I’m insisting that the reality not be ignored.
The reality: in 1917, the working class seized control of Russia, establishing the first workers’ state. As part of that workers’ state’s communist policy of self-determination for oppressed nations, the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine was allowed to become an independent country under a capitalist government. However, as that government cooperated with counterrevolutionary forces aiming to attack Soviet Russia, Russia, backed by urban workers’ uprisings, invaded. Though capitalist Ukraine went through a series of reactionary governments, intrigues with imperialist powers, truces, and offensives, eventually in 1919-1921 the working class aided by the Red Army seized control of Ukraine. However, the international advance of the workers allowing for the victories in Russia and Ukraine eventually faltered and began to be reversed. In particular, this led to an offensive by a “Right Communist” faction that, basing itself on the capitalist aspirations of the peasants and small entrepreneurs, opposed the working-class program of the “Left Communists” and essentially demanded an end to efforts to build socialism, and a bureaucratic “Center” faction of renegades from communism that played off the contending class forces against each other to increase its independent power as an unaccountable privileged caste. These factions were personified respectively by Bukharin, Lenin, and Stalin—but the fight among them was not a fight among individuals jealous of their power so much as a struggle for the victory of one of three irreconcilable political programs.
This political fight between communism and anti-communism played out with respect to every concrete issue facing the new workers’ states. With regard to agrarian policy: the original, communist policy of Lenin called for a worker-peasant alliance based on an absolute rejection of forced collectivization, mutual struggle against exploiting classes, and encouragement of voluntary collectivization through material incentives. As the center-right alliance gained the initiative (following the defeat of socialist Hungary and Bavaria, the Polish defeat of socialist Russia, Mussolini’s victory, etc.), they encouraged the growth of private peasant capital under the Bukharin slogan “through the kulaks to socialism.” To this end they retarded the industrialization of the countryside and repressed the poor peasants in order to serve the special interests of the middle peasants. After with merciless police measures the leftist rank and file was forced out of the ruling party, this social layer fueled an aggressive right that increasingly openly sought capitalist restoration. The belatedly alarmed center, seeking to defeat this political enemy without empowering a working class eager to restore the workers’ democracy upheld in Lenin’s time and drowned in blood to facilitate the victory of the anti-communist center-right, fell back on administrative ultraleft maneuvers such as forced collectivization and democidal “extermination of the kulaks as a class.”
The same dynamic was seen with respect to nationalities policy. The leftist (communist) policy was of self-determination for all oppressed nationalities, where not inconsistent with the defense of the workers’ state. Thus Ukraine and other subject nations such as Finland were freely allowed to secede; minority nations were given privileged access to autonomous political control and encouraged to use their own languages for official business and preserve their own cultural traditions; and nations seeking to unite with Russia on the basis of socialism (as Ukraine, in its vast majority, expressed a wish to do in 1917-1921) were allowed to do so. Lenin’s conception for a multinational alliance of workers’ states was for independent nations to come together on the basis of a common political program including a coordinated foreign policy. The right on the other hand pursued two contradictory programs: exalting the Russians at the expense of the subject nations in order to provide consumer goods to urban Russia without the kind of industrialization that would strengthen the left, and promoting the narrow nationalist aims of relatively wealthy and economically developed minority nations (Ukrainians, Poles, Belarussians, and Lithuanians most of all) at the expense of socialism, and as a smokescreen for supporting the landlords and other reactionary classes of those nations against the workers and poor peasants of those same nations and those they oppressed (for example in Ukraine where many of the landlords were Polish but Ukrainian nationalism also was mobilized by reactionary forces against the Jewish, Ukrainian, and Polish worker-peasant masses). Thus Bukharin’s future allies (Bukharin himself being on the left at the time) Tomsky and Rykov supported the Ukrainian People’s Republic based on its class-collaborationist character in 1917-1919, but then with Bukharin became arch-Russian chauvinists when it was a matter of defeating the Left Oppositionists such as Trotsky and Rakovsky (the outstanding Ukrainian communist leader) trying to carry on Trotsky’s legacy, then made an exception for Polish interests precisely because doing so would advance Russia’s efforts to reduce Ukraine to subjection in the following years, before cynically positioning themselves as the champions of Ukraine in the person of the kulak during Stalin’s ultraleft detour. The center’s approach was equally cynical if more coherent. Stalin counterposed to Lenin’s effort to build an alliance of free socialist nations a centralist federation that would be dominated by Russia, and when his efforts to unite those nations in a single “Soviet Union” over Lenin’s objections that it would be a violation of self-determination proved too powerful to stop, Lenin fought hard to make the Soviet Union a loose confederation of autonomous republics. It was not until the 1936 constitution that Stalin got the kind of regime, tightly controlled from Moscow, that he angled for. But at every point the bureaucracy sought to simplify its administrative tasks as much as possible by making the Soviet Union a Russian nation with undifferentiated oppressed minority groups as much as possible. Thus its efforts to “exterminate the kulaks as a class”—themselves born of the success of the center-right in displacing the agrarian policy of the Leninist left and the obligatory revival of the forced-collectivization measures pursued by capitalist leaders such as Ivan the Terrible—took the form of the genocidal Holodomor against the Ukrainian people.
