The devastating effects of the restoration of capitalism in the Ukraine
Comrade Tishchenko’s speech gives a graphic
account of the devastating effects of the restoration of capitalism in the
Ukraine, involving a precipitate decline in population, drastic reduction of
living standards, a dramatic decline in GDP, unprecedented levels of
unemployment, social degradation and destitution – all the things that the
freedom-loving imperialist media are totally silent about.
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Dear comrades participating
in the 16th International Congress of Trade Unions. Greetings to you all,
courageous fighters for the working class. I come as the representative of the
Ukraine, a republic of the former Soviet Union, to tell you how the Ukrainian
people have paid as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
restoration of capitalism in Ukraine, as indeed have the workers of other
republics of the former USSR. The situation of Ukrainian workers since the
restoration of capitalism and the destruction of the Soviet Union is
disastrous. Everything that was built and established under socialism has been
annihilated over the last 20 years.
Under socialism there was collective, state,
ownership of all means of production. That meant that every citizen of the Soviet Union was a co-owner of industry, the land, and everything under the soil of the
richest country in the world.
But then there was a counter-revolutionary
overthrow of all that had been achieved by renegades hailing from the top ranks
of the Communist Party who found that the socialist way of life presented a
great obstacle to their own enrichment. The slogan of ‘democracy’ was used to
mask their criminal endeavours. State ownership of the means of production was
stigmatised as ‘inefficient’ and ‘bureaucratic’ by these people. It was
declared that only private ownership was advanced and efficient. Under the guise
of seeking greater ‘efficiency’, all means of production, all land, and all
minerals were privatised and violently snatched from the hands of the people,
without any compensation. Not a single cent has been paid to the average
citizen by way of compensation for the privatisation of banks, factories,
railways and mineral deposits. This amounted in fact to the biggest robbery in
the history of humanity. The people gave privatisation the nickname of
‘thieve-isation’.
Its result is that 27 ‘great families’ have
appropriated the bulk of the wealth created by several generations of Soviet
people. What little these ‘big fish’ could not manage to devour was swallowed
by smaller predators. The greatest part, however, of our country’s huge
economic, industrial and intellectual potential was simply squandered and went
to waste.
It is no coincidence that even after 20 years, the
Ukraine has failed to return to the level of GDP it achieved in the 1990s.
In 2010 it was only at 63% of its maximum achievement in the socialist era!
Things could not be otherwise because the corrupt leadership, regardless of
political party and orientation, acting on behalf of international capital
relentlessly destroyed all the country´s productive forces throughout this
period. 12 million jobs have been lost and thousands of companies have been
destroyed.
Statistics for 1996-2008 show that during that
period 1,879 enterprises were bankrupted and closed down in the Kharkov region alone. Over the following 2 years, a further 200 enterprises at least were
annihilated, including the state enterprise Electrical Apparatus, which had
employed 15,000 workers in Soviet times. The few remaining state-owned
enterprises are under threat, including the Shevchenko electronics workshop,
the Kharkov electrical machinery plant, Proton, etc. The huge Malyshev heavy
industry workshop which previously employed 70,000 people now employs a mere
4,000. The Kharkov Aviation Plant, which in communist times produced 2
aircraft per month, has now only managed to produce 4 aircraft in the last 6
years.
All the enterprises mentioned are monstrously in
arrears with the payment of wages – €2.45 million at the Shevchenko plant (with
salaries from 2008 still remaining unpaid), €2.8 million at aircraft manufacturers,
and €1.8 million at the Malyshev plant. The tractor-building KhTZ workshop
which formerly produced over 50,000 tractors a year, employing 40,000
employees, today only produces 500-600 a year, the same weekly rate as in 1932,
the year when the plant was built! And now only 3,900 workers remain.
A mere 1,800 workers remain at the Shevchenko
electronics state enterprise from over 22,000 that were employed there in
1990. They have been driven to despair by 14 months of arrears in the payment
of their wages. On 21 and 22 March they were forced to protest, supported by
activists from the NGO ‘Labour of Kharkov’ and the All Ukrainian Union of
Workers. They blocked roads and held a demonstration through the city of Kharkov to the headquarters of the regional administration, demanding the payment of their
wages. However, the head of the administration refused to come out to meet the
workers, as a result of which the workers were forced to enter the
headquarters, at which point three top police officers tried to arrest the
organizer of the action. It would have been better for them if they had
refused to engage in such activity. The women workers held on to these
officers so furiously that I began to feel concern, and not only for the fate
of their epaulettes! Truly women are a powerful force!
Official from Kharkov province were forced by these
actions to address the problems.
Processes of destruction have affected almost the
whole of the eastern, industrial, area of the Ukraine. Makeevka, the former industrial
heart of the Donbas coal basin, has become an unimportant provincial town. In
recent years 20 of its 30 coal mines, as well as a cotton mill, the Skiff
plant, a reinforced concrete structures plant, glass, pipe-casting plants have
disappeared altogether. The metallurgical plant is still operative but employs
only 1,500 workers rather than the 20,000 it employed in 1991. As a result
Makeevka today has only 380,000 inhabitants, as compared to the 720,000 it had
in 1990.
In Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region, its ‘Alpha’
medical and military laser equipment plant, its air conditioning plant, and two
of its building contractors, ‘Donmashstroy’ and ‘Kramzhilstroy’, have
disappeared. The Kramatorsk heavy machinery plant has reduced the number of
its employees from 7,000 to 800. The Novokramatorsk heavy machinery plant
(that produces mills, walking excavators, etc.) has cut its staff numbers from
34,000 to 14,000.
The story is the same in the case of other
enterprises in the region. The Slaviansk chemical equipment plant and the
Slavianskoda plant have closed. Coke plants have been dismantled. Over 100
mines in the area are scheduled for closure. Workers desperate to find
employment are forced to work in illegal shallow mines operated by criminal gangs,
without social insurance or safety measures, risking their lives at all times.
According to official statistics there are 40,000 people unemployed. The real
figure exceeds 200,000.
In the Lugask region, 38 coal mines have survived
out of the 92 in 1990. The Linos refinery and the huge Lugansk locomotive
workshop have ceased operations. At these workshops it is not even known who
the owner is.
The same situation prevails in the Dnepropetrovsk region. Here machinery is also being destroyed. The mining equipment
workshop has ceased to exist. Yuzhmash, the massive scientific and industrial
complex that once developed and manufactured the world’s most advanced missiles
and space launchers, orbiting satellites and space vehicles, unsurpassed even
today, has reduced the number of its employees to a seventh of their previous
number. The Dnepropress workshop has reduced its workforce to one ninth. A
system of employment contracts has been introduced here that renders any
employee totally defenceless against the employer.
The situation in the Ukrainian capital looks no
better. The Bolshevik and Arsenal plants are struggling to survive.
Those plants which are still functioning are unable
to provide an acceptable work environment. For example, in the winter front
the workers of the Kharkov tractor plant and the Malyshev plant had to light
fires in the workshops in order to warm both the factory and the equipment.
And it is not only in the sectors of energy and
defence that companies are being destroyed: such industries as machine tools
and microelectronics are also affected.
It is a dreadful fact that in a country which
possesses 30% of the world’s reserves of black earth, and which has the most
favourable agricultural conditions, agricultural machinery is being destroyed.
The Kharkov plant for the manufacture of self-propelled tractor chassis, which
had a capacity of producing 100,000 tractors a year, the Hammer and Sickle
workshop for the production of engines for harvesters which used to produce
50,000 engines a year, and the Kharkov tractor engines workshop, have already
ceased to exist.
The culprit has been President Leonid Kuchma. His
decrees forcing the break-up of farms have caused a level of damage beyond what
even Adolf Hitler was able to achieve. They have impacted on the whole of
agricultural production and the rural infrastructure.
For example, official statistics of the Kharkov region show that the drop in the number of cattle exceeds that which followed the
Nazi occupation: in 1990 the number of cattle in the area was 1,203,800, but in
2009 this had reduced to a mere 101,400, one twelth of the previous number.
Cows numbered 371,900 in 1990 but in 2009 there were only 40,000, i.e., a ninth
of the former number. Milk production in 1990 was 10,299,000 quintals. Now it
is only a sixth of that, namely 1,683 quintals in 2009.
The new ‘efficient’ private owners reject
scientific methods of farming and crop rotation but are instead growing
dollar-earning export-oriented wheat, sunflower seed, corn, canola. They are
preparing a great famine for the people. Sadly the Ukraine is now forced to
buy from abroad such victuals as meat, vegetables, sugar, etc. – all products
which in Soviet times used to be produced in sufficient quantities not only for
consumption in the Ukraine but for other Soviet Republics also. In those days,
for example, 6.5 million tons of sugar were produced annually, but today this
has fallen to 1.5 million tons. The changes scheduled by the top state
authorities that will among other things permit foreigners to buy land will be
the death knell for what remains of Ukrainian agriculture. It will be an
unpardonable crime against not only the present generation but against future
ones also.
An even greater injustice that occurs, both in town
and country, is effected through the so-called informal, or illegal, sector.
The government admits that almost half the economy relies on the informal
sector. It follows that the employees in this sector, also more than half of
the total, are almost entirely unprotected. There are no formal conditions of
employment, their experience is not officially recorded, they are not entitled
to paid leave or sick pay. In case of injury or other disaster they receive no
benefits. They are paid in cash in brown envelopes, without any contribution
being made to pension or other funds. For informal workers, trade unions are
out of the question. In fact half of the workers in the Ukraine have the status of illegal immigrants in their own homeland.
Is it any wonder that so many years after its
so-called independence the population of the Ukraine has declined by 6 million?
The result of capitalist reform has been that the Ukraine is now the European country with the lowest living standards. The government claims
it cannot afford healthcare, nor education, nor scientific research, nor
military expenditure, nor housing construction, nor housing maintenance or
communal services, nor support for sport or the arts. There is no money to pay
pensions, benefits, or to increase salaries and allowances. Yet enough money
was there in Soviet Ukraine to pay for all of this.
It is notorious that under capitalism trade unions
lack the militancy to defend the interests of workers, always taking the side
of the bosses, and thus often becoming complicit in the destruction of the
enterprise itself. One can count on the fingers of one hand the times when
such unions have actually mobilised workers for action. The current chairman
of the Ukrainian Trade Unions Federation is simultaneously a member of
parliament representing the region’s governing party in the Ukrainian
parliament.
In these circumstances, it would be futile to
expect action from such unions. In this year’s protests against the Tax Code,
or health workers’ protests demanding decent salaries, etc, no credit can be
accorded to the trade unions which always collaborate with the government in
power. Trade unions have ceased to speak for working people or to defend their
interests. Therefore they will be forced either to change their behaviour of
find themselves bereft of membership. In the meantime they are parasites on the
contributions forced out of rank and file union members.
Where official trade unions fail, independent ones
appear. But they too are often controlled by one bourgeois political party or
another. As a result the workers themselves find themselves forced to act as
protectors of employees, rights, joining together in community organisations.
One such organization is ‘Labour Kharkiv’ – a regional organisation (of which I
am the chairman) and another is the Ukrainian Workers’ Union. There are cells
of these organisations at many large industrial enterprises.
It seems, however, that the current leaders of the
official unions are not satisfied with the damage they have already caused.
Otherwise how could they be supporting the so-called ‘pension reform’ that is
being undertaken at the behest of the IMF, raising the age of retirement and
eliminating the state guarantee of pension payments? … How can they be
supporting the new Labour Code which increases the merciless exploitation of
workers by increasing hours of work and abolishing what remains of workers’
protection from the arbitrary whims of the employer, enabling workers to be
dismissed without the consent of the union? And in the government’s Housing
Code, rents will be increased, with penalties being imposed giving rise to
debts that will lead to people being thrown out of their apartments.
Previously all housing was given to people by Soviet Power. This is not the
case with the current Satanic Power!
Since 1992 the Ukraine has been in the grip of the
IMF, obediently dancing to the tune of western capital. As a result the Ukraine is in 6th place of nations most likely to default on their sovereign debts, its
external public debt amounting to $54.6bn, while its total foreign debt has
reached $111.6bn. The Ukrainian authorities do not appear to have realised
that no country in the world has, while following IMF prescriptions, ever
avoided poverty or falling inevitably into the noose of indebtedness to this
financial monster.
Therefore successive representatives of the
bourgeois class implemented all the IMF prescriptions, resulting not only in an
appalling deterioration in the standard of living of most working people but
also in a loss of efficiency in production and the destruction of productive
forces. No country anywhere in the world has engaged in such a frenzy of
destruction of machinery, equipment, whole factories, agricultural machinery
and irrigation systems, turning them into scrap metal. No country has so
disparagingly rejected its system of training of workers. As a result of this
policy, a catastrophic aging is taken place of the workforce and the natural
link between generations, the transfer of skill and knowledge,have been
interrupted, which creates enormous difficulties for the future. It is as
though some evil spirit has dedicated itself to destroying the working class
for good.
This fact is not hidden. Back in 2000, the President
of the French Senate, speaking to the Ukrainian parliament, set out what he
deemed to be the desirable priorities for the Ukraine: metallurgy, chemicals
and agriculture. The rest, according to the bosses of international
imperialism, the Ukraine does not need. During 20 years, their lackeys, the
Ukrainian officials, went beyond the expectations of the transnational
corporations and international imperialism insofar as destruction of the Ukraine’s economic potential was concerned. It should be noted, however, that the
bourgeois class which developed over these 20 years, never lost sight of its
own profits. Today many members of this class have become billionaires ranking
high among the world’s richest people. There is perhaps no other country in Europe where the ratio of the income of the poorest and the richest is, at 1:40 so unfair.
But if you visited the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, you might think that what I, Tishchenko, am saying is not entirely true, or even not
true at all, because you would see luxury cars costing between $100,000 and $1
million, and you find more such vehicles in Kiev than bicycles in Athens. The bourgeoisie acquired these foreign cars with the money taken from workers.
The time will come when we are able to say; ‘Hand it all back, it isn’t
yours’. We, the representatives of the left labour movement, are upholding
advanced Marxist-Leninist theory, and are well aware that the only solution for
the Ukraine, its only escape from severe crisis, is revolutionary change, which
is also the case for other former Soviet republics. Paradoxically, however,
society is not yet ready for such a change.
We have a great deal of work to do within
the protesting labour movement to defend the gains of socialism, to fight
against the injustice and lawlessness that have become commonplace in modern Ukraine! The experience of our colleagues from around the world is certainly useful for us
in our work.
Therefore, the labour movement in the Ukraine welcomes any expression of solidarity and support from the international trade
union movement, in particular from the 16th International Congress of Trade
Unions.
However, we understand that we have a great deal
more to do. The year 2017 will be the 100th anniversary of the greatest of all
revolutions – the Great October Socialist Revolution, and it is approaching
fast. We have every reason to benefit from the experiences of our grandfathers
and great-grandfathers so that we can repeat the revolutionary transformation.
Long live the global labour movement !
Long live the inevitable
victory of socialism over the darkness of capitalism !
9
April 2011, Pavel Tishchenko, Ukraine.