Towards the Abyss 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd i 03/02/2024 11:22:21 Volodymyr Ishchenko was born in Hoshcha in western Ukraine in 1982 to parents who worked on cybernetics and cosmonautics in Kiev. He taught sociology at Kiev universities and was active in the Ukrainian new left. He is now a researcher at the Freie Universität in Berlin. His writing has been published by the Guardian, Al Jazeera, Jacobin and New Left Review. 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd ii 03/02/2024 11:22:23 Towards the Abyss Ukraine from Maidan to War Volodymyr Ishchenko London • New York 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd iii 03/02/2024 11:22:23 First published by Verso 2024 © Volodymyr Ishchenko 2024 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-554-0 ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-556-4 (US EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-555-7 (UK EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ishchenko, Volodymyr, author. Title: Towards the abyss : Ukraine from Maidan to war / Volodymyr Ishchenko. Other titles: Ukraine from Maidan to war Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2023046448 (print) | LCCN 2023046449 (ebook) | ISBN 9781804295540 (paperback) | ISBN 9781804295564 (ebook ; US) | ISBN 9781804295557 (ebook ; UK) Subjects: LCSH: Ukraine Conflict, 2014- | Russo-Ukrainian War, 2014- | Ukraine--Politics and government--2014- | Ukraine--Relations--Russia (Federation) | Russia (Federation)--Relations--Ukraine. Classification: LCC DK5417 .I834 2024 (print) | LCC DK5417 (ebook) | DDC 947.7086--dc23/eng/20231130 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023046448 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023046449 Typeset in Fournier MT by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd iv 03/02/2024 11:22:23 To my mother and father 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd v 03/02/2024 11:22:23 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd vi 03/02/2024 11:22:23 Contents Acknowledgements Preface: A Wrong Ukrainian 2014 Recap of Events 1. Ukraine Protests Are No Longer Just about Europe 2. Maidan Mythologies 3. A Comedian in a Drama 4. From Ukraine with Comparisons: Preliminary Notes on Belarus 5. The Post-Soviet Vicious Circle with Oleg Zhuravlev 2022 6. 7. 8. 9. ix xiii 3 9 25 37 45 57 Three Scenarios for the Ukraine–Russia Crisis 67 NATO through Ukrainian Eyes 85 Behind Russia’s War Is Thirty Years of Post-Soviet Class Conflict 95 Ukrainian Voices? 109 Interview: Towards the Abyss 121 Notes 149 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd vii 03/02/2024 11:22:23 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd viii 03/02/2024 11:22:23 Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the tremendous work of Tom Hazeldine of Verso Books, who went through all my opinion pieces, essays, and interviews over the course of nearly a decade, organizing and editing the selected texts. During this long period, I worked in various institutions in Ukraine and Germany. My political and polemical texts were not directly related to the teaching activities and projects I was working on. However, without the support of Svitlana Oksamytna, Pavlo Kutuev, Nina Potarska, Heiko Pleines, Gal Kirn, Christian Prunitsch, Mihai Varga, and Katharina Bluhm, it is not certain that I would have found time for them. It should be clear from my references and mentions who have been important intellectual influences on me. However, Don Kalb, Georgi Derluguian, Lucan Ahmad Way, Dominique Arel, and Jesse Driscoll not only shaped my thinking about class and nation, the Soviet and post-Soviet period, Ukrainian politics and the war, but also provided human support as senior colleagues, even when they clearly disagreed with my views. The analysis of the post-Soviet maidan revolutions and the crisis of hegemony would not have been possible without our long-standing collaboration with Oleg Zhuravlev, who read and provided important comments on early drafts of many of the texts in this collection. Our research with Oleksii Viedrov, Andrii Gladun, and Mykhailo Slukvin informed some of 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd ix 03/02/2024 11:22:23 x T O WA R D S T H E A B Y S S the conclusions about Euromaidan. I am also grateful to Yuri Dergunov for his advice, which helped to improve some of the essays. I am very glad that we were and remain comrades, despite the front that divided our country. Some of the texts also benefited greatly from discussions in the collective of LeftEast – an outlet of the Eastern European left. Of course, the views expressed in the texts and any mistakes are mine alone. No words can express how grateful I am for my wife Tania’s unlimited patience and understanding when some of these texts were taking me away from my family for too much time. The chapters in this book draw on the following publications: Chapter 1: Guardian: ‘Ukraine protests are no longer just about Europe ’, 22 January 2014; ‘Ukraine has not experienced a genuine revolution, merely a change of elites’, 28 February 2014, ‘Maidan or anti-Maidan? The Ukraine situation requires more nuance ’, 15 April 2014; ‘Ukraine has ignored the far right for too long – it must wake up to the danger’, 13 November 2014; ‘Ukraine’s government bears more responsibility for ongoing conflict than the far-right’, 4 September 2015; ‘Kiev has a nasty case of anti-communist hysteria’, 18 December 2015. Chapter 2: ‘Maidan mythologies’, New Left Review 93, May–June 2015. Chapter 3: ‘A comedian in a drama’, Jacobin, 24 April 2019. Chapter 4: ‘From Ukraine with comparisons: Emerging notes on Belarus’, LeftEast, 21 August 2020. Chapter 5: ‘How maidan revolutions reproduce and intensify the post-Soviet crisis of political representation’ (with Oleg Zhuravlev), PONARS Eurasia policy memo no. 714, 18 October 2021; ‘Ukraine in the vicious circle of post-Soviet crisis of hegemony’, LeftEast, 29 October 2021. Chapter 6: ‘Three scenarios for the UkraineRussia crisis’, Al Jazeera, 16 February 2022; ‘Russia’s war in Ukraine may finally end the post-Soviet condition’, The Parliament Magazine, 21 March 2022; ‘Why did Ukraine suspend 11 “pro-Russia” parties?’, Al Jazeera, 21 March 2022; ‘Russia’s military Keynesianism’, Al Jazeera, 26 October 2022. Chapter 7: ‘NATO through Ukrainian eyes’, in Grey Anderson, ed., 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd x 03/02/2024 11:22:23 Acknowledgements xi Natopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance since the Cold War, Verso, London and New York 2023. Chapter 8: ‘Behind Russia’s war is thirty years of postSoviet class conflict’, Jacobin, 3 October 2022. Chapter 9: ‘Ukrainian voices?’, New Left Review 138, Nov–Dec 2022. Interview: ‘Towards the Abyss’, New Left Review 133/134, Jan–Apr 2022. 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xi 03/02/2024 11:22:23 Doomed, doomed and wretched. Or rather – happy and doomed, since they don’t know they’re doomed, that the mighty of their world see in them only a dirty tribe of ravishers . . . that for them everything is preordained and – worst of all – that historical truth here . . . is not on their side, they are relics, condemned to destruction by objective laws, and to assist them means to go against progress, to delay progress on some tiny sector of the front. Only that doesn’t interest me . . . What has their progress to do with me, it’s not my progress and I call it progress only because there’s no other suitable word. – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, The Snail on the Slope 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xii 03/02/2024 11:22:23 Preface A Wrong Ukrainian There are several ways in which this book should not be read. You should not read it looking for some objective Truth about the war in Ukraine. You should not read me as a sympathetic ‘Ukrainian voice’ with whom you can repent your ‘Western privilege’. I also hope you will not see the book in precisely the opposite way: as an attempt to ‘sell’ you a superficially sympathetic position that pushes the right buttons for an international audience but, if anything, serves the interests of reactionary political forces. Sometimes my writing has indeed been read in these regrettable ways. As a social scientist, I try to advance a deeper understanding of protests, revolutions, far rights and radical lefts, civil societies, nationalisms and imperialisms, and I have been doing so for twenty years. Compared with my scholarly publishing, the chapters in this book are openly political and indeed polemical. They are passionate, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but not exactly an ‘objective’ yardstick by which to judge the war in Ukraine. Some of my conclusions sound strikingly prophetic today. Some have been proven wrong. For some, the jury is still out.* * My thinking has been evolving since 2014, both as a result of escalating events and deeper engagement with them as a researcher. For this collection, I added a few retrospective endnotes to update the facts or analysis of the original texts when I felt it was necessary. These are indicated by square brackets in the notes section. 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xiii 03/02/2024 11:22:23 xiv T O WA R D S T H E A B Y S S I am Ukrainian and lived in Kiev for most of my life, studying and teaching at Ukrainian universities and conducting research and media projects with Ukrainian NGOs. However, as you will read, I am highly sceptical of attempts to use national identity to claim the moral high ground. In Kiev I was active in small ‘new left’ initiatives from the early 2000s until I had to leave Ukraine in 2019. But none of the chapters in this book was written as a partisan of any political outfit. How do I want this book to be read? My answer may sound surprising and perhaps like wishful thinking. I would like the book, with its rolling analysis of the beginning of the armed conflict in Ukraine, to be read first and foremost because it records reactions to globally relevant processes. Wherever you look, social and environmental problems are overlapping and reinforcing each other, creating what Adam Tooze terms a ‘polycrisis’.1 We have become accustomed to the feeling that next year will be worse than the last. Some people got this feeling with the pandemic in 2020, some with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2015–16, some with the global economic crisis in 2008, some with 9/11 and the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For most Ukrainians, the problems did not start with the 2022 invasion, or with the Euromaidan revolution and the war in Donbass in 2014. The feeling that the country was in a deep crisis, that it was developing in the wrong direction, that nobody in the political elite or state institutions could be trusted, has been spreading for decades, and at least since the 1990s, when systematic data on public opinion has become regularly available. Fresh hopes were raised by the maidan* revolutions of 2004 and 2014 * Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’ (2004) and ‘Euromaidan’ or ‘Revolution of Dignity’ (2014) both started at the central ‘Maidan’ square in Kiev, as had the earlier ‘Revolution on Granite’ (1990), and the word maidan is nowadays often applied to any massive anti-government street protests not only in Ukraine but in other postSoviet countries as well. In this book, ‘Euromaidan’ and ‘Maidan’ refer interchangeably to the revolution of 2014, while the phrase ‘maidan revolutions’ is used as a generic term for a type of loosely organized revolution with vaguely articulated claims and weak leadership; this is theorized in Chapter 5. 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xiv 03/02/2024 11:22:23 A Wrong Ukrainian xv (see Chapter 5), by the election of Volodymyr Zelenskyi, a ‘new face’, in 2019 (Chapter 3) and by the spectacular failure of Russia’s initial invasion plan and the Ukrainian victories in the first year of the full-scale war. But overall, the gloom has proved difficult to dispel. One specific group has experienced this crisis particularly severely, to the point of its own disintegration as a political community – which at any rate provides a certain epistemological vantage point. Let’s call this group Soviet Ukrainians, as distinct from Russian-speaking Ukrainians or those living in the southeastern regions of Ukraine. Rather than essentializing ethnolinguistic differences or regional political cultures, to understand Ukrainian political cleavages we should think about the dynamics of class and social revolution. Towards the Abyss grew out of the political activism and evolving intellectual reflection of a person who belongs ‘organically’ to this Soviet Ukrainian group. Since the beginning of the Euromaidan revolution in late 2013, I had had a growing feeling that things were getting worse and worse. There were disturbing signs that my country was sliding in a direction that held no promise, at least not for people like me. Until the very last moment, I remained hopeful about the prospects for a pluralistic Ukraine, as you can see from the opening passage of Chapter 6, written on the eve of the Russian invasion. But one of my first thoughts when I read the news in the early morning of 24 February 2022 was that no matter how this war ends, I will no longer have a homeland. I feel the same today. For the predominantly peasant and illiterate population of the territory of present-day Ukraine in the 1920s, the processes of nation-building and social revolution were inextricably linked. Ukrainians were becoming a modern nation as part of an egalitarian revolutionary movement with universal appeal. Originally, the Bolsheviks were a party of an urban revolutionary intelligentsia that appealed to the working class. They had a problem winning majority support in the largely agrarian Russian Empire. In Ukraine, there were additional peculiarities. The Bolsheviks were an 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xv 03/02/2024 11:22:23 xvi T O WA R D S T H E A B Y S S urban party in predominantly Russian, Jewish and Polish cities surrounded by Ukrainian-speaking peasants. There is a long tradition of analysing this problem through the prism of the ‘Ukrainian national question’.2 The weakness of this approach is its primordial and teleological conception of the Ukrainian nation. It assumes that Ukrainian peasants were somehow presupposed to adopt a specific variant of national identity propagated by the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, when they were really more interested in land redistribution – a subject on which bourgeois nationalists took a fairly moderate position, not least because they needed the support of the imperialist powers: first Germany, then the Entente. The Bolsheviks succeeded in Ukraine less because of their views on the ‘Ukrainian national question’ than because they were the most revolutionary force in the Civil War. The Bolsheviks came to power in what Gramsci famously called the ‘war of manoeuvre ’, without securing a strong counter-hegemony over the majority; it was just that the competing forces were even weaker. This put the question of building a durable hegemony post-factum on the agenda of the new revolutionary state. Nationalism has been a typical means of constructing hegemony in modern states, allowing the interests of a particular class or class fraction to be presented as the interests of the whole nation. Therefore, it is not surprising that the new Soviet state turned to nation-building. There was genuine interest among the Bolsheviks in the liberation of oppressed nations, and lively debate about the various ‘national questions’ posed by the decline of the Romanov, Habsburg and Hohenzollern empires. In the 1920s, ‘organic’ cadres from the national minorities of the former Russian Empire were recruited en masse into nascent Soviet institutions. To overcome the illiteracy of the peasant majority, the Bolsheviks introduced mass schooling and promoted cultural development in national-minority languages. They also established quasi-independent nation-state structures within the Soviet Union, including the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. But the Soviet approach to nationalism shifted in accordance with 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xvi 03/02/2024 11:22:23 A Wrong Ukrainian xvii broader strategic imperatives. By the 1930s, with deteriorating prospects for the worldwide proletarian revolution and the consolidation of state socialism in one country, the usefulness of the above became doubtful. The ‘affirmative action’ policies were curtailed and national intelligentsias repressed, followed by wartime mobilization of Russian patriotism and creeping post-war Russification. The Soviet Union did not lead a world revolution, but it built a modern nation-state in the vast space vacated by the Russian Empire. At its heart was the idea of a civic nation of the ‘Soviet people ’. This imagined community unified all the diverse ethnicities of the Union within a socialist economy and culture, defined politically by loyalty to the communist project. In practice, as with any other civic nationalism, it was never ethnically ‘neutral’. Russian culture underlay it, and the Russian language was the vernacular of social progress and individual career advancement. In these circumstances, the Ukrainian villagers who migrated to the cities after 1945 would start speaking Russian, including to their children. As Ukrainian and Russian are not that different anyway, this was typically perceived not so much in ethnic terms but rather as a switch from a ‘rural’ language to an ‘urban’ one. Thus, by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, a large group of Russianspeaking Ukrainians had emerged in Ukraine (along with a fairly large group of ethnic Russians). They identified as Ukrainian – this was actually inscribed by the Soviet practice of including ethnonational identity in passports – but almost exclusively used the Russian language at home, with their family and friends, and, if not otherwise required, in education, at work and in interactions with the state. Let me add some brief family history here. The westernmost part of Ukraine – Galicia – was united with the rest of the country during World War II. This is where my father was born – in Lviv, the largest city in the western regions. My mother was born in Hoshcha, a very small town in the Rivne region, which had also been part of Poland in the interwar period. 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xvii 03/02/2024 11:22:23 xviii T O WA R D S T H E A B Y S S However, none of my grandparents were natives of these places. Ukraine took its present form under the Soviet Union, a society that facilitated a lot of horizontal mobility, without which my family could not have existed. Among my grandparents and great-grandparents, there were Ukrainians from both eastern and relatively western parts of the country, as well as Russians from the Moscow area, Poles and Belarusians. The grandfather whose surname I inherited came from Donbass – not the Russian-speaking, urban, working-class Donbass, but the rural and at that time predominantly Ukrainian-speaking Donbass north of the Lugansk region, which is now annexed by Russia. After World War II he moved to Lviv to study, where he met my Russian grandmother. They started a Russian-speaking family in Lviv, which was rapidly Ukrainianizing after losing its pre-war Polish and Jewish majority and becoming stereotyped as a sort of capital of ‘Banderovite’ nationalism. What was even more impressive was the rapid vertical mobility that the Bolshevik Revolution had unleashed. The Lviv side of my family descended from a low-level clerk on a collective farm and a party commissar in the Red Army from a working-class family who rose to the military rank of major. My other two great-grandparents were a sugar-refinery worker and staunch Bolshevik activist, and a forest engineer. My grandparents were the first generation to finish a real higher education and to teach in schools and universities. My father, from Lviv, graduated from the prestigious Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology – commonly hailed as the ‘Soviet MIT’ – and worked on modelling the movements of Soviet spaceships at the Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev, which was founded and headed by Viktor Glushkov, the creator of the first personal computer in the Soviet Union and particularly famous for the National Automated System for Computation and Information Processing. Some believe that this unrealized project for the ‘Soviet Internet’ could have solved some of the biggest problems of the centralized planned economy. My father and mother met at Glushkov’s Institute and started a Russian-speaking family in Kiev. 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xviii 03/02/2024 11:22:24 A Wrong Ukrainian xix The grandmother who helped raise me was a teacher of Russian language and literature, although she came from a Ukrainian village. The works of classical Russian poets, whose names and monuments are now erased from Ukrainian streets, were the first books she read to me and the first poems I could recite by heart. Was this ‘colonization’? Did the Ukrainian speakers in my family feel oppressed when they spoke in Russian? On the contrary, it was the language of their loving partners, of the big cities, of higher education, the language spoken by most of their peers and colleagues in the technical intelligentsia. For them, it was not the language of oppression, but of advancement. As for the millions of other Soviet Ukrainian families. Our ‘Russification’ was part of a modernizing transformation of revolutionary magnitude. I can tell my son that one of his grandfathers worked with spaceships, and another grandfather worked with blueprints of Mriia (meaning ‘Dream’ in Ukrainian) – the largest airplane on Earth, built in the late 1980s by the Antonov aircraft plant in Kiev to transport some of those spaceships. How many of my son’s generation will be able to tell their children something similar? Mriia was destroyed at the Hostomel airport near Kiev in the first days of the Russian invasion. The darkest sides of the Soviet experience also feature in my family history. The stories of Holodomor – the Great Famine of 1932–3 – which my grandmother survived as a little girl, were part of my childhood memories, along with the poems of Pushkin and Lermontov. My Red Army commissar ancestor could never meet my other great-grandfather, who was arrested as an alleged ‘Polish spy’ and executed in 1937 during Stalin’s Great Terror. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956, the year Khrushchev’s Thaw began. In some of the perestroika years, when knowledge of the extent of the crimes of Stalinism became widely discussed, I remember my grandfather looking at his father’s photo and re-reading the letter in which the Soviet authorities acknowledged a ‘mistake ’. The state had killed his father in a fit of spy mania, for nothing. Throughout his youth, he lived with the stigma of being a ‘family member of an enemy of 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xix 03/02/2024 11:22:24 xx T O WA R D S T H E A B Y S S the people ’, which broke his career. Nevertheless, he served this state in the military. He died suddenly in 1990 as the Soviet order was rapidly collapsing. My grandmother wondered what he would have thought about what happened next. When the Soviet Union fell, there was no reversion to a ‘natural’ Ukrainianization, even under an independent Ukrainian state. Government bodies, the education system and some of the media were Ukrainianized; informal communication tended to be conducted in whichever language was convenient or predominant – Russian in the more urbanized and industrialized southeastern regions, Ukrainian in the less urbanized western and central regions. The commercial sector had little interest in switching to Ukrainian, since Russian-language cultural production could be sold to almost the entire post-Soviet Russian-speaking world. This is why so many Ukrainian media and celebrities, including future president Volodymyr Zelenskyi, produced and performed primarily or even exclusively in Russian. The Russian market was simply bigger than the Ukrainian one. Ukrainianization was limited because the post-Soviet transformation turned out to be de-modernizing rather than modernizing, with no new vector of development to replace a Soviet project which had itself been stagnating by the 1970s (see Chapter 5). There was no alternative ‘postSoviet’ way forward, only three decades of gradual degradation, and then the bloodiest war on the European continent for decades. In pre-Euromaidan polls, the majority of Ukrainians would typically say that the USSR had been rather a good thing. In retrospect, the post-Stalin Soviet years were the best period in the history of the present-day Ukrainian territories, if we care first and foremost about the lives of the masses. In the post-Soviet period, amid constant social crisis, language and ethnonational identity became markers of political polarization. There is a tendency to see the regional cleavage in Ukrainian politics as almost an ethnic conflict between Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers. This, 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xx 03/02/2024 11:22:24 A Wrong Ukrainian xxi however, is an essentializing, retrospective interpretation. Although it took on a more ethnonational dimension as the crisis escalated, what lay behind Ukraine’s ‘regional’ cleavage was a class conflict.4 The ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ political camps were deeply asymmetrical in terms of the social classes they sought to represent and in their political capacities. The political capitalists – the ‘oligarchs’ who captured the commanding heights of the economy and the state, whom I discuss in Chapter 8 – were the camp of status quo, post-Soviet stagnation, while the ‘Western’ camp promised integration into neoliberal globalization. The agenda of the ‘Western’ camp reflected the interests of the professional middle classes. Excluded from political capitalism, they aspired to the role of comprador bourgeoisie allied with transnational capital. The latter would benefit from the enforcement of ‘transparency’ and ‘anti-corruption’, thus eliminating the main competitive advantages of Ukraine’s political capitalists. The ‘Western’ camp was also joined by those sections of workers who were integrated into EU markets primarily as migrant workers. But the prospect of Western capitalist competition repelled other large sections of Ukrainian workers, especially employees of the big post-Soviet industries and the public sector, to whom the ‘Eastern’ camp could offer at least some stability in the midst of the post-Soviet collapse, and who passively supported its rule without any enthusiasm for it. My father adapted to the post-Soviet changes, even though he had to leave behind a collapsing science sector in order to feed our family. My mother had to take several short-term jobs after leaving the Institute of Cybernetics, while also devoting herself to my sister and me. Overall, we survived the disastrous 1990s better than many Ukrainian families. I was able to benefit from a high-quality education at an elite Russian-language school, a Soviet holdover, which in the 1990s reproduced the cultural if not the economic capital of intellectuals. The reading circle of a technical intelligentsia family also played its part. Soviet science fiction, with its powerful vision of a 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xxi 03/02/2024 11:22:24 xxii T O WA R D S T H E A B Y S S utopian future and exploration of social and ethical issues, was crucial in developing my worldview. My parents had moved too far to the right of the political spectrum to pass on to me any irrational nostalgia for the past. What interested me was the possibility of a radically different and humane future of unlimited progress in taking control of natural and social forces. The movement towards that future was at the heart of the universal appeal of the Bolshevik revolution. Even faded, this vision of progress marked the worldview of the last Soviet generation. Feeling inclined towards the social sciences, I did not follow my father’s path into physics and mathematics, but chose to study at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy – a peculiar and remarkable project founded immediately after Ukraine’s independence as a wannabe elite university that would combine the practices of a Western liberal arts education with the Ukrainianizing agenda of nationalist intellectuals primarily trained in the humanities. The Mohyla promised a modern education in the social sciences. Perhaps naively, I believed that in order to change society, one must first try to understand it. From a student’s perspective, the nationalist agenda at Mohyla manifested itself in the use of Ukrainian as the language of education, some pathosladen speeches by the university administration and the views of some lecturers. Mohyla’s students and faculty were, on average, more politicized than in other Ukrainian universities; they were also more internationalized, thanks in part to an emphasis on good English skills and stronger ties and exchanges with Western academia. Within this politicized milieu, a relatively small but vocal ‘new left’ emerged, fuelled by disillusionment with the first maidan, the ‘Orange Revolution’ of 2004. As a young lecturer at Mohyla, I actively participated in its development. These Ukrainian Kulturträger won a narrow ‘left’ niche in middle-class civil society. They also provided ‘Ukrainian voices’ for certain progressive segments of the international public. But the activism in this milieu was on the whole a disappointing experience, and I reflected a lot on its problems 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xxii 03/02/2024 11:22:24 A Wrong Ukrainian xxiii and limitations.3 The new left did more than simply oppose the ‘old left’ – nostalgically pro-Soviet, geopolitically pro-Russian, culturally conservative, not always consistently anti-oligarchic and represented primarily by the Communist Party of Ukraine (see Chapter 1). Emphasizing such oppositions indeed helped to gain us greater acceptance among the pro-Western national-liberals. At the same, it reaffirmed our distance from the majority of our people, who remained passive and atomized. I believed that overcoming this self-marginalizing dynamic required us to position ourselves against bourgeois civil society and appeal directly to the masses – who, thanks to the post-Soviet legacy, were potentially sympathetic to many radical ideas on economics, politics and ideology, and were not properly represented by anyone in politics or the public sphere. For over thirty years, the Ukrainian nationalist intelligentsia had been advancing a very specific project of Ukrainian modernity. Its two main components were a rejection of Soviet modernization and an anti-Russian articulation of Ukrainian national identity. These intellectuals sought to draw an equivalence between everything Ukrainian (in their specific articulation) and everything modern, while on the other hand they hoped to associate everything backward with everything Soviet and Russian. In effect, they sought to reverse the symbolic hierarchy that identified Ukrainian with backwardness, which they feared existed behind the screen of the Soviet internationalist project. Now ‘Ukrainian’ should be seen as young, metropolitan, cosmopolitan, fluent in English, stylish, mobile, liberal, well-educated, successful. The ‘Soviet’ and ‘Russian’, on the other hand, had to become old, conservative, provincial, rigid, clinging to dying industries, poorly or inadequately educated, in bad taste, losers. This polarization did not require complete homogeneity. After all, modernity is also about free rational debate. The fulfilment of Ukrainian modernity required ‘Ukrainian feminists’, ‘Ukrainian liberals’, ‘Ukrainian leftists’ – as well as Ukrainian rightists. Of course there should be discussion 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xxiii 03/02/2024 11:22:24 xxiv T O WA R D S T H E A B Y S S of the nationalist crimes of World War II (with the obligatory disclaimer that the Soviets were worse). Of course there should be concern about right-wing violence today (with obligatory disclaimers that it benefited Putin). And so on and so on. But at the critical moments when these discussions could really matter politically, and not just appease the ‘enlightened’ conscience, all the red lines were strictly enforced, and you had to get back in line. Or get in trouble. I was so much like these people. We had so much in common in our biographies. We went through the same universities, the same scholarships, the same programmes, the same civil-society institutions, the same conferences. We spoke the same languages. But I had not begun to think like them. My peer group often reacted to this with hatred. In one trashing of me by nationalist intellectuals, I was portrayed as a danger to the dear cause of the ‘Ukrainian nation-building project’. It was not because of what I wrote: they typically did not engage in any substantive discussion. And regardless of what I could possibly write, there were so much stronger forces in the media and politics that any imaginable ‘threat’ I posed was negligible. No, it was certainly not what I did that threatened the nationalist cause, but, I think, simply the existence of people like me. We could challenge the national-liberals as social equals in forums. We were an unwanted nuisance to their monopoly. Not really traitors to an imagined community, but traitors to a real existing social group. Class traitors, not national traitors. Here was the real hatred. We were Ukrainian and modern, but not like them. Soviet Ukrainians who could have become comprador intellectuals in a peripheralizing country, but refused this role. We resisted their collective gaslighting. That is why there was no rational engagement, only denial, silence, rejection, cancelling. One could write thousands of words against Russian imperialism and yet still be called a ‘troubadour of the empire’. One could literally say ‘I hate Putin’ and still be accused of spreading Russian propaganda. Our intellectuals were not rated as intellectuals. Our scholarship was not scholarship but ‘political activism’. The political repression against us 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xxiv 03/02/2024 11:22:24 A Wrong Ukrainian xxv was not political repression, because threats and violence allegedly never occurred. We were simply not allowed to exist, because, if we did exist, the specific articulation of modernity and backwardness in Ukraine would no longer work. Whatever we did, we could not simply be. We were potential embryos of an alternative Ukrainian modernity, one that could build an ‘organic’ representation for Soviet Ukrainians – for what they were, not for what they were ‘supposed’ to become in the view of nationalist intellectuals; that is, to become like them or to disappear altogether (at least from Ukraine’s public sphere). We could offer an alternative for Ukraine that could also be more appealing globally (see Chapter 9) and in line with future trends, or at least with what more and more young people around the world would prefer as their future. Why didn’t it work out this way? Many have compared the post-Soviet conflicts with the collapse of empires of the past: new contested borders were drawn; ethnonational groups that were part of the imperial majority became minorities in the new states; groups that were formerly oppressed minorities were given opportunities for revenge. These comparisons are typically blind to social class and revolutionary dynamics, which provide a very different perspective. For example, the political crises and conflicts that followed the collapse of the great European empires after World War I were fundamentally different to those that followed the demise of the multinational Soviet Union. The post-Soviet crisis was the terminal crisis of a social revolution, not an ancien régime. The new nationalisms of a hundred years ago blossomed in the context of modernization, not de-modernization. The 1920s and ’30s were a period of intense politicization, when organized revolutionary workers fought against no less committed and organized fascist counter-revolutionaries. The post-Soviet years, by contrast, were a period of atomization, of general apathy, disturbed only by short-term maidan mobilizations. In sum, the post– World War I crisis was a stalemate of strengthening social forces. The postSoviet crisis was a stalemate of mutual weakness. 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xxv 03/02/2024 11:22:24 xxvi T O WA R D S T H E A B Y S S As noted above, the pro-Western intellectual and civic elites in postSoviet Ukraine could offer nothing comparable to Soviet modernization. The majority of Ukrainians did not buy their dubious promises that they too could join the global middle class. But the Russian elite ’s offer was even less attractive. They typically compensated for their weakness in soft power with hard power. But even when they resorted to escalating coercion, they exposed their profound weaknesses. There were three critical moments when the Ukrainian majority broke away from Russia, ending up further removed from its orbit on each occasion. Each of these moments was related to the failure or mid-course correction of military coercion initiated by the Russian elite. Ukrainians responded to the failed coup in Moscow in August 1991 by voting for independence, only eight months after having voted to preserve the Soviet Union. In response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbass in 2014, support for Russia-led reintegration projects became limited to a small minority in Ukraine, whereas they had previously been able to claim a majority or at least a plurality (see Chapter 7). The full-scale invasion in 2022 provoked the strongest antiRussian consolidation in Ukraine’s history. These massive reactions to Russian coercion were purely negative in nature – rejections of what Russia was doing, rather than support for the West or for Ukrainian ethnonationalism. However, it was the ‘Western’ camp that was able to seize the opportunity of these negative shocks to advance the positive substance of its agenda. This happened because of the profound class and political asymmetries between the ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ camps. The political capitalists of the ‘Eastern’ camp did not develop their own civil society and Soviet Ukrainians remained too atomized to build their organic representation from below. Their plebeian ‘anti-maidans’ were never a match for the maidan protests they were responding to (see Chapters 1 and 2). If Volodymyr Zelenskyi’s landslide victory over Petro Poroshenko in 2019 – after the incumbent ran on an aggressive nationalist programme – offered a last hope, this was dashed by the 2022 invasion. 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xxvi 03/02/2024 11:22:24 A Wrong Ukrainian xxvii As a result of the failure to develop and defend a pluralist nation-building project that would ‘organically’ grow from the Soviet Ukraine, a large group of Ukrainians is now becoming the object of assimilation policies, squeezed between the ‘Western’ nation-building projects of Ukrainian bourgeois civil society and Putin’s nostrum of ‘one and the same people’. In the notorious 2021 essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, Putin articulated the Ukrainian–Russian distinction as a difference of regionalcultural variety within the same ‘people’ as a political unit. However, there is in fact less of a cultural difference between the population of the urbanized and mostly Russian-speaking southeastern Ukraine and the Russians, and more of a political difference. The urban culture of the late Soviet period, with its largely homogeneous cuisine throughout the USSR, typical references and jokes from literature and cinema, rituals and holidays, is far more relevant to them than the pre-modern ethnic traditions of Ukrainian and Russian villages. If some of the previously Russian-speaking Ukrainians switched to Ukrainian as a reaction to the invasion, it was clearly a political choice for them, not determined by their ethnic identity. The people feel more connected to the national imagined community of Ukraine, and less to Putin’s, even if they have a different vision of the nation than the speakers of the ‘Western’ camp. In 2016, only 26 per cent of Ukrainians agreed with the statement that Ukrainians and Russians are ‘one and the same people’, although 51 per cent agreed that Ukrainians and Russians are different but ‘brotherly people’.5 Both figures are likely to have fallen dramatically after 2022. For the ‘Western’ camp, the weak cultural difference of some Ukrainians from Russians has always been a political threat. It was seen not only as legitimizing Russian expansionism, but also as a threat to their elitist ersatzmodernization project. Quite early after the Russian missiles hit Ukrainian soil and Russian troops crossed the border, the national-liberal intellectuals understood that this was not only a threat, but also an opportunity for ‘knife solutions’ – a radical, uncompromising transformation of the whole country 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xxvii 03/02/2024 11:22:24 xxviii T O WA R D S T H E A B Y S S in their image and likeness on a scale that was impossible before: the war helps to silence the voices of discontent.6 The substance of ‘decolonization’ (see Chapter 9) was not the building of a stronger sovereign state with a robust public sector – one that would contradict transnational capital, their crucial partner. Rather, it was the eradication of anything related to Russia or the Soviet Union from the Ukrainian public sphere, including the removal of Russian-language books from libraries, the ban on teaching Russian in schools, even in predominantly Russian-speaking cities like Odessa, and even a ridiculously obscurantist attempt (which passed the first reading in the Ukrainian parliament) to ban the citation of Russian and Russian-language sources in science and education. Add to this the banning of political parties, including some of Ukraine’s oldest, such as the Socialist and Communist parties, which have represented the ‘Eastern’ camp for decades, and further repression of popular opposition media and bloggers stigmatized as ‘pro-Russian’, even when they expressed no sympathy for the invasion (see Chapter 6). Ironically, the result is similar to the situation of Ukrainians in the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire: not so much discriminated against as individuals, but prohibited from expressing a distinct collective identity that would be seen as treasonous and repressed. In Ukraine, we can’t be Soviet anymore. In Russia, it does not look like we can be Ukrainians. Soviet Ukrainians were the product of a social revolution; its degradation destroyed them as a political community. First, the late Soviet and postSoviet leadership became seen as nothing more than a corrupt, self-serving elite. The atomized masses responded with frequent but poorly organized and amorphous protests that, when successful, only reproduced and intensified the underlying crisis. Unlike social revolutions, the maidans did not bring radical transformations in favour of the popular classes; they typically only increased social inequality. The maidan revolutions did not even build a stronger state but only destabilized the existing one, allowing domestic 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xxviii 03/02/2024 11:22:24 A Wrong Ukrainian xxix and transnational elite rivals to seize the opportunity to advance their interests and agendas. The post-Soviet elite responded only with more coercion, which eventually escalated into war (see how it worked out with the successful repression of the 2020 uprising in Belarus in Chapter 4). This set the stage for the flourishing not of developmental national ideologies but of regressive neo-tribalist identities. There was no strong force from below to counteract this dynamic. The processes of the escalating crisis of hegemony are universal, but their manifestations in the post-Soviet space are of a rather unique magnitude. The decomposition of a political community is the ultimate endpoint of these crisis trends. Divided by frontlines and borders, some volunteering, some being mobilized by force, some collaborating, some fleeing abroad, some trying to maintain a normal life and work in their hometowns, some simply trying to survive, taking different positions on the war (who even cares what ‘Ukrainian voices’ who speak from Donetsk or Sevastopol think?), lacking our political and public representatives, with limited space for expression, with broken ties and suppressed discussions; is there even a common name, a claimed identity for all of us now? It is easy to pretend that we have never even existed, at most a dead-end branch from the main line of Ukrainian nation-building. But one can be sure that without a new cycle of modernizing development in Ukraine, Soviet Ukrainians will not be fully assimilated. The political communication required to define our common identity, interests and collective actions in relation to Ukraine, and the states where we will end up, may start again. The revolutionary project initiated by the Bolsheviks a hundred years ago has lost its embeddedness in the national communities where it once took root. For the contemporary left, this should mean not a break with the project of progress, rationality and universal emancipation, but rather the search for a political (and perhaps no longer national) community in which our efforts could be more effectively applied. Any new social revolution would learn from the Soviet one as much as the Bolsheviks learned from the 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xxix 03/02/2024 11:22:24 xxx T O WA R D S T H E A B Y S S French Revolution of 1789 – understanding its limits and acknowledging its (sometimes unjustifiable) mistakes, but also registering and building on its achievements. Could Ukraine again be a core part of a social-revolutionary movement? The extent of the ethnonationalist and anti-communist reformatting of the country’s politics, society and ideology may leave no hope for this in the foreseeable future. But consider how dramatically the memory of the World War II has changed over time. Who could have imagined in 1945, after the Nazi war of extermination and enslavement on the Eastern Front, which murdered between one-sixth and one-quarter of the entire civilian population of Ukraine, that the descendants of the survivors would fight using German tanks against Russians on the very same battlefields where they had fought in the Red Army against German tanks, and would do so while demolishing the remaining monuments to their heroic ancestors? It is unlikely to be the final ironic twist of Ukrainian history. 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd xxx 03/02/2024 11:22:24 Notes Preface: A Wrong Ukrainian 1 Adam Tooze, ‘Welcome to the world of the polycrisis’, Financial Times, 28 October 2022. 2 The recently published books written in this tradition that review these discussions between Bolshevik leaders and ‘Ukrainian Marxists’ are Stephen Velychenko, Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red: The Ukrainian Marxist Critique of Russian Communist Rule in Ukraine, 1918–1925, Toronto 2015; and Marko Bojcun, The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine, 1897–1918, Leiden 2021. 3 For example, Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘Left divergence, right convergence: anarchists, Marxists, and nationalist polarization in the Ukrainian conflict, 2013–14’, Globalizations, vol. 17, no. 5, 2020, pp. 820–39, and ‘Contradictions of post-Soviet Ukraine and failure of Ukraine’s new left’, LeftEast, 9 January 2020. 4 See Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘Class or regional cleavage? The Russian invasion and Ukraine’s “East/West” divide’, European Societies, forthcoming, for an elaboration of this argument. 5 ‘Konsolidatsiia ukrainskoho suspilstva: shliakhy, vyklyky, perspektyvy’ [Consolidation of Ukrainian society: Paths, challenges, prospects], Razumkov Centre, 2016, p. 71. 6 S. Rudenko, ‘Spetsoperatsiia “Derusyfikatsiia.” Interviu z holovnym redaktorom “Istorychnoi pravdy” Vakhtanhom Kipiani’ [Special operation ‘Derussification’: Interview with the editor-in-chief of ‘Istorychna pravda’ Vakhtang Kipiani], Ukrainska Pravda, 25 April 2022. 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd 149 03/02/2024 11:22:28 Notes for pages 3 to 30 150 Recap of Events 1 2 For example, Lucan A. Way, Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics, Baltimore 2015. A. Kravchuk et al., ‘The expected impact of the EU–Ukraine Association Agreement’, Transnational Institute, 31 March 2016. 1. Ukraine Protests Are No Longer Just about Europe 1 [The attempt at a student strike quickly fizzled out. Later, I analyzed how the weakness of workers’ organizations and strikes contributed to the violent radicalization of the Euromaidan, with disastrous consequences for the country. See Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘Insufficiently diverse: The problem of nonviolent leverage and radicalization of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, 2013–2014’, Journal of Eurasian Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, 2020, pp. 201–15.] 2 [Now I would put it slightly differently. Instead of saying that Euromaidan was neither a revolution nor a coup, I would say that it combined elements of both. Revolutions and coups are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, the characteristics of revolutions like Euromaidan make them structurally predisposed to being hijacked, including for coups, by forces that do not represent the majority of participants (see Chapter 5).] 3 [See Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘Denial of the obvious: Far right in Maidan protests and their danger today’, Vox Ukraine, 16 April 2018.] 4 [The government delayed the final verdict in the Ukrainian court system on the Communist Party’s appeal, so as not to allow the party to appeal to the ECHR. After the Russian invasion, the government banned communists together with over a dozen parties labelled as ‘pro-Russian’. See Chapter 6, below.] 5 [After the Russian invasion, this materialized most prominently for the Western public as the ‘Ukrainian left’ phenomenon, even though this small milieu has failed so far to even build a strong organization, let alone a new party: see Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘Contradictions of post-Soviet Ukraine and failure of Ukraine’s new left’, LeftEast, 9 January 2020, and also the Preface to this collection.] 2. Maidan Mythologies 1 [My analysis of this problem has evolved since 2014–15, as will become clear in Chapter 5. It is precisely the characteristics that Maidan shared with the 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd 150 03/02/2024 11:22:28 Notes for pages 31 to 42 151 global wave of protests of the 2010s – poorly articulated demands, beyond ‘Down with Yanukovych!’; loose organization; weak and dispersed leadership – that allowed it to be so easily hijacked by right-wing forces.] 2 [Later published in Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘Far right participation in the Ukrainian Maidan protests: An attempt of systematic estimation’, European Politics and Society, vol. 17, no. 4, 2016, pp. 453–72.] 3 [More on this in a later article: Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘Insufficiently diverse: The problem of nonviolent leverage and radicalization of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, 2013–14’, Journal of Eurasian Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, 2020, pp. 201–15.] 4 [See, however, my development of the class-conflict argument for the elite classes – political capitalists, professional middle class and transnational capital – in Chapter 8, below.] 3. A Comedian in a Drama 1 [Ironically, speculation about Kolomoiskyi’s significant influence on Zelenskyi appears to have been proven wrong. Andrii Bohdan, a lawyer whom many perceived as a link between the two, served as Zelenskyi’s chief of staff for less than a year. A small group of deputies loyal to Kolomoiskyi entered the Ukrainian parliament on Zelenskyi’s party list, but even more entered outside it. Kolomoiskyi received no compensation for PrivatBank. In fact, Kolomoiskyi could be very unhappy with developments under Zelenskyi. Before the invasion, his pundits criticized the ‘external management’ of Ukraine by the West and ‘anti-corruption’ civil society. After the invasion began, he broke ranks with the Ukrainian elite and did not publicly condemn the invasion for a long time. Some of Kolomoiskyi’s key property became a primary target of selective nationalizations in 2022 under military pretext.] 2 [The following may sound naive in today’s post-invasion reality. However, these trends had actually begun to materialize. Zelenskyi’s attacks on the political opposition and the ‘oligarchs’ tended to unite the most powerful elite fractions in Ukrainian politics against him, rather than consolidating his power. Neoliberal-nationalist civil society was increasingly delegitimized as a promoter of Western interests. Some new parties appeared, trying to mobilize Zelenskyi’s ‘betrayed majority’. But all these developments, which benefited the left in the long run, were aborted by the Russian invasion.] 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd 151 03/02/2024 11:22:28 152 Notes for pages 45 to 59 4. From Ukraine with Comparisons 1 Olga Onuch and Gwendolyn Sasse, ‘Anti-regime action and geopolitical polarization: Understanding protester dispositions in Belarus’, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 38, nos 1–2, 2022, pp. 62–87. 2 Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘Insufficiently diverse: The problem of nonviolent leverage and radicalization of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, 2013–2014’, Journal of Eurasian Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, 2020, pp. 201–15. 5. The Vicious Post-Soviet Circle 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 [This chapter is based on a paper co-authored with Oleg Zhuravlev, ‘The Post-Soviet vicious circle: Revolution as reproduction of the crisis of hegemony’, in Dylan Riley and Marco Santoro, eds, The Anthem Companion to Gramsci, forthcoming. It is mostly compiled from Volodymyr Ishchenko and Oleg Zhuravlev, ‘How maidan revolutions reproduce and intensify the post-Soviet crisis of political representation’, PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo 714, 18 October 2021; and Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘Ukraine in the vicious circle of post-Soviet crisis of hegemony’, LeftEast, 29 October 2021.] Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks: Volume 2, New York 1996, pp. 32–3. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin, Cambridge, MA, 2009; Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley 1995; Anatoly Pinsky, ‘Subjectivity after Stalin’, Russian Studies in History, vol. 58, nos 2–3, pp. 79–88. Juliane Fürst, ‘Prisoners of the Soviet self? Political youth opposition in Late Stalinism’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 54, no. 3, 2002, pp. 353–75. For example, Pınar Bedirhanoğ lu, ‘The nomenklatura’s passive revolution in Russia in the neoliberal era’, in Leo McCann, ed., Russian Transformations, London 2004, pp. 19–41; Rick Simon, ‘Passive revolution, perestroika and the emergence of the new Russia’, Capital & Class, vol. 34, no. 3, 2010, pp. 429–48; Kees Van Der Pijl, ‘Soviet socialism and passive revolution’, in Stephen Gill, ed., Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, Cambridge 2011, pp. 237–58; Owen Worth, Hegemony, International Political Economy and Post-Communist Russia, London 2017. Adam Morton, ‘The continuum of passive revolution’, Capital & Class, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 315–42, at p. 333. See also Alex Callinicos, ‘The limits of passive revolution’, Capital & Class, vol. 34, no. 3, 2010, pp. 491–507. Michael Burawoy, ‘The state and economic involution: Russia through a China lens’, World Development, vol. 24, no. 6, 1996, pp. 1105–17; Steven L. 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd 152 03/02/2024 11:22:28 Notes for pages 61 to 67 8 9 10 11 12 13 153 Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions, Cambridge, MA, 1998; Yakov Rabkin, ‘Undoing years of progress’, in Yakov Rabkin and Mikhail Minakov, eds, Demodernization: A Future in the Past, Stuttgart 2018, pp. 24–8. Pascal Perrineau, ‘The crisis in political representation’, in Pascal Perrineau and Luc Rouban, eds, Politics in France and Europe, New York 2010, pp. 3–14. Oleg Zhuravlev and Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘Exclusiveness of civic nationalism: Euromaidan eventful nationalism in Ukraine’, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 36, no. 3, 2020, pp. 226–45. Maxim Gatskov and Kseniia Gatskova, ‘Civil society in Ukraine’, in Alberto Veira-Ramos et al., eds, Ukraine in Transformation: From Soviet Republic to European Society, Cham 2019, pp. 123–44. Mikhail Minakov, ‘Republic of clans: The evolution of the Ukrainian political system’, in Bálint Magyar, ed., Stubborn Structures: Reconceptualizing PostCommunist Regimes, Budapest 2019, pp. 217–46, at p. 240. Paul Chaisty and Stephen Whitefield, ‘How challenger parties can win big with frozen cleavages: Explaining the landslide victory of the Servant of the People Party in the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary elections’, Party Politics, vol. 28, no. 1, January 2022, pp. 115–26. [As discussed in Chapter 6, below, the present war in Ukraine may lead either to the elimination of a sovereign centre of capital accumulation in the postSoviet space, and to the latter’s eventual disintegration, or to fundamental political, economic and ideological changes in Russia itself. In either case, the vicious post-Soviet cycle is coming to an end.] 6. Three Scenarios for the Ukraine–Russia Crisis 1 [Should Zelenskyi’s public denials of the invasion threat on the eve of the invasion be considered irresponsible in retrospect? Some Ukrainians think so now, and may question Zelenskyi and his team even more harshly after the war is over. Should I be ashamed of my feelings and of questioning the ‘imminent invasion’ narrative? In all the self-congratulatory reports of the US and British elites (e.g. Erin Banco et al., ‘Something was badly wrong: When Washington realized Russia was actually invading Ukraine’, Politico, 24 February 2023), I have seen no convincing explanation as to why so little was done to prevent the invasion by those who claimed its ‘imminence’ several months before it began – neither supplying arms to Ukraine much earlier nor negotiating seriously with Putin; there was practically nothing but an information campaign. Its aim was not to prevent the invasion, but to ensure Western consolidation against Russia after it had begun. The campaign 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd 153 03/02/2024 11:22:28 154 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Notes for pages 68 to 79 left most of the European and Ukrainian elites unconvinced until the very last days. As is now well documented, Ukraine was only preparing for a limited Russian offensive in Donbass and ‘hybrid’ destabilization (Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi et al., ‘Preliminary lessons in conventional warfighting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: February–July 2022’, Royal United Services Institute, 30 November 2022, pp. 22–3). I wrote this op-ed in early February 2022, outlining what the Ukrainian government could and should do to preserve the chance for a pluralistic and sovereign Ukraine – a chance to get my country back that was cut short by the Russian invasion.] Samuel Charap, ‘How to break the cycle of conflict with Russia’, Foreign Affairs, 7 February 2022. Samuel Charap et al., eds, A Consensus Proposal for a Revised Regional Order in Post-Soviet Europe and Eurasia, Rand Corporation, 2019. ‘Zahroza novoho vtorhnennya: hromadsʹka dumka pro konflikt, mozhlyvi kompromisy ta protydiyu Rosiyi’ [The threat of a new invasion: Public opinion on the conflict, possible compromises and counteracting Russia], Ilko Kucheriv Foundation, 2 February 2022. ‘Yesli Zapadu budet vygodno – prodast Ukrainu’ [If it is profitable for the West, it will sell Ukraine], Gazeta.ua, 24 September 2019. [See Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘The Minsk Accords and the Political Weaknes of the “Other Ukraine”’, Russian Politics, vol. 8, no. 2, 2023, pp. 127–46, for a detailed analysis of the domestic contention in Ukraine over the Minsk Accords and the fundamental problem of the inability of the ‘Eastern’ camp in Ukrainian politics to articulate a positive program for Ukraine’s pluralist national development and to support it with sustained civic mobilization.] Adam Tooze, ‘What if Putin’s war regime turns to MMT [Modern Monetary Theory]?’, Chartbook, 3 March 2022. Anastasiya Tovt, ‘ “Sanktsii stali biznesom”: Kak vnosyatsya oshibki i “ispravleniya” v sanktsionnyye spiski SNBO’ [‘“Sanctions have become business”: How “errors” and “corrections” are made to the NSDC sanctions lists’], Strana.ua, 23 November 2021. [Indeed, in the course of 2022, they changed the law and permanently banned these parties and more under an expedited procedure. In addition, the government pressured a number of opposition MPs to resign and turned the remaining ‘pro-Russian’ deputies into even more loyal supporters of Zelenskyi than the ‘pro-Western’ parties: Igor Burdyga, ‘These are the men Russia wanted to put in charge of Ukraine ’, openDemocracy, 4 March 2023.] [According to one estimate, there were indeed relatively more collaborators with the Russians from the banned parties. However, the absolute majority of elected officials and members of local councils from these parties remained loyal to Ukraine, which raises even more questions about the reasons and 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd 154 03/02/2024 11:22:28 Notes for pages 79 to 88 155 motives for their ban and stigmatization as ‘pro-Russian’: Kateryna Bereziuk, ‘U yakykh partiiakh zradnykiv naibilshe?’, [Which parties have more traitors?], Chesno, 17 March 2023.] 11 Sergey Faldin, ‘Is Russia’s silent majority waking up?’, Al Jazeera, 20 October 2022. 12 Adam Tooze, ‘Warfare without the state: New Keynesian shock therapy for Ukraine ’s home front’, Chartbook, 22 October 2022. 7. NATO through Ukrainian Eyes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Natalia Panina, ed., Ukrainske suspilstvo 1994–2004: stsiolohichnyi monitorynh [Ukrainian Society 1994–2004: Sociological Monitoring], Kiev 2004, p. 16; ‘Stavlennia hromadian do intehratsiinykh proektiv’ [The Attitude of Citizens to Integration Projects], Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), 20 March 2012. All KIIS polls cited in this chapter are available at kiis.com.ua. For example, F. Stephen Larrabee, ‘Ukraine at the crossroads’, Washington Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 4, September 2007, pp. 45–61, at p. 49. Studies show no correlation between support for NATO membership and perceived level of knowledge about the organization. See Valerii Khmelko, ‘Stavlennia hromadian Ukrainy do yii vstupu do Yevrosoiuzu i NATO ta yikhni otsinky svoyei obiznanosti stosovno tsykh orhanizatsii’ [Attitudes of Ukrainian citizens towards joining the EU and NATO and their assessment of their knowledge about these organizations], Sotsiolohiia: teoriia, metody, marketynh, no. 1, 2006, pp. 71–87. Panina, Ukrainske suspilstvo 1994–2004: sotsiolohichnyi monitorynh, p. 16; Andrii Bychenko, ‘Hromadska dumka pro NATO i pryiednannia do nioho Ukrainy’ [Public Opinion on NATO and Ukraine’s NATO Membership], Natsionalna bezpeka i oborona, 2006, p. 21. Bychenko, ‘Hromadska dumka pro NATO i pryiednannia do nioho Ukrainy’, p. 36; Khmelko, ‘Stavlennia hromadian Ukrainy do yii vstupu do Yevrosoiuzu i NATO ta yikhni otsinky svoyei obiznanosti stosovno tsykh orhanizatsii’. Although the alliance enjoyed somewhat higher approval in the western regions than in the east, no pro-NATO majority existed in the former prior to 2014. Political capitalists, in the sense I employ the term here, represent the fraction of the capitalist class whose main competitive advantage derives from selective benefits bestowed by the state, unlike capitalists who look to exploit technological innovations or a particularly cheap labour force. See Chapter 8, below. Oleksii V. Haran and Mariia Zolkina, ‘The demise of Ukraine’s “Eurasian vector” and the rise of pro-NATO sentiment’, PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo 458, 16 February 2017. 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd 155 03/02/2024 11:22:28 156 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Notes for pages 88 to 89 Stephen F. Cohen, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, New York 2011, p. 191. Serhii Leshchenko, ‘Yuliia Tymoshenko: het vid Aliansu!’ [Yulia Tymoshenko: Away from the Alliance!], Ukrainska pravda, 11 February 2009. Igor Guzhva, Olesia Medvedeva and Maksim Minin, ‘Na grani voiny. Timoshenko snova premier, gibel 106 shakhterov. Chem zhila strana v 2007 godu’ [On the Brink of War. Tymoshenko is prime minister again, the Death of 106 Miners. What the Country Experienced in 2007], Strana News, 11 August 2021. Dominique Arel, ‘Ukraine since the War in Georgia’, Survival, vol. 50, no. 6, December 2008, pp. 15–25, at pp. 18–19. Haran and Zolkina, ‘The demise of Ukraine’s “Eurasian vector” and the rise of Pro-NATO sentiment’. Ibid. There were no doubt technical and methodological hurdles to polling in these areas. However, nationalist outcry over the ‘treasonous’ findings of the periodic surveys that were carried out in Crimea and the parts of Donbass not controlled by the Ukrainian government raises the question of whether political considerations were no less decisive in the choice to omit the opinions of a significant part of the population (never officially deducted from national tallies). See Andrii Gladun, ‘Sotsiolohiia ta ideolohiia: dyskusiia shchodo opytuvan pro nastroi krymchan’ [Sociology and ideology: A discussion regarding surveys of the attitudes of Crimeans], Commons: Journal of Social Criticism, 28 April 2015; Gwendolyn Sasse, ‘The Donbas – Two parts, or still one? The experience of war through the eyes of the regional population’, ZOiS, 2 May 2017. This is all the more peculiar in light of the regular polling conducted in parts of southeastern Ukraine of population dislocations and a moving front line, occupied by Russia in 2022, despite even more serious concerns about reliability as a result of population dislocations and a moving front line. Gerard Toal, John O’Loughlin and Kristin M. Bakke, ‘Is Ukraine caught between Europe and Russia? We asked Ukrainians this important question’, Washington Post, 26 February 2020; ‘Suspilno-politychni oriientatsii naselennia Ukrainy’ [Socio-political orientations of the population of Ukraine], KIIS, April 2020. ‘Dumky ta pohliady naselennia Ukrainy: lypen 2020’ [The opinions and views of the population of Ukraine: July 2020], Social Monitoring Center, 21 July 2020. ‘Suspilna pidtrymka yevroatlantychnoho kursu Ukrainy: otsinky ta rekomendatsii’ [The public support for Ukraine ’s Euro-Atlantic course: Assessment and recommendations], Razumkov Centre, 2021; available at razumkov.org. ua. 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd 156 03/02/2024 11:22:28 Notes for pages 90 to 93 157 18 ‘Ukraine is the only non-NATO country supporting every NATO mission’, the president declaimed ahead of the Bucharest Summit. Steven Lee Myers, ‘Bush backs Ukraine ’s bid to join NATO’, New York Times, 1 April 2008. 19 ‘Heopolitychni oriientatsii zhytelliv Ukrainy: cherven 2021 roku’ [Geopolitical orientations of the residents of Ukraine: June 2021], KIIS, 18 July 2021; Olga Onuch and Javier Perez Sandoval, ‘A majority of Ukrainians support joining NATO. Does this matter?’, Washington Post, 4 February 2022. 20 For example, Alexander J. Motyl, ‘Ukraine’s TV president is dangerously pro-Russian’, Foreign Policy, 1 April 2019. 21 Serhii Kudelia, ‘NATO or bust: Why do Ukraine’s leaders dismiss neutrality as a security Strategy?’, Russia Matters, 9 February 2022. 22 Volodymyr Ishchenko and Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat, ‘Why Russia’s political capitalists went to war – And how the war could end their rule’, Cross-Border Talks, 29 July 2022. 23 Especially after the repression and marginalization of the left parties that did have some ability to mobilize their supporters. See Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘The Ukrainian left during and after the Maidan protests’, Study for the Left in the European Parliament, January 2016. 24 ‘Civic space and fundamental freedoms in Ukraine, 1 November 2019–31 October 2021’, United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner, Ukraine 2021. 25 In the wording of the survey, the two options were not mutually exclusive. ‘Mozhlyvosti ta oereshkody na shliakhu demokratychnoho perekhodu Ukrainy’ [Opportunities and obstacles on the way of Ukraine’s democratic transition], KIIS, 2–11 May 2022. 26 ‘Opytuvannia NDI: mozhlyvosti ta oereshkody na shliakhu demokratychnoho perekhodu Ukrainy’ [NDI survey: Opportunities and obstacles on the way of Ukraine ’s democratic transition], KIIS, 20 September 2022. 27 ‘Nastroi ta otsinky ukrainskykh bizhentsiv (lypen- serpen 2022 r.)’ [Moods and evaluations of Ukrainian refugees (June–August 2022)], Razumkov Centre, 30 August 2022. 28 On the basis of an experiment conducted in May 2022, researchers at the KIIS estimate that the spiral of silence contributed an additional 4–6 per cent to pro-Western positions. ‘Pryiniatnist vidmovy vid vstupu do NATO pry otrymanni harantii bezpeky vid okremykh krain: rezultaty telefonnoho opytuvannia, provedenoho 13–18 travnia 2022 roku’ [The acceptability of Ukraine ’s refusal to join NATO on conditions of security guarantees from certain countries: Results of a telephone survey on 13–18 May 2022], KIIS, 24 May 2022. 29 The Gradus poll had its limitations: it was restricted to city dwellers with access to smartphones, and slightly skewed to the more urbanized southeast of 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd 157 03/02/2024 11:22:29 Notes for pages 93 to 110 158 30 31 32 33 34 the country; however, it did not include people over the age of sixty, who are generally less supportive of NATO. ‘The attitudes, emotions, and actions of Ukrainians during the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine’, Gradus, April 2022; available at gradus.app. ‘Pryiniatnist vidmovy vid vstupu do NATO’, KIIS, 24 May 2022. ‘Results – 2022: Under the Blue-Yellow Flag of Freedom!’ Democratic Initiatives Foundation, 5 January 2023; available at dif.org. WSJ/NORC Ukraine Poll June 2022; available at norc.org. ‘Perception index of the Russian-Ukrainian War: Results of a telephone survey conducted on 19–24 May 2022’, KIIS, 27 May 2022. ‘Hromadska dumka v Ukraini pislia 10 misiatsiv viiny’ [Public opinion in Ukraine after 10 months of war], KIIS, 15 January 2023. 8. Behind Russia’s War Is Thirty Years of Post-Soviet Class Conflict 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions, Cambridge, MA 1998. Ruslan Dzarasov, ‘Insider rent makes Russian capitalism: A rejoinder to Simon Pirani’, Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, vol. 19, no. 3, 2011, pp. 585–97. Iván Szelényi, ‘Capitalisms after communism’, New Left Review 96, Nov–Dec 2015. Göran Therborn, What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules? London, 1978. Branko Milanović, ‘Can corruption be good for growth?’, Brave New Europe, 29 June 2020. ‘Mark Beissinger on contemporary urban civic revolutions’, Democracy Paradox [podcast], 12 April 2022. Branko Milanović, ‘Russia’s war shows the chaos in the world order’, Jacobin, 21 March 2022. 9. Ukrainian Voices? 1 As Mark Beissinger has established on the basis of a mass of quantitative data; see The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion, Princeton 2022. For ‘deficient revolutions’, see Volodymyr Ishchenko and Oleg Zhuravlev, ‘How Maidan revolutions reproduce and intensify the post-Soviet crisis of political representation’, PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo No. 714, 18 October 2021, and Chapter 5 in this book. 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd 158 03/02/2024 11:22:29 Notes for pages 110 to 122 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 159 Anna Jikhareva and Kaspar Surber, ‘Ukraine shouldn’t become a neoliberal laboratory’, Jacobin, 17 September 2022; Peter Korotaev, ‘Ukraine’s war economy is being choked by neoliberal dogmas’, Jacobin, 14 July 2022; Luke Cooper, ‘Market economics in an all-out-war?’, LSE Research Report, 1 December 2022. Aris Roussinos, ‘Did Ukraine need a war?’, UnHerd, 1 July 2022. Cooper, ‘Market economics in an all-out-war?’ Chi Chi Shi, ‘Defining my own oppression: Neoliberalism and the demand of victimhood’, Historical Materialism, vol. 26, no. 2, 2018, pp. 271–95. Nancy Fraser, ‘From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a “post-socialist” age’, New Left Review 212, July–August 1995, pp. 68–93. Iryna Podolyak, ‘Why Russians are to blame for Putin’, Visegrad/Insight, 16 March 2022. Olesya Khromeychuk, ‘Where is Ukraine?’, RSA, 13 June 2022. George Packer, ‘Ukrainians are defending the values Americans claim to hold’, Atlantic, October 2022. Nataliya Gumenyuk, ‘Russia’s invasion is making Ukraine more democratic’, Atlantic, 16 July 2022. US National Democratic Institute, ‘Opportunities and challenges facing Ukraine ’s democratic transition’, August 2022; Iryna Balachuk, ‘Majority of Ukrainians want strong leader, not democracy during war – KMIS’, Ukrainska Pravda, 18 August 2022. Anton Oleinik, ‘Volunteers in Ukraine: From provision of services to stateand nation-building’, Journal of Civil Society, 18 September 2018, pp. 364–85. Alexander Maxwell, ‘Popular and scholarly primordialism: The politics of Ukrainian history during Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine’, Journal of Nationalism, Memory and Language Politics, vol. 16, no. 1, October 2022, pp. 152–71. Mark Beissinger, ‘Revolutions have succeeded more often in our time, but their consequences have become more ambiguous’, CEU Democracy Institute, 8 April 2022. Interview: Towards the Abyss 1 Volodymyr Ishchenko and Oleg Zhuravlev, ‘How maidan revolutions reproduce and intensify the post-Soviet crisis of political representation’, PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo 714, 18 October 2021, and Chapter 5 in this book. 2 Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘Insufficiently diverse: The problem of nonviolent leverage and radicalization of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, 2013–14’, Journal of Eurasian Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, 2020, pp. 201–15. 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd 159 03/02/2024 11:22:29 160 Notes for pages 124 to 144 3 Ishchenko, ‘Ukraine’s fractures’, New Left Review 87, May–June 2014. 4 Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘Nationalist radicalization trends in post-Euromaidan Ukraine ’, PONARS Eurasia, Policy Memo 529, May 2018. 5 Oleg Zhuravlev and Volodymyr Ishchenko, ‘Exclusiveness of civic nationalism: Euromaidan eventful nationalism in Ukraine’, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 36, no. 3, 2020, pp. 226–45. 6 [This actually backfired on Zelenskyi. He had to dismiss his loyalist chief of counter-intelligence and also the prosecutor general in July 2022 when it appeared that even some high-ranking officers in their structures collaborated with Russians. See ‘Zelenskiy fires Ukraine’s spy chief and top state prosecutor’, Guardian, 17 July 2022.] 7 [According to a later and widely cited analysis by the Royal United Services Institute, the Kremlin did indeed bet on the destabilization of the Ukrainian government for the success of its ‘special military operation’; however, it rushed ahead with the full-scale invasion plan before the prerequisite of a fullblown political crisis materialized: Jack Watling, Oleksandr V Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds, ‘Preliminary lessons from Russia’s unconventional operations during the Russo-Ukrainian War, February 2022–February 2023’, RUSI, 29 March 2023.] 8 Simon Shuster, ‘The untold story of the Ukraine crisis’, Time, 2 February 2022. 9 James Risen, ‘US intelligence says Putin made a last-minute decision to invade Ukraine’, Intercept, 11 March 2022. 9781804295540 Towards the Abyss (311k) - 8th pass.indd 160 03/02/2024 11:22:29