Socialist Party of Ukraine

History

Creation

Following Ukraine's independence on 24 August 1991, Leonid Kravchuk as the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine's parliament) signed several important documents among which was the disbandment (26 August) and later the prohibition (30 August) of communist parties. This led to the collapse of the communist-majority faction, informally known as the "group of 239", led by Oleksandr Moroz. Four days after the prohibition of communist parties, Moroz called on communists to unite in a new left-wing party. The founding congress of the party was held in Kyiv on 26 October 1991 and Moroz was elected leader. The party's programme, approved at a second congress held in November 1992, emphasised the party's status as the successor to the Communist Party of Ukraine and proclaimed the party's goal of achieving socialism through "people's democracy".

1990s

In 1993, the party experienced a mass exodus of members when the Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU), which claimed to be the direct successor of the Soviet-era Communist Party, was formed in June. The situation was so severe that several of the party's regional organisations had ceased to exist and the continued existence of the party was put into question at an extraordinary congress, but those who supported merging into the Communist Party remained in the minority. In total, some 40,000 members, or half the party's membership, left for the refounded KPU.

In December 1993, the party entered the opposition to the administration of prime minister Leonid Kuchma and president Leonid Kravchuk, but by this point Kuchma had already resigned as prime minister.

In March 1994, the party participated in the country's first parliamentary election since independence and won 14 seats, becoming the fourth-largest party in the Verkhovna Rada behind the Communist Party, People's Movement of Ukraine (Rukh), and the Peasant Party of Ukraine (SelPU). By mid-1994, the party controlled a parliamentary faction of 25 deputies, as deputies from other parties, especially those from the Peasant Party of Ukraine (SelPU) opted to sit with the Socialists, and Moroz was elected Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada (speaker of parliament) with the support of Communist deputies.

In the 1994 presidential election held in June, Moroz was the sole left-wing candidate and received the support of both the Communist Party, and the Peasant Party, but garnered just 13.3% of the vote and failed to advance past the first round of voting. Moroz himself did not endorse either Kravchuk or Kuchma in the second round, and the party's central leadership left the decision of who to endorse for the presidency to individual branches. Most followed the Communist Party in supporting Kuchma, the eventual winner. During the election, Moroz campaigned for transforming Ukraine into a parliamentary republic, prohibiting the sale of land, and a "state-regulated market".

Over the course of Moroz's term as chairman, relations between himself and Kuchma became increasingly strained. The duo notably clashed on the issue of constitutional reform; Kuchma favoured increasing the power of the presidency and transforming Ukraine into a unitary state, while Moroz and the left-wing in parliament sought to empower parliament and advocated decentralisation. The adoption of a temporary, mini constitution in June 1995 did not ease tensions, and Moroz repeatedly rebuffed efforts to pass "pro-presidential" drafts of a basic law. The semi-presidential republican constitution, a compromise, was eventually adopted by parliament with the necessary two-thirds majority in June 1996.

2000s

During the 2000s, the party was member to a series of protests and conflicts in opposition to the presidency of Kuchma and pro-Kuchma parties. It opposed the 2000 Ukrainian constitutional referendum called by Kuchma with the intention of expanding the powers of the presidency and decreasing that of the Ukrainian parliament. While the amendments were approved by voters, their implementation was obstructed when Kuchma was implicated in the Cassette Scandal, also known as Kuchmagate. Moroz publicly accused Kuchma of being involved in the disappearance and murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, who had been found decapitated in Kyiv. He played select recordings that supposedly proved Kuchma ordered the abduction of Gongadze to journalists using a cassette player, which earned the scandal its name.

The resultant Ukraine without Kuchma (UBK) protest campaign ended when it was violently dispersed by the Militsiya, the national police force, in March 2001. One of the party's members who gained national prominence as a result of his involvement in the protests, Yuriy Lutsenko, would later become the minister of internal affairs under the government of Yulia Tymoshenko as well as Prosecutor General of Ukraine.

Separately, a group of former party members consisting of Ivan Chizh, Serhii Kiyashko, Mykola Lavrynenko, and Vasyl Aresto, founded the splinter All-Ukrainian Union of Leftists "Justice" in April 2000. As members of the Socialist Platform, they had been expelled for their opposition to Moroz's reforms within the party.

During the election campaign for the 2002 Ukrainian parliamentary election, opposition parties and candidates were afforded little media access, and the party's youth wing endorsed the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united), a member of the pro-Kuchma alliance led by Viktor Medvedchuk. Nevertheless, the party managed to secure 6.9% of the popular vote, and 20 proportional seats seats, and 3 constituencies. The Union of Young Socialists was founded as the party's new youth organisation the same year and led by Oleksandr Starynets, a former first secretary of Komsomol of Ukraine. The party was a participant in the Rise up, Ukraine! protests which called for early presidential elections.

The party was a participant in the Orange Revolution in 2004, a series of protests sparked by the fraudulent results of the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election. Moroz had been the party's candidate but shifted his support to Viktor Yushchenko after garnering just 5.82% of the vote in the first round. The election's initial result, which gave the victory to Kuchma-supported Viktor Yanukovych was contested by international observers. Yushchenko was declared the winner of the re-run, and Yanukovych resigned as prime minister to allow for the appointment of a new coalition government led by Yulia Tymoshenko, which counted the Socialist Party alongside Our Ukraine, the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, and the Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs of Ukraine. The government's inauguration was the first time the party held power as part of the executive branch of the central government. It received three ministerial portfolios, with Stanislav Nikolaenko assuming the position of Minister of Education and Science, Yuriy Lutsenko as Minister of Internal Affairs, and Oleksandr Baranivsky as Minister of Agrarian Affairs. The coalition was replicated at the regional level, with the party gaining the position of chairman of the regional state administration in two oblasts, as well as the appointment of Valentyna Semenyuk-Samsonenko as director of the State Property Fund of Ukraine. The party retained its position in the succeeding Yekhanurov government, which had come to power in the aftermath of a power struggle between the head of the National Security and Defense Council Petro Poroshenko and Tymoshenko, who was dismissed as prime minister as a result.

2010s

The party nominated Moroz as their candidate in the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election, and garnered just 0.4% of the vote. The election was eventually won by Viktor Yanukovych. Moroz stepped down as leader in July 2010 and was replaced by Vasyl Tsushko, the incumbent minister for the economy in the Azarov government. Moroz was made the party's honorary leader. The other candidates included Mykola Rudkovsky, one of the party's financers holding the position of first secretary of the political council, Viktor Subotin, the general manager of Turboatom, and Valentina-Semenyuk. The party's electoral misfortunes continued in that year's local elections, where just 38 councilors from the party were elected across 11 oblasts and three city councils. It performed the best in the Chernihiv and Poltava Oblasts where the party won 11% and 5.8% of the votes respectively.

Tsushko himself resigned as leader in July 2011, citing the difficulty of combining his position in government as head of the Anti-Monopoly Committee with party responsibilities. Sources within the party claimed the true reason was Tsushko's deteriorating health. In the leadership election held afterward, Moroz, who ran on a platform of bringing the party into opposition to the Azarov government, managed to defeat Rudkovsky, who was alleged to have the backing of the ruling Party of Regions.

That same month, the party was reported to have been expelled from the Socialist International for failing to comply with "the fundamental values and principles of the International". However, the minutes of the meeting where the decision was undertaken showed that the party had been expelled "due to not being actively engaged in SI activities, having no representation, or not having paid membership fees for some time".

Rudkovsky left the party in December 2011 after a planned merger of 11 left-wing parties failed, accusing Moroz of sabotaging the unification process to maintain his cult of personality. The party had been member to an agreement announced in November that year which would have seen ten other left-wing parties merge into the Socialist Party, whereupon it would adopt a new name. This plan fell apart when the party's political council refused to ratify the merger agreement and demanded the other parties merge into the Socialist Party without any conditions. Only five parties agreed to do so; the Peasant Party of Ukraine, Socialist Ukraine, Children of War, "Children of War" People's Party of Ukraine, and Cossack Glory, while the remaining five parties opted to merge and form the United Left and Peasants. In January 2012, the Ministry of Justice declared the merger between the Peasant Party and the Socialist Party illegal.

Russian invasion and banning

On 24 February 2022, Russia launched an invasion into Ukraine. On 6 March, Kyva was charged with high treason after making a number of statements justifying the invasion and blaming it on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He had fled to Russia a month prior to the invasion. The SPU was one of several political parties suspended by the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine as a result of the invasion, along with Derzhava, Left Opposition, Nashi, Opposition Bloc, Opposition Platform — For Life, Party of Shariy, Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Union of Leftists, and the Volodymyr Saldo Bloc.

On 15 June 2022, the Eighth Administrative Court of Appeal banned the party and all of its property was transferred to the state. Vikor Zaika, who was also the director of the Illia Kyva Charitable Foundation "Liberation", was the party's official leader at its banning. The Security Service of Ukraine and Ministry of Justice cited the party's alleged anti-Ukrainian and pro-Russian activities, statements of its previous leaders, as well as Kyva's continued influence over the party as its justifications. On 18 October 2022, the final appeal against the party's ban lodged by Sadovy's faction was dismissed by the Supreme Court of Ukraine.

Ideological development

While the party was founded at the initiative of reformists within the Soviet-era Communist Party of Ukraine, the rank-and-file membership who answered the appeal for the formation of a new left-wing party were significantly more radical than its leadership and many who had participated in the party's founding had sought to recreate the banned Communist Party under a new name. This had a significant impact on the party's early positions; while it adopted a compromise on the national question, positioning itself as a supporter of Ukrainian statehood, but one based on the equality of all individuals regardless of nationality, and advocated for unity with former Soviet republics, it fiercely opposed any and all reforms to the country's economic system, with Moroz decrying the "unprecedented, uncontrolled profiteering of Western monopolies in the economical and spiritual space of Ukraine". It also adopted the view that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was caused by the failure of the state-bureaucratic system rather than the result of a crisis of socialism.

The party's poor performance in the 1994 parliamentary elections, where it won fewer seats than the refounded Communist Party, as well as Moroz's election as parliamentary chairman, which necessitated compromise with the executive, provided the some impetus for the party to begin adopting a more moderate position. In a post-election congress held in April 1994, Moroz publicly complained about the attitude of some of the party's membership, who had tried to "transfer the party organisation over to the Communists" upon its refoundation in 1993. Instead, he argued that with the party free of its defectors—some 40,000 party members had left for the Communist Party in between 1993 and 1994—it could now adopt a more centrist approach. The party's leadership thus adopted a less antagonistic attitude towards the government's reform programme and accepted the principle of private ownership, if only for the service and retail trade industry. Moroz's supporters also began to talk of emulating the Democratic Left Alliance of Poland, whose electoral success in the 1993 Polish parliamentary election allowed it to form a coalition government; that following the "Polish route", the party should build a broad coalition of left-wing parties with democratic and progressive-patriotic forces.

During this time, the party also attempted to affirm its Ukrainian character by claiming the legacy of non-Soviet socialists such as Mykhailo Drahomanov and Volodymyr Vynnychenko, as well as early nationalist figures within the Ukrainian SSR, such as Vasyl Shahkrai, Mykola Skrypnyk, Christian Rakovsky, and Alexander Shumsky.