THE Ukrainian Prime Minister, Mykola Azarov, of the Stalinist Party of the Regions resigned on Tuesday in an attempt to draw the EU-backed right-wing movement that has been fighting for ‘regime change’ into a government of national unity.
The ‘muscle’ for this right wing is being provided by the various fascist and Jew-baiting movements that have been fighting it out with the police, matching them for numbers, helmets, riot shields and staves, while hurling petrol bombs, and firing live rounds.
The announcement of the PM’s resignation came as MPs gathered for a special session of parliament to repeal the recently passed legislation that banned demonstrators in Independence Square from wearing helmets, carrying staves or holding banners.
‘The acute and dangerous conflict for our people, for the fate of Ukraine, demands further responsible steps,’ Azarov said in a statement posted on the Cabinet website.
‘In order to create additional opportunities for social and political compromise, for the peaceful settlement of conflict, I have taken a personal decision to ask the president of Ukraine to accept my resignation,’ Azarov stated.
His resignation certainly will not lead to a compromise, or to a peaceful settlement of the conflict. It will whet the appetite of the right wing, the EU, the US and their fascist stormtroopers to carry through the work and force either an immediate change of government or a general election that will be held in a threatening, pogrom-type atmosphere.
The truth of the matter is, as the victory of Yanukovych and the Party of the Regions in the 2010 general election showed, the majority of the Ukrainian people are opposed to the mass privatisation programme of the right wing, and want to turn away from the EU and NATO, towards Russia and the reconstitution of the USSR.
The Stalinist bureaucracy is however more frightened of mobilising the power of the Ukrainian workers – the miners, steel workers, factory workers, farmers and youth – than it is of the right wing and the pro-NATO fascists.
The bureaucracy knows that once the working class is summoned forward to fight, it will not stop at driving the fascists and the right wing off the streets, but will continue with a political revolution to restore workers’ rule and soviet power.
This is why the fascists have been allowed to literally get away with murder.
What is true for Ukraine is even truer for Russia.
There, Putin and the Stalinist bureaucracy are busily letting the oligarchs out of jail and refusing the demand and the advice that have been given to them publicly, that the way to become the most popular Russian since Lenin would be to expropriate the oligarchs, instead of ruling in a form of balancing act worthy of a Bonaparte, with one foot on the oligarchs and the other on the working class.
Internationally, Putin displays the same balancing tactic, calling the US imperialists, ‘partners’ on the one hand, while trying to sustain a pro-Russian regime in Syria with the other.
It is also true that far from regime change being the end of the game for the Ukrainian right wing and the US and the UK ruling class, it is just the beginning, since the real target is Russia, achieving regime change there in a massive counter-revolution, before divvying up the Russian Far East and the Arctic to the various imperialist bandits.
Defending Russia and Ukraine from the drive to restore capitalism, a drive which erupts directly out of the capitalist crisis is a job for the Ukrainian and Russian workers and the working class of the world.
For this job to be done requires building sections of the Fourth International everywhere, in all of the major capitalist states and throughout the territories of the USSR, to organise the political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucrats and the socialist revolution in the West to replace bankrupt capitalism and imperialism with socialism, in a world socialist republic.
This is the only way that the world crisis of capitalism can be resolved in the interests of the workers of the world and the oppressed nations.
There is not a moment to lose.
Build the Fourth International in all of the Soviet states, and all over the capitalist world. Forward to the victory of the world socialist revolution.
