Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the formation of a Ukrainian nation, Ukraine has been a battleground in the rivalry between the U.S. and Russian imperialists. And Ukrainian nationalists have tried to win the workers of Ukraine to support one or the other of these imperialist powers. Now workers are killing each other as imperialist powers and Ukrainian capitalists fight over Ukraine’s riches.
Under Viktor Yushchenko, president of Ukraine from 2005 to 2010 and a leader of the pro U.S. so-called Orange Revolution, fascist lies began to be accepted as the official truth, taught in Ukrainian schools and promoted by Ukrainian academics, all meant to promote Ukrainian nationalism and anti-communism.
Historic lies as a means to rationalize war, violence against our class, or as a way to build trust in the “State” are not unique to Ukraine or Russia. It is a practice we see imposed by international ruling classes from the U.S. to China and yes, today in Ukraine (see Editorial, page 2).
Below, CHALLENGE debunks some of the lies about Ukraine spread by Ukrainian nationalists and fascists. We say SMASH ALL BORDERS, and fight only for an international communist revolution led by the working class.
The 1930’s famine: a “Holodomor” lie
There never was any “Holodomor” or deliberate starvation of workers from Ukraine by the Soviet Union. It’s a lie disseminated by Ukrainian nationalists and fascists, with no historical evidence. The “Holodomor” is a politically motivated myth. It originated with Ukrainians living outside Ukraine, led by veterans of Ukrainian pro Nazi forces.
While the famine of 1932-33 took a terrible toll, it was only one of a long series. Russia and Ukraine had experienced famines every two to four years for a millennium — yes, for a thousand years—and devastating famines every decade or so. As the Soviet leadership, Joseph Stalin included, realized the extent of this famine, they sent millions of tons of food and grain aid to Ukraine. They also sent tractors and organizers to collectivize agriculture. The result was a good harvest in 1933, which ended the famines once and for all.
The collectivization of agriculture reorganized farming on a large-scale with increasing mechanization. Collectivization was the greatest humanitarian triumph of the 20th century. It ended the famines that had devastated Ukraine and Russia for a thousand years! (There was one more famine in the Soviet Union, in 1946-47. It was caused by the devastation of World War II and the worst drought in centuries. It affected all of Europe and much of Asia. England also had to institute bread rationings.
Nazi collaborators not“freedom fighters”
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) were trained by Germany’s Nazis. They were not “freedom fighters” as today’s Ukrainian fascists would have us believe. During World War II they entered the Soviet Union with Adolph Hitler’s troops and participated in mass murders of Jewish, Polish, and communist workers. As many as 100,000 civilians from Poland were slaughtered in 1943-44.
Stepan Bandera led the more hard-core fascist wing of the OUN. In 1941, the Banderist leadership declared an “independent” Ukraine state, in reality a satellite of Nazi Germany. UPA was formed in part from the 14th Waffen-SS Division (storm troopers), an all-western Ukrainian Nazi SS division.
Both the lies about the famine and about Ukraine’s “freedom fighters” have a Nazi origin. And both are taught as “truth” in today’s Ukraine!
Euromaidan: U.S promoted coup
In 2010 the Russian imperialists made a comeback as their stooge, Victor Yanukovich, was elected president. Yanukovich was just as corrupt and anti-working class as the previous pro U.S. president. He was deposed by the U.S.-supported Euromaidan coup in 2014.
One of the political parties involved was the outright fascist Svoboda, a neo-Nazi outfit that received over two million votes in the previous parliamentary elections. This group toppled the Lenin statue in Kyev, replacing it with the black-and-red Nazi occupation flag from World War II.
Svoboda and the paramilitary neo-Nazi Right Sector are the political descendants of western Ukraine leaders who sided with the Nazis during World War II. Svoboda has organized large celebrations in memory of  World War II Nazi collaborators and the Nazi Waffen SS (storm troopers). Svoboda and Right Sector were unreservedly backed by the EU and U.S. imperialists.
Neo-Nazi“volunteer” battalions of the Ukrainian Army
After the Euromaidan coup, the Russian imperialists struck back. In February-March of 2014 Russian forces took over Crimea from Ukraine. The Ukrainian government was alarmed and with U.S. aid started upgrading its military. Neo-Nazis took advantage.
The neo-Nazi Azov Battalion was started in 2014 as a volunteer unit of the Ukrainian National Guard. It received funding from the interior ministry, but was also funded by Igor Kolomoisky, an energy billionaire (oligarch) and ex-governor of the Dnipropetrovska region in eastern Ukraine. Kolomoisky also funded the neo-Nazi leaning battalions Aidar, Dnipro 1, Dnipro 2, and Donbas. Meanwhile the U.S. Army was training these neo-Nazi battalions (Aljazeera, 3/1).
There were over 30 nationalist battalions, all funded by private investors. Amnesty reported  such loose regulation on these groups that its "members... act with virtually no oversight or control" (News Week, 9/9/14).
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: Neo-Nazi collaborator
Zelensky was elected to fight corruption in Ukraine, make peace with Russia and far down the list was improving conditions for the impoverished working class of Ukraine.  Instead he has attacked his political enemies, installed his friends and associates in positions of political and economic power and strengthened neo-Nazi groups such as the Azov battalion. He has done nothing for the working class and his popularity had sunk to about 20 percent before the war with Russia began.
 Zelensky was corrupt from the start, depending heavily on the backing of Ihor Kolomoisky, the same billionaire who funded the neo-Nazi Azov and Aidar battalions. He had the backing of Kolomoisky’s media empire that had produced his comedy show. He appointed various Kolomoisky associates as his advisors and to key positions in his government. Those officials who threatened Kolomoisky’s interests were fired (Atlantic Council, 7/10/21). He also amassed a small fortune which he hid in “a sprawling network of offshore companies'' (The Guardian,10/3/21).
Meanwhile the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion flourishes under Zelensky. But Azov is much more than a volunteer battalion. It has its own political party; two publishing houses; summer camps for children; and a vigilante force known as the National Militia, which patrols the streets of Ukrainian cities alongside the police. It also has a military wing with at least two training bases and a vast arsenal of weapons; drones, armored vehicles and artillery pieces. It has also become a military training center for neo-Nazis from all over the world, training up to 17,000 racists from some 50 countries. Cossack House is their recruitment center in Kiev, on loan from the Ukraine Defense Ministry (Time, 1/7/21).
Nationalism, and its twin fascism, mean misery and death for workers. Let’s turn the guns on the imperialist powers and their capitalist stooges. Fight for communism.

Queens and Staten Island, NYC — At two different Amazon locations in New York City (NYC) Black and white workers staged walkouts in solidarity with each other and with fellow workers internationally. The same day, Amazon workers also walked out in Maryland and marched in New Jersey. The class-consciousness that these workers understand exemplifies that under capitalism, control of the means of production = power. So when the working class stops churning the gears, the bosses’ profit machine slows down!
“When we stop production, only then, is when they listen to us.”
“What we did today falls under the same legacy of workers fighting for their power.”
Workers from the Woodside facility walked out to support the workers who walked out at the Long Island City warehouse, chanting,” workers united will never be defeated!” Home-made picket signs read, “We Make Amazon's Profit,” and “This Ain't Just Amazon, This is Capital!”
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) salutes the Amazon workers’ struggle and invites them to join our Party. The rulers are moving closer to yet another imperialist world war and global fascism. Only a mass revolutionary communist movement can lead the working class from this dark night. Our task is to bring the fight against imperialist war and racist police terror to workers on the job, to the shop floor in factories, hospitals, and fields.
Amazon, with millions of workers around the world and a significant number of super exploited Black workers in their ranks, have the potential to bring Bezos, number two on the list of richest bosses in the world, and his blood sucking to a grinding halt.
Thus, Amazon is fertile ground for the kind of class conscious fightback that could be transformed into revolutionary movement for  communism to liberate our class, humanity, and planet from this capitalist inferno.
Battle lines clear for Amazon workers
In 2020, there were 950,000 Amazon warehouse workers in the U.S.: 61 percent (579,500) were Black and Latin and 31 percent (294,500) were women. As the U.S. has shifted from a mainly industrial to a mainly service economy, Amazon represents the old auto and steel industries combined. This is the greatest concentration of young Black, Latin and women workers, and they are everywhere.
Work shifts can last up to 11 hours with only one 45-minute break and two 15-minute breaks. The workers are demanding a $3/hr. raise, longer breaks and respectful treatment from the bosses. The work is hard, the hours are long, and the battle lines are clear. About 40 workers, mostly in their early 20s, Black, Latin and white, women and men, turned in petitions with demands for better working conditions, but the bosses didn't want to accept them or respond to their demands.
The company’s higher ups  called in extra managers to try to intimidate the workers out of taking any action. It was very exciting to see the second group of workers walk out, saying that only because they knew they had each other’s back were they able to stand against their supervisor. You could feel the closeness of their relationships.
Red ideas spreading among Black, Latin workers
Workers complained that now that the holiday rush is over, Amazon is trying to get rid of as many workers as they can to make even more profit. Two workers are doing the work that six workers had been doing. A Latin worker said that Amazon has had him on unpaid ”vacation“ since the beginning of the year, trying to fire him or force him to quit because he injured his back after more than two years of heavy lifting and long hours.
A young Black worker in the walkout said that she originally did not want to work at Amazon. She said that she has no time for anything else besides work and that the paycheck isn’t enough to live on. She was hired with the understanding that she would be paid $18.50/hr but is only getting $16.
But she said that meeting “revolutionary-minded” coworkers and organizing against the boss has changed her life and made the entire experience worthwhile. This is what the Party means when we say build a base! Develop relationships with fellow class sisters and brothers in a way that teaches us to struggle with one another and fight the bosses, side-by-side with one another!
Workers, PL’ers rally for Amazon unionization
Meanwhile a few days later in Staten Island, the Amazon Labor Union organized a rally to support the vote for unionization at Amazon. While the ALU (Amazon Labor Union) let all the politicians speak before the workers, PL’ers and friends spoke with several workers and shared copies of CHALLENGE.
One worker at the rally said, “I’ve been working at Amazon for a year. It is not like the average job. Amazon is modern day slavery in America. Everything consists of multi-tasking to get the right items together. When you work inside Amazon, your rights don’t exist. There is no leaving your station to use the restroom, to go get a drink of water or even to shift your legs. The managers and supervisors constantly tell you your time is too much and how much time you wasted.”
Another speaker talked about a worker who wanted to leave because his wife was having a baby, and was told that he must complete his shift or he would be fired. He ended up quitting. In their campaign against the union, Amazon is trying to scare workers about job security, but with a 150 percent turnover of the workforce every year, workers already have no job security at Amazon.
Smash liberal politicians, union misleaders
The limits of union struggles were exemplified by the ALU, which only fights for economic gains and doesn’t seek to unite all workers for workers’ power. This was exemplified by the Teamsters union's lackluster efforts to mobilize more than just a handful of their workers to the rally. A United Parcel Service worker we spoke to expressed resentment towards his union saying it was weakening and failing to organize Amazon.
If union leadership represented the interests of the working class, they would be trying to organize all workers to fight like hell. While unions are important places for workers to organize class struggle and fight back, unions won’t solve workers’ problems, because whatever gains we make are only temporary under capitalism.
PLP fights alongside Amazon workers to win the right to organize so that they have some form of protection from their greedy bosses. But we need a lot more than a raise.
We need a new communist world with no Bezos’, no profits, no racism and no imperialist wars. The only real protection for workers is to seize state power with armed communist revolution. Amazon workers in the U.S. and around the world can help make this next war the last! We invite them all to march with PLP on May Day and make that world a reality.

GARY, IN—The brave actions of working-class youth in the majority-Black city of Gary have sharpened the struggle against racist capitalist attacks in education. The students of Westside Leadership Academy showed everyone the power of active fightback against the profit system’s injustice and racist neglect by staging a protest walkout on March 3. They have since been supported on a weekly basis by antiracist fighters demonstrating outside the school.
The 1972 National Black Political Convention was held at this school. Since then, the city has been controlled by one pro-capitalist politician after another. Black workers in the city have long been at the receiving end of racist legislation that affects the working class statewide. These students have pushed back against the anti-worker ideas taught to them, demanding a better existence than what capitalism can ever offer.
Members of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP), who are active in mass organization struggles in the area, have joined and supported these students. Young people have positively received CHALLENGE and been encouraged by PL’ers to speak loudly on the bullhorn about school conditions.
While learning much from the bold actions of these youth, we can never hold any illusions that the capitalist education system can be reformed to serve our class interests. Its racist and nationalist core serves to prepare working-class students for a life of exploitation, alienation or military service.
Education can only serve our needs as an enlightening and collective force when it’s freed from capitalism’s constraints. We fight for an egalitarian communist world where young people actively help lead society for the advancement of all.
Working-class youth express their needs
On the day of the walkout, students didn't hold anything back about their demands. Some shouted that they wanted better food, college information, better teachers, and water. The corporate shill superintendent has said that water fountains were closed to prevent further Covid-19 infections in the school. Instead, each student was given one small bottle of water for the entire day.
Also being protested are cases of sexist harassment, including accusations of one staff member sending inappropriate photos to students, and other staff members trying to engage in relationships with youth. Far from being opposed, this predatory sexism has been routinely brushed off by the school bosses.
Support services – already minimal before the pandemic – have been virtually nonexistent in the last two years. This includes the overbearing corporate climate that already existed in the notoriously corrupt city leadership. Students bravely spoke about the futures they wanted and how they knew officials weren't acting in their interests. PL’ers spoke candidly to the crowd about capitalism and its racist disregard for workers and youth. Students understood the role of the school-to-prison pipeline and talked about their real fears due to lack of support in all directions.
Capitalism continues to sacrifice our youth
In the wake of the student walkout, the school bosses have worked overtime to try to silence and intimidate. They immediately lied about how many students were involved in the walkout, while trying to cover up how they locked students out of the school to punish them. For the time being, the administration promised an ongoing dialogue with students to try to address their concerns, putting future actions on hold.
If one looks at the history of the school system in the city, there will be little optimism that this “dialogue” will go anywhere. Since 2017, three different emergency managers have been appointed by MGT Counseling, the company chosen by the state to manage the district to control the Gary school system. This was after many years of mismanagement by members of the Gary community school corporation and the distrust they earned from workers in the city.
Living under capitalism proves the bosses will always center their profit growth and working-class youth will not be spared in that pursuit. The corporate takeover of the school system has little to do with better support and performance of the majority of Black and working-class students, more so lining the pockets and boosting influence among the rotten capitalists.
Politicians, their cop enforcers, and public school administrators in Northwest Indiana have proven that their commitment is to money and systemic power. Youth are disenfranchised in their poverty-stricken communities, and many have lost their lives. Kemonte Cobbs, 15 years old, and Vincent Smith Jr, 16 years old, are two Black youths murdered by the kkkops in Gary.
Communism, not capitalism, is our future
Communists from PLP are active in these struggles by building relationships with teachers, students, and families, by sharing CHALLENGE and our political line. Being residents of the area, former students in these schools, and workers in the neighborhoods give us the opportunity to show youth that capitalism and all its destruction does not have to be their future. Continuing resistance and learning about communism for the defeat of the profit-driven system of capitalism are the needed lessons we will continue to push.

 This is part four of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930s the urban bourgeoisie (capitalists) of Spain, supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to re-establish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy gave Franco massive military aid.
In 1936 the International Communist Movement, called the Comintern, headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers, mainly workers from more than 60 countries into the International Brigades (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. But, in defending the Republic, they were defending capitalists. This was part of the united front against fascism, where communists united with so-called liberal capitalists against the fascist capitalists.
In the Progressive Labor Party we are against any unity with capitalists. They all have to go and the working class must rule: that’s communism.
If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers and their leadership is essential. Our class cannot destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism—without their leadership. The following continues that story:

Eluard Luchelle McDaniels was born in Mississippi in 1912. Escaping an abusive household, he left home and headed west to California to complete high school there and later study art at San Francisco State College. The social connections that McDaniels was able to develop with politicized artists soon led him to the labor movement and the Communist Party, which he joined in 1930.
As workers, none of us are predestined to take on the class struggle and become leaders in the fight against racism, sexism, and fascism. Rather, life under capitalism rains oppression and exploitation on our class and individuals make the choice to join in a collective battle against the bosses. The story of Eluard McDaniels shows how a commitment to the working class and a communist political line positively shape our life experiences towards the path of equality and liberation.
Eluard’s antiracist stance sharpens the class struggle
In 1929, McDaniels traveled to Montgomery, Alabama and New Orleans, Louisiana because he had heard of streetcar strikes over pay increases, better working conditions, and break time. He learned that there was a white headquarters and a Black headquarters, which he recognized as a fatal and flawed strategy that would doom the strike.
According to McDaniels, he approached the white strikers and said, “Negroes across the street and you across over here, and you both striking the same concern… That make no sense.” White workers were receiving 25 to 30 percent more than Black workers, doing practically the same work.
McDaniels was able to utilize an antiracist political line that convinced workers to integrate the strikers and to make sharper demands that would benefit all workers. Eventually, the police ran him out of New Orleans. But the workers won the strike. The police had to fight the white workers to get to McDaniels, who concluded that their unyielding defense was the only reason why the police couldn’t make an example out of him.
Shortly after, as the capitalist world sunk deeper into the misery of the Great Depression, he returned to the South to help organize the Alabama Sharecroppers' Union. He also made a trip to New York to bring the Scottsboro boys (nine Black youth who were falsely accused by racists and sentenced to death) to the Communist Party’s attention.
Around this same time he became involved in the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), writing short stories for a WPA publication. Far from seeing art and literature as things abstract and separate from the class struggle, McDaniels understood culture as a weapon in the hand of the working class to not just reflect but to help shape the struggle against capitalism.
To be antifascist is to be internationalist
As capitalist governments across the globe decayed into fascist dictatorships as a response to the system’s crises, McDaniels was convinced that anti-fascism and anti-racism were one and the same. “I saw the invaders of Spain [were] the same people I’ve been fighting all my life." Historian Peter Carroll quotes McDaniels as saying, "I’ve seen lynching and starvation, and I know my people’s enemies.”
In Spain, McDaniels was assigned to a transport unit as a truck driver. In early 1938 he was transferred as an infantryman to the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion and then to the (U.S.) Lincoln-Washington Battalion. Rising to the rank of sergeant he led white troops into battle, while capitalist militaries worldwide were still operating using segregated units.
During the Ebro Offensive, Spanish Loyalist troops (anti-fascist), awed by his skills at tossing grenades, gave McDaniels the nickname "El Fantastico." Wounded in his left leg, he spent the remainder of his time in Spain in hospitals.
A lifelong commitment to revolution
Upon his return to the United States, McDaniels headed for his native Mississippi, where he spoke to integrated audiences. “I told them that we have to stand together and build a human brotherhood and they applauded. It made me happy,” he later said.
McDaniels continued to face and fight racial discrimination. In 1941, he led a protest at a segregated lunch counter in Durban, South Africa. After his return from active service in World War II, he spoke on behalf of the National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards at the National Convention of Maritime Unions in May 1946, denouncing the anti-union activities of the War Shipping Administration and the Coast Guard.
During the 1960s, McDaniels led protesters to City Hall in Sacramento, California, to protest muddy sidewalks in the all-Black sections of town. Like many other Black veterans, he did not agree with the non-violence of most of the Civil Rights leadership. Since capitalism is a system that is inherently violent towards the working class, we have every right and duty to use revolutionary violence in order to defend ourselves and take state power from the bosses!
McDaniels stayed committed to struggle through the remainder of his years, working in industry until his retirement. He died in San Francisco on December 6, 1985, having left his exceptional mark on the long fight for international working-class liberation.

Sources: Peter Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; David Featherstone, “Black internationalism, international communism and anti-fascist political trajectories: African American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War” (2014); http://narratingmemory.com;http://historynewsnetwork.org; http://alba-valb.org