One of the most terrible effects of
the counterrevolution which drowned the revolution of October
1917 in blood,
was the complete isolation of the handful of revolutionaries in the USSR who
survived the gulag and the raids of the GPU and the KGB (which also managed to
bury the theoretical contributions of the Russian Communist Left). When the
disintegration of the USSR began to raise the iron curtain imposed by the
Stalinist bourgeoisie, it was important that revolutionaries in the West and in
the countries of the ex-USSR should try to rebuild their contacts, exchange
their experience and their ideas, so that the revolutionaries in these
countries can return to their place in the international movement of the
proletariat. This is why the ICC has taken part, since 1996, in the conferences
organised by the Praxis group in Moscow (and in Kiev in 2005), and conducts a regular correspondence with several groups
and contacts in Russia and the Ukraine. We have already published several articles from this
correspondence on our Russian language web site. We have also begun the
publication of a Russian language print publication, Интернационализм (Internationalism),
in order to improve the exchange of ideas with comrades who do not have access
to the Internet.
We know that this work requires enormous
patience on all sides. The language barrier and translation is already a major
difficulty; the ideas of the Communist Left from which the ICC draws its
heritage are little known in the ex-USSR; similarly, the ideas developed by the
comrades in these countries are often strongly marked by the specific
experience there and are unfamiliar to readers in the West. The two articles
that we are publishing here are the fruit of this long-term work: the first, is
an extract from our correspondence with a comrade from Voronezh (a town on the
river Don to the south of Moscow) and contains our response to his arguments in
favour of self-management; the second, is an article by a comrade from the Ukraine
on the presidential elections in 2004 which overthrew the regime of Leonid
Kuchma.
