The Yugoslav worker-communists would do well to ponder these lines.Ī second article by Trotsky replying to critics of his program for the Ukraine will appear in the December Fourth International. It would be criminal to entertain any illusions on this score.” The program of independence for the Ukraine in the epoch of imperialism is directly and indissolubly bound up with the program of the proletarian revolution. “Only hopeless pacifist blockheads are capable of thinking that the emancipation and unification of the Ukraine can be achieved.
TROTSKY MODELS FREE
Recent reports of “partisan bands” operating in the Ukraine and of groupings of anti-Stalinist Ukrainian refugees in exile indicate that the embers of the Ukrainian problem are still glowing and that Trotsky’s slogan – A united, free and independent workers’ and peasants’ Ukraine – has lost none of its timeliness.
Hitler’s first and easy victories in the war resulted not least of all from the dissatisfaction and hatred towards the Kremlin which Stalin’s policy had engendered in the Ukrainian people. This was punishment for murmuring against the Kremlin whip and “security” against a possible revolt.Īs far as the Ukraine itself the concerned, here too Trotsky proved correct if not in detail then in the essence of the matter. During the war and since, Stalin has uprooted entire peoples from their ancestral homes and shipped them in cattle cars to the barren wastelands of Siberia. The ruthless offensive against Tito is, in reality, only the latest and most dramatic expression of what Trotsky called the “outright strangulation of any kind of national development of the peoples of the USSR.” By an ironic quirk of history, the man who made his reputation as a Marxist expert on the national question, has “solved” the problem of the national minorities by methods no Czar would have dared to employ. Today, more than a decade later the struggle of Yugoslavia against the oppressive Great Russian chauvinism of the Kremlin confirms what Trotsky wrote in 1939. Like so many of the writings of the great Marxist master, his analysis in this article has withstood the test of the years and the turbulent events they encompassed. Trotsky’s article on the Ukraine first appeared in the Socialist Appeal on May 9, 1939. This work is completely free to copy and distribute.
TROTSKY MODELS ARCHIVE
Public Domain: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive 2009. Transcription/HTML Markup: Einde O’Callaghan for the Trotsky Internet Archive. Source: Arsenal of Marxism, Fourth International, Vol. Originally published: Socialist Appeal, Vol. Leon Trotsky: Problem of the Ukraine (1939) Leon Trotsky Problem of the Ukraine (April 1939)
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