1/ The NATO war against Russia in #Ukraine, now in its third year, has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. It rests on monstrous historical & political lies, chief among them that this war is about "democracy" and has no relevant pre-history. 2/ Critical to an understanding of this war is the 2014 far-right coup in Kiev. In this article on today's @WSWS_Updates, a Ukrainian socialist reviews the historical background & implications of this event: wsws.org/en/articles/20…

1/ Given the glorification of #Navalny by the pseudo-left hangers on of imperialism & the media, it is worth examining his politics. Far from being a democrat, he embodied the alliance between fascist forces & sections of the oligarchy, upon which imperialism bases its intervention in that region. 2/ As the son of a Red Army officer, Navalny was born in 1976 into the privileged layers of the Soviet bureaucracy. His family participated in the restoration of capitalism which plunged the masses of workers into misery.
wsws.org/en/topics/even…

The term “Holodomor” is widely deployed now in the anti-Russian war propaganda, but most people don’t know its history or meaning. This 🧵 will sum up the main historical and political issues involved. 1/
👇 On a linguistic level, the term simply means “death by hunger”. In this sense, it is certainly applicable to the horrific famine that ravaged Soviet Ukraine and many other parts of the USSR in the early 1930s. 2/

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the heroic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The uprising was led by socialist Zionist, social democratic and communist youth. 1/ It took the Nazis almost 1 month to suppress the uprising.
At least 13,000 people were killed by the Germans & their helpers; half of them were burned alive or suffocated as the ghetto was set aflame.
Ukrainian mercenaries, the Trawniki, played a major role in the massacre. 2/

I was very pleased to be able to conduct this important interview with historian Christian Gerlach, one of the world’s leading experts on the Nazi war against the Soviet Union and the Holocaust, for the @WSWS_Updates 1/
wsws.org/en/articles/20… Over the past 3 decades, Gerlach’s research has been critical in shaping our understanding of the crimes of Nazism. Every page in his voluminous writings on the crimes of Nazism reads like an indictment of German imperialism and the entire German state apparatus. 2/

The Ukrainian Rada celebrated the anniversary of the Ukrainian fascist Stepan #Bandera by tweeting an image of Valerii Zaluzhnyi, head of the armed forces, & a Bandera quote: “The complete & final victory of Ukr. nationalism will come when the Ru empire ceases to exist.” 1/ Zaluzhnyi, who is overseeing an army that is de facto co-led and armed by NATO is well-known for his admiration of Ukrainian fascism and has repeatedly been photographed with far-right paraphernalia. 2/ --> wsws.org/en/articles/20…

The series on @TimothyDSnyder's Bloodlands is now concluded. The last part deals with the political implications of this work of right-wing, imperialist propaganda and its assault on all the fundamental principles of history as a science. 1/ wsws.org/en/articles/20… I urge you to check out and study this timeline. It is divided into two parts: The first provides an overview of the struggle of the ICFI against historical falsification. The second is a chronology of the period covered but distorted in Bloodlands.2/ wsws.org/en/special/pag…

This is the 4th installment of the series on @TimothyDSnyder Bloodlands. It deals with the arguably most sinister aspect of this book: the deliberate attempt to downplay the role of Eastern European collaborators -- esp in Ukraine -- in the #Holocaust. 1/ wsws.org/en/articles/20… Snyder not only minimizes the Nazis' persecution of German Jews. He ignores the historical & political origins of the anti-semitism of both the Nazis and their far-right allies in Eastern Europe. 2/

Part 3 of this analysis of @TimothyDSnyder's Bloodlands exposes his extraordinary minimization of the crimes of Hitler's Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union. 1/
#Ukraine #historyteacher #historians
wsws.org/en/articles/20… Again, Snyder conceals from his readers what the historical scholarship has established: TheNazi war of annihilation against the Soviet Union was a criminal endeavor of imperialist aggression & counterrevolution, that had been prepared for by the entire German state & army. 2/

This is part 2 of the review of @TimothyDSnyder's Bloodlands. As part of his false equation of Stalinism with both socialism and fascism, he distorts and lies about one of the most critical aspects of 20th century history: The Stalinist Great Terror. 1/ wsws.org/en/articles/20… Snyder completely ignores Stalin's political persecutions, which primarily targeted the Trotskyist opposition, as well as members of the Bolshevik Party & Communist International, thus obscuring the fact that the terror was essentially a political genocide of socialists. 2/

This is the first part of a review of @TimothyDSnyder Bloodlands. Snyder has played a central role in the NATO war propaganda against Russia over Ukraine & this book has been advertised as the “essential historical background” to the war. 1/ wsws.org/en/articles/20… Snyder claims to present a work of historical scholarship. In reality, he distorts, refutes or ignores the principal findings of historical research into the crimes of Nazism, Eastern European fascism & Stalinism that has been produced over the past 3 decades. 2/

Today, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality published a statement: A call to youth throughout the world: Build a mass movement to stop the Ukraine war! 1/13
wsws.org/en/articles/20… Millions of workers and youth around the world war horrified, disgusted and concerned at what is happening in front of their eyes. They are opposed to war and a social system that offers nothing to them but mass death and suffering, but they do not know how to fight it. 2/13

Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the head of the same #UkrainianArmy that is supposedly defending "democracy" and "freedom" has been repeatedly photographed with symbols and paraphernalia associated with Ukrainian #fascism & neo-Nazism. 1/7
#UkraineRussiaWar #нетвойне This is Zaluzhnyi in a military office with soldiers. In the room, there are busts and portraits of the Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera and other Nazi collaborators. Last year, Zaluzhnyi employed the former head of the neo-fascist Right Sector as his advisor. 2/7

1/ 100 years ago, on September 22 1922, Joseph Stalin wrote a letter to Vladimir Lenin that directly refutes the lie that Stalin represented the continuity of Lenin: In fact, the Soviet Union was founded in opposition to the national chauvinism of Stalin. 2/ In the letter, Stalin demanded the complete economic and political subordination of the Soviet republics of Ukraine, the Caucasus and other regions, to the central apparatus in Moscow. In the perhaps most revealing formulation, Stalin wrote:

Today's edition of the @WSWS_Updates carries three sharp & important comments on the death of #QueenElizabethII.
Chris Marsden's comment on the the #queensfuneral draws a parallel to that of Edward VII in 1910. 1/
wsws.org/en/articles/20… The bombastic spectacle preceded the outbreak of WWI by just 4 years, followed by the overthrow of the Tsars in Russia in 1917 and the German Kaiser in 1918. Similarly, the glorification of monarchy, pomp & backwardness today heralds nothing so much as war & revolution. 2/

1/ 98 years today, on September 2, 1924, Mikhail Glazman, Trotsky's closest collaborators during the Civil War, shot himself bc he had been expelled from the party, based on false accusations. He was the first Trotskyist who was driven to death by the Stalinist bureaucracy. 2/ Glazman was a remarkable representative of a generation of revolutionaries who played a key role in the Left Opposition. Shaped by the experience of the civil war, fought under Trotsky's leadership, they were unwavering in their commitment to the revolution, honest, and firm.

1/ Mikhail Gorbachev will go down in history as the executor of the final act of the Stalinist betrayal of the October revolution: the pro-capitalist "perestroika" policy which led to the destruction of the Soviet Union. No one can understand his role w/o studying the documents 2/ written by the ICFI 35 years ago. In contrast to all the petty bourgeois cheerleaders of Gorbachev, the ICFI recognized in "perestroika" a move by the bureaucracy toward capitalist restoration. This analysis was summed up as early as March 1987: wsws.org/en/special/lib…

1/ It speaks volumes about the level of intellectual & political degradation and disorientation among America's so called "public intellectuals" that
@jasonintrator, a supposed expert on fascism and Yale professor, can make such an extraordinarily disoriented statement. 2/ There is no question that anyone in West Germany in the 1980s would inevitably run into Nazis since they had been allowed to run much of the country by US imperialism after WWII. But, unlike Stanley, many would refuse to have "polite dinners" with them.

1/This is a horrifying image of a pogrom in Lviv on July 1, 1941, that was encouraged by the Nazis but principally carried out by Ukrainian nationalists -- above all the OUN. The same organization the @nytimes and @TimothyDSnyder now want you to believe wasn't that big of a deal. 2/ Historian John-Paul Himka wrote on this pogrom: "The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) set up a short-lived government in Lviv on 30 June headed by a vehement anti-Semite. It simultaneously plastered the city with leaflets encouraging ethnic cleansing."

1/ Ukrainian & Russian workers share a long & powerful revolutionary history. Trotksy's Left Opposition enjoyed enormous support in the Ukrainian working class. The following is a thread with excerpts from letters by workers in Soviet Ukraine from 1926-7. #UkraineRussiaWar 2/ On 1 May, 1926, a worker at a Ukrainian sugar refinery wrote to the City Council of Kiev: "I propose that we rename "KIEV" to the city of "TROTSKIEV". As Trotskiev, the city will no longer recall the mythical “Kiev”...

On June 21, it will be 80 years since the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Oistrakh played this stunning work in Leningrad, under conditions of a Nazi siege & starvation. When a shrapnel came through the window, people kept listening, so he kept playing Oistrakh, Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels - they all played for the Red Army and civilians in the rear during the war. I don't think their unique intensity in music making can be explained out this shared historical experienc & the power of music & culture