Here is a revised and updated version of my preliminary post of the crisis in Ukraine.  Hopefully, it is better edited  I recommend that all readers look at the CPUSA statement on PA's front page

Norman Markowitz

                 A little more  than twenty two years ago, the Soviet Union was dismembered from the top in a complex, far reaching counter-revolution

  This  achieved  what had been the great and unifying goal of the capitalist world since the Soviet revolution, a goal which led major capitalist forces and nations  to  directly and indirectly aid fascist movements and states in the 1920s and 1930s in the name of anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism.

  These policies resulted in WWII, the greatest war in human history. After that of course came  a post war “cold war” nuclear arms races which led almost to a nuclear WWIII, which in the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly  destroyed much of humanity.  As one anti-Communist trade unionist, James Carey, then an official of the Communist led United Electrical Worlers had said in 1945, “In this war we fought with the Communists against the Fascists.  In the next war, we will fight with the Fascists against the Communists.”  Outside of Europe, that was prophecy during the cold war period

 When the Soviet Union was dismembered at the end of 1991, that sordid history , the interventions in Korea and Vietnam, the interventions in Africa, Latin America and Asia in support of dictatorships of the rightwas  conveniently forgotten.   All the miseries of the world, long   blamed in cqpitalist propaganda as “totalitiarnism,” Communism, Stalinism,”were now  supposed to cease   and history itself would   in a Hollywood happy ending of “free market capitalism.”  Of course, since all of this was based on distortions and lies, it didn’t exactly work out that way.

           Boris Yeltsin have been supported because of their anti-Communism by the capitalist states for a generation, inspite of  the corrupt authoritarian nature of their governments   Their    “New Russia,” led by cliques of former “second economy” black marketers and former Soviet Bureaucrats with dreams of living the life of the  capitalist rich and famous, was  and is no longer a revolutionary threat to anyone, neither revered nor feared, nor respected as the Soviet Union had been.

The truth is that New Russia today is very weak as  powerful transnational  capitalist syndicates covet its natural resources and the natural resources of former Soviet Republics in the East    Its army, which had saved humanity from Hitler Fascist domination in WWII  now fights  Chechen terrorists.  Itss people  fall into life under capitalism, with all of its insecurities and inequalities where, to paraphrase a line from the U.S. playwright Clifford Odets, at the time a member of t he CPUSA, the meaning of life is written on dollar bills(or in the case of “new Russia”, Ruble bills).

                Ukraine has little that the  trsnsnational capitalists covet, but it had been the second largest of the Soviet Republics   And it had a history which meant  nothing to capitalists, except as a means to divide people and strengthen their rule.

 Its western territories had been taken over by Polish nationalist  Josef Pilsudski, who established a large Polish State incorporating the Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia  with the  help of Britian and France after WWI  The Soviet Union briefly received the Western Ukraine and other former Czarist Russian territories  back as part of the Molotov Ribbentrop non aggression pact, which anti-Communist called the “Hitler-Stalin Pact,” and used then and ever after to discredit everything associated with the Soviet Union.

 But the non aggression pact was from the Soviet side a desperate attempt to play for time to build up its depleted military forces and to gain control of territories that traditionally had been corridors for the invasion of Russia.

                While Ukraine was conquered rapidly by Hitler’s armies and treated as conquered territory, the Nazis recruited rightwing nationalists into a “Ukrainian Insurgent Army”  to fight against the Soviet Union (and against the anti-fascist Ukrainians who fought heroically as both partisans and soldiers in the Red Army).  Many of these Ukrainians fled with the retreating German armies and ended up in Germany, Canada, and the U.S., continuing their nationalist activities until the dismembering from above of the Soviet Union gave them a new lease on life.

After the destruction of the Soviet Union, major capitalist powers and media, led by the U,S,  encouraged and sanitized all anti-Soviet groups everywhere in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Republics, regardless of their policies and their history.  Just as Hitler had declared his Japanese allies “honorary Aryans,” so all sorts of adventurers, swindlers, national chauvinists, and would be warlords became “honorary democrats” after 1991, starting of course with Boris Yeltsin.

          Ukraine  has in general been subject to the  petty authoritarianism  and  social insecurities of Russia itself and all of the former Soviet Republics, some of whom In the East now have U.S. military bases. It is this history, not the continued scapegoating of the former Soviet Union,  that is the background to the present crisis

 One can say that the divisions between the Eastern Ukraine, which has large numbers of ethnic Russians  suspicious for good reasons of Ukrainian national chauvinism and the Western Ukraine, suspicious of Russian chauvinism and domination have greatly increased. 

Those who mock the old Soviet ideal of a family of peoples, living in equality and with cultural linguistic rights, all working together to build socialism, should look at Ukraine today, its urban mobs screaming ant-Russian slogans; the influence of groups which identify directly with the pro Nazi Ukrainians of WWII and engage in revived Hitlerite anti-Semitic propaganda and attacks on  visible Jewish people(reports of assaults on Hebrew teachers, men wearing Jewish Yarmulkes) understand what  the long-term effects of the political counter-revolution which destroyed the Soviet Union and dismembered its Republics  has been.

                But why, one may ask, have the U.S. and its allies,  encouraged if not unleashed these forces?

  I doubt that they want groups like the  crudely anti- Russian anti Semtic Svoboda(“freedom’) party, to come to power or even have a major share of power.  But Britian, France and the U.S. in the 1920s  and early  1930s did not want Hitler to come to power either.

 Rather they wanted to use him first in Germany against Communists and Socialists and then in Europe against the Soviet Union.  Today, the European Union states and the U.S. NAT0 bloc hope to use Ukraine, the other former Soviet Republics, and tne former  East Eiuropean  Soviet Bloc states against potential Russian business competitors

                 Ukraine under the collapsing  present government has been something like a “protectorate”/satellite of the Putin Russian regime, which doesn’t want Ukraine to join the European Union, where it would  be part of an economic bloc that Russia sees as against its interests  and  under the direct influence of the U.S. NAT0  military bloc, which would if it could reduce Russia to the status of protectorate/satellite.  Today the Putin regime seems to be encouraging  a further breakup of Ukraine into various regions, in order to retain its influence over the regions that supported the government which has been ousted in the present coup.  This has encouraged  recycled cold war rhetoric on the part of U.S. NAT0 bloc politicians, but frankly what would or could anyone expect.  If anything, Putin’s actions are a further example of the extent of New Russia’s weakness, its retreat from a former Soviet Republic where it previously was able to hold as a protectorate to some  new boundary comparable to what the capitalist powers compelled Soviet Russia, devastated by civil war, foreign internvention, land famine, to except at the beginning of the 1920s.  Lenin accepted those borders because he was a revolutionary internationalist, struggling to consolidate the encircled Soviet state and advance in the future socialist revolutions.

 Lenin, as all understood, was playing for time  as he worked to save the first socialist state in history What is  Putin playing for?  Probably his regime’s ability to sustain itself from its internal enemies, most of whom are probably sick and tired of  his attempt to craft a macho man personality cult while New Russia wallows in economic stagnation and deepening inequality at home and retreat and defeat abroad.

 So why are these  events  important if one sees nothing positive in Putin’s  New Russia?  First, “containment”/ encirclement of the Soviet Union didn’t begin with the post WWII cold war.  It began immediately after WWI with what was called the “cordon sanitaire” or quarantine of “Soviet Russia” led by the British and French empires, a policy which meant  supporting authoritarian  rightist governments in  Poland, Rumania, Hungary, the Baltic States, and using them as “frontline states” against the Soviets. 

. Today, there is  no  no Soviet Union  and there is no major European power seeking to resolve the capitalist world crisis with fascist solutions, “unifying” Europe around overt racist  imperialist policies. 

 But the European Union’s austerity policies and the weakness of the European left  provide fertile soil for such movements.

                Today, the forces major capitalist media have been  cheering on are a club to be used against Russia, whose natural resources they still covet and  whose military power on paper at least makes them a potential competitor for weath and power with the major capitalist nations. 

 The European Union nations and the U.S. have been playing with political fire by supporting these forces, operating under the assumption, as in the past, that these countries are too small and backward r to threaten them.

Today, with the Russian limited military involvement,there is also the possibility of the conflict escalating into central and Eastern Europe. There is also the possibility that these neo Nazi groups may produce some “blowback” in Western Europe and possibly even the U.S

Today that seems very remote.  But, if we go back to the 1980s, when capitalist media and many on the self-proclaimed “anti-Stalinist left” were cheering on both Polish Solidarity and similar groups in Eastern European along with the anti-Soviet “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan,  we should remember that those who looked  at the ideology and polices of Al Queda and the Talban and suggested that they would if they could attack Western Europe and the U.S. were either ignored or denounced as Soviet agents.

                Fortunately, the  CPUSA and the Communist parties of the world are responding positively to this crisis   First, rather than say nothing, which given the forces in conflict may be tempting , the broad  left  should be to exposing  both the national chauvinist elements that are struggling for power in the Ukraine and calling for a peace process. .

What there has been though is the assertion that the crisis “goes back” to troubles in “Soviet times.”  Actually, these events go back to the divisions and distractions that followed the downfall of the Soviet Union, the social and economic insecurity and inequality which advanced everywhere and the petty national chauvinisms that made large numbers of former Soviet citizens be treated as foreigners in their own country. 

Below I have copied the link to an open letter by the Communist Party of Ukraine, to the Communist Parties of the world, a   concrete call for action put forward by the Communist Party of Ukraine, which has itself been a target of neo Nazi violence.  It provides a decent on the scene analysis of what is happening and a