THE fuse lit in 1985 has finally reached the powder barrel: the Soviet Union has exploded. The explosive potential was immense; the national question in this part of the world is of a formidable complexity. The ex-Russian empire, like the Ottoman empire, was marked by a geographical continuity between metropolis and colonies. The geographical dimensions of the Russian imperial domain were maintained as a result of the 1917 revolution which brought to power an internationalist regime proposing a definitive democratic solution to the national question. But behind the formal, legal equality of nations resulting from the revolution there remained a real inequality and oppression inherited from Tsarist times, albeit transformed in its social nature. The equality of nations, like that of individuals, can only be assured if compensation for the real inequalities produced by history is added to its formal expression. Thus Lenin argued for a transitional inequality weighted towards the formerly oppressed and absolute respect of their sovereignty. The Stalinist degeneration justified Lenin's worst fears. Specific national oppression combined with national resentment against general bureaucratic oppression, leading to the current explosion.
The absence of an autonomous political intervention by the working class of the ex-USSR gives the collapse of the Stalinist system a chaotic air. The working class is the only class capable of forging a renewed and remodelled union. The other unifying framework of the USSR was the bureaucracy, now collapsing under the weight of its phenomenal bankruptcy and decomposing into so many active factors of disintegration, with the exception of a minority grouped around Gorbachev. For Marxists, in particular those who share the class analysis of the USSR developed by Leon Trotsky, the political approach to the national question in the USSR is highly complicated by this overlapping between an oppression to be overthrown and social gains to be defended, extended and qualitatively improved: all the more complicated in that the collapse of the USSR is taking place on the basis of capitalist restoration.
Moreover, in the current historic context, the newly independent nations will tend to be drawn into the imperialist orbit, thus replacing one dependency by another, very much more pernicious; while a general "everybody for themselves" approach is itself a generator of national injustice. Precisely because the ex-USSR was not a federation of genuinely equal republics, those who have devoured the best slices of the common cake over the decades can also, by suddenly declaring their total sovereignty, escape the task of reparation and compensation to the least favoured. And one can understand the resentment of the Asiatic republics towards the unilateral declarations of independence by the other richer republics.
This great political complexity of the national question in the Soviet Union has for a long time led to divergent analyses in our own ranks. Programmatic divergences with political consequences, for, beyond the democratic assumptions common to all, there is the question of how to formulate national demands in the context of a non-capitalist state. Is it correct, for example, to reproduce the classical approach of the colonial question under capitalism, demanding unconditional independence for the oppressed nationalities? The debate remains open. It should be clarified by the evolution of the independent states in the ex-USSR and their socio-political dynamics. The article on the Ukraine that follows is the expression of one point of view in this debate. It can be compared to other analyses, of the Ukrainian and other national questions in eastern Europe, which are regularly published in our pages — Salah Jaber *
UKRAINE when the wave of social revolution in Russia in 1917 awoke the Ukrainian national revolution, but the two revolutions did not combine. The petty bourgeois regime of the Ukrainian People's Republic, led by Symon Petliura, was fiercely opposed to Bolshevism, while also resisting the White Russian armies. The successive Bolshevik governments set up in the Ukraine during the civil war did not understand either the breadth or the depth of the Ukrainian question and gave way to Great Russian pressures.
Parallel Communist Party
A parallel Ukrainian Communist Party — the so-called Borotbists - was formed, with wide popular support, as a rival to the Bolshevik Party, aspiring to the independence of a Soviet Ukraine. After merging with the Bolsheviks, in the 1920s former Borotbists played a decisive role in the extraordinary Ukrainian national renaissance of the time, comparable only with that which followed the Cossack revolution. After being put back on its feet, the Ukrainian people were once more crushed during the Stalinist counterrevolution. A famine consciously provoked by Stalin led to the death of six million Ukrainian peasants in 1932-33.
All the gains of the October revolution on the plane of national liberties were reversed in a murderous process of Stalinization and Russification. The stifling of Ukrainian national consciousness was a necessity for the Stalinist regime faced with one of the major effects of industrialization: the massive incorporation of the "dekulakized" peasantry, imbued with a strong sense of national identity, into an industrial proletariat which, in the Ukraine, had previously been mainly Russian. The Second World War showed that what frightened the bureaucracy - the Ukrainization of the working class in the Ukraine — had become a reality. In autumn 1941, in the interval between the withdrawal of the Soviet army and the installation of the Nazi civilian administration, a Ukrainian workers' regime was set up to run the big industrial city and region of Kryvyi Rih. Under the German occupation of the Donbass, the working class expressed its aspiration to an "independent Soviet Ukraine without the dictatorship of Stalin and the Communist Party", , and it was under this slogan that the local networks of young Communists resisted Nazi imperialism.
After the war and right up until recent years, the bureaucracy exerted itself to consolidate its "gains"" of the 1930s. The national culture was degraded to the level of folklore, and the national language discriminated against in the schools, and in public and scientific life. The daily use of Russian in public places was considered as the most elementary proof of a citizen's 4 loyalty towards the Soviet state. It was made easy for the Russian minority and hard for the Ukrainian majority to occupy any kind of position of responsibility, whether in education, culture, professional life, not to speak of Ukrainian underrepresentation in the intelligentsia and their over-representation in the collective farm peasantry and working class. The economy was pillaged and suffered a dependent and deformed development.
Since the establishment of the Stalinist regime, the Ukraine has been obliged to transfer economic surpluses worth one sixth of its national income to Russia and other parts of the USS without compensation. The Soviet authorities pretended that these surpluses were being invested in under-developed, above all Asian, regions of the USSR but "empirical evidence denies the hypothesis that the mode of investment was influenced by the objective of regional equalization" according to the economist Volodymyr Bandera.
A North/South split
And, indeed, if this is not true, then how can one explain that the USSR is so clearly split along a North/South axis and the levels of development on the two sides of this axis are characterized by a persistent and even growing divergence?
The first irruption of a mass movement demanding national liberty in this republic appeared in summer 1988, somewhat later than in the Baltic States or the Caucasus. Even then the movement was restricted to the city of Lviv in the west of the republic. The Lviv region (eastern Galicia) was only recently reunited with the rest of the Ukraine, on the basis of the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939. In the past, this region did not belong to the Russian Empire, but, successively, to Poland until the end of the 18th century, to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and then again to Poland between the two world wars. Having escaped the national oppression experienced by the majority of the Ukrainian people under the Tsarist Empire and the Stalinist regime, the population of this region has been traditionally marked by a strong national identity and a powerful aspiration for independence, forged in their struggles against the Polish ruling class.
The annexation by the USSR of Western Ukraine was massively resisted by nationalist guerillas who enjoyed the support of the peasant masses and were only finally exterminated in the early 1950s. The final act of this resistance coincided with the first anti-Stalinist uprising in the USSR; in 1953-54 former Ukrainian nationalist fighters led mass strikes by concentration camp convicts, from Karaganda in Kazakhstan to Norilsk and Vorkuta in the far north.
Echoes from the Polish revolution of 1980-81 had considerable impact in this neighbouring land, contributing to the rebirth of national consciousness. Given
International Viewpoint #219 • December 23, 1991 all this, it was not surprising that the Ukrainian national movement got started in Lviv, that it rapidly won broad worker and popular support and that it catalyzed the national awakening in Central and Eastern Ukraine.
In this part of the republic, it was first of all relayed by the democratic intelligentsia in Kiev. Promoter of demands for national rights in the 1960s under the "nationalist deviationist" regime of Petro Shelest, it had been brutally crushed after the fall of this regime on the orders of Brezhnev. It only began to timidly come back to life after the nuclear disaster at Chornobyl, finally going on to link up with the pro-independence militants from Lviv led by Vyacheslav Chornovil. This led to the formation of the People's Movement of the Ukraine (Rukh) with the Kievan writer Ivan Drach as its president. In September 1989 Rukh's founding congress came out for the sovereignty of the republic.
While the resolutions of this congress were a political bombshell, a second, and even more powerful, bomb exploded several months later: the Supreme Soviet of the Ukraine adopted a declaration on the sovereignty of the republic. This spectacular vote was only made possible by a turnaround on the part of the republic's bureaucracy. Renowned as a bastion of Stalinist conservatism, responsible for the Brezhnevite "stagnation" and forced Russification, it split under pressure from the mass movement.
The reformist wing, led by Leonid Kravchuk, supporting perestroika, took up the demand for national rights and the sovereignty of the republic. It realized that the Ukrainian bureaucracy could only retain power if it controlled the passage from the command economy to a market economy, so as to ensure itself a decisive place in the private appropriation of the means of production and the accumulation of capital, and if it challenged the Lviv nationalists and Kiev democrats for leadership of the national movement. A decisive factor in its decision was the threat represented by the emergence of an independent workers' movement in the Donbass.
This movement appeared in the wake of the first wave of Soviet miners' strikes. If on the socio-economic level the workers of the basin raised very radical demands, their national consciousness remained low, owing to the long process of Russification. The Donbass regional Union of Strike Committees was reluctant to join Rukh or form a united democratic front with it, contrary to the attitude of the miners and other workers at the other end of the Ukraine, in the Lviv region.
It was clear that the fate of the Ukrainian national movement largely rested on the decisions of this gigantic concentration of the industrial proletariat. In spring 1991, during the second wave of miners strikes, the Donbass strike committees swung
round to calling for the transfer of the economic management of the whole basin to the republican authorities, in this way joining in the push towards independence.
A subsequent and even more powerful bomb exploded in the aftermath of the failure of the coup in Moscow in August 1991. At first hesitant and even inclined to look favourably on the imperial putsch, the reformist wing of the Ukrainian bureaucracy surprised the world.
Independence declared
On August 24, without waiting for the results of the referendum set for three months later, the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet voted through a declaration of independence, sounding thus the death knell of the Soviet Union. This act led to great tensions between the Ukrainian authorities and the new "democratic" regime of Boris Yeltsin in Russia.
"The proclamation of the independence of the Ukraine is a bomb that destroys age-old stereotypes" wrote Yevhen Sverstiuk, a pro-independence activist. "In this respect, Boris Yeltsin has immediately ceased to be a democrat, and has become a seasoned apparatchik, the Russian people's deputies have recourse to the formulas of the Stalinist constitution and the American president keeps a diplomatic silence... The most experienced Russian politicians, conservatives and democrats, supporters or opponents of the coup, unite on the Ukrainian question as the Russian political class did in 1917."2
While setting about dismantling the arms of the central Union regime to give Russia control over the decisive means of rule such as the army, the police, the KGB and military-industrial complex, Yeltsin also put pressure on the Ukraine. He threatened to call into question the RussoUkrainian frontier and support separatist movements among the Ukraine's Russian minority. These threats coincided with stepped up propaganda from Russian Stalino-nationalist groups for the formation of a separatist republic of "New Russia" in southern Ukraine and the annexation by Russia of the Donbass. In Crimea the same groups have also been demanding the separation of the peninsula, exploiting the hostility of the local Russian population to the return, supported by the Ukrainian national movement, of the Tatar people to their native land from which they were expelled by Stalin. In the Transcarpathian region the local bureaucracy has tried to incite a supposed Ruthenian people, whilst nationalist currents in Czecho-Slovakia and Hungary are demanding the annexation of that region. The Ukrainian regime, as well as the national movement, is opposed to any redrawing of frontiers, and as a sign of good will has promised not to demand the vast ethnically Ukrainian territories belonging to Russia.
In the framework of a war of nerves
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Black Sea between Moscow and Kiev, the Muscovite press stated that the Yeltsin government has considered a nuclear strike against the Ukraine, then "corrected" its information to suggest that it was Kravchuk's government that was considering a nuclear strike on Russia and that American military potential could be called on to ensure the defense of Russia from a Ukrainian attack. A sharp polemic has broken out between Moscow and Kiev over the control of Soviet nuclear arms stranded on Ukrainian territory. The Ukraine has expressed support for denuclearization, but in the transitional period, before their withdrawal or destruction, there remains the question of whether these arms should continue to be under the control of a central state or pass into the hands of the Russian state or be controlled in common by the four nuclear states, the Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan.
This is a political, not a technical, question. The problem is to make sure that the bureaucratic centre under Gorbachev, which is resisting with increasing desperation the break-up of the Union, or the Yeltsin regime, whose hegemonic aspirations are clear, do not use their control of nuclear arms to hinder the independence process. It is true that the break up of the USSR puts a question mark over the arms' reduction treaties agreed between Moscow and Washington, but it is also true that when the people imposes its will, pacts agreed between the imperialists and the bureaucrats are not worth much.
Yeltsin's policy towards the Ukraine is highly contradictory. On the one hand, this republic's independence is a huge point of support for his efforts to dismantle the Gorbachevian centre, which can no longer count on the potential support of the Soviet army and the Western powers. This is well shown by the initiative taken by Yeltsin in common with the presidents of the Ukraine and Belarus on December 8, 1991, to declare that "the USSR, as a subject of international law and geopolitical reality no longer exists," and to found in its place a "community of independent states." But the independence of the Ukraine gravely restricts the resources available for the restoration of capitalism in Russia. For this restoration to take place, the former bureaucracy and the new Russian elite need free access to the raw materials, industries and labour force of other republics, and most importantly of the Ukraine.
Just before the Moscow coup, President Bush went to Kiev with the aim of persuading the Ukrainian national movement to renounce the goal of independence. The strategy of US imperialism concerning the Ukraine was established in 1948, at the height of the Cold War, in a document, then strictly secret, entitled "United States Objectives With Respect To Russia"
According to the terms of this document, US policy in this area should correspond to a supreme imperative, namely it should be in accordance with the interests and aspirations of the Great Russian people — more exactly with the interests of the Kremlin regime in dominating other nations. "They were the strongest national element in the Russian Empire, as they now are in the Soviet Union. They will continue to be the strongest national element in that general area, under any status. Any long term US policy must be based on their acceptance and their cooperation. The Ukrainian territory is as much a part of their national heritage as the Mid-West is of ours"
The Ukrainians should remain "in the family of the traditional Russian Empire, of which they form an inextricable part.... For better or for worse, they will have to work out their destiny in some sort of special relationship with the Great Russian people. It seems clear that this relation1. "Dekulakized" — a reference to the liquidation of peasants who resisted collectivization, who the Stalinist regime claimed were all Kulaks (rich peasants). 2. Literaturna Ukrayina, September 3, 1991. 3. National Security Council Records, The National 5 Archives of the United States.
UKRAINE / CENTRAL ASIA ship can be at best a federal one, under which the Ukraine would enjoy a consid erable measure of political and cultural autonomy but would not be economically or militarily independent'3. The world imperialist order needs, as one of its major pillars, Russian hegemony over the peoples of the old empire.
Commenting on the policy of the United States and the other Western powers, a militant of the Ukrainian national movement remarked: "It is significant that it took the shedding of blood in the Baltic states before there was any real protest from the West, although before this the Soviet army had been responsible for as much bloodshed at Tbilisi, Baku and other parts of the empire. We need to be aware that the Ukraine cannot count on the support of the West, because the latter only recognizes as illegal the incorporation of the Baltic states. In its opinion, all the other republics are part of the legitimate and indivisible territory of the USSR" 4 the Ukrainian national question nas The Ukrainian national question has always been combined with the social question. The Ukrainian aspiration to independence has always been characterized by a strong aspiration to the social liberation of the broad masses. The Ukrainian nation forged itself initially in the course of a peasant revolution against feudalism. The national revolution of 191820 based itself on the social aspirations of the peasant and worker masses, as is witnessed by the rise of the so-called Borotbist Communist-independence current. In the mid-1920s Ukrainian Communist dissidents, led by Mykola Khvylovy, demanded the independence of, Soviet Ukraine in order to protect "the young working class of the young nation" against the degeneration of the Russian revolution and against oppression by the bureaucratic layer which had come to power in Moscow.
### Nationalist guerillas
The nationalist guerillas of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) which operated in the western part of the country during the 1940s, advocated the overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and the conquest of independence for the republic while opposing the restoration of capitalism. The socialization of the fundamental means of production, they argued, was necessary to prevent the formation of an exploiting class on the basis of private property, whereas in the context of a nationalized economy, political democracy was seen as indispensable to prevent the formation of a parasitic and totalitarian layer on the basis of a monopoly of State power. For these guerillas, in the words of their commander Petro Poltava, the anti6 Stalinist revolution and the conquest of independence by the oppressed peoples of International Viewpoint #219 • December 23,