Leonid Kuchma expelled from Ukraine’s Communist Party

Ukraine’s Communist Party, which had been banned after the failure of the Emergency Committee (known for the Russian abbreviation of GKChP), held a session on Saturday. The presidium of Ukraine’s Supreme Rada had issued a decree on prohibiting the Communist Party prohibition on August 30, 1991. On December 27, 2001, the Constitutional Court declared the prohibition invalid. Saturday’s session was called to rehabilitate the Communist Party. In addition, the communists decided to expel incumbent Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, first Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, and Chairman of the Ukrainian parliament of the third convocation Ivan Plyusch from the party. The resolution says that the mentioned people could never be called real Communists and that they used the party for their careers. However, the same things can be said about many people, Ukrain's top officials among them, and many of them are consequently to be expelled from the party now. Indeed, the majority of the Ukrainian political establishment, which is blamed of today’s poor state in Ukraine, belonged to the Communist Party or the Communist Youth Union in the past. Does the parliament mean to say that these people were not real communists as well? Ukraine considers Pyotr Simonenko to be its real communist and is closely watching the way he struggles for the rights of workers nowadays, and conclusions are drawn at that.

A session of Ukraine’s two communist parties (headed by Stanislav Gurenko and Pyotr Simonenko) took place on Sunday for the purpose of unification. Based on the session’s results, a resolution was issued. The resolution says that the Communist Party headed by Pyotr Simonenko and officially registered on July 22, 1991, is the only legal successor to the party founded on July 12, 1918. Thus, the old Communist Party has joined the new one founded after the GKChP failure in August 1991. This is quite natural, as the Communist Party headed by Simonenko is a real political power in Ukraine nowadays. After the adoption of the resolution, Ukrainian communists may attempt to recover the property that belonged to the Communist Party before 1991. Doesn't it seem that this is the real reason for the reahbilitaion of the old Communist Party?

Andrei Lubensky Ukraine PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Maria Gousseva