Ukraine: A Search for Identity and Freedom

October 1944 - Red Army liberates Kiev

 by John Maryon

Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are predominantly from the East Slav sub-group of the Slavic people.  Crimean Tatars form an important ethnic group of the population of Crimea.  The fertile lands of mineral rich Ukraine were for centuries shared between the Poles and the Mongols.  By 1500 the Ottoman empire had expanded and taken over South East Ukraine and Crimea.  In 1654, following years of conflict with the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Cossack leader of Ukraine pledged allegiance to the Czardom of Russia in exchange of protection. Russian influence increased and in 1797 Catherine the Great established the port city of Odessa and the region became an important part of the Russian Empire. 
Today most people have heard of the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale, Balaclava and the Charge of the Light Brigade.   It was an imperialist conflict for Middle East influence between Russia and an alliance of France, Britain and Turkey.  Russia lost the war and with it influence in the region and now had only a limited access to the Black Sea. However there were two other significant impacts.  One saw the break up of European alliances and the other was that it forced Russia to become modernised. 
Following the 1917 Great October Revolution in Russia Ukraine became a Soviet Republic, the Ukrainian SSR.  A majority of those in Eastern Ukraine spoke Russian while in the western areas the people spoke Ukrainian.  The  Ukrainian language is very similar to Russian and considered by some to be a dialect. In the Crimea, Tatar and other ethnic languages were secured by decree. A devious  Kruschchev was to later cede Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR. 
To understand the Ukraine of today it is important to consider some developments during the pre World War 2 period. The Congress of Soviets had proclaimed Soviet Power in 1917 and elected Soviets were established in the towns, villages, work places and military units. The new young republic started on the road to building socialism. But the peaceful life was soon to be shattered.  Counter-revolutionary forces led by former Czarist officers and the feudal lords of Central Asia waged a civil war against the Soviet republic. They were to be supported by forces of intervention. British, French, American and Japanese forces in the Far East invaded the Soviet Union. An undeclared war of intervention was underway and Britain occupied Odessa while Germany took control of a large part of western Ukraine. 
The Soviet forces were united and soon built an alliance with workers and peasants and established the Red Army. A war economy was established. The counter-revolutionary military superiority was short lived as conflicting interests emerged. The White Guards, as the alliance of foreign backed fighters was known, depended upon foreign finance and was essentially a mercenary army.  When the money stopped during the major capitalist economic crisis they fell apart. The imperialist powers however continued to occupy western parts of the country.  The imperialist powers used former Soviet territory to establish a cordon sanitaire from which they could carry out attacks on the young republic. 
Collectivisation of agriculture enabled farms to be modernised. The days of the horse-drawn wooden plough were over and Ukraine started to become an important grain growing area.  The process of change was not an easy one. The years 1932-1934 saw the worst drought in living memory.  A typhoid epidemic ravaged the Caucasus.  Many agriculture experts and cadres sent from Moscow were murdered by fascist gangs.  Some kulaks slaughtered all their animals and invading forces burned crops. Many people died of starvation. However by the late 1930s Ukraine had become the bread-basket of the Soviet Union while the industrial regions of Eastern Ukraine became known as the Soviet Ruhr. 
At 0400 on 22 June 1941 Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. Of the 27 million Russians who were killed during the war, five million were from Ukraine plus 1.5 million Jewish people who lived in the region.  Nationalists from the former ruling class in Western Ukraine supported Hitler and the Nazis. The leader of the Halychyn SS Division , Stefan Bandera, was held responsible for many atrocities.  Jews, communists, socialists, the mentally ill and the disabled were slaughtered in the death camps. Under the leadership of Joseph Stalin the Soviet Union fought courageously  and was able to smash the Nazi war machine. The battle of Stalingrad is considered to be the turning  point of the Second World War which ended in victory in 1945, But after the war many Ukrainian Nazis were made welcome in the USA and Britain. 
During the post-war era industry quickly developed and agriculture flourished. Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union. Oligarchs took over in Russia and Ukraine grabbing the wealth that had been created during people's rule with former officials changing sides to get their noses in the trough. Living standards fell and unemployment reappeared after an absence of 50 years. With the fall of the Soviet Union the Russians were promised that NATO would not expand eastwards.  The gullible Russian leadership believed this but the imperialists saw it as an opportunity to expand their malignant influence, gain access to Russia's rich resources and to threaten China. 
The United States is notorious for its never-ending wars and coups for regime change. The long list includes Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Chile.  In February 2014 it was Ukraine's turn. In a coup planned, financed and supported by the USA, the democratically elected government of Yanukovych was overthrown. Opposition parties were banned, politicians arrested and demonstrators murdered in Odessa by being driven into the trade union building which was then set on fire. The new pro-Nato and pro-European Union puppet regime embarked on widespread repressive measures against Russian speakers, including a ban on the Russian language. Strong resistance in Eastern Ukraine led to the establishment of independent states which were recognised by Russia and later along with Crimea voted to join the Russian Federation. Between 2014 and 2022 some 8,000 civilians were killed by shelling from regime held areas.
In 2022 Russia commenced its special military operation to defend those regions under attack, prevent the expansion of Nato eastwards and rid the Ukraine government of supporters of the infamous Nazi collaborator, Stefan Bandera. The civil war became a proxy one as the Americans and their Western allies poured in money and weapons. Negotiations, such as the Minsk agreements to end the conflict have been repeatedly sabotaged by Western leaders. The Western powers are losing their war and Ukraine is tragically being destroyed in scenes similar to those left in Vietnam and Korea. Instead of bringing the tragedy to an end Western leaders, including, Macron of France, Merz of Germany and Starmer of Britain, have become obsessed with keeping the war going. They continue to pour in money to keep the conflict going while their own economies face collapse. 

Victory Day 2025

 This year marks the 80th anniversary of  the end of the Second World War. The war, which cost over 61 million lives, began with the Nazi German invasion of Poland on 1st September 1939 and ended on 2nd September 1945 when the Japanese Emperor Hirohito surrendered following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American atom bombs. 
Announcing the news of the German surrender on 8th May 1945 the old king, George VI, said “We shall have failed, and the blood of our dearest will have flowed in vain, if the victory which they died to win does not lead to a lasting peace, founded on justice and established in good will. To that, then, let us turn our thoughts on this day of just triumph and proud sorrow; and then take up our work again, resolved as a people to do nothing unworthy of those who died for us and to make the world such a world as they would have desired, for their children and for ours”. That world, sadly, has not happened.
It would be quite impossible, of course, to write all that should be said about the Second World War. But there are three key points that must never be forgotten.
The first is the imperialist nature of the conflict which was launched by German finance capital which saw territorial expansion as necessary to break free of the constraints placed on Germany after the first world war.
The second is the impact of fascist ideas which led to the most barbarous treatment of many people, especially Jews and other minorities, under the Nazi heel. Slave labour and super exploitation soon became murder by brutality and starvation and ultimately it became mass slaughter in the gas chambers of the Nazi death camps.
The third aspect was the war against the USSR. This was more than an attack against a state, it was a direct attack on socialism. The Nazis even used this fact to try and lure other capitalist leaderships to support its anti-communist crusade against the Soviet Union.
Donald Trump can, perhaps, be forgiven for believing the Hollywood myth that the Americans, almost single-handedly, won the war. To be fair, he did acknowledge that Russia “lost millions of people, and that was absolutely an important factor” while nevertheless adding that there was “no factor as important as us”. 
 Still that’s more than some European politicians would say these days as the Soviet role in the victory is air-brushed out of history by those who choose to forget those who made the greatest sacrifice in the struggle against Nazi Germany. 
Winston Churchill said that the RAF’s battle with the Luftwaffe in 1940 was the “finest hour” in what would later be called the Battle of Britain. It certainly was, but the finest hour for the world communist movement was undoubtedly the Battle for Europe.
The Soviet people, led by Joseph Stalin and the Bolsheviks, liberated half of Europe and smashed Nazi Germany while Josef Broz Tito’s guerrilla army and Enver Hoxha’s partisans drove the fascists out of the Balkans. Communist-led resistance forces had the fascists on the run in Greece, France and Italy while Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung and Ho Chi Minh led the fight for freedom against the Empire of Japan.
If it wasn’t for the communists Germany and Japan would have won the war. What that would have meant can easily be seen by their actions during the conflict – the extermination of millions of Jews and others deemed unfit to live by the Nazis; concentration camps, mass slavery and dictatorial rule by industrialists, landowners, war-lords and degenerates of every kind. This was the world ruled by Hitler and Hirohito – a world that would have set back civilisation hundreds of years had it succeeded.
The Soviet Union is now sadly no more but nothing can take away its achievements. The Soviet victory will be remembered by working people for ever.

Never Again!

The slogan used by liberated prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp to denounce Nazism is always recalled on 27th January, now known as Holocaust Day. That was the day in 1945 when the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops advancing into the Third Reich.
Millions, including some six million Jews, suffered and died in that unspeakable horror. And this year, on the 80th anniversary of its liberation King Charles joined world and religious leaders to mourn those who perished in Nazi death camps to pledge that future generations must never allow the horrors of the Holocaust to be forgotten or repeated. But the role of the Soviet Union that liberated Auschwitz is being deliberately ignored by the imperialists and their lackeys that use Holocaust Day to justify their own moral bankruptcy. 
The decision to exclude Russia from Auschwitz’s 80th  anniversary commemorations sends a troubling message to the world about the value of historical truth. When we start erasing inconvenient aspects of history to suit present-day narratives we lose sight of the lessons that history teaches us. The Holocaust and the broader atrocities of the Second World War  were enabled by dehumanisation, propaganda, and the denial of reality. To combat these forces in our time we must commit to an honest reckoning with the past even when it is uncomfortable.
Selective amnesia is dangerous. The Second World War was a global conflict that required immense sacrifices from the Allied Powers that combined to defeat Nazi Germany and its Axis allies. But no country paid a higher price than the USSR. Over 27 million Soviet citizens died in the war including 8,7 million battlefield losses. To erase or diminish that contribution is to distort the historical record and risk undermining the shared understanding that has underpinned the post-war international order.
 It is undoubtedly true that the Holocaust was perpetrated in a climate of anti-semitism and abhorrent racism deliberately fostered by the Nazis and the German ruling class. The Nazis didn’t invent anti-semitism but they stoked it up and fanned the flames to make pogroms seem respectable and even "patriotic". But it was not the existence of racist ideas on their own which led to Nazism and the “final solution” but the ruling class of finance capitalists which wanted war and territorial expansion.
 It was this class which used the Nazis to advance its aims and which systematically elevated racism – and particularly anti-semitism – in order to find an excuse for wholesale theft, super exploitation and war to provide a convenient internal enemy on which the attention of the people could be focused.
The Nazis said the Jews were to blame for people's ills. They said that it was the Jews who bled the country dry. They claimed that the Jews were the enemies of the Germans and the entire human race.These lies were told in order to conceal the real exploiters and parasites –  the capitalist class as a whole. It ensured that capitalism was not blamed while millions of innocent Jews, most of whom were working class, were persecuted.
The leading German bankers, manufacturers and other big capitalists made a great deal of money from the war itself and from forced labour and the camp system in general. They survived the fall of the Third Reich largely unscathed and some of their successors are still leaders in the field today.
 Yes; we should all learn from the Holocaust. We should learn to struggle against every form of racism. But we should also learn that it was capitalism which backed Hitler, it is capitalism which resorts to unleashing fascism when it cannot rule in the old way and it was capitalism which created the gas chambers of Auschwitz – these are the lessons of history.

Ducking and diving in Vichy France

By Andy Brooks

Szkolnikoff: Hitler’s Jewish smuggler: by Pierre Abramovici, Pen & Sword Books. Barnsley 2016, 223 pp, illus, £19.99. ISBN 978-1-47386-186-2 (hardback)

The popular perception of France under the German occupation is moulded by war-time propaganda that has echoed down the decades in a seemingly endless stream of films and TV dramas that portray the Germans as Nazi thugs who take anything they fancy from a helpless French population while spivs, much like Private Walker in Dad’s Army, use the consequential shortages to exploit their own people on the street. But this is only part of the story.
     That indeed was the reality for some. But for others it was more complex. Thousands of French men and women collaborated with the Germans under the reactionary Petain regime that took over after the 1940 armistice which left northern France under continued German military occupation. Some were French fascists who believed in Hitler’s ideology of hate. Others simply thought that they were playing safe on the mistaken belief that Germany was going to win the war. On the way some made a bit of money out of the Germans. Others made immense fortunes
     In June 1945 the charred body of a man was found dumped in a field near Madrid. He was Mendel Szkolnikoff. Born in Russia in 1895 he was a Karaite, a member of a small breakaway Jewish sect that was exempt from the anti-semitic laws of the Czarist empire. This worked in his favour in the 1940s because the Nazis did not consider the Karaites to be Jews either.
    Szkolnikoff started life as a petty trader in Czarist Russia before fleeing the Soviet Union in the late 1920s to run a number of small businesses from modest apartments in western Europe.
     This all changed following the fall of France in 1940. Within weeks of the armistice Szkolnikoff becomes a major player in the textile industry as a middleman between French manufacturers to supply fabrics and clothing to the SS, the Luftwaffe and the German navy. Literally from rags to riches “Michel” Szkolnikoff, as he calls himself now, is buying chateaux in France, mansions in Monte Carlo and stashing millions away in bank accounts in Monaco, Spain and Switzerland.
     How he got there and why he came to a sticky end are questions that the author, Pierre Abramovici, tries to answer in this life of what, clearly, was an extraordinary man.
     Nazi Germany, still at war with Britain and soon to be embroiled in what proved to be a fatal confrontation with the Soviet Union, wanted everything France could produce to help their war effort. As Vichy France was technically now neutral under the terms of the 1940 armistice the Germans had to pay for their imports. But the harsh economic regime that they had imposed on France, which included a colossally overvalued 20 to one exchange rate between the Vichy franc and the Reichmark meant that the French state ultimately always ended up footing the bill.
    Though the Petain regime encouraged collaboration few French manufacturers wanted to directly deal with the Germans. And this is where Szkolnikoff made his mark. He knew the power of expensive gifts that only money can provide. With a well-connected German wife and an ever expanding range of contacts within the German hierarchy and the Vichy establishment “Michel” built up a spectacular black market empire as well as a personal fortune said to be worth £377 million in today's money.
     This is a specialist book that tells us more about the methods than the man. But by shining a light on the murky world of the war-time black market it will remain essential reading for all students of the German occupation of France in the Second World War.
    

The Longest Day

Although we were promised vast spectacles on 6^th June to mark the 75^th anniversary of the D-Day landings earlier in the month, the commemorative events were clearly overshadowed by the hostile reception to President Trump in London and the Brexit crisis that brought down Theresa May, who formally stepped down as Prime Minister the day after.

Donald Trump joined the Queen and some other NATO politicians for a ceremony in Portsmouth and the signing of a pointless joint statement that committed its 16 signatories to “work constructively as friends and allies to find common ground”, even where their opinions differ, and "to work together to resolve international tensions peacefully”. Apart from Trump, the only other heads of state and government at the ceremony were French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The Russians were pointedly not invited to the Portsmouth event nor to the Battle of Normandy celebrations held across the Channel on the same day.

The Normandy landings did, of course, hasten the end of the Third Reich but they weren’t in themselves the deciding factor in the defeat of Nazi Germany. It was the Red Army that even Winston Churchill said had "torn the guts out of the Nazi war machine" on the eastern front during the Second World War. Churchill, of course, was a rabid anti-communist, who saw the alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union as a marriage of convenience that would end as soon as the Nazi threat was over.

It was only when the Hitler’s Wehrmacht was on the run that Anglo-American imperialism moved towards a ‘Second Front’. Fearing that the Soviet army would soon liberate the entire European continent, their forces landed in France and fought their way to western Germany.

It is always important to remember the sacrifice of all those who fought in the struggle against fascism during the Second World War. The Normandy landings liberated France and hastened the end of Hitler’s regime. But it was the sacrifice of the Soviet people of all nationalities who rallied to the call to defend their socialist motherland that brought Hitler to his knees. Over 20 million Soviet citizens, including the flower of their youth, died in the epic struggle to defeat the brutal Nazi war-machine – a struggle that ended in victory over Hitler’s Third Reich in 1945.