The World Socialist Web Site is proud to announce the launch of its Ukrainian-language edition (wsws.org/uk).
The Ukrainian edition of the WSWS will provide an international socialist perspective for workers and student youth and lay the foundations for a Ukrainian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). It will publish major articles of the WSWS and key programmatic and historical documents by the ICFI.
The first postings are 1) the WSWS’s New Year’s statement, “2023: The global capitalist crisis and the growing offensive of the international working class”; and 2) an essay by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North on the struggle waged by Lenin in 1922-23 against Stalin’s chauvinist attitude toward national minorities in the newly formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Since February 2022, the ICFI has opposed both the US-NATO proxy war against Russia and the Putin regime’s reactionary intervention in Ukraine. Like the Russian edition of the WSWS, a central focus of the Ukrainian WSWS will be the fight for the international unity of the working class of the former Soviet Union and the building of a unified movement of workers in Ukraine and Russia to put an end to the disastrous war as part of a global revolutionary movement by the working class against imperialism and capitalism.
In the 1917 October Revolution and the subsequent Civil War, Ukrainian and Russian workers fought side by side against capitalism and for socialism. Between 1941 and 1945, both national groups made immense sacrifices in the common struggle against the Nazi invasion and in defense of the Soviet Union.
The workers of Ukraine have paid a particularly bitter price for the Stalinist repudiation of the internationalist program of the October Revolution, based on the bankrupt concept of the building of “socialism in one country.” The decades of Stalinist betrayals culminated in the destruction of the Soviet Union by the Soviet bureaucracy and the restoration of capitalism, which was an unmitigated socio-economic and political disaster for the working class. The unfolding war in Ukraine today can only be understood as the end product of this historic betrayal of the October Revolution by Stalinism.
Throughout this period, however, the Trotskyist movement has defended the traditions of Marxism and revolutionary internationalism against the betrayals of Stalinism and various petty-bourgeois opportunist and nationalist tendencies—chief among them Pabloism—which wrote off the working class as a revolutionary force and instead sought to subordinate it to the dominant Stalinist, social democratic and trade union bureaucracies.
Today, the International Committee of the Fourth International is the sole Trotskyist and, indeed, socialist and revolutionary party. We are confident that the program and perspectives of Trotskyism will find a powerful response among an advanced layer of Ukrainian workers, youth and intellectuals, who will join the fight to build the Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution.