The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and its alliance with Ukrainian leftists supporting a pro-NATO course against Russia.
Source: NewColdWar.org / Original Source: Junge Welt & [2].
An unholy alliance of
leftists supporting a pro-NATO course against Russia, By Susann
Witt-Stahl and Denis Koval, published
in German in Junge
Welt,
June 25, 2016.
The Die
Linke (Left
Party)-affiliated Rosa Luxemburg Foundation wants to play it safe. It
relies not on historical pro-Soviet or Marxist left traditions but
instead promotes a “new left”. The foundation is named after a
world-renowned icon of anti-capitalist movements whose identity is
bound with communist and anti-imperialist ideas. But the members of
the Foundation’s leadership recommend to the left a convergence
with the ‘liberal imperialism’ of the global hegemon, the USA.
Understandably,
this requires some political flexibility. Progressive forces should
not plant themselves on one side or the other of competing
imperialist powers, says the Facebook page Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung
Ukraine.
It demands that the “independent left” distance itself from the
NATO-EU bloc, on the one hand, and from Russia on the other hand.
This
agenda is followed by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (RLF) with its
Ukrainian partners. But it never explicitly speaks out against the
accelerated expansion of the Western powers to the very borders of
the Russian Federation. Instead, it consistently warns about “Great
Russian chauvinism” and denounces the former Soviet Union and the
anti-imperialist left.
In
Ukraine, the Foundation cooperates principally with the small ‘Left
Opposition’ group (not to be confused with the political front of
the same name in which the Ukrainian Communist Party participates).
In April 2014, the Left Opposition (LO) along with the “independent”
trade Union ‘Zachist Prazi’ (Labor Defence) of Oleg Vernik merged
into the ‘Social Movement’. The aim was to create an alliance (so
far without any success) to be a Ukrainian version of Syriza.
One
of the founders of the ‘LO’ is Zakhar Popovich, who in 2003
together with Oleh Vernik was expelled from the Trotskyist Committee
for a Workers’ International (reported in Junge
Welt)
because of a lengthy fraud they perpetuated. They had collected
donations for non-existent left-wing organizations in Ukraine.
According
to its self description, LO stands for a politics of peace, beyond
the “nationalist polarisation” of pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian
forces. But it doesn’t dare to criticize Ukrainian
ultranationalists. LO has openly supported the assaults by
Euromaidan. Zakhar Popovich and his comrade Vitaly Dudin, the lawyer
of the Kiev Center for Social and Labor Research, are also RLF
partners. They marched in Maidan Square with a red EU flag
side-by-side with the ultra-right.
The
LO also welcomed the political section of the EU Association
agreement, which includes clauses providing for military cooperation
of Ukraine with the West.
Accordingly,
LO has nothing to do with the “opposition” anymore. In March of
2014, Zakhar Popovich characterised the Yatsenyuk coup government as
“legitimate” and appealed “to all governments in the world and
Russia to recognize it”. He announced that his support was only
“practical”, not political, because of the numerous,
Goebbels-type followers from the Svoboda Party who were in the
government.
LO’s
demand to end the civil war in eastern Ukraine is expressed by the
fact that in 2014, Fedor Ustinov, a member of its organizing
committee, voluntarily joined the Ukrainian extremist ’ battalion
‘Shachtarsk’ in order to participate in the “punitive
expedition” against the insurgents in the unrecognized people’s
republics of Donbass. The “American anti-imperialist response” to
the “imperialist aggression of Russia” needed to be
strenghthened. In this way did Ustinov understand the “balancing to
be done against the two rival “imperialist” camps.
The
LO is not only in the pro-NATO camp with both feet, it is also in the
rightwing quagmire. The ‘Social Movement’–that is, LO
and Zachist
Prazi–view
the organisation ‘Autonomous Resistance’ as not only “comrades.
In Odessa, they have gone so far as to hold a joint rally with
fascists who organize memorial marches for Stepan Bandera’s
Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) which committed massacres during WWII
(especially of the Polish civilian population) and collaborated with
Nazi Germany.
The
LO member and co-organizer Andriy Ishchenko was until 2004 the
chairman of the Odessa cell of the Ukrainian National Assembly –
Ukrainian People’s Self-Defence (UNA-UNSO), a fascist party and the
core organization of the Right Sector. The UNA-UNSO’s paramilitary
force contributed to the 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’ of the famous
Atlanticist Viktor Yushchenko, who became Ukraine’s president in
2005.
Perhaps
Andriy Ishchenko is now an ‘ex’ neo-Nazi? Hardly. Until today, he
still welcomes his former comrades as “friends”. “I am not
ashamed of my membership in this organization. We were in the
forefront of the struggle of the Ukrainian people for their rights
and the the social struggles of the’ 90s,” said Ishchenko in
2014, speaking about his unfinished past.
The
fact that Andriy Ishchenko wants to help the Right Sector to become
“left wing” is enough for RLF, apparently, to present him in its
pages as a “left activist”. Moreover, to whitewash the pro-Maidan
‘Autonomous Resistance’, Nelia Vakhovska, the project
co-ordinator of the RLF in Ukraine, and Ivo Georgiev, from the centre
for International Dialogue and Cooperation of the RLF, call
Autonomous Resistance a “citizens ‘ movement” in a published
post titled ‘The
life of left activists in Ukraine is dangerous‘.
The RLF Facebook page provides weblinks to
these neo-Nazi Banderites.
Although
LO has a maximum of two dozen activist members, conferences and other
events with speakers from the LO are promoted by RLF and LO’s
positions are uncritically disseminated. This also applies to other
structures from the spectrum of the ‘new left’ in Ukraine, for
example, the magazine Prostory of
the ‘Autonomous Workers’ Union’. The members of AWU regularly
mobilize against “pro-Putin fascists” (their term for opponents
of Maidan) and believe that there is “no alternative” to the
“Anti-Terrorist Operation” taking place in Donbass.
Ukraine’s
‘decommunization’ law and other repressive measures against the
Ukrainian Communists have opened space for what some critics call a
“fake left” in Ukraine. The fact that this left holds a long-time
monopoly on the funds of the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation is being
hushed up.
The
‘new left’ is used to whitewashing the alliance of the Western
powers with the fascists in Ukraine. They approve the cooperation of
the NATO-oriented, Ukrainian economic elite with the Western neocons
that took place on the Maidan and approve a new escalation against
Russia.
Background:
“Peace is War”
The
Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation was involved in the creation of the
pro-Maidan‘left‘. In
April 2014, for example, it promoted a conference ‘The
Left and Maidan‘
organized
by its Ukrainian partners.
The
conference also served as a founding Congress of the ‘Social
Movement‘
− initiated
predominantly by the Left Opposition. The results of a survey
were presented at the conference, according to which 93 per
cent of Maidan-activists were presented as “apolitical” and
only seven per cent
(including the socialists) were organized politically. Accordingly,
the proportion of fascists and other radical Right involved
inMmaidan was said to be very low.
In
December 2015, the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation supported the
event ‘Aspects
of the media coverage of the military conflict‘ organized
by the Centre for Labour and Social Research, including
experts “reporting
from the ATO-zone” (‘Anti-Terrorist
Operation‘
is
the Kyiv government’s official name for the military
offensive of the Ukrainian army in eastern Ukraine). As
stated in the event announcement, the participants included
Yana Salakhova from George Soros’ ‘Renaissance
Foundation‘
and
Igor Burdyga, a journalist, member of the LO and militant of
the‘AutoMaidan
who believes the arsonists of Odessa on May 2, 2014 were
“patriots” while the protests of the victims’s relatives were
“ukrainophobic”.
The
RLF also supports projects of the Visual Culture Research Center in
Kiev. For example, in 2014, it staged a series of benefits named
‘Peace Is War‘
which
featured pro-Maidan propaganda films that encourage the viewer to
understand that
the militarisation of Ukrainian society is a “consequence of
Russian aggressionbeginning in March 2014″.
The
Foundation similarly promotes moderate nationalists from the
artist scene. Sergiy Zhadan, according to the RLF, is a “leftist
writer”, but he will participate in the‘Banderstad Festival‘,
a large gathering of Ukrainian fascists taking
place in August 2016.
‘New
visions’ for Ukraine by a pro-Maidan leftist of the Rosa Luxembourg
Foundation, By
Susann Witt-Stahl, published
in German in Junge
Welt,
June 25, 2016.
The
project-coordinator of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in
Ukraine advocates a “real revolution” against
communism.
Nelia
Vakhovska is a journalist, translator and has for several years
worked in Kyiv for the German-based Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. The
36-year-old Ukrainian is close to the small group ‘Left Opposition’
[of Trotskyist origin]. She is a supporter of the Euromaidan (which
she calls “a real revolution”) and of the search for “new
visions”.
“The
right-wing in Ukraine presents no real danger to the basically
liberal government in Kyiv,” she told a roundtable discussion
organized by the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation (RLS) in Berlin in March
2014. She was describing the first government cabinet of Prime
Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, which as we know was made up exclusively
of the civil and extreme right-wing, including the Svoboda Party.
Vakhovska
does not deny the right-wing violence taking place in Ukraine, but
she produces her own interpretation, celebrating the Banderites and
other fascist movements in the Ukraine. “The followers of [Stepan]
Bandera are prompted by Putin’s propaganda,” says Vakhovska. Her
thesis should warm the hearts of all the anti-Russian hardliners in
the left parliamentary partnership between the Green Party and the
SPD (social-democrats) in Germany. But any socialist should be
horrified over her words. Apparently, Vakhovska overlooks the
hundreds of uniforms and flags bearing symbols of Bandera’s WW2-era
Ukrainian Partisan Army which were present during the Maidan protests
as well as the five-meter-high portrait of the old-new national hero
near the big stage in Maidan Square in central Kyiv.
Vakhovska
also expresses quite specific views when it comes to the history of
Ukraine as a former Soviet Republic. “The concept of the left is,
of course, discredited, due to our Soviet past and to our
post-colonial situation today,” she says. This view was not
challenged at the Berlin event. There was no “counterview” at
that event. The RLS fails to include anti-imperialist and other
Marxist left views that would provide a plurality of opinion in its
pages and at its events.
There
are no nuances when Vakhovska makes her conclusions on the Ukrainian
Communists who participated in the Anti-Maidan movement and whose
activists have been forced into into exile by the new rulers. These
communists had to flee or were imprisoned. The violent clashes
between Euromaidan supporters and their opponents (including the
Marxist organization Borotba) in Kharkiv and Odessa created a “point
of no return”. But Vakhovska in her contributions to RLF blames not
the fascists, who burned down the Trade Union House in Odessa on May
2, 2014, murdering 48 people, including a member of Borotba. On the
contrary, Vakhovska presents a counter-explanation by the “new
left” of events, along with a partner of the RLF, the Visual
Culture Research Center. They call for shunning Borotba because it
allegedly “supports the authoritarian Soviet past”. But Vakhovska
doesn’t mention that together with her magazine Prostory,
he is involved with the campaign against the Marxists.
