Papers by Angelina Shevchuk
had appeared already under the government of the Democratic Republic of Petliura and progressed s... more had appeared already under the government of the Democratic Republic of Petliura and progressed slowly, still seeking its path. Furthermore, the roots of this movement lay at the very basis of the Russian revolution. It was noteworthy already from the first days of the February upheaval. It was a movement of the lowest strata of the working people, who sought to destroy the economic slave system and create a new system, based on the socialization of means and instruments of labor and the cultivation of the land by the workers themselves. We have already mentioned that, in the name of these principles , workers got rid of the owners of factories and transferred the management of production to their class organs: trade unions, factory committees or workers' commissions specially created for this purpose. The peasants took over the land of the pomeshchiks (gentry) and of the kulaks (wealthy peasants) and reserved the produce strictly for the workers themselves , thus sketching a new type of agrarian economy. This practice of direct revolutionary action by the workers and peasants developed in the Ukraine almost unobstructed during the whole first year of the revolution and created a healthy and clear line of revolutionary conduct for the masses. And every time one or another political group, having taken power, tried to break the workers' line of revolutionary conduct , the workers launched a revolutionary opposition and struggled in various ways against these attempts. Thus the revolutionary movement of the working people toward social independence, which had begun in the first days of the revolution, did not weaken no matter what power was established in the Ukraine. It was not even extinguished by the Bolsheviks who, after the October upheaval, tried to introduce their autocratic state system into the country. What was characteristic about this movement? Its desire to attain the real goals of the working class in the revolution; its will to win labor's independence; its defiance of all non-laboring social groups.
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Papers by Angelina Shevchuk