THE offer of the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to ‘opposition leaders’ to take the premiership and other key positions in his elected government has been rejected by the imperialist agents and neo-fascists that make up the leadership of the Ukrainian ‘opposition’.
They are determined to have regime change in the Ukraine, and are showing their complete contempt for parliamentary democracy.
Egging them on, the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, has emphasised that the US supports and will continue to support the extra-parliamentary activities of the opposition, as has the leadership of the European Union, whose Foreign Minister Baroness Ashton has already addressed the right-wing rallies in Independence Square in Kiev.
Leading US politicians, such as ex-presidential Republican candidate John McCain, have also been to Kiev (he went there after his visit to the Islamist militias in Syria) to support the counter-revolutionary attempt at regime change in the Ukraine.
The ‘opposition’ is setting up alternative administrations all over western Ukraine and storming government buildings there, preparing to carry out its minimum programme, that is to force the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow and Kiev to agree to the partition of the Ukraine.
This is why the demand of Gorbachev (whose Perestroika policy prepared the way for the attempt by the ‘shock therapists’ to restore capitalism to Russia in 100 days) to Putin to meet the US leader Obama to resolve the crisis, falls perfectly into line with the plans of the imperialist powers to, at the minimum, partition the country.
This would win for the imperialist powers the breadbasket of the Ukraine, and place its military forces much closer to Moscow.
What stands out in the boldest relief is the refusal of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Ukraine to mobilise the working class or to use the forces of the state to put an end to the demonstrations.
One day in London of the same type of practices that are happening daily in Kiev would see the army in the streets, with armoured cars, rubber, plastic and other bullets flying, and no quarter given to the ‘mob’.
In fact, Yanukovych is balancing between the working class in eastern Ukraine along with the sections of workers in the west that support his regime, and the pro-imperialist opposition.
He is refusing to call the working class onto the streets to rout the ‘opposition’, as the Donetsk steel and coal workers would certainly do.
Meanwhile, at the same time as Kerry and McCain are stoking up the counter-revolution, Putin stays silent and does not publicly tell Yanukovych that Russia will respond positively to any request by the Ukrainian government for assistance.
The Stalinist bureaucracy is incapable of defending the gains of the 1917 revolution, either in Ukraine or Russia. It fears a political revolution of the working class to restore rule through Soviets and instead prefers to balance between it and the Western Powers, wheeling and dealing as it can with the world’s capitalist powers, who though they are in a desperate crisis, have the upper hand over the bureaucracy because they are a ruling class with definite class interests.
This is why, while Putin helped Obama to disarm Syria of its wmds, he has been rewarded in return by an attempt at an imperialist coup against close neighbour Ukraine.
What is required in Ukraine is the mobilisation of the working class to drive the fascists and the imperialist agents off the streets and restore Soviet power.
This is opposed by Putin because this would upset the balancing act that the bureaucracy performs at home with the oligarchs, and abroad with the imperialist powers.
What is required is the building up of the Soviet sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International to lead the political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy and bar the road to the restoration of capitalism, by restoring rule through workers’ Soviets all over the area of the USSR, as part of the world socialist revolution to smash capitalism and imperialism.
