UKRAINIAN President Viktor Yushchenko has mounted a coup attempt in the Ukraine, dissolving parliament and calling a snap general election on May 27th.
The parliament dominated by a coalition led by the Prime Minister Yanukovich has refused to be dissolved, and condemned the President’s measures as illegal.
Yesterday tens of thousands of Ukrainian workers including miners from the Donetsk Basin assembled outside the parliament in support of the parliament and opposed to Yushchenko.
Meanwhile the Defence Minister Hrytsenko has announced that the army will only obey the President, a statement whose correctness will be tested in the days ahead when the army is ordered to drive the workers off the streets.
In fact, the situation has turned into its opposite from that of the 27th November 2004 when over a hundred thousand supporters of the Orange bourgeois counter-revolution massed outside parliament condemning the result of the 2004 presidential election as rigged, demanded a recount and demanded that the Ukraine break with Russia and join the EU and NATO.
In the midst of a right-wing hysteria, involving an alleged KGB plot to poison Yushchenko, a recount was forced, and with right-wing mobs on the streets, and at the polling stations, even that showed that Yanukovich had 44 per cent of the vote as against 52 per cent for Yushchenko.
At that point Yushchenko was declared president and his ally Yulia Tymoshenko became the Prime Minister.
The victory of the Orange revolution lasted just 12 months as the victors could not wait to emulate the Russian oligarchs by tearing each other apart in their haste to enrich themselves by grabbing the nationalised industries.
Meanwhile in areas such as the Crimea, local residents began their campaigns to prevent NATO forces entering the Ukraine and exercising in the Crimea and other places.
The Orange revolution bubble burst on August 4 2006 when with armed gangs fighting in the streets over the ownership of enterprises, and amidst rapidly rising inflation, the Orange leadership was heavily defeated in parliamentary elections and Yanukovich was returned leading an anti-NATO pro-Russia coalition.
Last Monday’s decree closing down the parliament is a coupist reply of the alleged ‘democratic’ forces to their defeat in the Ukraine.
There is no doubt that the working class will fight any attempt to impose an Orange ‘White Guards’ dictatorship on the Ukraine.
This will be just the start of the action. The working class must take general strike action to force the resignation of the President, and establish workers and peasants soviets all over the Ukraine to impose the power of the working class on society.
These soviets must form a workers’ militia and call upon the Ukrainian armed forces to give the soviets their full support.
The Trotskyist movement in the Ukraine must come to the fore by fighting for these demands and for the organisation of a political revolution to over- throw the would-be Ukrainian bourgeoisie and its Stalinist and revisionist allies to re-establish a soviet Ukraine.
This will be the beginning of the revolutionary reconstitution of the USSR by giving the Russian, Belarussian, Moldavian and Khazak working classes a concrete example of what has to be done to defend the gains of October 1917 by political revolutions to reconstitute the Soviet Union.
This political revolution will be a powerful development for both the Soviet and World Revolutions.
It will be taking place in a situation where the oppressed nations are battling imperialism and beating it in the Middle East and the Gulf, and where the metropolitan working class of the US and the EU are doing battle with capitalism and imperialism at its very centres.
Forward to the political revolution in the Ukraine and all the Soviet states. Forward to the victory of the world socialist revolution. Build the Fourth International.
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