Letter from the Union of Communists of Ukraine to comrades from the Russian Communist

Workers' Party
Dear comrades!
At this critical moment, when the instigators of imperialist war managed to pit the peoples of the
two, until recently, fraternal republics that founded the Soviet Union, the Russian Federative
Soviet Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, against each other. The
republics which made the greatest contribution to its great deeds - industrialization, the victory
over German Nazism, conquest of outer space, development of unique Soviet social relationships,
creation of the outstanding Soviet culture - we address to you, the rank-and file communists, who
are just like us do not seek comfortable seats in the Duma, Verkhovna Rada, or local parliaments;
who do not wait for any approval of those in power; with whom we “will share the glory", and to
whom "socialism, built in battles, will be a common memorial".
For almost three decades, professing the principles of proletarian internationalism, revolutionary
Marxism and historical continuity, the Union of Communists of Ukraine has been both an ally and
a structural unit of the Russian Communist Workers' Party.
We were together when, within the Communist Initiative Movement and the Marxist Platform in
the CPSU in the early 1990s, we tried but failed to save the Party and our Soviet Motherland from
destruction. Together we share this historical guilt of failing to raise the people to fight and both
of us bear the worst possible punishment - the loss of our socialist Motherland.
Over the next two decades we stayed together, though each in his own shard of the USSR , at
rallies and demonstrations, at factory checkpoints, in pickets, at lectures in labor collectives; in our
personnel apartments, turned into editorial offices for producing leaflets, bulletins, the magazine
Marxism and Modernity, the newspaper Workers' Russia, and other publications.
We were one in our not recognizing as communist the parliamentary parties of the Communist
Party of the Russian Federation and the Communist Party of Ukraine; debunking their political
conformism and ideological revisionism. We were united in denouncing these parties as
opportunist; both of us shared an assessment of them as "petty-bourgeois at the beck and call of
the big bourgeoisie". Time has confirmed our common rightness: the road of these parties is the
road of a gradual slide into the mire of bourgeois parliamentarism and rejection of class principles;
the names of their leaders have become nominal, symbolizing the betrayal of the cause of the
proletariat.
We were united in our assessments and actions (albeit with some time lag on part of the RCWP
leadership) when the Maidan roller went through Ukraine in 2014, towards which the working-
class Donbass rose and stopped the roller in its tracks. When the masses in the Donbass put forward
pro-Soviet field commanders from their ranks who were organizers of combat units: people from
the people - the very same Soviet people who, remaining loyal to their proletarian flair and the
heroic tradition of the Donbas anti-fascist resistance, did not submit to the offensive of extreme
reaction, paying the ultimate price for this - the lives of thousands of heroes.
Those members of the RCWP who had correctly assessed the situation in the heat of the moment,
joined the Working Group and made a significant contribution to the anti-fascist resistance in
Donbass both in word and deed: by making dozens of trips to its cities and front lines, by
propagating Communist ideas, by setting up Communist groups and organizations, distributed
communist press, and provided versatile assistance to fighters. The members of the Working
group went to Donbass as if they went the workplace, and not out of idle curiosity, or as extreme

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tourists - not to shoot at targets with combat weapons and have a drink or two from their hospitable
hosts: our comrades travelled to Donbass under shelling, in the hot in 20-degree cold weather,
under pouring rain and snow, sometimes across three borders, bending under the load of
newspapers, magazines and warm clothes for the fighters, with the money collected by the
workers. It is the fruit of their work, their contacts that are now being used by those who are hiding
behind the opinion of some Donetsk and Luhansk residents, still clinging to the cobweb of a
ghostly hope for "Big Brother" to justify their support for the military aggression of the bourgeois
Russian Federation.
What is wrong with the leadership of the Russian Communist Worker's Party today? Where have
revolutionary integrity, internationalism, conviction, and honesty gone? Where has communist
honor gone? We feel ashamed watching after their political actions: entering into alliances with
dubious and openly reactionary political forces, inconsistent, non-communist actions, leading the
party to lose its image as a proletarian party. We are writing to you in the face of the imminent
threat of a complete political degeneration of the RCWP, its definitive departure from its class
positions and, therefore, an immediate threat of complete ideological degradation and the
inevitable disintegration of the Party.
This degradation can also be traced on the level of personal morality of the leadership - the
shameless manipulation of the name of Tamila Yabrova, Comrade Rose; attempts to hide behind
her undeniable authority, bright name, and glorious deeds to support their, in our opinion,
fundamentally erroneous position. Even in the eulogy published after her death, her name was
used by the leadership to settle an old score with Cherepanov (it reads that Yabrova denounced the
position of the RCWP, omitting, at the same time to mention that she equally blamed in this split
the top leadership of RCWP as well); meanwhile in a Skype conversation with her in the presence
of witnesses late 2020-early 2021 comrade Tyulkin made the offensive remark that she had
allegedly "sold out to Cherepanov" (given that the Tyumen organization had helped publish
“Marxism and the Present Day” journal, the only militant Marxist theoretical and practical journal
in the entire post-Soviet space, on several occasions).
V.A. Tyulkin hopes that omrade Yabrova will no longer be able to prevent such manipulations,
but this is not the case. All the Marxist dialectics of her approach in her assessments of world
events and Party affairs, so fully and vividly realized in her speeches at internal Party and
international theoretical events, in discussions with the leading figures of the international
communist movement, show what position she would have taken now: the resolute condemnation
of the imperialist war unleashed and the struggle with imperialism fraught with it.
Comrade Tyulkin is silent about the serious disagreements between the leadership of the RCWP
and the UCU, which lasted all the last years of T. Yabrova's life - both in relation to theoretical
work, organizational work, the emphasis on elections, and the half-hearted and inconsistent work
with the Donbas comrades. These disagreements became so deep that Comrade Tyulkin
announced that he was resigning from the editorial board of Marxism and the Present Day, and
comrade Yabrova announced that she was resigning from the Central Committee. Moreover,
having taken the situation in the Party hard, she raised the question several times before us whether
the UCU should leave the RCWP, and each time she decided, for the sake of preserving the Party
unity, to wait and try once again to change the minds of former like-minded comrades.
It is not for the first time in history that an imperialist war has become more than an ordeal - a
watershed, approaching which both left-wing political figures and whole parties either fell into
oblivion (such as the social democratic parties of the First World War times and the parliamentary

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parties that emerged in the former Soviet republics in the 1990s), or stayed in line in the
revolutionary battles.
A complete distortion of the COMINTERN Leninist doctrine of imperialist war and the position
of the parties is the provisions put forward by the RCWP about "absolutely bad and not so bad
imperialism". The RCWP leadership has picked up with unwavering stubbornness the slogan of
"denazification" so skillfully manipulated by the Russian bourgeois authorities, who openly
sympathize with fascist philosophers, politicians and war criminals. Is all this for the sake of a
shameful pre-election alliance with the opportunist CPRF and KPU, and moreover - with the
Limonovites and other reactionary and pro-fascist "patriotic" filth?
Comrades! By supporting such pseudo-denazification, you are supporting the destruction of
Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure, and the deaths of civilians. Was this the military tactics
of the Soviet Red Army during the liberation of Germany in 1945? No, it was diametrically
opposed to the actions of the anti-Hitler coalition allies, who bombed dozens of German cities -
Dresden, Hamburg, Magdeburg, Bonn, Dortmund, Miesburg, Nuremberg, etc. Today in Ukraine,
dozens of cities have been destroyed or semi-destroyed as a result of the invasion: Kharkiv,
Mariupol, Irpen, Volnovakha, Izyum, Popasna, Rubizhne, Severodonetsk, Artemivsk...
Who in Kyiv has been denazified by the destruction of the energy and water supply systems? The
fascist Ukrainian authorities? Not at all - they are quite comfortable with their autonomous supply
of any resources. The trouble is with the residents of the city, with the most unprotected ones:
those who do not have personal transport, money savings, and especially health to bring water to
the n-th floor of a Soviet high-rise without a working elevator, or to get hold of electric generators;
those who have neither cottages, nor even small summer houses with ovens to get away from the
city and wait out the cold. There are many such families in the capital, especially pensioners who
were working in Soviet enterprises for most of their active lives and did not accepted the new
Ukrainian nationalist "values".
What else do the patriotic "anti-fascist" pro-war advocates support? Do they happen to support the
denial the right of the Ukrainian people to a national identity? Just like in Tsarist Russia, and not
at all like in Soviet Russia. The RCWP has not officially commented on these disgusting passages
of the Russian president.
We, the majority of the UCU, which the RCWP leadership has dubbed (sometimes several times
on the same page) with the labels "backsliding from class positions", "opportunists", "anti-war
advocates", etc., it is from a class-based, internationalist position that we declare:
- We deny any such accusations against us, considering them to be a Jesuit turning from a sick
head to a healthy one. We also consider it comradely unethical, even unacceptable, when in a
discussion on the most serious fundamental issues of our time the opponents get personal,
especially discuss the details of personal biographies with third parties at times when this threatens
the personal safety of Ukrainian comrades.
- We have exhausted possibilities for discussion with the party leadership of the RCWP (these
have been attempted at several public international events and in personal correspondence). We
have not received a single substantive response to our arguments, apart from the fact that we have
"too many words" or the absolutely absurd and insulting accusation that we allegedly "wish defeat
for Donbass".
- We consider it impossible for us to remain in the ranks of a party that has tainted itself with the
tactics of tailgating its bourgeois government and supports the fratricidal slaughter unleashed by

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the imperialists in brutal competition for resources and political hegemony, in which the
representatives of the proletariat on both sides of the front die in the first place.
- We continue the struggle against imperialism in the ranks of the world communist movement.
Above all, shoulder to shoulder with those revolutionary parties whose glorious history of
intransigence in matters of agreement with the bourgeoisie and whose authority make it possible
to mobilize the working masses for active action against the arms supplies that are fanning the
hotbed of imperialist war on the territory of Ukraine.
- We know that there are comrades in the RCWP who have a different point of view, and in case
their position prevails, and the party changes its assessment of the current situation, and more
importantly its current tactics, we will again be together in the service of the proletariat in the
forms that correspond to the historical period in which we have had the opportunity to live and act.
Till then our paths diverge.
- Because of the repeated shift in the emphasis of the summer party schools from training for class
battles to training for general and local elections - in simple terms, a shift from training for the
future - to training for the moment - we take responsibility for the development, preparation, and
implementation of party training for young comrades.
- Comrades are kindly requested to take special note that since our former comrade in charge of
the UCU website remains loyal to the RCWP leadership and posts materials that contradict our
line of thought, this website is no longer the official site of the UCU. We have set up a new website
called "Rosengarten" (Garden of Rose) at https://rosengartenjournal.com
Approved by decision of the general meeting of the UCU
03-28 November 2022