In the first elections of 2014, amidst mounting attacks against communists, it won 608,000 votes, or 3.87% and lost all its seats in parliament. The party has been driven underground.

None of the far right parties described here have been singled out for prosecution or banning under the new law. The legislation states that, in addition to communists, the ban extends to “National Socialist (Nazi)” organisations. But conveniently none of the far right or neo-Nazi groups operating in the country precisely fit this description. None still use overtly Nazi symbols. And yet the law does specifically refer to Communists. No ambiguity there.

It is likely, though, that as the law is put into practice in the coming weeks and months we will see more of the violent attacks on CPU members that take place daily. Left groups not allied to or even sympathetic to the CPU have condemned the law as paving the way to destroying the left as a whole. We got a taste of what is to come in on 2 May last year, in Odessa.

This was when members of Right Sector and other groups massacred 42 opponents of the Kiev government, who had taken refuge in the city’s Trade Union House. The victims died when the neo-Nazis threw petrol bombs and burning tyres into the building.

The organisations involved in the Odessa massacre were the same as those who had used snipers to massacre police and demonstrators during the Maidan protests the previous February. The Kiev government’s investigations into these events have been laughably superficial and lazy, more concerned to rule out any official involvement in the killings than to find out the truth.

Predictably, Kiev’s Western backers have shown little interest in this or in the banning of the Communist Party. The “totalitarian regimes” narrative equating Communism with fascism anyway goes down well in imperialist circles. Western media coverage of the new law has been scant and vague.

For instance, an article on the website of the BBC (15 April), the UK state broadcaster, breezily titled “Goodbye, Lenin” said nothing about the impending persecution of thousands of communists. It was more interested in musing about what would happen to all the Soviet iconography dotted around Ukraine - mainly statues and place names commemorating Lenin - than the Kiev government’s obvious disregard for the democratic development it froths about so earnestly to its EU and US taskmasters.

This May marks 70 years since the defeat of Nazi fascism in Europe. The Soviet Union paid the highest price for this victory in terms of lives - over 25 million people - and sacrifice.

The Ukraine government’s law banning the Communist Party of Ukraine seeks to obscure this by downgrading the significance of the traditional anniversary of the defeat of fascism, long celebrated on 9 May across the former Soviet Union and much of Eastern Europe. It does this by casting the day before, 8 May, as “Remembrance and Reconciliation Day”.

It might as well be called “Amnesia and Vengeance Day” so well does it tie in with Kiev’s far right crusade against communists, the airbrushing away of the meaning of fascism and anti-fascism and of the role of the Soviet Union in Europe’s liberation in World War II.

The developments in Ukraine underline more than ever the need for active and prominent international solidarity among communist and workers’ parties. It is not hard to see the offensive against Ukraine’s communists as part of the rising temperature of attacks on the working class and its organisations globally. What happens to communists in Ukraine today is all too likely - given the current course of imperialism - to be repeated in other countries and regions in the future with increasing ferocity.  

Awareness of what the ultra-right, extreme nationalists, fascists, national socialists (no relation to socialism) and neo-Nazis stand for in their different shifting guises is important not only to people living where the genocides and atrocities of World War II took place. It is of crucial importance for people in every country where national chauvinism, racism, xenophobia, and ultra-populism are exploited to decimate working class unity and authority.

Cde Mark Waller is a member of the Communist Party of Finland living in South Africa, and writes in personal capacity.

Umsebenzi Online is an online voice of the South African Working class