TEN years ago today, 42 Ukrainian trade unionists were burned to death when Odessa’s House of Trade Unions was set alight by fascists.
They had taken refuge from a crowd of Ukrainian nationalists, opposing their protest against that February’s Maidan coup.
As Keith Barlow writes today, the date was no accident. May 2 1933 was the date on which Nazi Germany banned trade unions.
Doubt the connection? The Ukrainian right have long memories. Ukraine since 2014 has explicitly glorified World War II Nazi collaborators.
Last year Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologised after joining Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in applauding Yaroslav Hunka, a veteran of the Ukrainian “Galicia” division of the SS.
But such applause would be routine in Zelensky’s Ukraine, which has named January 1 a holiday in honour of Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists leader Stepan Bandera — despite protests from Israel and Poland because of its massacre of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles during the Holocaust. And graffiti reading “Galician SS” was scrawled on the House of Trade Unions as those trapped inside were burned alive.
The standard Western narrative is that 2014 saw a democratic revolution in Ukraine. The far right’s role is discounted as propaganda or gross exaggeration. This argument is backed up by the genuinely poor showing of fascist parties in Ukrainian elections.
But the far right’s strength cannot be solely judged by elections.
Its ideological influence is clear in the official commemorations for Bandera and the mass destruction of monuments to the Red Army, in which millions of Ukrainians (including Zelensky’s grandfather) fought to liberate their country from Nazi occupation.
It is shown by the neonazi formations which became shock troops of the new regime when civil war broke out in the Donbass. The most notorious of these is the Azov Battalion, founded by Andriy Biletsky to “lead the white races in a crusade against semite-led untermenschen.”
Now the “Azov Brigade” of Ukraine’s military, it is the subject of sycophantic write-ups in the press to shore up Western support for the war (the Guardian ran a glowing report on it, “Elite force bucks trend of Ukrainian losses on eastern front,” last weekend).
Why focus on this? Ten years on, nobody has been prosecuted for the act of mass murder that took place in Odessa’s House of Trade Unions. That tells us something about the character of Ukraine’s post-Maidan government.
And a more nuanced look at the events of 2014, which provoked the civil war which, through Russia’s 2022 invasion, has become a major European war, gives context we need to strengthen the forces for peace.
In 2014 the TUC condemned the role of the US in fomenting the Ukraine crisis.
Since Russia’s attack on Ukraine, this understanding has been weakened, and the war used to justify union support for higher arms spending.
That is to misunderstand the imperialist character of the British government. It aligns the working class with a ruling class fighting to preserve a US-led world order that is coming apart, as global South countries reject a system which disempowers and robs them.
Non-Western countries understand this, which is why the vast majority have rejected US and EU sanctions on Russia: not because they support Russia’s invasion, but because they don’t support the US either.
Washington called their behaviour a “mutiny.” As pointed out by Belgian communist Peter Mertens, socialist advance depends on linking the “mutiny” of the global South against imperialism with working-class revolt in the West.
Israel’s assault on Palestine has opened eyes to the reality of imperialism again, with Britain among the facilitators of genocide in Gaza.
Efforts to revive enthusiasm for continuing the war in Ukraine are designed to demobilise this resurgent anti-imperialist movement, to sell us a vision of Nato as a protector not an aggressor.
The left needs to oppose that. The main enemy is at home.
