‘The Disgrace of the Maidan Leftists’: how Workers Power gave British campism its revolutionary alibi
Part 5 of "With Washington and Moscow"
A four-page tabloid supplement. Summer 2014, Issue 378 of Workers Power, paper of the British section of the League for the Fifth International. Newport, South Wales on the editorial address because the comrades were preparing for a counter-conference around the September 2014 NATO summit. The front-page photograph: USS Vella Gulf on station in the Black Sea. The headline above it: Stop NATO’s New War Drive. The headline to the right, by Dave Stockton: The disgrace of the Maidan leftists.
The disgrace, according to Stockton, was that some on the British and international left had failed to grasp what Maidan really was. Specifically, Socialist Resistance, named in the second paragraph as British section of the Fourth International. The FI, Stockton wrote, had committed ‘its very own 4 August’.
The reference is precise. 4 August 1914 was the day the German SPD voted for the Kaiser’s war credits, the foundational betrayal that broke the Second International. To accuse the Fourth International, on the hundredth anniversary of August 1914, of repeating that betrayal because it had refused to read Maidan as a fascist coup, is the most serious charge a Trotskyist publication can level at another Trotskyist organisation. It was the considered judgment of the Workers Power leadership in summer 2014. It was also a text that enabled the refounding of British campism, theoretically underpinning the conversion of a layer of Trotskyists into cyphers for the Kremlin’s talking points on Ukraine.
What the supplement said
The Stockton article and KD Tait’s accompanying piece, Gunpoint democracy: bullets and ballots cannot crush resistance, together establish the framework that the British conservative left has been operating within ever since. Maidan as fascist coup. The post-February government as illegitimate. The east Ukrainian uprisings as authentic anti-fascist resistance. The Fourth International, Socialist Resistance specifically, as having dishonoured itself by refusing the analysis.
The boxed sidebar on page three is the operative document on Odesa. It runs through what it wrongly claims happened on 2 May. Police in collusion with neo-Nazi groups. A thousand Right Sector fighters brought in from Kyiv and Kharkiv to make an example of the resistance. The Anti-Maidan figures who fired on the unity march reframed as agents provocateurs in disguise, firing on a ‘fascist march’ as pretext for the slaughter that followed. Cause and effect inverted at every juncture. Botsman, the Anti-Maidan militant filmed firing a Kalashnikov from behind a police cordon, becomes in the supplement a state agent dressed as Anti-Maidan, attacking fascists.
The witness sourced for the inversion is Borotba, described in the text as a socialist group. Borotba’s Kyiv offices had been attacked weeks earlier. Aleksei Albu, leader of Borotba’s Odesa organisation, fled to Russian-annexed Crimea on 24 May 2014, where he founded a Committee for the Liberation of Odesa together with the Russian nationalist party Rodina and the far-right organisation Slavic Unity. The supplement’s primary witness on Odesa was, within three weeks of the supplement going to press, in occupied Crimea convening a Russian state nationalist front against his own city. The Workers Power leadership constructed its founding account of the Odesa fire on the testimony of a man whose political project was relocating to the occupier as it was being printed.
That is one half of the supplement. The other half is on the back page.
Why then: Workers Power and the regroupment process
Workers Power’s stance was a puzzle on its own terms. The group’s position on Syria had been the opposite, opposing Russian and Iranian intervention, supporting the right of resistance even where Workers Power judged the leadership of that resistance to be politically mistaken. The Ukraine line broke the symmetry. It only became coherent as factional manoeuvre.
Through 2013 and into 2014, Socialist Resistance, the Anticapitalist Initiative and the International Socialist Network had been working through a three-way regroupment process initiated by ACI members in Manchester. The Exchange, the joint magazine of the three organisations, had been launched as a practical testing ground. I became a member of its working group. The process was the British section of a broader convergence that ran through the European Anticapitalist Left, with the Fourth International orientation that Socialist Resistance brought as one of its anchors. It was not Workers Power’s project. The ISN politics conference in late 2013 widened the discussion to include Workers Power, Plan C and the Industrial Workers of the World; Socialist Resistance responded that Workers Power would be a pressure toward exactly the kind of ‘narrow dogmatic organisation’ the regroupment was trying to avoid.
Trotcon, the March 2014 open conference for Trotskyists and the diaspora emerging from the SWP crisis, was the moment when the regroupment saw wider participation. It was there that Workers Power rolled out its campist line on Ukraine to an astonished audience, including many ISN members who took Workers Power’s claims at face value. The Stockton supplement appeared months later, but I heard those arguments at Trotcon. The function it served, beyond its stated case on Ukraine, was to fracture the regroupment from outside. By making support for the ‘Maidan junta’ the test of revolutionary seriousness, and by accusing Socialist Resistance of having committed its own 4 August, Workers Power positioned itself as the ostensibly-principled pole and rendered the existing regroupment partners as accommodationists. The Ukraine line had a domestic factional purpose. Stockton’s August 1914 charge was not only an analysis. It was a wrecking ball. And one which opened the doors to profound errors of judgment, which Workers Power later doubled down on, seemingly driven by the vampiric logic of factional opportunism.
That is the context in which the back-page advertisement makes sense.
The 2 June launch
A boxed advertisement. SOLIDARITY with ANTIFASCIST RESISTANCE in UKRAINE, launch meeting at 7.30pm Monday 2 June, Room V111, Vernon Square campus of SOAS, hosted by Socialist Appeal’s SOAS Marxist Society. The confirmed speakers list reads as a directory of the British conservative-left orbit on Ukraine assembling itself in real time. Boris Kagarlitsky, calling in from the Institute for Globalization Studies and Social Movements in Moscow. Sergei Kirichuk of Borotba, by Skype from somewhere in Ukraine on the eve of the move to Russia. Richard Brenner of Solidarity with Antifascist Resistance in Ukraine, the campaign Workers Power was launching. Alan Woods of Socialist Appeal. Seamus Milne of The Guardian, listed as invited. Plus, in smaller type at the foot of the advertisement, ‘speakers to be confirmed from the Communist Party of Britain and Counterfire’.
That last line is the connective tissue. Counterfire’s founder Chris Nineham would, ten months later, publish the Sakwa review on the Stop the War website, the British template for the Odesa myth that the first piece in this series traced. The genealogy is direct. Workers Power organised the launch meeting in June 2014. Counterfire turned up. By March 2015, Counterfire’s joint chair was publishing the laundered version of the supplement’s framework on the website of Britain’s largest anti-war organisation, with the casualty figure inflated and the agency stripped out by passive voice.
The cast assembled at SOAS that night was the British conservative-left network on Ukraine in a single room: the Communist Party of Britain whose paper the Morning Star would carry the anniversary editorials; Counterfire which would run Stop the War; Socialist Appeal which has since absorbed itself into the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain; and the Workers Power tradition itself. Plus the Russian and Ukrainian witnesses for the prosecution.
The witnesses are the part that aged most badly. Not in the direction Stockton expected.
Yalta, July 2014: the doubling down
If the SOAS meeting in June was the launch, Yalta in July was the consummation. The Hotel Yalta-Intourist on the south coast of Russian-annexed Crimea, three months after the annexation. The conference was titled ‘The World Crisis and the Confrontation in Ukraine’, organised by Aleksei Anpilogov and his Centre of Co-ordination, also styled Novaya Rus’, with Boris Kagarlitsky as its public face on the left. Richard Brenner of Workers Power attended. Alan Freeman of Socialist Action attended. Of perhaps fifty to seventy participants, those two were the British contingent.
The conference produced a Yalta Manifesto. It was, in its own framing, the first stage of a broader project. The second stage, six weeks later in the same hotel, dispensed with the left decoration. The invitation list ran through the European far right: the BNP, Hungary’s Jobbik, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, Italy’s Forza Nuova and Lega Nord, Bulgaria’s Ataka, Poland’s Samooborona and Falanga, the French National Front. Nick Griffin was invited. Roberto Fiore of Forza Nuova attended. The two stages were not coincidental and not deniable: Darya Mitina, the Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, who spoke at the second conference and reported on it afterwards, described it as ‘the second stage of the conference ‘Russia, Novorossiya, Ukraine: Global Problems and Challenges’’. Same organiser, same venue, same project. The first stage was the left-wing decoration. The second was the substance.
By September the AWL had documented the overlap. By October Brenner had issued a 5,000-word statement defending his attendance. The defence was that the Russian government had not initiated the conference and that he had not been a willing dupe of Russian fascism. The publicity material for both conferences described them as initiatives of Anpilogov’s organisation, which was funding and co-ordinating the armed Anti-Maidan resistance in eastern Ukraine. Mitina reported that the second conference was the right wing of the same project the left wing had attended. The defence did not survive the documentation.
Workers Power did not retract. It doubled down. The supplement’s line was not a tactical mistake corrected on contact with reality. It was a position to be defended at length, in print, against detailed primary-source criticism, on the grounds that the criticism came from the wrong kind of leftists. The same dynamic that had driven the supplement: fracture the regroupment, claim the principled pole, treat criticism as evidence of the critics’ accommodation to imperialism. That same dynamic now drove the response to Yalta. The hardening of the position was the political content of the project.
The Yalta exposure was the moment the British conservative-left network on Ukraine acquired its enduring shape. The campaign Workers Power had launched at SOAS in June, with its CPB and Counterfire and Socialist Appeal hinterland, did not collapse on the evidence that its sponsoring organisation had spent July at a Russian fascist conference in occupied Crimea. It carried on. Stop the War carried on. Counterfire carried on. The Sakwa review went up the following March. The line had become institutional.
What happened to the witnesses
Borotba relocated to Russia and Russian-occupied territory across 2014 and 2015. Albu in Crimea by May 2014. Victor Shapinov, Borotba’s leading theoretician, in Crimea by autumn 2014. Kirichuk in German exile from mid-2014, where the regional office of Die Linke distanced itself from him after detailed accusations of Borotba’s collaboration with Russian and Ukrainian far-right organisations. The ‘socialist group’ the supplement reproduced as authoritative on Odesa was, within twelve months, dispersed across the occupier’s territory and Western European exile, with its leadership tied to the political infrastructure of Russian-annexed Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk authorities.
Kagarlitsky’s trajectory is the more difficult one. He spent 2014 through 2021 producing the kind of material the supplement leaned on: defending Russian intervention as anti-fascist, attacking the FI line as accommodation to imperialism, building the international intellectual scaffolding for the position the British conservative left was importing wholesale. Then in February 2022 he broke. He opposed the full-scale invasion, called it a war of aggression, and said so publicly on his Rabkor channel. The Russian state arrested him in July 2023 on charges of ‘justifying terrorism’. A military court fined him in December 2023; the prosecution appealed, and on 13 February 2024 the appeal court reversed the fine and sentenced him to five years in a penal colony. The Supreme Court Military Chamber upheld the sentence on 5 June 2024. He is now in the colony at Torzhok. By the time the Workers Party flyer went up in Holland Park last week, the supplement’s most prominent Moscow witness had been jailed by the regime he had spent a decade defending, for the offence of saying out loud what the Fourth International had said in 2014.
Workers Power ostensibly dissolved in 2015. Its members reconstituted as the Red Flag Platform. The League for the Fifth International continued to operate internationally and, by the 2022 invasion, had moved away from Stockton’s earlier framework. At the International Socialist League’s Third World Congress in Istanbul in December 2025, the L5I formally converged with the ISL on a common programme that defends Ukrainian self-determination and supports the Ukrainian resistance for it to win.
That is the position the supplement called a disgrace. That is the position the supplement accused the Fourth International of having taken as a betrayal on the scale of August 1914. Eleven years later, the international tendency Stockton helped lead has formally endorsed the position he denounced.
Critics on the further left have called the convergence superficial and predicted it will not survive its first serious test. That scepticism may be warranted, but ISL has organisational elan and a deeply held, progressive position on Ukraine (as we noted). The formal repudiation of the founding text is, nonetheless, on the record. The tradition that wrote the disgrace has ratified what the supplement called the disgrace.
What the inheritors didn’t do
Stop the War never withdrew the Nineham review. Counterfire continues to platform the Sakwa framework. The Morning Star ran Keith Barlow’s piece in May 2024 arguing that Right Sector chose 2 May 2014 because that was the date the Nazis banned trade unions in Germany in 1933, a conspiratorial reverse-engineering several rhetorical stages downstream from Stockton’s original. The Workers Party of Britain, founded by Galloway in 2019, inherited the framework wholesale and has industrialised the annual Holland Park commemoration around it, aided by neo-nazis.
The argument has been retired by some of its authors. The conclusion has been preserved by its inheritors.
Honour roll
Stockton’s supplement assembled an honour roll for posterity. Workers Power. The Communist Party of Britain. Counterfire. Socialist Appeal (now the RCP). Sadly, OKDE-Spartakos, the Greek section of the Fourth International. Borotba. Kagarlitsky’s institute. The international anti-fascist front against Kyiv.
Eleven years on, the honour roll looks different. The Fourth International was right about the character of the war that began in 2014 and resumed at scale in 2022. OKDE-Spartakos, which Stockton praised for breaking from the FI line, was wrong, and remains so. The L5I, the international tendency Stockton helped found, has converged on the ISL and FI’s position. Kagarlitsky paid for arriving at that position with a prison sentence. Borotba is in Moscow.
The dishonour roll, the British institutions Stockton’s supplement convened and that have never repudiated it, are the ones that were at Holland Park on Saturday with new MPs and new co-sponsors and the same Borotba account. They are doing the work the founding text instructed them to do. The founding tendency has retired the work. They have not.
Williamson picks up the baton
The supplement survives as four scanned pages in a zip file. Page one carries the cruiser. Page two carries the disgrace. Page three carries Tait and the Borotba sidebar. Page four carries the launch advertisement and the photograph of the burning House of Trade Unions. The bittest irony: the headline urging people to “remember Mariupol”, the city that would be murdered by Russia in 2022, 80% of its population driven out as refugees, and still-uncounted tens of thousands killed, perhaps as many as 75,000.
It was eleven years and ten months from the date the supplement went to press to the moment Chris Williamson took the microphone in Holland Park. The Odesa casualty figure has stabilised at forty-eight from the high-water mark of Nineham’s hundreds. The Borotba account has otherwise survived intact, ported from a tabloid printed in Newport to a flyer printed for a London commemoration. The argument from cause and effect has not been allowed to interfere.
The work is still owed.
Postscript: June 2026.
The League for the Fifth International formally converged with the International Socialist League at a congress in Istanbul in December 2025. The convergence was grounded in a shared political assessment of Russian imperialism’s aggression against Ukraine and a common rejection of campism. That the international tendency whose leading figure wrote the 2014 supplement has now ratified the position the supplement called a disgrace is on the record, and it should be acknowledged plainly.
The evolution was gradual and is now traceable through primary sources. In June 2022, Dave Stockton himself was still describing the Maidan as a coup carried out by ‘an alliance of Ukrainian neoliberals, far right nationalists and fascists, with the aid of US diplomats and NGOs,’ while acknowledging Russian atrocities and calling for Russian withdrawal. The analytical framework of the supplement survived intact into the second year of the full-scale invasion. By January 2023, Markus Lehner’s article in Neue Internationale recognised Ukrainian self-defence as central and explicitly rejected defeatism, while still opposing arms supplies. The June 2023 L5I Congress resolution then made a formal correction: ‘we did so in an inconsistent way when we did not recognise the right of the Ukrainians to receive the means for this end. We correct this error.’ That correction is real, and it matters.
What the June 2023 resolution did not correct is equally significant. The Kremlin’s Maidan coup framing appears, softened but intact, in paragraph 10 of the same document. The supplement’s reliance on Borotba as a primary witness on Odesa is not named. The August 1914 charge against the Fourth International is not retracted. The decade of defending those positions against primary source refutation is not examined. The organisation demonstrated, in the same document, that it knows how to make a formal correction. The correction was applied only to the arms supply error. It was not applied to the analytical method that produced the original campist position in 2014.
This matters for the ISL as the organisation that absorbed the L5I layer at Istanbul. The question of what the convergence resolved and what it left open is examined in the next instalment in this series, which takes a specific programmatic question, the April 2022 demand by the Russian Socialist Movement and Sotsialnyi Rukh for UN peacekeepers from non-NATO countries, as a case study in how schemas operate within organisations that formally hold the right positions, and where the pressure points remain.
Note: As a comradely courtesy, we shared the draft for this article with Workers Power on May 5th and (after they did not respond) with the paper’s former editor, Richard Brenner. The final article is ours.
Workers Power No. 378, Summer 2014 Ukraine Supplement
About this series
“With Washington and Moscow” examines how a section of the international left moved from opposing both Cold War blocs to accommodating the joint US-Russia partition of Ukraine. The series documents the settlement terms, traces the political trajectory of organisations that enabled this outcome, amplifies Ukrainian socialist voices, and argues for an internationalism that sides with the oppressed against all imperialisms.
All parts of the series will be posted at “With Washington and Moscow”.