Vladyslav Starodubtsev reports :

Two days ago Democratic Left, Democratic Socialists of America’s online publication,  ran Eric Lee’s article about his recent visit to Ukraine. It was entitled “Notes from Kyiv: Which side are we on?”

DSA has now answered that question — by removing the article from its website.

Thanks to Des Derwin and Adam Novak for drawing our attention to this Undemocratic Anti-Socialist Censorship hatchet job.

We are advised this is the result of a decision taken by the organisation’s National Political Committee.

The full article is below; a link is here :

http://www.ericlee.info/dsa/?fbclid=IwAR3uFMDynjwMNYD9aAtVHIiHGflnmBjV6RSqOpH8yf99w6chNJA6un6aIa4_aem_AXOhKIsBXHEKZAELbQbA7y15Eqz3nYQ6al86Y8NcbhOYnUarU37W1mjRCyJ863dmZTY&fs=e&s=cl

We are advised that the long-standing editor of Democratic Left, Maxine Phillips, has resigned in protest.

Notes from Kyiv: Which side are we on?

September 26, 2023 by Eric Lee

As I walked around Kyiv on a beautiful, sunny morning in early September, I noticed the scaffolding in the city’s squares.  Statues had been covered up to protect them from bomb damage.  Later, I saw a statue with no protection around it– a graffiti-covered memorial to a Red Army general whose name nobody remembered. I was told that this statue had been covered by protective scaffolding before the war.  The protection was removed when the war broke out.  There was some hope that Russian bombs might solve the problem of what to do with this relic of Soviet rule.

You cannot understand the war in Ukraine without knowing its history. This was made very clear to me in a conversation I had with Olesia Briazgunova, who works for one of Ukraine’s two national trade union centers, the KVPU (Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine).  I suggested that I saw some similarities between the situation in Ukraine today and the Spanish Civil War.  

Olesia stopped me right there and  asked if there had been genocide in Spain.  I said there hadn’t been. She said, “Well there’s genocide here — and the Russians have been trying to wipe out the Ukrainian nation for a very long time.”   I thought of Stalin’s terror-famine of the early 1930s, which Ukrainians call the Holodomor, and which they rightly consider an act of deliberate genocide.  She had a point.