The Ukraine against
International Viewpoint #196 • December 10, 1990 traits and specialness, the peoples did not allow themselves to be ground into a uniform mass of hopeless slaves, into biolog ical robots — zombies.
Thus, any objective historical, political, economic, social and cultural analysis inevitably leads us to one conclusion only full sovereignty of the Ukrainian people, a completely independent Ukrainian state, corresponds to the development of world civilization today. Any
Speech by nationalist leader
Introduction by Gerry Foley other formula for the historical existence of a people, of a nation, unequivocally and mercilessly consigns Ukrainian society to the rearguard of society, makes it fodder, raw material for the development of other nation-states.
We see that for some reason forces are
THE SECOND national congress of the Ukrainian national-democratic movement, Rukh, opened in Kiev on
October 25 in the wake of a campaign of mass mobilizations against the still Communist-dominated government of the republic. The Communists gained more than a two-thirds majority in the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet in elections that were largely rigged.
Nonetheless, Rukh and other opposition forces won a strong foothold in the Supreme Soviet and control of local governments in western Ukraine. After the elections, the local
Communist Party also started running scared. Thus, the
CP-dominated Supreme Soviet voted a declaration of sovereignty going very far toward full independence.
The campaign was a militant one, involving massive rallies in western Ukraine and Kiev, and in particular a hunger strike involving a fifth of all students in the republic. It was also uneven. Nonetheless, it won major victories, finally forcing out the premier, Vitalil Mosol, on October 23.
The Rukh congress was marked by a radicalization, confirmation of the goal of full independence for Ukraine and total rejection of perestroika, which the Ukrainian movement, like the Baltic fronts, was supposedly founded to support from below. The new stance of the movement is illustrated by the keynote speech of the chairman, the poet Ivan Drach. The following is a condensation of the speech. In some passages,
Drach showed that he identified Stalinism with Bolshevism, but they were only repetitions of his general attacks on the
Stalinist system.
G
ORBACHEV reminded us of
Malyskov's words...
"My
Ukraine, I need nothing in the world but to hear your voice and to keep your kindness." It is very important to listen to the voice of
Ukraine — it has been raised in rallies; it has grown harsh and uncompromising.
Emotion has often upset cool thinking.
But our kindness cooled with the student hunger strikers on the stones of Independence Square.
The wheel of history has skidded in the blood of millions of bodies, right here on one sixth of the planet, precisely because a new imperialist reaction, hiding behind a socialist mask, resurrected all that was blackest, lowest and most savage. Thus, our road to liberation, to a return to the family of peoples, has not been and will not be easy. But we are condemned to pursue it to a victorious conclusion, if we do not want to vanish forever from the face of the earth.
This holds for all the national colonies convoyed in stages into this gigantic gulag. Although the all-Union administration mixed them together in the camps for the sake of international demoralization, it still could not completely destroy their specific features, their individuality. Preserving their deep-seated national uniting in opposition to state sovereignty for the Ukrainian people that yesterday, it would seem, were making very different noises. From Gorbachev and the entire Presidential Council to their political opposites and opponents. From the Central Committees of the CPSU and the Ukrainian CP to dozens of Moscow parties and grouplets.
Yesterday's liberals and humanists
We see how yesterday's liberals and humanists, even recent cultural luminaries, are flocking to the Kremlin's doors in order not to be left behind in condemning "separatism and nationalism." We have felt, and continue to feel, warmth and sympathy for Russian patriots who, in the bad times not so long ago, fought for the resurrection of their country. So, it is with sorrow that we note that the patriotism of many of them, it seems today, still contains such elements as a boastful and arrogant disrespect for the efforts of non-Russian peoples, and above all, Ukrainians, to liberate themselves.
It is strange to see how Russian dissidents, driven abroad not long ago, raise an outcry against us from there in the columns of mouthpieces of the Communist Party. Solzhenitsyn himself has sounded a charge against his concentration camp mates — the Ukrainians and Byelorussians.
Thus, we see the imperial idea in action, at work, as when the defeated Denikin and Shulgin praised their Bolshevik enemies for restoring the "one and indivisible" [Russian state).
We have to be prepared to see the imperial center mount the most furious opposition to the efforts of the Ukrainian people to liberate itself. Ukraine has been and remains the breadbasket of the empire, one of the main providers of living power, of cannon fodder, of military technology for the favored and main institution of rule — the army.
The Donetsk miner; the Luhansk chemical worker; the Dnieper metalworker; the Kiev and Kharkiv machine builders; the Mikolaiv shipyard workers; the
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USSR Gorbachev
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8
LITHUANIA
Czechoslovakia,
Hungary,
Roma-
USSR nia, and even
Albania are capable of an indepen-
ESTONIA dent existence.
LATVIA
It seems that, since we cannot
-BYELORUSSIA get an accurate economic service,
USSR
All this has been focused finally into the hermetic programs, incomprehensible to the masses, of Abalkin and Shatalin, or the hybrid version of them. Thus, it was thought that no one would understand anything and not see the simplest thing under the decorations of semi-scientific verbiage— which is that the rulers want to escape from their bankruptcy, cover up their squandering, and their wicked waste
POLAND ROMANIA wheat and hay growers; those who live on the shores of the dying Black Sea and along the winding poisoned swamps of the Dnieper; to say nothing of those whose towns have been transformed into atomic leprosoriums by cesium and strontium radiation — all of us here, in Ukraine, can no longer hide, close our eyes and not see how mutilation, the loss of national character, degeneration, annihilation are knocking on all our doors. The existing state, which mouths the words of the workers' anthem, does not care about us. It is not ours.
No matter how much the Meat Combine is restructured, it remains the Meat Combine. Improving the technology may lighten the work of the personnel or of their "collective management," take it onto the world market, increase profits. It might even "humanize" the barbaric aspect. But a people that cannot defend its own rights will always remain raw material for this combine.
The Ukraine's bloody sacrifices
Anyone in the USSR or in the world who might think that this comparison is too crude, should test their gentlemanly or professorial objectivity. Count up the millions of people murdered in the USSR and especially in the Ukrainian SSR and ask themselves how many more. We Ukrainians have paid to God and humanity such a price for our existence, and we have the right not to offer up any more bloody sacrifices on the altar of our independence; we have paid for it a hundred times over.
Are any further proofs needed of the advantage of forming an independent Ukrainian state? Unfortunately, there are. It appears that the colonizers and the native collaborators have intimidated people by saying that Ukraine cannot exist independently of the center for economic reasons. But without important natural resources and located on poor land,
UKRAINE we have to create a counterintelligence service that can steal full and reliable information about the material resources, finances TURKEY and all other economic balance sheets from the Kremlin or the Politbureau of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian CP that concern relations with the imperial
To get hold of such clandestine economic accounts of the Central Committee of the CPSU and of the CPU would make it possible to show, for example, that maintaining our own national Ukrainian army would cost the Ukrainian working people considerably less than they spend today for the biggest army in the world, the armed forces of the Soviet Union. The size of the forces deployed in the three Ukrainian known to the Kremlin, the party-colonial NATO, but not to the Ukrainian people.
No other member of the UN besides Ukraine maintains so many military bases on its territory that are of no benefit to it and have no permission to exist from its own government. Like Rukh, the [other] effort to reduce the specific weight of military production in the so-called GNP of the Ukrainian SSR.
Those light-minded critics of the leadership of the CP general staff who say that perestroika started without a plan, without any clear definition of goals, without a general worked-out conception, are quite wrong. To the contrary! The strategic "general line" has been main-
Forcing the people to work It is to force the people to work more and better, maintaining the level of exploitation already achieved, maintaining the lowest possible labor costs, even for a third-world country. What both right and left consider hesitation, half-measures, irresolution on the part of the top authorities is nothing other than maneuvering, a consistent, stubborn attempt in new conditions not to relinquish any of the products of labor and their distribution from of social product at the expense of the people; they want to coerce the people by so-called economic methods, that is by the threat of hunger and impoverishment, to get the ruling oligarchy and its Siamese twin, the criminal mafia, out of their his-
"regulated socialist market" programs, the government has camouflaged a still crueller exploitation of the working people. There is only one innovation. Today everyone is going to be forced by "economic conditions" to grab their miserable ration away from their neighbors. Treacherously, they the "party-state"] are planning a war of all
Along with this, the power of the party-state parasitic class over everyone will be maintained. The workers will be incited against the peasants, and both against the intelligentsia. National, inter-ethnic conflicts will be provoked. All of this is to prepare the conditions for a transition, more accurately, a return from the present weak dictatorship to an open dictatorship.
### Gorbachev's truculent perorations
The truculent perorations by the general
This heralds against the republics' declarations of sovereignty, the ponderous pseudo-scientific about "a single economic space" are only a clumsy mask for the centuries-old "one and indivisible" [Russian state].
It is quite clear today, after so many years of the perestroika fakers, after verbal sleight-of-hand about new approaches or the "human factor," after the real political problems were shouted down with empty noise and furious attacks on "extre-
"destructive elements," and "separatists", that theperestroika government is seeking only to maintain itself in the saddle and put a bridle back on the work-
After all that, in 1989 a real perestroika started, which came as a surprise to the authorities although not to the democratic forces — the emergence on the political arena of such a mighty force as the working class. The miners' strikes, which were highly organized and determined, really shook the party-state power.
We well remember how the highest officials and the party-state press attacked the miners, how they incited against them the workers of related industries, as well as peasants. They accused them of group
International Viewpoint #196 • December 10, 1990
USSR egoism. The democratic forces do not have the billions that the CPSU-CPU have. They don't have sausage and shoes, building materials We can offer the miners our moral and political support, our solidarity, and we did that. The authorities managed to confuse the miners, to make Rukh a bogeyman for them. Who gained from that? Let the miners answer that one themselves.
We believe that the party-state bureaucracy will not succeed in the end in driving a wedge between the national social liberation movement in Ukraine and the miners. Just as in the last analysis neither Gierek nor Jaruzelski managed to block the way to unity of the Polish workers' Solidarnosc. Just as the Czarist Okhrana did not manage to form its own workers organization in order to save the
However, such historical certainty and do not keep us from seeing today the subjective (by no means objective) causes that obstruct fruitful dialogue between Rukh and the new workers' movement in Ukraine. These causes exist not only in Donbass but in Crimea, partially in Kharkov, Dnipropetrovsk Odessa — everywhere the so-called Russian-speaking population lives. Deafening, manipulative propaganda for many imprint on mass consciousness.
Imposition of a single language
There has been the refrain that people lose their ethnic roots, their nationality, their homeland just because they speak Russian, although speaking English or French does not make Canadians or Congolese respectively English or French. But in the USSR, Ukrainians and Byelorussians, under the pressure of the total imposition of a single language in the empire, started to speak Russian, and were subtracted from their nation and added to the dominant one. That is how the notorious Stalinist "fusion of the nations" and the Brezhnevite "creation of a new historic community — the Soviet people"— took place.
We do not think Ukrainians who speak Russian automatically change their nationality. Even less that they can become enemies of their own people. It grieves us that centuries of bloody and bloodless Russification of Ukraine have forced many of our compatriots to make a hard choice between their own survival and their mother tongue.
We honor the heroes who sacrificed themselves to defend the life of the nation, but it would be inhuman and unjust to condemn all those who have not become heroes. And it would be still more wrong to rally the nation only around one symbol, the language. 10 into consideration. In the morning of I would like the miners to take this fact
October 17 the Communists in the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR rattled their sabers and demanded in fact a Tbilisi variant of "pacifying" the students and youth. And when a column of workers marched up to the parliament building and shouted only one word "Arsenal!" the hawks suddenly became peace-loving and prudent.
Kremlin follows imperialist examples
The Kremlin politicians' treacherous plan is to incite as many peoples against each other as it can. We have seen how the imperialist center achieved this in practice in Moldavia. Now they want to spread this Moldavianization to Ukraine. We know about the colonialists in Africa, Asia, Latin America cutting up the territories that were to be freed.
In the same way as the South African racists impose the will of the white minority on the Black population, the CPSU and its special services want to give privileges to the so-called Russianspeaking minority in the Baltic in order to make it into a fifth column in the fight against the national-liberation movement. They are trying to do that in Ukraine as
What should be the strategy and tactics of the democratic forces in Ukraine today? Above all, they should declare directly and openly that it is fundamentally and consciously opposed to the strategy of the party-repressive forces that have until now held power in the republic. The strategic aim of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian CP is to maintain at any cost its power over the people. In this respect, it neglects no means - from psychological warfare, cold war against the democratic forces, to police clubs, tanks, sappers' shovels.
In contrast, our strategy does not aim at seizing power, but is based on the peaceful road of establishing the sovereignty of the Ukrainian people. Unlike the Ukrainian CP, we are not imposing our rule on the people, we are not calling on the working people to advance under our leadership to a shining but never achieved future. We are not fooling anyone with glittering pharasaical promises "to feed the people." This people feeds everyone, including the Ukrainian CP.
We see our strategy and tactics as going to the people, gaining the fullest possible experience of its difficulties and problems, its aspirations, its everyday and historical interest and to turn this experience into political action. The democratic forces can come to power only through the will of the working people, and the future government cannot be other than under
The tactics of our political struggle follow from that. We must exercise all inalienable rights of the people recognized by international law, United Nations treaties, the Helsinki accords and nonviolent but determined means. In the arsenal of our peaceful means of struggle are the golden treasury of the national-liberation movements, especially various forms of mass disobedience linked with the names of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and other great sons of humanity. We will learn from, and use the experience of the victory of the Polish Solidarnosc and the Czechoslovak Civic Forum, the experience of the patriots of Namibia and the supporters of Nelson Mandela.
Strikes, rallies, demonstrations, pickets, petitions, refusal to pay taxes and to accept the illegal expropriation by the party and the state of socio-economic and industrial production in the guise of state property and the so-called socialist obligations, stopping payment for municipal services - all of these and many other methods are effective weapons for liberating the working people, especially now, when the serf-masters' so-called economic reforms are aimed directly at more and more impoverishing the people.
In defence of national ownership
In connection with this, we are making every effort to prevent the reform of national ownership, when the party top echelon and its Siamese twin — organized crime - wants to convert it into their own private property.
The real facts and the laws that the party, Komsomol, and economic magnates adopt in the Supreme Soviets in Moscow and Kiev confirm that this legislative process of converting the party-state-feudal socialists into the first social-capitalists, industrialists and bankers has started. 90% of the working people have still not gotten any ownership, and the issued an order [ukaz] declaring the inviolability of property in order to defend the property of the
We have nothing to fear - neither the unleashing of a civil war nor even the already perceptible steps by the party-state leaders with their dictatorial pretensions, nor of parliamentary trickery. Likewise, we do not need to worry about the slow growth of national and social consciousness of any layers of Ukrainian society nor about their passivity. Today, in Ukraine, as in other peoples of the empire, powerful democratic forces have not arisen in order quickly to renounce their struggle.
And when spontaneous protests and the natural and inalienable human aspirations for freedom and happiness come together with organized political forces, the advance of history is not so cruel, not so pitiless, although it remains historically irreversible. *