leader of the youth wing of the outlawed Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) were arrested by Ukrainian authorities in Kiev and could reportedly be facing execution The press office of the Security Service of Ukraine charged the two with being “propagandists” aiming to “destabilize” the internal situation in Ukraine the state accused them of acting as agents for Russia and Belarus according to information received from the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) a global organization of progressive youth groups In a statement issued Monday, WFDY said that the Kononovich brothers leaders in “our Ukrainian member organization the Leninist Communist Youth Union of Ukraine,” also known as the Komsomol had been detained “by the Ukrainian regime during the last hours.” Mikhail Kononovich is the Communist youth group’s first secretary “They will possibly be murdered in the following hours.” It called on all its member organizations around the world to denounce the arrests and demand the brothers be freed and that any execution order be rescinded The Kononovich brothers were most recently known to have participated in a demonstration in front of the U.S stop its military expansionism in Europe via NATO The government that took power in Ukraine in the wake of the U.S.-backed “Euro-Maidan” coup of 2014 outlawed the Communist Party and banned it from running candidates in elections The party’s youth group was also made illegal and its members subjected to political persecution by the police and in the courts Across the country, the government enforced a so-called “de-communization” law that not only outlawed the CPU, but also forbid the use of any Communist names or symbols in public, mandated the destruction of Soviet war memorials and prevented any teaching about the positive aspects of Soviet history in schools Instead of listening to the CPU’s pleas for negotiation the government executed a war in the east that took an estimated 15,000 lives from 2014 to 2022 CPU leader Petro Symonenko was branded a traitor by the Ukrainian government for repeatedly urging ceasefires and direct negotiations to stop the fighting The CPU called for a federalist solution to the divisions within Ukraine in the early days of the civil war, foreshadowing the Minsk Agreements The latter were meant to halt the fighting in Donetsk and Lugansk by granting autonomy to those areas but the government in Kiev never abided by the accords they remained undeterred by the government’s legal prohibitions and continued their political work In an interview featured in People’s World in November 2019 Mikhail Kononovich—one of the two activists currently being held by the state—discussed Communist Youth Union mobilizations against the privatization of public farmlands by the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky After the Soviet Union fell apart in 1990-91 the Ukrainian government abandoned the collective farm system that had defined socialist agriculture in the USSR The former collectively-owned land was distributed among the members of the farms and bans on further sales were put in place to protect small farmers from being swallowed up by corporate industrial giants The Zelensky government reversed that longstanding policy in 2019 leading to fears that Ukrainian farmland—which takes up as much space as France and Germany combined—would be gobbled up by foreign agribusiness giants Ukraine is a top wheat producer; together with Russia it accounts for about 30% of the world’s traded wheat. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing war have disrupted exports from both countries and sent global wheat prices soaring will certainly be accelerated—leading to higher profits for producers outside the conflict zone Mikhail Kononovich situated the government’s persecution of Communists within the context of the neoliberal economic policies of marketization and privatization that have been pursued since the coup of 2014 All through the 1990s and most of the 2000s the CPU was the largest party in the Ukrainian parliament and in the last election before it was banned It often stood as a roadblock to multiple governments’ attempts to sell off more of the public property and resources inherited from Soviet socialism Kononovich said the outlawing of the CPU was intended “to clear the political field of left parties so they would not interfere with lowering social standards and selling land.” Comparing the fight to the resistance against Nazi invaders during World War II “The sale of [public] land is our Stalingrad—not one step back The Kononovich family has been repeatedly targeted by both state authorities and fascist militia forces. According to a filing on record with the European Parliament while leaving flowers in 2016 at a monument to Red Army soldiers who fought against Hitler Mikhail Kononovich and other members of the Komsomol were victims of an assault by right-wing militants Kononovich suffered serious blows to the head and another member nearly lost his sight Fascist gangs attempted to pressure hospital staff not to treat the injured Communists and also regularly intimidated Kononovich’s wife and daughter at their home afterward and the conditions under which they are being held are not known Information from the CPU remains difficult to obtain due to the fighting in and around Kiev and because the party’s website and electronic communications channels have been blocked by the government since just after the war began And urge the immediate release of Mikhail and Aleksander Kononovich Important background info on the war in Ukraine: > There are no good guys in the Ukraine war > Dark days for Ukraine’s left > Kiev plans birthday parties for Nazi collaborators; Ukrainian Communists sound alarm > Ukraine Communist leader warns: “The Nazis are coming” > Ukrainian prime minister was guest speaker at neo-Nazi event Atkins is the managing editor at People's World in political science from York University in Toronto and has a research and teaching background in political economy and the politics and ideas of the American left U.S. imperialism’s new Cold War against China fosters anti-Asian racism at... 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As Kathryn Bigelow’s new dramatization of the unrest hits screens Detroiters who lived through it reflect on how far their city has come her father owned a record store and studio that recorded some of the most famous American blues and gospel of the 20th century Artists who had graced the building included John Lee Hooker and the very first gospel song recorded by the queen of soul But the family was forced to move their store when a freeway was built in the neighborhood. The new store was located on 12th Street in Detroit – just blocks away from the epicenter of where the civil unrest of 1967 would become one of the most violent and destructive disturbances in the US since the American civil war. Read more“I can remember the change in atmosphere on 12th as the younger black people had a sort of bristling energy that was very different than the old days – they were not going to take some of the humiliation and discrimination that had been endemic in the community for so long,” Music recalled “There were rebellions happening all over the country Everybody knew it was a matter of time before it happened in Detroit.” just as the cherry trees were beginning to fruit on her block Music looked outside the window and saw something she would never forget A tank driving down the streets of Detroit With the police and national guard overwhelmed by the five days of violence that would eventually leave 43 people dead more than a thousand injured and destroy 2,000 buildings President Lyndon Johnson sent in the US military The unrest had been sparked when a welcome-home party for two black Vietnam veterans held in an after-hours drinking club – known colloquially as a “blind pig” – was raided by police But the roots of the rage were much deeper Music’s record shop was looted and eventually shattered Black and white people took part in the looting Marsha Music: ‘Everybody knew it was a matter of time before it happened in Detroit’. Photograph: Alexandre da VeigaThis violence is the backdrop to Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit which focuses on the Algiers motel incident where three young black men were killed and others assaulted by white police officers claiming self-defense The three white officers and a black security guard were acquitted The film comes as Detroit is experiencing a much-touted economic resurgence. Yet one in four homes in the city has been foreclosed upon; one in six homes has had its water shut off in what the United Nations calls a “violation of human rights”; and the city sits in the single most racially segregated metro area in the US “blacks were watching a horn of plenty in front of them [in 1967] and were on the verge of being able to have a real engagement with the American Dream She mused upon 50 years – to the day – of history you do have what I would call a potentially volatile situation Those kind of situations I believe in contrast to the wealth people see penetrating the city is the type of juxtaposition that is ripe for conflict.” Policemen arrest black suspects on 12th street on 25 July 1967. Photograph: AFP/Getty ImagesThe 1967 unrest is still so politically fraught that Detroiters cannot even decide what to call it, alternatively referring to the disturbance as a riot, an uprising, or a rebellion. Former Detroit police chief and deputy mayor Isaiah McKinnon is one of those who refers to 1967 as a rebellion – an uprising against the humiliation, iniquity, and brutality inflicted on African Americans unabated since the beginning of slavery. McKinnon worked as an adviser to Bigelow’s film, and is now an associate professor at the University of Detroit Mercy, working to get young black men to continue education and become teachers. McKinnon had gone back to his middle school one day to thank a teacher when he was stopped by “the big four” – a group of four white policemen in a squad car fearful he or his parents would be arrested for filing a complaint he decided to become a Detroit police officer – to try to effect change from within Pre-1967 Detroit was considered a bastion of the black middle class and racial tolerance by many elites in politics and media Wages for African Americans were higher than average Detroit had the highest rate of black homeownership in the nation and mayor Jerome Cavanagh famously said just weeks before the disturbance that citizens don’t “need to throw a brick to communicate with city hall” “The assumption was everyone was happy,” McKinnon said McKinnon was in his second year on the force when the disturbance in 1967 erupted One of the approximately 75 black police at the time – in a force that was about 93% white – he was assigned to the precinct at the epicenter he was stopped by two white police officers Former Detroit police chief Isaiah ‘Ike’ McKinnon in his office Photograph: Alexandre da VeigaThe lead officer approached the car held a gun to his head and said: “Tonight you’re going to die Speeding away in his Ford Mustang convertible pushing the accelerator with his right hand and steering with the other McKinnon was shot at as he drove for his life “If these guys are behaving this way to me a fellow law enforcement officer,” McKinnon said “what are they gonna do to people in the street?” In a Detroit Free Press survey in the aftermath of the 1967 events, far and away the No 1 cause that drove people to destruction, behind housing segregation, employment discrimination, and abuse in stores among other humiliations, was mistreatment by police Although the Detroit police department has vastly improved its diversity with more than half of the force African American the US has recently seen a rash of large-scale civil disturbances following incidents of police misconduct And although there have been no large-scale public disturbances in Detroit since 1967, the city did recently have its own turmoil, when seven-year-old Aiyana Jones was shot dead by a bullet from a police machine gun on a no-knock raid on her apartment— the incorrect one who claimed the girl’s grandmother grabbed the gun before it went off “The whole question of police brutality is very active,” said novelist and playwright Pearl Cleage Home in Detroit from Howard University at the time of the unrest Cleage rode out the disturbance at her mother’s She remembers seeing the homes of friends burning and went to high school with Aubrey Pollard one of the slain men at the Algiers motel depicted in Bigelow’s film was “on the side of the civil rights movement that was not advocating non-violent protest … [like Malcolm X] he understood the necessity for self-defense.” After the unrest, the elder Cleage convened a “people’s tribunal” at his church, the Central United Church of Christ. The mock trial examined the events and the three white officers and black security guard acquitted of the murders. The civil rights icon Rosa Parks and prominent novelist John O Killens sat on the jury that convicted the men The atmosphere was just rage and sorrow and anger at what was happening and the fact that we didn’t seem to be able to protect ourselves and to get a police force and a mayor who were on the side of the black people in Detroit.” Cleage said she sees vast similarities to what is happening now with the killings of young black men by police all of those people are black men killed by police in questionable circumstances – and that’s putting it mildly questionable – it’s the same feeling of absolute frustration at our inability to protect ourselves from the people who are supposed to be protecting us and the same problems with the social issues around it.” She referred to a speech Donald Trump gave last week to a group of officers in which he urged them to be “rough” and “not too nice” with suspects “To have the president of the country say that’s what we need to do and have a room full of police officers applaud that that doesn’t lead anyplace but a feeling of Clashes over the removal of statues to Confederacy leaders in the United States have dominated headlines over the past month The politics of this new iconoclasm is hotly debated on the left: should statues of racists or should countries have to look their past Who decides which statues are unacceptable are more complicated than that: many statues do not date from the Civil War but were erected in the era of the Jim Crow laws as a conscious symbol of the subjugation of Black people; their current role as active rallying points for white supremacists and fascists strengthens the left case for tearing them down But while our ears are full of the sound and fury of U.S a far more thorough wave of destruction has taken place in Ukraine And there it’s the fascists who are attacking monuments to the country’s past head of Ukraine’s Institute of National Memory reported last month that 1,320 statues of Lenin had been removed—every public statue of the Russian revolutionary leader in the land—along with 1,069 “other Soviet monuments.” “The destruction of Lenin’s monuments became the ‘idée fixe’ of the regime,” Petro Symonenko leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU) Symonenko is unconvinced that tearing down statues is necessarily positive though he does wryly note that it is not merely a southern problem in the U.S.: “In New York there is a monument to General Philip Sheridan who wanted to kill all the buffalo to exterminate the Native Americans who said he only met ‘good Indians among the corpses of Indians’.” The “Maidan” uprising of 2014 was hailed by the U.S despite the fact that the president it overthrew The new government in Kiev was backed from the start by openly fascist paramilitaries and its aggressive Ukrainian nationalism and attacks on trade unionists and left-wingers (most notoriously the 42 burned alive in Odessa’s House of Trade Unions on May 2 2014) sparked a revolt in the country’s mainly Russian-speaking east The Communist Party were no fans of Yanukovych’s corruption-riddled administration but the violence and brutality of the new order is much worse: “A band of thieves has been replaced by a band of robbers,” Symonenko remarks bitterly “The regime relies on ultra-right forces and criminal organizations” (such as the fascist Svoboda and Right Sector parties or the neo-Nazi Azov and Aidan paramilitary battalions) “Their patriotism consists only of destroying even the physical destruction of dissenters.” Ukraine’s right take as their political inspiration Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) which collaborated with the Nazis during WWII who acknowledged his intellectual debt to Hitler and Mussolini Street violence and vandalism were part of Maidan from the beginning a mob led by neo-Nazis barbarously destroyed a monument to Lenin A journalist from one of the TV channels showed me a fragment of the granite asking with a smirk: ‘Do you know what this is?’ I answered: ‘These are the splinters of Ukraine.’ The Donbass is blazing in the fire of civil war And right across Ukraine there is a ‘cold’ civil war: a war between the ideologists of Hitler and the Nazi collaborators of the OUN whose leaders have always been the communists.” alongside that of monuments to Red Army soldiers and Jewish and Polish victims of the OUN is part of the “de-communization” process that has seen a concerted effort to ban the KPU the renaming of any streets with names deemed pro-Soviet and the criminalization of positive references to the Soviet Union in print Kiev’s attacks on freedom of expression have been condemned internationally including by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and Amnesty International Masterminding this process is the Institute of National Memory founded under former president Viktor Yuschenko in 2006 but since 2014 “the regime’s main tool in falsifying history and promoting neo-Nazism as state ideology,” in Symonenko’s words “People call it the institute of national unconsciousness—absence of memory,” he says “Its task is to reshape public consciousness to erase everything connected with the heroic victories of the Soviet Ukrainian people together with other peoples within the USSR restored a country destroyed by the Nazi invaders.” He compares the institute to Heinrich Himmler’s Ahnenerbe which sought to create myths about the origins and ancient past of the German race It too prattles about the “exclusivity of the Ukrainian nation,” its “superiority,” and tries to assert that Ukrainians are pure-blood Aryans Symonenko notes that pseudo-science and pseudo-archaeology is back in a big way “It’s not by chance that the media spreads nonsense about the Ukrainian origin of Jesus Christ or that the Ukrainian nation is ‘older than the pyramids’,” he sighs The institute has also worked hard to portray Russia as an eternal “enemy and aggressor” against Ukraine despite the countries’ histories being so intertwined that both trace their states back to the Kievan Rus federation with its capital at Kiev in the ninth century “School history textbooks affirm that there was no Great Patriotic War of the Soviet peoples against the Hitler hordes,” he says “No millions of Ukrainian Red Army warriors dying on the battlefield to liberate Europe from fascism there was an invasion of Ukraine by German and Soviet troops.” since the OUN and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) collaborated with the Nazis and played an active part in the Holocaust the OUN-UPA are ‘warriors of light’ waging a ‘war of liberation’ against an evil enemy Institute chief Viatrovych has repeatedly been accused by other academics of faking historical documents Jeffrey Burds of Northeastern University in Boston says that “scholars on his staff publish document collections that are falsified and have compared their transcriptions to the originals.” Burds says whole sentences that might portray Ukrainian nationalists of the past in a bad light are removed from documents His criticisms are echoed by a researcher at the Kennan Institute and Holocaust Memorial Museum in the United States “When Viatrovych was chief archivist at the SBU [Ukraine’s security service] he created a digital archive open to Ukrainian citizens and foreigners “He and his team made sure to exclude any documents from the archive that may cast a negative light on the OUN-UPA including their involvement in the Holocaust and other war crimes,” he told Josh Cohen of the publication Foreign Policy last year Because Ukraine’s history is being so thoroughly rewritten it is not merely statues of Lenin which are being torn down “Monuments to Soviet soldiers are desecrated practically every day Monuments and plaques to heroes of the resistance state and party leaders who made a huge contribution to victory over Hitler a monument to the unknown soldier has recently been damaged “In Kiev they vandalized the complex of the eternal flame in the Park of Eternal Glory to the Soldiers of World War II They defiled the monument to the liberator of Kiev General Vatutin was commanding the Ukrainian front against the Nazis when he was ambushed and killed by OUN-UPA collaborators in 1944 The UPA’s involvement in the Holocaust has been a particular embarrassment to the country’s new rulers explaining their eagerness to destroy memorials to both Polish and Jewish victims of its ethnic cleansing operation Attempts to remove tributes to the Poles who died in the Volyn massacre—the UPA had promised a “shameful death” to all Poles in Ukraine—caused protests earlier this year “The crimes of the OUN-UPA against civilians are crimes against humanity that do not have a statute of limitations,” Symonenko contends these are only the most famous crimes of Bandera and the nationalists “Wherever their foot went you’ll find a local Babi Yar.” will always maintain that hiding the truth about these crimes is unacceptable He quotes the monument to the victims at Volyn: “If I forget them He lists more examples than there is space for here—memorials to Marshal Zhukov who led the Soviet armies in the second world war to leaders of the partisan resistance against German occupation such as Sidor Kovpak and many more have been defaced or smashed But he is unsurprised by the events in Ukraine: “After all the oligarchs’ rule is now based on right-wing radical forces composed of the ideological heirs of Hitler’s henchmen “Under slogans of struggling for democracy and liberation from the totalitarian communist past the ideology of neo-Nazism is being actively seeded in Ukraine Recently the National Guard’s deputy commander said he would not condemn the Azov battalion for sporting Nazi tattoos and greeting each other with ‘Sieg Heils,’ because ‘they have their own view on the National Socialist movement in Germany and that is normal’.” It adds insult to injury that alongside the destruction of memorials to the anti-fascists of the second world war monuments are being raised and streets renamed in honor of the collaborators “The perpetuation of the names of these executioners on our streets is no smaller a crime than their original atrocities,” he says furiously please urge the progressive public to support our struggle to ensure that in other cities around the world we do not see streets named for Nazi agents and Hitlerite officers and we preserve the boulevards and avenues named in memory of those who liberated the world from the brown plague of Hitler.” This fighting spirit is a key reason banning the Communist Party has been a priority for the Ukrainian government ever since Maidan even though the party was not an ally of the Yanukovych administration the coup overthrew The KPU—which at the last pre-coup elections in 2012 won 32 seats and more than 2.6 million votes (over 13 per cent)—is now banned by a ministerial decree it considers unconstitutional from having a parliamentary presence In July, a court postponed a final decision on whether to ban the KPU outright pending a ruling from the Constitutional Court on whether the de-communization laws were in accordance with the constitution But Symonenko is not optimistic that the Constitutional Court will do the right thing “This court is completely controlled by President Poroshenko,” he sighs “and he has said his ‘main achievement’ is that the KPU is not allowed to participate in parliamentary elections.” It’s true Poroshenko cannot claim to have achieved much else The CIA says Ukraine’s mortality rate is the second-highest in the world after Lesotho’s Average wages have collapsed since 2014 while the cost of basics such as energy and food have soared Much of the case against Yanukovych was made by justifiable charges that his government was corrupt—but Symonenko says that while most Ukrainians are now poorer “the capital of officials of all ranks grows like mushrooms after rain “Corruption and embezzlement permeate all spheres of public life The cynicism and banditry of the authorities is gobsmacking eight employees at the Justice Ministry each received more than 23 million hryvnia ($883,000 USD) in ‘premiums.’ “That’s when the average monthly wage is $250 According to the audit company Ernst & Young Ukraine is the most corrupt and fraudulent country in Europe.” But he insists the communists will “fight on to victory,” whatever challenges are thrown in its way “The de-communization laws prohibit not just Soviet but international communist symbols They equate those who profess communist ideology to criminals and terrorists more than 400 criminal cases have been fabricated against communists He says that among the most poignant was the case of Alla Aleksandrovskaya first secretary of the KPU’s Kharkiv committee who was thrown into jail for nearly five months despite being unwell and in her late sixties for proposing to the city council that it appeal to the president in favor of elected local governors KPU lawyers were able to have verdicts overturned against Viktor Ryzhevol and Alexander Tsymbal two party members jailed on charges of ‘violating Ukraine’s territorial integrity’ for allegedly participating in counting votes held in the self-declared Lugansk People’s Republic The case is not a one-off: “The Communist Party will continue to fight for every comrade who is persecuted.” This is an edited version of an article originally published in Morning Star the socialist daily newspaper published in Great Britain Fascists eventually come for everyone, they don’t stop with rights activists Coalition forming in Detroit to resist rising fascist threat Video: Springsteen sings “Nueva Canción” as tribute to people of Argentina, Chile This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page was a major figure in mathematics for seven decades His research ranged over most of pure maths a topic that is fundamental to medical scanners He was an incomparable teacher and made significant advances in every field that he touched Gelfand was born to Jewish parents in the small town of Okny (now Krasni Okny) to the north of Odessa in southern Ukraine which was then a part of the Russian empire In 1930 he moved to Moscow to complete his secondary education he was not permitted to enrol as an undergraduate having (according to some sources) been expelled from school because his father Israel took a part-time job as doorkeeper at the Lenin Library and taught evening classes on mathematics The work made it possible for him to attend mathematics courses at Moscow State University He showed such talent that Andrei Kolmogorov the leading Soviet mathematician of the period His 1935 PhD thesis was in the relatively new area of functional analysis where the ideas of calculus are extended from finitely many variables to infinitely many One practical application is to partial differential equations the mathematical physicist's favourite tool for describing the natural world Another is the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics Gelfand was appointed to the Steklov Mathematical Institute and taught at the university but lost both positions temporarily through antisemitism He was elected a corresponding (low-status) member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences but it was more than 30 years before he was made a full member run independently of the university and open to anybody ran for nearly 50 years and is famous throughout the mathematical world and then Massachusetts Institute of Technology The heart of Gelfand's research was representation theory a concept of central importance in mathematics and physics A symmetry of an object is a transformation that preserves its structure and the collection of all such transformations is the object's symmetry group is highly symmetric: if you change an electron's direction of spin the laws of physics still work the same way Representation theory studies all the contexts in which a particular symmetry group can arise Its applications include subatomic particles and pattern formation – why snowflakes are six-sided and why tigers have stripes but leopards have spots The most important types of symmetry are the "classical groups" a typical example being the group of all rotations of space Gelfand solved many fundamental questions about classical groups using a mixture of algebraic and geometric methods His interests went beyond mathematics into theoretical and experimental science he started applying mathematics to cell biology setting up the Institute of Biological Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences Some of his discoveries have applications that are important for everyone: medical scanners Doctors routinely use several different kinds of scanner use beams of x-rays to obtain a three-dimensional image of the body's internal organs This is a bit like holding a semi-transparent object up to the light and using the resulting shadows to work out its true shape The first steps in this area were taken in 1917 by Johann Radon Gelfand developed Radon's ideas extensively His ideas are vital to today's medical imaging methods Oxford University was awarding him an honorary degree and – unusually for that time – he had been allowed to leave the Soviet Union to receive it So this was a rare opportunity to see the great man in action Several of us piled into a car and drove to Oxford's Mathematical Institute which was about a remarkable geometrical phenomenon Today it is interpreted as a deep phenomenon in representation theory placing limits on what is theoretically possible explaining their significance as he went along he had made a very surprising result seem natural and inevitable – a sure sign of high-quality mathematics The Soviet Union awarded him the Order of Lenin three times He won the Wolf prize (comparable to a Nobel) in 1978 and the Kyoto prize (for "significant contributions to the progress of science and the enrichment and elevation of the human spirit") in 1989 He was elected to innumerable academic bodies including the Royal Society and the US National Academy of Science He set up a distance-learning school for mathematics in the Soviet Union He considered teaching and research to be inseparable and was equally comfortable talking to schoolchildren or his research colleagues several of them now outstanding mathematicians in their own right four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren born 2 September 1913; died 5 October 2009