Communist Party of Ukraine

• 1. Introduction

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  The Communist Party of Ukraine was founded on the 19th of June 1993, less than two years after its predecessor was banned by the collapsing Soviet state. Its leader, Petro Symonenko, has held that position from the very first congress to the present day. For two decades, this party navigated the turbulent politics of an independent Ukraine, winning hundreds of parliamentary seats and drawing millions of votes. Then came the Euromaidan protests, a war, and a court ruling that handed the party's buildings, funds, and entire organisational apparatus to the Ukrainian state. How did a party that once commanded a quarter of Ukraine's popular vote end up banned twice, its assets seized, its leader reportedly fleeing to Belarus? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. From Ashes to Parliament

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  On the 6th of March 1993, Ukrainian communists gathered at the All-Ukrainian Conference for Communists without, as the sources put it, "clear legality". The original Soviet-era Communist Party of Ukraine had ceased to exist on the 30th of August 1991, when the Ukrainian parliament banned both it and its parent body in Moscow. The communists who met in March were improvising, trying to reconstitute something that had formally ceased to exist. Two months after that conference, the Verkhovna Rada legalised communist parties, and on the 19th of June 1993 the 1st Congress formally launched the new party. Organisers numbered it the 29th Congress to signal an unbroken lineage from 1918.

  Symonenko was elected First Secretary at that founding congress and never relinquished the post. His party arrived in parliament at the 1994 elections by backing Socialist Party candidate Oleksandr Moroz for the presidency, with Moroz returning the gesture by speaking at the 22nd KPU Congress in 1999. In the 1998 parliamentary election, the party reached its high-water mark: 24.65 percent of the vote and 123 seats, making it the largest single party in the Verkhovna Rada. Its party list that year drew from across Ukrainian society: a tunneler from the Karl Marks Mine in Yenakieve, an actress from the Lesya Ukrainka Theater in Kyiv, a tool craftsman from Dniproshyna, and a pensioner sat alongside sitting MPs. Emboldened by that result, the party ran Symonenko for president in 1999. He won 23.1 percent in the first round, behind incumbent Leonid Kuchma's 38 percent, then took 38.8 percent in the runoff to Kuchma's 57.7 percent.

• 3. Decline and Separatist Ties

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  Symonenko received only 5 percent of the vote in the 2004 presidential election, finishing fourth and failing to reach the runoff that triggered the Orange Revolution. From that point the party's numbers fell steadily: 3.66 percent and 21 seats in the 2006 parliamentary elections, 5.39 percent and 27 seats in 2007. Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko, writing in The Guardian, described the party by the 2010s as having "degenerated into a conservative and pro-Russian rather than pro-working class grouping, gradually losing its voters and membership". The richest deputy of the 7th Verkhovna Rada, Oksana Kalietnik, sat in the Communist faction, a fact Ishchenko cited as evidence that the party's leadership had become part of what he called the bourgeois elite.

  As the electoral numbers contracted, the party's links to separatist networks were quietly expanding. No later than 2006, the Communist Party office in Donetsk was providing material and logistical assistance to the separatist organisation Donetsk Republic. When the Donetsk District Administrative Court banned that organisation for separatism on the 6th of November 2007, the Donetsk communists did not stop; they continued lending tents and printing capabilities to the separatist cause. At the 2012 parliamentary election the party won 13.18 percent nationally and 32 seats, but it competed in 220 of 225 constituencies and won none of them outright. An independent candidate named Oksana Kaletnyk joined the Communist faction in December 2012 to give it the one constituency winner parliamentary rules required to form a recognised faction.

• 4. Between Two Loyalties

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  From November 2013 until February 2014, protests swept Ukraine after President Viktor Yanukovych abandoned a political association agreement with the European Union in favour of closer ties with Russia. The Communist Party's response during those weeks exposed the contradictions at its core. In January 2014 the party backed anti-protest laws that severely restricted freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate. Clashes in Kyiv between protesters and the Berkut special riot police killed 108 protesters and 13 police officers.

  Yet on the 22nd of February 2014, when Ukraine's parliament voted 328 to 0 to remove Yanukovych from office, the party's thirty deputies joined the majority. The party called the protest movement a coup designed to install a pro-NATO regime, and Symonenko issued an open plea to communist and left-wing movements worldwide to condemn the events. At the same time, the thirty deputies voted for Yanukovych's removal. A Kyiv Polytechnic professor, publishing in The Guardian, pointed to this combination as evidence of the party's peculiar position: vocally condemning the revolution while participating in its central act. On the 11th of April 2014, a scuffle broke out in the Verkhovna Rada between Symonenko and two MPs from the far-right Svoboda party, after Symonenko blamed them for the Russian annexation of Crimea.

• 5. Dissolution and the Courts

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  On the 6th of May 2014, a majority of MPs voted to expel the Communist Party from the parliamentary session hall after it issued a pro-separatist declaration. By the 1st of July, six MPs had left the Communist faction, reducing it to 23 members. On the 22nd of July, a vote of 232 MPs gave the Verkhovna Rada speaker the power to dissolve a faction that had fallen below its original size; President Petro Poroshenko signed the bill into law that same day. Speaker Turchynov announced the faction's impending dissolution and told MPs: "We only have to tolerate this party for another day". The faction was dissolved on the 24th of July 2014. That same day, 308 criminal proceedings were opened against party members.

  Symonenko's name remained on the ballot for the 2014 presidential election despite him withdrawing on the 16th of May, because he had missed the withdrawal deadline of the 1st of May; he received 1.5 percent. In the October 2014 parliamentary election the party won only 3.87 percent, falling short of the 5 percent threshold. For the first time since 1918, communists held no seats in Ukrainian national politics. Laws banning Soviet communist symbols came into force in May 2015, stripping the party of its right to use its own imagery. On the 16th of December 2015, the District Administrative Court in Kyiv formally banned the party for actions aimed at violating Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, collaboration with Russian proxy forces, and inciting ethnic hatred. John Dalhuisen of Amnesty International criticised the ban, saying it resembled "the same style of draconian measures used to stifle dissent" in the Soviet Union itself. The Party of the European Left and the European United Left-Nordic Green Left group in the European Parliament also condemned the move, as did Russia's State Duma and Britain's National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers.

• 6. Ideology and Soviet Nostalgia

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  Vladimir Lenin, in the party's official pronouncements, "is still considered sacrosanct". The party describes itself as continuing "speaking in the words of Lenin" and refers to itself as the "Leninist Communist Party of Ukraine". Its 1998 publication Historical Thesis, released to mark the would-be 80th anniversary of the Soviet state, painted what the source calls a rosy picture of Soviet history; controversial episodes such as the Great Purge and the Holodomor went unmentioned in the party press.

  On the 5th of May 2010, less than four months after a Kyiv court found Stalin guilty of genocide against the Ukrainian people during the 1932-33 Holodomor, the party's Zaporizhzhia branch unveiled a public statue of Stalin in Zaporizhzhia. Three people reportedly fainted during the ceremony and one woman later died of heatstroke. A party statement issued in her memory said, according to the source, "She died a worthy death in front of Stalin." Vasyl Tereshchuk, a party theoretician expelled in 2005, articulated the party's view of Ukraine's economic future: ordinary people were surviving on assets accumulated under Soviet power, he argued, but "their full proletarianization will come sooner or later". Symonenko made further controversy in 2007 by accusing Ukrainian nationalist figure Roman Shukhevych of receiving two Iron Crosses from Adolf Hitler. A Kyiv court found he could not prove the claim and ordered him to retract it publicly.

• 7. Seizure and Aftermath

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  On the 6th of July 2022, following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a Lviv court banned the party a second time and ordered its assets transferred to the Ukrainian state. The Eighth Administrative Appeal Court stated that it had "satisfied the claims of the Ministry of Justice" and that property, funds, and assets of every regional, city, and district organisation had been transferred. During the Kyiv offensive that preceded the ruling, Symonenko reportedly fled to Belarus with the assistance of Russian forces. In October 2022, he spoke at the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties in Havana, Cuba, where he blamed the United States and United Kingdom for the war and said they wanted to "use Ukraine against Russia and Taiwan against China". In August 2023, Ukraine's Security Service opened an investigation against him on charges of sedition and treason.