Trotsky, later, quotes from an internal document submitted by Khitarov, to the Fifteenth Congress of the CPSU, when he had just returned from China.
“Say-O came to the comrades in Shanghai and told them that there was a military coup in preparation, that Chiang Kai-shek had summoned him to headquarters, had given him an unusually cold reception and that he, Say-O, would not go there any longer – because he feared a trap. Chiang Kai-shek proposed to Say-O that he get out of the city with his division and to go to the front; and he, Say-O, proposed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party that they agree that he should not submit to Chiang Kai-shek’s order. He was ready to remain in Shanghai and fight together with the Shanghai workers against the military overthrow that was in preparation. To all this, our responsible leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Duxiu included, declared that they knew about the coup being prepared, but that they did not want a premature conflict with Chiang Kai-shek. The First Division was let out of Shanghai, the city was occupied by the Second Division of Bai-Sung Gee and, two days later, the Shanghai workers were massacred.”
This report, however, was excluded from the Minutes of the Congress, because it was not simply damning of the Chinese leaders, but of Stalin and the Comintern leadership that was directing them! In fact, as Trotsky, again, later, details, not only did the communists form this government in Shanghai, not only were they warned of the coming coup, but they had arms, and the ability to have utilised divisions in the forces of the KMT. Instead, they did nothing, and the main reason was not wanting to alienate Chiang Kai Shek, whose representative still sat inside the Comintern! The coup presaged a period of White terror, by the KMT, rather like the White Terror, in Russia, unleashed by the forces of Kolchak and his supporters from the imperialist armies of Britain, France and the United States.
During the White Terror of the KMT, their reactionary politics was shown by the fact that they targeted women with short hair, who had opposed the barbaric process of foot-binding. They would cut off their breasts and shave their heads, before displaying their corpses as a means of terrorising the populace. These were the reactionary forces that British imperialism was supporting in China. The White Terror saw 10,000 communists murdered within 20 days, in Changsha, and in the next three years, 300,000 people were killed in Hunan, with whole families murdered, and young women sold into prostitution by the KMT.
The Stalinists, of course, could not acknowledge that their popular front strategy had been responsible for allowing this to happen, just as they could not acknowledge that the same approach of cosying up to the leaders of the TUC, via the ARC, had derailed the 1926 General Strike, in Britain, by creating illusions in those leaders, rather than preparing the workers for their inevitable betrayal, and need to build rank and file, revolutionary organisations, defence squads, leading up to the creation of soviets, the basis of which already existed, in Britain, in the form of the Labour and Trades Councils.
In Ukraine, of course, there is no actual popular front government, just the corrupt, right-wing government of Zelensky, against which even Kerensky's Provisional Government, in 1917, would look left-wing. It is not a matter of warning Ukrainian workers to prepare for some future coup or betrayal by that government, as the Bolsheviks had to do in 1917, in Russia, and in China, in 1927, or of the betrayal by the TUC, in 1926, though a more serious attack on Ukrainian workers, by Zelensky is not out of the question. Rather, in Ukraine, it is already the case that Zelensky's government is attacking Ukrainian workers, and yet Ukrainian reformists and centrists are still supporting it, on the basis of a subordination to it, in the name of a bloc for the purpose of national independence, in a war with Russia, i.e. the position of social-patriots in WWI and II, of the Stalinists in China, in 1925-7, in Spain in 1936, Chile in 1973, and so on. And they are supported in that by the USC.
Now, its quite true that, in 1914, revolutionaries opposed the war, voted against war credits, and so on, and yet, as workers were conscripted into armies, revolutionaries were amongst them. We are not pacifists, and the class struggle, to win workers conscripted into those armies goes on, as we try to get them to turn their guns on their own ruling class. Until such time that we overthrow that ruling-class they will have their wars, just as, until we overthrow capitalism, their will be capitalist production, and workers will be drafted into it, because they must live. We are not hippy drop-outs, trying to opt out of that reality, and so, just as we too work alongside other workers, so until such time as we are strong enough to establish our own, independent, workers militia, it is necessary to stand alongside workers in those armies.
But, there is a difference, as Lenin sets out in Left-Wing Communism, between voluntarily making compromises, and making compromises forced on you by current weakness. The support given by the USC, and those amongst the Ukrainian “Left” is not a compromise forced upon them by weakness, but a voluntary choice to support their own ruling-class, as did the social-patriots in WWI and II.
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