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The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 15 April 18, 2016
(front page)
Attack on Ukraine Communist Party is threat to working class
BY JOHN STUDER
Members of the Communist Party and the Leninist Communist Youth Union in
Ukraine were attacked and beaten by rightist thugs from the Azov Civil
Corp in Kiev Feb. 17. Mikhail Kononovych, the leader of the youth group,
and Igor Plitsyn, first secretary of the LCYU Kiev City Committee, were
seriously injured.
This latest attack is part of an ongoing series of physical assaults,
destruction of political offices, “disappearances” of CP members and
government efforts to ban the party from exercising its right to
participate in politics.
These attacks are a deadly threat to the working class and labor
movement, precedents that will be turned against all those who fight for
a class-struggle road forward in Ukraine.
The CP and Communist Youth were seeking to replace a commemorative
plaque celebrating former Stalinist leader Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, a
member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union from 1971 to 1989, who died in 1990. Their banner was stomped and
burned by the thugs.
Shcherbytsky is notorious for attempting to hide and minimize the scope
of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. He ordered workers to turn
out for a May Day rally in Kiev five days after the power plant
exploded, while radiation was still raining down on the city.
On Feb. 27 the Ukrainian Security Service accused Kononovych and his
brother Alexander, a secretary of the Communist Party’s Volyn regional
committee, of supporting the separatist forces backed by Moscow in
Donetsk and Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine. Alexander Kononovych was seized
on the street and kidnapped March 12.
The physical attacks have been encouraged by the government of President
Petro Poroshenko, which has filed suit to ban the Communist Party and
passed “decommunization” laws aimed at outlawing the party, “communist
symbols” and literature. And laying the basis for jailing its members.
Two years ago mass popular mobilizations known as the “Maidan” overthrew
the Moscow-backed government of Viktor Yanukovych. Over the following
months, the capitalist rulers sought to get the workers and youth who
had mobilized off the streets.
Since taking office in May 2014, the Poroshenko regime has moved to
crack down on political rights and impose layoffs and cuts in social
spending that have dealt blows to working people. He accuses opponents
of the regime of being “fifth columnists,” suggesting any disagreement
with government policies amounts to supporting the rebellion in the east.
The Communist Party of Ukraine sent out an international appeal Feb. 29
urging support to its ongoing efforts to challenge the ban in court.
At the same time, the Moscow-backed leaders of the so-called Donetsk and
Luhansk People’s Republics banned the CP there, preventing them from
taking part in local elections in October 2014 and 2015.
Various groups in the labor movement that say they seek to advance a
rebirth of Marxism and that fight against attacks on political rights in
Ukraine have taken widely different positions on whether to fight
against the attacks on the Communist Party.
The banning of the party “gives us a real chance to rehabilitate the
name Communists for the Ukrainian working class, though it will not be
that easy,” Artem Klymenko, a member of the Flame socialist group in
Poltava, told the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign in December.
“Decommunization has many negative consequences, because it is part of
the anti-democratic policies,” he said. “As for the ban of the Communist
Party, it is not the worst thing.”
“To my mind, the fact of banning CPU does not have a negative impact on
democratic rights in Ukraine,” Volodymyr Sotnyk, a member of the Free
Trade Union of Railway Workers of Ukraine in Kiev, told the same group.
“De facto the working class has never been protected by CPU. Now the
place for a real left party is vacant.”
“The attacks on the Communist Party of Ukraine have nothing to do with
the political positions of the party, which are against the interests of
the working class. They are part of the capitalist government’s broader
attacks on the unions and parties of the left,” Ivan Ovcharenko, a
leader of the all-Ukrainian Defense of Labor union in Kiev, told the
Militant by Skype March 20. “The government’s ‘decommunization’ moves
have made it more difficult for socialists like us to function.”
“Workers and all defenders of political rights must stand in solidarity
with the Ukrainian Communist Party, its youth organization and members
against physical attacks and legislative assaults,” the Militant said in
an editorial last July. “They are the naked fist that gives meaning to
the capitalist rulers’ ‘decommunization’ laws, which seek to outlaw
communist political views.”
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