Old structures, new conditions

The Ukraine is facing a “protracted crisis of stagnation”, with drawn-out struggles both among and within the former republics of the USSR as “the old bureaucracy and the emerging bourgeoisie” wrestle for the right to exploit the people, says Ukrainian left activist and historian Sergei Klimovsky.

The government of Leonid Kravchuk is simply proceeding more slowly on the same road as Russia under Boris Yeltsin. “One cannot say that the course of Kravchuk is simply the restoration of capitalism. It is rather an attempt to maintain the old totalitarian structures under new conditions and keep control over the key sectors of the economy while granting some freedom to private entrepreneurs.”

So far, Klimovsky adds, “privatisation is going very slowly”, largely due to a shortage of Ukrainian capital and nervousness on the part of potential Western investors.

As in Poland and elsewhere, shady deals are being cooked up to sell off a few economic plums cheaply to Western capital, and the overall prospects for the Ukraine are bleak: “Integration of the Ukraine into the world market presupposes a structural change of the economy that would reduce it to a secondary position. Many enterprises will have to close or adapt to the role of appendages to Western companies.”

Like Yeltsin and others in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Ukrainian political leadership consists largely of sections of the old “Communist” elite, which is cynically using nationalism and “revised and falsified” versions of national history to preserve its position under the new conditions.

Klimovsky expects that this period of stagnation will produce workers' protests, which will pose the need for left-wing political organisations “of a new type”. -- P.F.L.

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