The last thing I would expect from a knucklehead Putinite like Mike
Whitney or Pepe Escobar is any kind of engagement with the history of
Ukrainian national oppression but it never fails to amaze me how little
interest there is for the Marxist traveling circus consisting of people
like Roger Annis, the ex-Trotskyist in Canada, Renfrey Clarke, the
Socialist Alliance member in Australia, sect leaders Alan Woods and Jeff
Mackler et al. Most of these people probably were exposed to what the
Fourth International said about Ukraine in the 1960s and have either
forgotten it in their dotage or more likely sweep it under the rug. If
there’s anybody who can be called the leader of this new breed of Great
Russian Chauvinism, it is Boris Kagarlitsky who has a material incentive
to be Putin’s spin doctor. His think-tank is funded by the Kremlin.
There’s one man who has their number. He is Stephen Velychenko, the
chair of the Ukrainan studies at the University of Toronto who wrote a
two-part series on the traveling circus. This is from part one:.
Kargalitsky’s pro Kremlin audience finds his worker revolution scenario
appealing. But given their preconceptions, ignorance of Russian and
Ukrainian, and minimal knowledge about either country, they either
cannot, or choose not to, know what he omits from his articles. For
example, he makes no mention of Russian imperialism, great power
chauvinism, non Russian national movements, linguistic and cultural
russification of non Russians, or the link between the national and the
social questions. He does not dwell on how his imagined “working class”
movement was aided and funded in its origins by Ukraine’s pro Russian
capitalists (oligarchs); in particular, Rinat Akhmetov, nor that the
local Russian extremist leaders are not interested in nationalization –
least of all Akhmetov’s holdings. He does not mention either the small
size of the neo-Nazi section of the Ukrainian right nor how few
Ukrainian citizens support the Russian neo nazi right. [9] For all their
Marxist rhetoric neither Kargalitsky or his likeminded reflect on why
the Russian neo-Nazi leaders of Ukraine’s imagined proletarian
revolution do not associate themselves with Marxism of any kind, why
they sport double headed eagles and tsarist colours, rather than hammers
and sickles and red banners, why they use Orthodox symbolism, or, why
they wax nostalgic over the tsarist empire rather than the short-lived
Russian Bolshevik Krivoi-Rog Republic of 1918.
In order to correct the “preconceptions” and “ignorance” that plagues so
much of the left, Velychenko has just written a book titled “Painting
Imperialism and Nationalism Red: The Ukrainian Marxist Critique of
Russian Communist Rule in Ukraine, 1918-1925” that demonstrates in
copious detail how the Bolsheviks treated the Ukrainians just like the
British treated the Irish. Lenin was probably the most committed to
breaking with Great Russian Chauvinism and probably would have been a
force for combating Stalin’s open embrace of it but even he was not immune.
What you can read below is the first nineteen pages of chapter one, a
section titled historical background. For people committed to
understanding the roots of Ukrainian resistance to Russia domination,
even when expressed in a distorted form, Velychenko’s book is essential.
full:
https://louisproyect.org/2016/02/07/painting-imperialism-and-nationalism-red-the-ukrainian-marxist-critique-of-russian-communist-rule-in-ukraine-1918-1925/
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