Okay, very jargoney, leniney for the layman but gambare! Interesting essay about Russia, Ukraine, working-class/peasant self-determination and the cluster-fuck that became the Russian-Ukranian relationship. Gotta give overall credit to western imperialism and their lackeys though for creating the environment for bureaucracy to take over the Russian Revolution, through isolation of the first workers’ revolution.

Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist


Nestor Makhno, anarchist leader of Ukrainian peasants
Lenin more than once considered the possibility of allotting to the anarchists certain territories where, with the consent of the local population, they would carry out their stateless experiment. (Trotsky, Writings 1936-1937, Pathfinder, pp. 426-427)

Thanks to Andrew Pollack, we were able to scan in and reproduce an article that appeared in the Autumn 1989 International Marxist Review by Zbigniew Kowalewski titled “For the independence of Soviet Ukraine” that details the tragic failure of the Bolsheviks to understand the need for Ukrainian self-determination. To give you an idea of how Great Russian chauvinism persists in the Kremlin and among those self-proclaimed Marxists who repeat Putin’s talking points, the article states:

The national aspiration to sobornist’, the unity of the country, was thus openly flouted. It was with the “Katerynoslavian” right wing of the party that there was the most serious confrontation. It…

View original post 8,538 more words