Apologies to our readers for the high frequency of posts, which reflects events. Tomorrow's post will be postponed to next month and Saturday's regular post in Castilian will go only to subscribers of Topo Rojo. Meanwhile, some friends of Ukraine are calling the French youth revolt Putin’s work. That’s the Kremlin’s argument about Maidan, turned round to face west. Seventy years after Budapest, it’s worth remembering who else said it.The French socialist Vincent Présumey has spent the last few days comparing France’s school students to the crowds on the Maidan in Kyiv in 2013–14. Under his post on Facebook, an argument broke out among people who all, as far as one can tell, support Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. It shows how easily a good cause can teach bad habits.
One reply put the case against the movement plainly. The groups that first called the protests were “officially pro-Russian”. A poster against the price of petrol is, “in the current context”, “the most pro-Russian slogan possible”. There was a Soviet flag on the marches and no Ukrainian ones. And disorder helps Putin: it puts Marine Le Pen “into orbit” and slows the economy just when France should be rearming and helping Ukraine. “It isn’t with barricades and good feelings that we’ll stop Putin.”
Présumey’s answer was sharp. The Kremlin’s supporters say “NATO and the CIA” whenever something moves against their side. Now the Kremlin’s opponents say “Putin” whenever something moves against theirs. It’s the same narrative, held up to a mirror.
He’s right, and the archive shows why.
The error: asking who profits, instead of who is moving
That reply makes one move. It starts from the war, asks which side gains from a revolt, and then decides what the revolt is. Demands, social content, who is on the streets and why: all of it drops out, and a movement becomes the pawn of whichever power you fear most.
That’s campism, the habit of judging every struggle by which camp it helps. We usually meet it on the left, in people who back any enemy of Washington. But nothing in the method requires that direction. Turn the map round and you get the same reasoning from Ukraine’s friends. We’ve seen it before, aimed the other way, and our comrades answered it at the time.
What the campists said about Maidan
In March 2014 Jeff Mackler, misleader of the once-promising US group Socialist Action, called the Maidan mobilisations “a grotesque caricature” of the Egyptian revolution and headlined it a coup. He hinted that the protesters had organised the snipers who killed them. The Russian media had a shorter phrase for the new government: the “Kiev junta”.
The people who were there said something else. Zakhar Popovych, of Ukraine’s Left Opposition, hid nothing. He told International Viewpoint that the neo-Nazis of Pravyi Sektor had led the first attacks on the riot police and were attacking the left on the square. But thousands of very different people had joined the fight, many of them Russian-speaking youth from the outskirts of Kyiv. “Nonetheless, it was a mass revolt of Ukrainians, of different nationalities and ethnic groups, for democracy in Ukraine.”
Ilya Budraitskis, writing from Moscow, named the error. Those who called it “a conflict of the elites”, he wrote, “miss the most important thing”: the Maidan had become a force that neither the government nor the opposition leaders could manipulate. He saw the “sickening dissonance” between its revolutionary content and its reactionary form, and said it called for “action aimed at changing such an ugly equation”, not squeamish moral verdicts. Catherine Samary later summed it up: neither “a pro-European revolution” nor “a fascist coup under NATO control”. Rejecting the coup story “does not imply ignoring the reality of the far right”.
That’s the method. Look honestly at the far right and at the foreign powers, then look at the people in the street, because they decide what a movement becomes.
The titushki
Présumey’s comparison goes one step further. Yanukovych’s regime didn’t only send in the riot police. Zbigniew Kowalewski described how the barons of the Party of Regions mobilised hired thugs, “the infamous ‘titushki’”, while their television warned of the “Nazis, fascists and Banderaites” of the Maidan. Thugs created the disorder; television blamed the movement for it.
Nobody yet knows exactly what happened in France on 17 October, and we shouldn’t pretend to. But the questions aren’t only being asked on Facebook. In Marseille, rioters wrecked the municipal police station on the Canebière and broke into the town hall. The Socialist mayor, Benoît Payan, no friend of the far left, has demanded explanations from the Interior Minister. He complained of a single company of CRS riot police for the whole city, and asked why the police gassed demonstrators and not looters. Présumey reads the mayor’s account as describing police who stood aside: “a quasi-collaboration”, he says, “without using the word”.
In Lyon, the left and the unions have said what they saw. On 20 October twelve organisations signed a statement against the Rhône prefecture, among them LFI, the PCF, the NPA, the FSU teachers’ union, Solidaires, the CNT, the UCL and the anti-fascist union network VISA. They accuse the prefecture of “disproportionate repression” against school students mobilising outside their lycées, and of breaking up and banning demonstrations; the education unions’ joint banner was stolen on the 13 October march. After 17 October the prefecture banned every gathering in the city centre. Then, during the curfew on the night of the 19th, “fascist and neo-Nazi groupuscules were able to keep marching under our windows without police intervention, from Bellecour to Perrache”. “No need to worry for the white supremacists,” the statement says: they “can calmly break the bans”. The signatories want the prefect’s resignation.
That’s the titushki pattern, seen by the people on the receiving end. In Lyon the people marching unhindered in the dark were the far right. The people who had their banners stolen and their demonstrations banned were the teachers and the school students.
We also know that the state wanted a culprit. According to a Mediapart investigation reported by L’Humanité, police intelligence officers say the Interior Ministry asked them in so many words to write that La France insoumise was behind the movement. They call that “objectively false”.
Since then the story has grown. On 20 October the Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, told the National Assembly that in certain places there had been “the planning of an insurrectionary scheme” by the far left and the ultra-left, “factious groupuscules” who meant to march on the Élysée and Matignon. Présumey calls it what it is: a mad narrative of an attempted coup. That’s the word the Kremlin used for the Maidan, now in the mouth of a French prime minister about his own school students. The same day David Lisnard, mayor of Cannes and presidential candidate, told RTL that the Millevaches plateau in Limousin harbours “terrorist training camps”. Présumey reminds him who last denounced fighters’ camps in those hills: the Nazis and Vichy, hunting the maquis of the communist Georges Guingouin, the largest in France by the summer of 1944.
The French state has form
Présumey is struck by how violent the police were from the start, by Western standards, against girls and boys of fifteen and sixteen. Nobody who knows the history should be surprised. The march of 17 October 2026 fell on the sixty-fifth anniversary of 17 October 1961, when the Paris police under Maurice Papon broke up a peaceful march of Algerians and probably around two hundred were killed, some thrown into the Seine with their hands tied. In December 1986, the night a million school and university students marched against the Devaquet bill, police on motorbikes trapped Malik Oussekine and clubbed him to death. He was twenty-two, and of Algerian origin. The bill was withdrawn anyway.
The French state has always met movements of the young and of the colonised with exceptional violence. The young have more than once beaten it all the same.
Who fills the space
The commenter saw a Soviet flag. Présumey mostly sees Palestinian ones, which for the kids at the vocational school near his home mean the misery of the world and revolt against it. Another commenter wore Ukrainian colours on the Paris march and got smiles. All of that can be true. Hundreds of thousands of teenagers don’t arrive with a finished view of the world. Budraitskis said the same of Ukrainian society in 2014: the battle over what it would become “was never predetermined”.
That’s the uncomfortable lesson of Maidan. In Moscow in December 2011, Budraitskis recalled, almost every left group agreed the protest was “ours” and that they would fight for their place in it. In Kyiv the left mostly stood back, sceptical and divided. The organised far right didn’t stand back. It filled the space. If Ukraine’s friends in France decide the school students are Putin’s useful idiots and stand back, the space won’t stay empty there either, and Le Pen’s party is best placed to take it.
Whose solidarity with Ukraine?
The “Putin” argument asks the young to stop, accept the cuts, put up with the police and wait for what Présumey reports Macron calling a “beautiful presidential election” in 2027. Présumey fears it ends with the Rassemblement National in power, and says his school students see that danger more clearly than many adults.
Solidarity with Ukraine built on social peace in France is solidarity on the French ruling class’s terms. Ukraine’s own young people didn’t wait for permission. In July 2025, when a law threatened the independence of Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies in the middle of the war, they came out with placards cut from cardboard boxes, and within ten days the law was reversed. Nobody serious called them Putin’s agents. In Serbia, students have led what Présumey calls the largest youth movement in Europe for more than a year, and when they cycled to Strasbourg, Macron chose to receive the president they were protesting against.
Présumey puts it in one sentence: the best solidarity with Ukraine sees “the common social and democratic foundation” of struggles in the East and the West. Setting them against each other ends in conspiracy theories. He has watched it happen in real time. Within days, one self-described pro-Ukrainian “centrist” had moved from a Putinist plot to a Putinist and Islamist one, and claimed to see “the Daesh dress code” on school students. The relentless denouncers of “demonstrations that play the far right’s game”, Présumey concluded, quickly come to play it themselves.
Budapest, seventy years on
This Friday, 23 October, is the seventieth anniversary of the Hungarian revolution, the clearest case there is of a movement slandered by people who judged it by the camp it seemed to help.
It began as a student demonstration in Budapest in solidarity with the Polish workers. When the crowd went to the radio station to have its demands broadcast, the secret police fired on it. Workers came out of the factories and soldiers went over to the crowd. Soviet tanks entered the city the next day, withdrew, and came back on 4 November. The Communist parties of the West called it a fascist counter-revolution. Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker‘s man in Budapest, saw democratic workers’ councils instead, and his paper censored what he sent.
Expelled from the Communist Party, Fryer went on to edit The Newsletter. For the first anniversary, in its issue of 19 October 1957, he printed eyewitness evidence to answer the “comfortable lies” about “White Terror” and “counter-revolution”. In the same paragraph the paper dissociated itself “utterly from the false ‘friends’ of the Hungarian people, the imperialists of Britain and America”. It refused both camps in one breath, and that’s the stance this autumn needs.
The rewrite desk. Franz Xaver Philipp ran the East German news agency ADN’s office in Vienna, monitoring Budapest radio. On 31 October 1956 he sent Berlin what the radio was saying: factories demanding the withdrawal of Soviet troops, police proud that they hadn’t fired on the people. ADN Berlin put out something else under his dateline: “FASCIST ‘ARROW CROSS’ ORGANIZES”, snipers on the rooftops, “EVEN A MOZART SCORE WAS THROWN INTO THE FLAMES BY THE FASCISTS”. On 2 November he reported miners going back to work; Berlin reported a city facing “CATASTROPHE”. On the morning of 4 November, as the tanks came back, he offered Berlin Nagy’s last broadcast and the writers’ appeal for help. The answer, after a long pause: “No. We won’t need that now.” Philipp resigned. Set that beside the intelligence officers asked to write that LFI was behind the movement. Nobody in Paris had to invent the method.
The surgeon at the airport. Marian Bielicki flew into Budapest for the Warsaw weekly Po Prostu with a planeload of medicine and blood plasma. A young woman in a nurse’s uniform, a surgeon as he later learned, spoke to him on the tarmac. He was a journalist, she told him, so “you simply don’t have the right to lie! It is a lie that fascists and counter-revolutionaries are fighting in the city. We are fighting, our nation is fighting, for real democracy, for real socialism, for freedom and independence!” One night he asked a roomful of insurgents, a steel worker, a shipyard worker, a plumber, a book-keeper and a medical student among them, whether they weren’t afraid of fascism. The student answered: “Nobody wants fascism . . . We won’t allow it.”
A box in the same issue quoted the Belgrade Politika of 26 October 1956, and it’s the most useful sentence of all: “Although fascist elements have also been taking part in the uprisings, this has not been a counter-revolution.”
There were fascists in Hungary in 1956. There were neo-Nazis on the Maidan in 2014. There are pro-Russian cranks and far-right looters around the edges of the French movement in 2026. In each case the people who made the movement were somebody else, and the slander needed to pretend they weren’t.
Raw material
Here Présumey’s comparison should be pushed further than he takes it. What happened in Hungary wasn’t only a protest. The historian Miklós Molnár, quoted by John Lister in Socialist Viewpoint in 1986, recorded that “in the space of forty-eight hours all the factories in the country had their elected councils”, with central councils forming for whole towns. A Central Workers’ Council of Greater Budapest called a general strike against the occupation that held into December. A nine-point statement of the councils’ rights began: “The factory belongs to the workers.” A student demonstration had become, in a fortnight, the outline of another kind of power.
That’s why the slander mattered so much to Moscow. A social movement can be bought off or worn down. A movement that starts building its own organs of democracy is the raw material of a new revolutionary movement.
France isn’t Hungary, and a school blockade isn’t a workers’ council. But the raw material is of the same kind. Teenagers are learning, under the baton and the tear gas, to organise themselves and hold their ground. Présumey’s word for it is ferocity. In 1986 their parents’ generation built a national coordination of delegates elected in each faculty and lycée, recallable and mandated by their general assemblies, which the movement’s reporters called “a shining example for the labour movement of democratic forms of self-organization and unity in action”. The question is whether this movement builds those forms again, joins up with the workplaces on the union strike day of 5 November, and finds a political voice of its own. Présumey’s charge against LFI is that it is surfing the movement while hoping it ends, because its only horizon is April 2027.
The Maidan shows what happens if it doesn’t. Budraitskis saw direct democracy born from direct experience, with “no political continuation”. Someone else supplied one.
For socialists outside France the tasks follow. Defend the movement and its organisations against repression, whoever is being lined up for blame this week. Refuse the “Putin” story as firmly as we refused the “NATO coup” story. And help the movement find its friends in the East, in Kyiv and in Belgrade.
Thirty years after Budapest, more than sixty oppositionists from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, Kuroń, Michnik and Bärbel Bohley among them, signed a joint declaration issued on the same day in Berlin, Budapest, Prague and Warsaw. They wrote that the workers, students and soldiers of 1956 had stormed the radio station “because they had had enough of official lies and wanted to hear the truth and to voice their demands”. Three years later their own regimes fell.
Sources: the Red Mole archive holds the Fourth International’s coverage of Maidan in International Viewpoint (2014), the 1957 eyewitness feature in The Newsletter no. 24, the 1986 tribute in International no. 7 and International Viewpoint no. 108, and John Lister’s twelve-page supplement on Hungary in Socialist Viewpoint no. 14 (1986).