When the massive famine of 1932-33 took hold, the Soviet leadership had no choice but to take grain from peasants in the countryside and redistribute it in a more egalitarian manner, as well as to feed the cities and the army. Excesses or cruelty occurring during collectivization resulted from errors in carrying out the plan; unevenness in the abilities of the tens of thousands of activists; the response of the peasants themselves; and attacks from kulak landowners. All were faced with a terrible situation under drastic conditions. Many people would inevitably die of starvation.
Two bogus explanations of this famine — known to Ukrainian nationalists as the “Holodomor” — have gained wide acceptance. The nationalists claim that Joseph Stalin and the Bolshevik leadership withheld grain from Ukrainian peasants in order to export it, or that they deliberately starved Ukrainian peasants to suppress the peasants’ strivings for independence.
Another distorted interpretation — the official position of the state capitalist Russian government — states that the famine was caused by the collectivization of agriculture, which led to disruptions, mismanagement, and peasant rebellion. This is the official position of the Russian government. There is no evidence to support any of these contentions.
A Mythical Genocide
Cynically modeled on the Jewish Holocaust, the “Holodomor” originated in the Ukrainian diaspora, particularly among those who had fought alongside the Nazis and fled with German troops to the West as the Red Army advanced. In true Nazi fashion, early proponents of this “deliberate famine” myth blamed the Jews for it.
When Ukraine became independent in 1991, these forces flooded into the country and took a dominant role in historical and ideological discussions. They celebrated the Ukrainian “freedom fighters,” who were guilty of mass murders of Jews, Poles, and Soviet citizens.
The “Holodomor” story was politically motivated from the start. Officially adopted by the Ukrainian state, it is now taught compulsorily in schools and promoted by Ukrainian academics. In fact, the main causes of the 1932-33 famine were environmental: drought in some areas; excessive rainfall in others; and plagues of crop diseases, insects, and mice that destroyed the crops. Weeds were widespread, caused by a shortage of labor due to population flight to towns and cities and the weakness of the remaining peasants, many of whom were starving. Labor shortages left much of the land unplanted or unharvested.
Many horses, the main animals used for plowing, had been lost or severely weakened by an earlier famine in 1931-32. Although the Soviet state imported and manufactured some tractors, they were insufficient to overcome the loss of horses. And much of the land had been planted with grain for year after year, resulting in soil exhaustion that reduced fertility.
As a result of all of these factors, the harvest was so small that the food available in the Soviet Union could not meet the needs of its population.
The Soviet leadership failed to fully understand the environmental causes, nor did local Party leaders. They tended to overemphasize human factors like mismanagement, faulty leadership, and peasant resistance and kulak sabotage. Nevertheless, the Soviet government greatly reduced its grain exports to support the population in Ukraine and elsewhere. It also began to ship aid in food and seed to Ukraine and other hard-hit areas.
Many peasants who hated the kolkhozy (collectivized farms) nevertheless worked hard on them. Many other peasants worked willingly throughout this period and sided with the socialist system. On the whole, peasants accepted collectivization.
The far right-wing is strong in Ukraine in part because it is backed by the Ukrainian government, which masquerades as “not far right.” Under Viktor Yushchenko, president of Ukraine from 2005 to 2010 and a leader of the so-called Orange Revolution, fascist lies began to be accepted as the official truth, taught in Ukrainian schools and promoted by Ukrainian academics.
The two basic lies involve the “Holodomor” of the 1930s and Ukraine’s “freedom fighters” during World War II.
Here are the facts
There never was any “Holodomor” or deliberate starvation of Ukrainians, or of anybody else in the Soviet Union (USSR). It’s a lie disseminated by Ukrainian nationalists and fascists, with no historical evidence. The “Holodomor” myth was politically motivated from the start. It originated in the Ukrainian diaspora (Ukrainians living outside Ukraine), a population led by veterans of Ukrainian Nazi forces.
While the famine of 1932-33 took a terrible toll, it was only one of a long series of catastrophes. Russia and Ukraine had experienced famine every two to four years for a millennium — yes, for a thousand years, at least —and devastating famines every decade or so. There were serious famines in 1920-1923, 1924-5, 1927-8, and again in 1932-33.
The Soviet leadership, Joseph Stalin included, did not understand the extent of these famines for some time. No one did. When they finally realized it, they sent millions of tons of food and grain aid to Ukraine and to other regions of the USSR. They also sent tractors and “political departments” to organize agriculture. The result was a good harvest in 1933, which ended the famine.
About 10 percent of the population of Ukraine died from the 1932-33 famine, roughly the same percentage as in 1920-23. The 90 percent who survived brought home the harvest and stopped the famine — with significant Soviet aid.
Thanks to the collectivization of agriculture, which took place mainly in 1930-31, farming was reorganized on a large-scale and increasingly mechanized basis. Collectivization was the greatest humanitarian triumph of the 20th century. It put an end to the famines that had devastated Ukraine and Russia for a thousand years or more! (There was one more famine in the Soviet Union, in 1946-47. It was caused by the devastation of World War II plus the worst drought in centuries, and affected all of Europe and much of Asia. Even England had to institute bread rationing.)
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) were trained by Germany’s Nazis. They entered the USSR with Adolph Hitler’s troops and participated in mass murders of Jews, Poles, and communists. As many as 100,000 Polish civilians were slaughtered in 1943-44.
Stepan Bandera led the more hard-core fascist wing of the OUN and eventually consolidated control over Ukraine’s nationalist forces. He was deemed unreliable by the Nazis, who imprisoned him for a time. Then they let him out so he could fight the Red Army again. In 1941, the Banderist leadership declared an “independent” Ukraine state, which was in reality a satellite of Nazi Germany.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army was formed in part from the 14th Waffen-SS Division (storm troopers) , an all-Western Ukrainian Nazi SS division.
Lies and Damned Lies
In short, both of Ukraine’s foundational historical myths — or, more accurately, lies — have a Nazi origin. And both are taught as “truth” in today’s Ukraine by the Ukrainian government and its institutions!
Russian-speaking workers in eastern Ukraine are affected by these lies as well. But they also question them, and many reject them. As they should do.
Now the open fascists are becoming prominent in the new Ukrainian government in Kiev. This isn’t surprising, since fascist lies have been officially propagated and taught in Ukraine for the past 15 to 20 years.
Unemployment rate: is it 6.7 percent or 23.2 percent? Obama’s Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) continues to understate the true number of U.S. unemployed workers by a huge margin. And it uses “guesstimates” that distort the true figures even further.
The BLS U.3 statistic — the one getting all the headlines in the bosses’ media — marked the February jobless rate at 6.7 percent. However, its U.6 statistic — generally ignored by the media — shows a rate nearly double at 12.6 percent because it includes what the BLS defines as the “marginally employed”: the short-term unemployed (the “discouraged” workers — those out of work up to one year) and those working part-time because they can’t find non-existent full-time jobs. But that is far from the true picture.
The BLS defines away millions of unemployed “discouraged workers” by no longer counting those out of work more than a year; one could define them as the “disappeared” jobless. There has been a heavy continuing rollover of the regular discouraged workers (less than a year) into the “disappeared” category, the worst since the Great Depression.
Shadowstats.com calculates the inclusion of these “disappeared” unemployed as raising the jobless rate to 23.2 percent, a far more accurate figure, completely buried by the bosses’ media.
However, two other factors make even that rate too low:
The BLS uses what it calls the Birth-Death Model (BDM). It adds in its “guesstimate” of the number of workers hired by newly-created businesses while assuming those firms going out of business as still having their previously reported payroll. This results in an overstatement of employment figures and distorts the percentages it has already used to assess the unemployment rates.
The BLS conducts two probes to figure the jobless: (1) the household survey, which counts the number of workers with jobs, and (2) the payroll survey, which counts the number of jobs, adding in those workers with more than one job, automatically raising the employment numbers by including multiple job-holders. It uses the latter survey to report jobless rates.
Thus, both these factors contribute to a distorted unemployment rate, which, if corrected, would raise the true rate even higher than 23.2 percent. On top of this, the jobless rate excludes workers on welfare who would seek jobs if they had childcare and young workers who cannot find jobs and therefore join the military, the so-called economic draft. Once in the armed forces, they’re dropped from the unemployment rolls.
And because of racism in hiring, black and Latino workers, historically the last hired and first fired, suffer as much as double the jobless rates of white workers.
Unemployment is built into capitalism. The system has never existed without it, except when it drafts millions into its war machine, as it did in the U.S. with 14 million in World War II, thereby “ending” the Great Depression’s mass unemployment. In fact, its economists denote five percent unemployment as “full employment.”
The only way to end this mass suffering is to destroy the system that profits from it, which uses the army of the unemployed to threaten those with jobs, to lower the wages of the working class overall. The answer is a system run by and for our class, without bosses and profits, in which everyone contributes to the society as a whole — universal employment. That’s communism.
- Information
U.S.-Russian Oil Rivalry Stokes Ukraine Firestorm
- Information
- 28 February 2014 60 hits
Ukraine represents but the latest flashpoint in a sharpening great-power conflict that reaches every country on earth. It pits rising China as well as a resurgent Russia against the declining but still predominant U.S. empire. At stake are the planet’s profit sources — workers’ labor, oil and gas — for opposing capitalist blocs in a potential World War III.
It’s difficult to predict what direction Ukraine’s deadly crisis will take. But one thing is certain: In the absence of a mass communist movement, the conflict’s course will be determined by the competition between U.S. and Russian imperialists and their local puppet politicians. Workers have no stake and no say in this fight among thieves and mass murderers. A communist-led movement would mean rebellions against all bosses and the spread of working-class ideas. It would mean control by workers, not the fascists and their allies now creating the turmoil in Ukraine.
Capitalism Creates Poverty in Ukraine
While official Ukrainian unemployment is around 8 percent, the actual jobless figure is closer to 25 percent. (Ukrainian bosses do not report laid-off workers.) Often workers go unpaid for several months before being laid off. Wages are so low that many families need at least two wage-earners to barely survive. The lack of job opportunities has driven 4.5 million workers — nearly 20 percent of the labor force — to seek work abroad.
Geography makes Ukraine indispensable for Russia’s biggest capitalists. It is the passageway for the bulk of lucrative and strategically vital gas exports to Europe. Ukraine harbors Russia’s naval fleet in the warm-water port of Sevastopol. It borders Poland and lies across the Black Sea from Turkey, two members of the U.S.-controlled North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
U.S. bosses cynically envision a Ukraine torn by bloody civil wars that weaken Moscow’s grip and clear the way for NATO intervention on “humanitarian” grounds. The New York Times (2/23/14) sees “the establishment of two or more rival power centers pushing the fractured nation into a Yugoslav-style disintegration” as the “most ominous” likely outcome of the current strife.
Serving the finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, the Times is painting Ukraine as a prospective replay of the Balkan genocide of the 1990s — another opportunity for U.S. imperialist intervention. U.S. President Bill Clinton seized on sectarian conflict in Bosnia and Kosovo to mount massive NATO bombing raids on pro-Russian Serbs. Thousands of workers were killed. While Russian influence hardly vanished from the former Yugoslavia, the Pentagon exploited the war’s carnage to install Camp Bondsteel, a permanent base for seven thousand troops, in Kosovo. With the demise of the USSR, the installation sits on the edge of the empire that the capitalists represented by Russian President Vladimir Putin are striving to rebuild.
Putin Wields Energy Weapon
In Ukraine, Putin wields energy as a geostrategic weapon. He shut off gas supplies twice in the last decade when the country was getting too close to the West. More recently, Putin tried using a carrot instead of a stick. His November 2013 promise of cheap gas (and a $15 billion loan) led Viktor Yanukovich, the Ukraine president turned fugitive, to turn down a prior European Union bailout offer.
But energy dictator Putin is only aping the worldwide extortion racket run by ExxonMobil and Chevron, along with Dutch and British allies Shell and BP, since the end of World War II. These companies determine how and when most of the world not under Moscow’s control gets oil and gas.
Any challenges to these “super majors,” in the wake of their loss of control over critical Iranian and Iraqi crude sources over the last 35 years, steer U.S. foreign policy and the allied war machine. Two massive invasions and years of sanctions killed a million working-class Iraqis, though U.S. rulers still failed to gain the upper hand there. Iran’s ayatollah oil bosses, who ousted the Exxon stooge Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979, remain the top target of the Pentagon’s short-term attack plans.
U.S. Aims to Break Putin’s Stranglehold
U.S. strategists hope they have turned a corner by using new drilling techniques to significantly increase domestic oil and gas production. The Exxon- and finance-capital-dominated Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think tank recently published an article entitled “America’s Energy Edge: The
Geopolitical Consequences of the Shale Revolution.” Its authors, Robert Blackwell and Meghan O’Sullivan, advised the George W. Bush administration in its energy-driven invasion of Iraq. They envision breaking Putin’s stranglehold on Europe by pumping more oil and gas in the U.S. Combined with Canadian production and the completion of the Keystone pipeline from northern Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast, this development could enable the U.S. to surpass Russia as an energy exporter. Blackwell and O’Sullivan wrote:
Countries that like to use their energy supplies for foreign policy purposes — usually in ways that run counter to U.S. interests — will see their influence shrink. Of all the governments likely to be hit hard, Moscow has the most to lose....Putin’s influence could diminish, creating new openings for his political opponents at home and making Moscow look weak abroad.
Increased U.S. energy production means invigorated U.S. imperialism, not isolationism. According to the CFR brain trust, a military abandonment of Exxon’s Saudi Arabian oil fields is not in the cards:
Washington will...maintain an interest in preserving the stability of international markets. Nowhere is that truer than in the Middle East, where vital U.S. interests....will endure. So will the need to police the global commons, such as the major sea-lanes through which trade in energy and other goods flows.
In preparing for World War II, U.S. rulers capped oil exports to use for their war machine. But now they’re moving to uncap any restrictions in order to cement and expand their coalition for the next potential world war. Ukraine and India, along with the European Union’s NATO members, would be ready to sign on.
But it appears that another great power has a similar idea. As Reuters reported (2/16/14), “Top oil producer Russia is aiming to eventually triple exports to China to some 1 million barrels per day…to secure market share.”
Chinese-Russian Axis
A potentially world-altering military and economic marriage of convenience is looming. “Russia is being pulled into China’s orbit, even as the Kremlin looks to exert its influence globally by expanding its customer base” said the Toronto Financial Post (1/30/14). “The partnership suits China as it doesn’t like depending on sea lanes that are patrolled by the United States.”
However they play out, these inter-imperialist battles inevitably consume the lives of millions of workers internationally. They give us all the more reason to build the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party as the workers’ main weapon to bury the bosses and their capitalist system. Join us!
As CHALLENGE goes to press, the struggle between imperialist factions and their capitalist allies in Ukraine remains in flux. After three months of increasingly militant protests exploded late in February, Viktor Yanukovych, the country’s Russia-leaning President, was ousted from power and driven from the capital city of Kiev. Armed workers seized the president’s opulent palace, a monument to the bosses’ greed. Yanukovych, charged with “mass murder” in connection with the shooting of dozens of protesters, is now camped among his supporter in Eastern Ukraine. The country’s parliament has set a new presidential election for May, and politicians tilting toward the European Union (EU) dominate the field. All of the top candidates are also allied with local fascist forces. (See box.)
The next phase of this conflict is unpredictable. Civil war — and the potential splitting of Ukraine into two or more states — remains conceivable, especially if Yanukovych can marshal support in his eastern stronghold. Another possibility is intervention by Russia, where the capitalists represented by President Vladimir Putin can ill afford to lose Ukraine from their economic and military sphere of influence.
All of these scenarios hinge on the competing interests of imperialist super powers and the local bosses who represent them. In the absence of a revolutionary movement for communism, none of them will serve the interests of workers in Ukraine, the region, or the world. (See editorial, page 2.)
Independence for the Rich
The protests in the Maidan, Kiev’s central square, were sparked when Yanukovych canceled a pending trade agreement with the EU in favor of a closer alliance with his Russian patrons and Putin’s plan for a Eurasian Economic Union. These protests built on deep anger at the dire conditions for workers throughout Ukraine.
Soon after the country voted its independence during the last days of the Soviet Union in 1991, wealth became concentrated among a handful of oligarchs, the group of entrepreneurial businessmen who made immense profits during Ukraine’s transition from state capitalism to a market-based economy. By 2008, according to the Eurasia Daily Monitor, the country’s 50 richest oligarchs controlled 85 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. The social safety net was shredded. Real wages dropped by nearly two-thirds. Today, about one-third of the population lives below the poverty line. The health system is a shambles, with adult death rates among the highest in the world. Government corruption is everywhere.
With life so miserable under the sway of the Russian imperialists, there is much talk in Ukraine of revolution. But many workers mistakenly look to Europe or to the local fascist opposition to solve their problems. The EU offers nothing but more misery for the country’s working class. If the EU and the International Monetary Fund replace Russia in propping up Ukraine’s hyper-inflated economy, the aid will come with strings attached — the same austerity policies that have ravaged workers in Greece and Spain. Changing imperialist rulers is not revolution.
Energy and Opportunism
The conflict in Ukraine has been reported in the U.S. bosses’ press as a battle for democracy, Western values, and freedom from autocracy and Russian domination. Politicians from Republican Senator John McCain to President Barack Obama cheered on the demonstrators as they occupied government buildings, hurled firebombs at the police, killed several cops and captured many more. Obama went so far as to threaten sanctions against the Ukrainian government if it failed to reverse recent legislation restricting demonstrations.
What’s really going on here? Ukraine has long been of vital interest to the Russian bosses, before and after its nominal independence. Its eastern provinces were once the Soviet Union’s breadbasket, and millions of Russians settled there after the famine of 1933. Russian remains the first language for many in that area, which generally supported Yanukovych in previous elections.
In this light, the effort led by German and U.S. rulers to pull Ukraine into the EU is an attempt to weaken Russian imperialism while exploiting the country’s workers and fertile agricultural land. Opportunities for energy profits loom large as well. The U.S. backed Shell Oil’s agreement last year (with Yanukovych) to explore recently discovered shale gas deposits in Ukraine. Successful exploitation of these reserves, estimated at four trillion cubic feet of gas, would allow Ukraine to reduce its energy dependence on Russia. Current plans by Shell and Ukraine include exports to Western Europe by 2020, a direct challenge to Russian imperialist domination of energy in this region.
The opposition Euromaidan movement (see box) is pro-EU and wants to de-emphasize Ukraine’s historic relationship with Russia. Its proponents include former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, released last week from prison and now a likely candidate for president in the May election. Timoshenko is a multi-millionare, a rank opportunist who maintained strong relations with Putin in the past but now backs the U.S. and European capitalists competing for dominance in Ukraine.
Only communist revolution, not fascist-led revolt, can meet workers’ needs. As workers rise in revolt and rebellion throughout the world, we must build an international communist party, the Progressive Labor Party, to organize a revolution and smash capitalism once and for all.
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Nazis Running the ‘Euromaidan’ Opposition
The opposition to the deposed Yanukovych regime is a coalition of three political parties called “Euromaidan,” named after its pro-European Union (EU) stance and the central square in Kiev (the “Maidan”). One is the right-wing, pro-capitalist Fatherland Party headed by multi-millionaire Yulia Timoshenko, modeled after European Christian Democratic parties. Another is the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform, which is aligned with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union Party.
The third party, so closely linked to the other two that they hold joint press conferences, is the outright fascist Svoboda, a neo-Nazi outfit that received over two million votes in the last parliamentary elections. This is the group that toppled the Lenin statue in Kiev, replacing it with the black-and-red Nazi occupation flag from World War II. Svoboda and the paramilitary neo-Nazi Pravy Sector are the political descendants of western Ukraine leaders who sided with the Nazis during World War II.
These fascists spearheaded the recent street demonstrations with Molotov cocktails, paving stones and iron bars. They led five thousand people in storming the regional administration building and took control of arms depots.
Svoboda’s bastion is in Galicia, to the west, where they have organized large celebrations in memory of World War II Nazi collaborators and the Nazi Waffen SS (storm troopers). The party has taken power in small localities there, instigating a reign of terror jointly with other fascist groups, assaulting Jews and working-class fighters.
Svoboda and Pravy Sector attract the most racist and reactionary elements of Ukrainian society. They are being given free rein by the other opposition parties, and this fascist-tainted alliance is unreservedly backed by the EU and U.S. imperialists.
