The Ukrainian New Left and Student Protests: A Thorny Way to Hegemony

12 The Ukrainian new left and student protests A thorny way to hegemony Volodymyr Ishchenko The major perception about the Eastern European radical left is that it is a weak, marginal, and irrelevant movement. This is a puzzle in its own right, as the neoliberal transformations in this region did not produce any strong response from the left comparable to the global justice movement, left-leaning anti-austerity mobilizations, or electorally successful new radical left parties like in Western and Southern Europe. The major response to neoliberal capitalism in Eastern Europe came almost exclusively from the side of rightwing populism (Kalb and Halmai 2011). This chapter will explore a limited success story, why and under which circumstances even the very weak emerging new left in post-Soviet societies is, nevertheless, sometimes able to win hegemony within large protests and grass-roots movement. For the majority of Ukrainians, the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) and other minor communist-successor parties represent the only left existing in their country. These parties were quite strong in the 1990s, both electorally and as structures of mobilization, in contrast to the pure electoral machines acting in support for competing “oligarchic” financial-industrial groups of emerging Ukrainian capitalists. However, in the 2000s, these parties were losing their electoral support and activist bases while gradually transforming into conservative Russian nationalist or European social democratic-oriented parties, and becoming minor partners of “oligarchic” right-wing parties. After the national elections in 2014, the CPU (the last of the at least nominally left parties) was left out of the parliament and eventually banned completely at the end of 2015 as a result of the anti-communist hysteria after the (Euro) Maidan protests and the CPU’s de facto support for the overthrown Viktor Yanukovych government. However, in parallel to the communist-successor parties, a new left movement has been emerging in Ukraine since the years of perestroika. At least in the Ukrainian context, I prefer to refer to this movement as “new left” rather as “radical left”, “extreme left” or “far left”. The movement was represented by a very heterogeneous but regularly cooperating network of organizations, proto-parties and informal initiatives of a variety of ideological currents, including anarchist, revolutionary Marxist, left-liberal, and social democratic positions. Some were overtly political organizations, in addition to labour and 212 Volodymyr Ishchenko student unions, as well as intellectual and cultural initiatives. The identity that united them was purely negative, and not necessarily “radical” or “extreme”. Rather, they identified as a “genuine left” speaking in opposition to the Ukrainian version of post-Soviet capitalism as well as against the “old left” communist-successor parties, usually denying that these parties had any left identity at all. Still, the new left has not been even close to replacing the CPU as the dominant representative of left ideas in Ukraine; it hardly united more than 1,000 active supporters in all groups in a country of 46 million inhabitants in 2013. The crucial test for the left was the (Euro)Maidan and the AntiMaidan protests. The left was not able to win mass support for their agenda in either movement and to prevent deadly competition of Ukrainian and Russian nationalisms articulating common social grievances behind the protest against President Yanukovych and, later, against the new post-Maidan neoliberal-nationalist government. As a result of the unprecedented upheavals in Ukraine – the most widespread since the Second World War – the new left became even weaker and more deeply divided into pro- and anti-Maidan camps (Ishchenko 2016a). However, the Ukrainian new left also provides an important case for understanding how radical movements build connections with grass-roots protests, how they operate within broad coalitions and which causal mechanisms, strategies, and factors account for their successes or failures. In this chapter, I will explore a small new left student union, “Direct Action” (DA), that was founded 2008 by ideological anarchists and Marxists and in 2010 led a mobilization involving 10,000 students in over 14 Ukrainian cities against the introduction of paid services in universities. DA was able to articulate a left-libertarian framing during large-scale student protests against the commercialization of education, which initially forced the government to make concessions, but later DA lost its hegemony in the student movement. I will apply the Gramscian argument that a “weak civil society” is not an obstacle but an important structural opportunity for a radical movement. It allows radicals to exploit what I call the “primacy effect” – being the first to raise an issue ignored by everyone else – and in this way to favour their own framing of the problem and its solutions, making a serious claim for hegemony in the wider movement. Ultimately, however, retaining hegemony may require additional resources. Back to Gramsci: The weaker civil society the better The “weak civil society” thesis often played a saviour role for the expected but seemingly failing democratization of the post-Soviet states. Democratization was failing because civil society was “weak” and it was weak because of the Soviet legacy of mistrust in public life and reliance on informal and private networks to deal with problems of survival (Howard 2002). This thesis, however, is not able to explain significant fluctuations in contentious politics Ukrainian new left and student protests 213 activity and “sudden” inexplicable peaks like the “colour revolutions”, the Ukrainian (Euro)Maidan, and recent large socio-economic mobilizations in many post-socialist countries like Slovenia (2012–2013), Romania (2012), Bulgaria (2013) and Armenia (2015). Moreover, it is heavily biased towards institutionalized civil society, primarily relying on data on the participation and activities of NGOs and ignoring hidden but very significant non-institutionalized activity. The argument also has a strong liberal normative implication that it would be good to have a “stronger civil society”. But is this true for all components of civil society? Petrova and Tarrow (2007) make quite an important addition to the “weak civil society” thesis, distinguishing between participatory and transactional activism. While participatory activism oriented towards grass-roots mobilization may be weak in post-socialist societies, civic associations could compensate for this with a specifically relational transactional activism that is essentially a coalition-building process with other usually weak participatory associations. I have argued elsewhere (Ishchenko 2011, p. 384) that the efficiency of transactional activism is not universal. While transactional activism might be efficient for pragmatic campaigns around local issues, it is much more problematic with the participation of highly ideological actors with a long-term perspective of systemic change, as in the case of radical left groups. In the latter case, allies, strategies, and claims lose their previous pragmatic obviousness – all these questions become politicized and ideologized. For a radical political group, the dominance of their ideological framing may be as important, and sometimes even more valuable, than the concrete local achievement the coalition might win. This may provoke tensions not only with allies from other ideological camps, but sometimes even with non-politicized pragmatists concerned primarily with local results and who usually see internal political discussions as only detrimental to the struggle. One of the earliest discussions about weak and strong civil societies comes from Antonio Gramsci. In academic fields such as cultural studies and in the Eurocommunist tendencies of the Western European left, it became popular to interpret his theory of the relations between a revolutionary party and civil society in an almost positive way, valorising the “war of position”, or the slow change of cultural meanings and reform of established institutions (Brandist 2015, pp. 1–8). However, for Gramsci, a strong civil society was actually an obstacle for the revolution in Western Europe. This is unlike in Russia, where a revolutionary taking of power by a “war of manoeuvre” was possible instead of getting stuck in the “trenches” of liberal civil society. From this perspective, it would be more logical to expect that the weak civil society in post-socialist societies could be beneficial rather than detrimental to the radical left. There are a number of factors strongly detrimental for the rise of strong new left or democratic socialist parties in Eastern Europe: a pervasive anti-communism, domination of resourceful communist-successor parties in the left part of the political spectrum, external push to social-democratization and de-radicalization (March 2011, pp. 112–116). However, even under these 214 Volodymyr Ishchenko unfavourable conditions the weak civil society may open a structural opportunity for at least temporary success of the new left in the mass protests – a potential step to hegemony. In social sciences the term “hegemony” is usually used to describe a relationship on the macro-level – a leadership of a social class or state over another. However, hegemony is a dynamic process starting from below – from counter-hegemonic challenges in educational and media institutions, civil society organizations, and, particularly, in social movements. As Colin Barker argues (2013), social movements are “fields of argument and discovery, in which different tendencies struggle for leadership (Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’)” (p. 7). The radical left (or another counter-hegemonic challenger) may not only help to win some particular concessions for the oppressed groups but, in the process, they will also get a chance to propagate left values and ideas, to establish authority and gain other symbolic capital, strengthen their organizations’ resources, and find new activists and supporters. In general, the left may win hegemony in at least some particular movements and over some concrete social groups first. In Gramsci’s own words, “a social group can, and indeed must, already exercise ‘leadership’ before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power)” (Gramsci 2000, p. 249). Like other Marxist concepts, “hegemony” is surprisingly little used in contemporary social movement studies (Barker et al. 2013). However, the problematics of hegemony expands analysis of leadership and coalitions in social movements. On the one hand, emerging research of leadership in social movement studies is too focused on individual leadership or leaders’ teams in social movement organizations (SMO), but is usually not touching the questions of groups’ or organizations’ leadership over other groups or organizations (Aminzade et al. 2001; Morris and Staggenborg 2004; Nepstad and Bob 2006). On the other hand, analysis of coalitions in social movements (McCammon and Moon 2015) usually misses the issues of power relations within the coalitions that are often not as horizontal and egalitarian as contemporary “network” left-libertarian social movements imagine themselves. Which SMO will have a larger influence on the coalition’s strategy and tactical decisions? Which SMO will have a larger impact on the agenda and framing of a coalition demands? Which SMO will get more benefits from the coalition’s success in terms of new recruits, resources, and publicity? Which SMO will have more legitimacy to claim representation of the general interest? These are all often tightly interconnected questions that are best grasped by the notion of hegemony. As Chantal Mouffe (1979, p. 179) brilliantly expressed, hegemony is the “indissoluble union of political leadership and intellectual and moral leadership”. How may the weak civil society help the radical left establishing the leading positions in mass protests and social movements in Eastern Europe? Going back to the Russian Marxist roots of Gramsci’s thoughts on hegemony and revolutionary socialist strategy also helps to bridge his theory with now Ukrainian new left and student protests 215 classical theories about the role of political opportunities and resources for social movements. One of the crucial ideas for Russian Marxists from Plekhanov to Trotsky was that the proletariat might have hegemony over the peasant masses in the revolution against the Tsar precisely because the Russian liberal bourgeoisie was too weak and incapable of taking initiative (Anderson 1976). Scholars analysing the impact of political opportunity structures on social movements show how factors like the relative openness or repressiveness of the state institutions, divisions within the elites and the availability of influential allies can open or close structural opportunities for social movements to emerge and succeed (McAdam 1996). Russian Marxist discussions suggest another option: sometimes it is not powerful allies or weak enemies, but simply the weakness of potential competitors may open an opportunity for radicals to win hegemony by exploiting their monopoly position. What I will call “the primacy effect” is one of the possible consequences of this situation. Basically, it means “first come, first served”: wherever a problem or grievance is not articulated and used for mobilization by any other political group, radicals (even if marginal) get an opportunity to lead a mass protest when it happens and to establish its hegemony within it. A prior strong position within the movement around some problem gives radicals a privileged position compared to other political groups when a mass mobilization around it erupts. Within the post-Soviet weak civil society, it creates a unique opportunity for the marginal new left. However, the primacy effect has obvious limits. From the perspective of building up a nation-wide hegemony, some “vacant” issues available for the radical movement may not have any potential for expanding struggles. A marginal movement may only reproduce and exacerbate its marginal status if it concentrates on issues that leave most of society indifferent or even adverse. For example, this may be the case of LGBT rights in conservative post-Soviet societies. The second limit is even more important. Consider the opening of a new market. The opening of a new market as a consequence of some technological innovation may give the innovative company huge profits and a temporary monopoly status. A higher rate of profit on the market will inevitably attract competing companies, and some of them may be resourceful enough to challenge the monopoly of the innovators. Likewise in the social movement industry (Zald and McCarthy 1980), competing social movement organizations will probably challenge the hegemonic status of the first SMO that benefited from mobilizing around an issue that everyone else ignored for a long time but that suddenly appeared highly resonant and promising for political struggle. Winning temporary hegemony may be easier than retaining it while competing with other politicized and often hostile actors over nonpoliticized masses. Differences in available material, social-organizational, moral, and cultural resources; various resonance of the groups’ frames; and potentially different political and other structural opportunities for various competing groups within the campaign or the movement will undoubtedly influence the results of the competition for hegemony. 216 Volodymyr Ishchenko Below, I show how the Ukrainian new left benefited from the primacy effect in student mobilizations in the context of weak civil society, and I show why it was not able to retain its hegemony in the end. Methods and sources The following analysis is based on various sources. Wherever I refer to protest event data, I use an original data set collected by the Ukrainian Protest and Coercion Data (UPCD) team under my supervision. This is a systematic data set of all protest events (regardless of issue or number of protesters) and reactions to them taking place on the territory of Ukraine since October 2009. The data set is based on monitoring the news-lines of almost 200 web-media, covering all provinces (oblasts) in Ukraine, as well as some major national media. At the time of writing, the UPCD set contained over 35,000 events covering the period from October 2009 until December 2014. The databases and codebooks with details on data collection methodology can be accessed from the Centre for Social and Labour Research website (http://cslr.org.ua/en/protests/). I also rely on in-depth interviews with five leaders and key activists of the “Direct Action” student union and of the “Foundation of Regional Initiatives” NGO, conducted from December 2013 to January 2014, their documents and articles produced for the union campaign, and activist discussions on Facebook and mailing lists. Additionally, my own prolonged activist participation in the Ukrainian new left movement since 2001 is important for my analysis and interpretation of the data. The weak and split civil society in Ukraine Various data indicate that civil society in Ukraine was indeed weak. According to the Ukrainian Single Register of Enterprises and Organizations, the number of registered civic associations has been steadily growing to over 145,700 civic organizations, trade unions, religious and other civil society organizations in 2014 (DSSU, 2015, p. 10). However, the Ukrainian National Academy of Science Institute of Sociology nation-wide polls consistently show that over 80 per cent of the respondents each year from 1994 to 2010 declared no membership in any voluntary association except “traditional” trade unions1 (Matusevych 2002; Komarova et al. 2013, p. 7). Other surveys showed a low level of trust in civic associations among Ukrainians, and very few had any knowledge about their activities (NISD 2013, pp. 290, 292). A growing number of formally registered voluntary associations typically involves only a tiny activist membership, usually detached from their communities’ problems and sometimes registered only for the purpose of receiving specific grants from Western donors (Narozhna 2004). The UPCD protest event data shows Ukrainian civil society from the perspective of protest mobilizations instead of from the perspective of formal organizations. While the number of protests has been growing since Ukrainian new left and student protests 217 Table 12.1 Reported number of participants in protest events in Ukraine, 2010–2013 (before Maidan) Number of Participants 2010 2011 2012 2013 (before Maidan) <10 <100 <1000 >1000 Unknown Total N 7% 22% 17% 7% 47% 100% 2,305 10% 35% 18% 3% 34% 100% 2,277 13% 32% 13% 3% 40% 100% 3,636 11% 46% 15% 3% 25% 100% 3,428 Source: UPCD 2010–2011, only a small number of them were reported as involving more than 100 participants. The number of events with over 1,000 participants has grown significantly since the start of (Euro)Maidan in late November, 2013. However, preliminary post-Maidan data show that it did not have any lasting effects on the number of large-scale protests. The protest events data also show that civil society in Ukraine is not just weak; it is split between institutionalized and grass-roots parts. Each year, in over 30 per cent of all protest events, no participation of any political party, formal civic organization (“NGOs” in Figure 12.1), trade union or even informal but political/ideological group was reported. This is partially the result of media description bias, as journalists can miss information on protest event participants (Earl et al. 2004, pp. 72–73); however, these events are not random. The issues profiles for the protests with the participation of political parties/politicians and/or civic organizations and those with the participation of presumably only non-politicized informal initiatives are drastically different. Figure 12.1 show that protests with only the participation of informal non-politicized initiatives raised predominantly socio-economic Figure 12.1 Reported participants and protest issues in Ukraine, 2011–2013 (before Maidan), number of protest events 218 Volodymyr Ishchenko issues (in fact, the majority of all socio-economic protests took place with the participation of only non-politicized informal initiatives), while political parties and NGOs gave much more attention to political and ideological issues.2 The weak and, moreover, split Ukrainian civil society, with a large number of small, localized, depoliticized, dispersed protests – particularly, around socio-economic issues – might provide a structural niche for the new left intervention. However, to what extent have they actually been able to exploit it? New left protests overview In general, the new left’s share of the total number of protests might seem marginal. The new left participated in only 88 protest events in 2010, then declining to 55 in 2011 and 48 in 2012; however, in 2013 (before 21 November) this grew to 115 events, which was only 1–4 per cent of the total number of protest events in corresponding years. The largest actions that the new left organized (not just joined) gathered just above 1,000 people and both took place in 2010 – the student action against introduction of paid services in universities and the “Labour Protection” trade union’s action against the privatization of street markets in the centre of Kiev. The Ukrainian new left was very much concentrated in the national capital, as 40 per cent of its protest events in 2010 and 2011 took place in Kiev and even more in 2012 (58 per cent) and 2013 (45 per cent) (the share of all protest events in Kiev was 17–18 per cent in these years). As I mentioned before, socio-economic protests in Ukraine were generally small, localized, depoliticized, and dispersed. Only during the last few years has large-scale mobilization occurred on the national level for several socioeconomic campaigns. The most notable was a campaign against Tax Code reform (by and large significantly increasing taxes for the small business demanded by the IMF) in autumn 2010, organized by small business owners and the self-employed. This was the largest protest mobilization in Ukraine between the Orange Revolution of 2004 and (Euro)Maidan in 2013–2014. However, in this and other major campaigns, the new left played no significant role, although some of the groups and organizations did try to intervene. Competitors were too strong compared to small new left groups. Mainstream opposition parties and ideological opponents, particularly the far right “Svoboda”, as well as the strong self-organization of the small business owners and Afghanistan war veterans, did not actually create any opportunity for the new left to make any significant impact on the movement. In fact, “Svoboda” was the most active identified political agent in Ukrainian protest events, though since (Euro)Maidan it has been sharing leadership with the “Right Sector”3 (CSLR 2014). The student protests in autumn 2010 present a unique case when the new left was actually able to lead a large social-economic protest and claim hegemony there. As Table 12.2 shows, the student campaigns were the central new left protest activity at least for three years. Students were the predominant ally Ukrainian new left and student protests 219 Table 12.2 Social groups reported in protest events together with the new left (number of protest events) Students Workers Neighbourhood Small business LGBT Football fans Teachers Artists Academics Foreign citizens, ethnic minorities 2010 2011 2012 2013 (before Maidan) 12 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 25 1 0 1 1 0 1 2 1 0 16 2 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 12 25 16 0 2 1 1 1 0 4 Source: UPCD. and social base, although their role has declined in significance recently because of the “Direct Action” union’s crisis. What explains this exceptional success of the new left in Ukrainian student protests? “Direct action” student union campaign The issue behind the protest campaign in 2010 was the Cabinet of Ministers decree #796 approving a list of paid services to be allowed by state and municipal educational institutions, including public universities. It was a typical solution in the framework of neoliberal commercialization of education, which has established itself as a dominant idea among Ukrainian education policy makers (Sovsun 2011a, с.59). The decree contained a long list of allowed paid services, among them charging students for missing classes, for the use of the Internet, libraries, gyms, publishing student documents, commercializing dormitories and many others. For students, it was an issue of “the cash in one’s own pocket”, as Mykhailo Kameniev, one of the primary organizers of the campaign, quite cynically commented in an interview, “the only kind of issue which could mobilize a huge number of students before (Euro)Maidan started”. The organizers of the campaign were the “Direct Action” student union and the “Foundation of Regional Initiatives” (FRI) youth civic organization. The DA was established in 2008 by ideological anarchists who were, at that time, primarily students of a major Ukrainian university, the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev. Additionally, many of them were activists in small new left groups. The union was established as a grass-roots student syndicalist organization based on “horizontal coordination principles”, a lack of formal or 220 Volodymyr Ishchenko informal leaders, an aspiration toward consensus decision-making and the replacement of the bureaucratic administrative apparatus in education with students’ and lecturers’ self-governance. It criticized the commercialization and marketization of education, stood for social rights of students, for libertarian pedagogy and against authoritarian tendencies in education. As one of the former de facto DA leaders, Ivan Shmatko, stated, “nobody hid anarcho-syndicalism, but nobody demonstratively emphasized it either.” Although in official descriptive texts about the DA, it was never explicitly called “a left-wing organization”, its analysis and criticism was substantively left-libertarian. They frequently referred to the 1960s and contemporary student protests in the EU and the US, informed by cooperation with other overtly leftist (even by name) organizations. They banned people with “racist, Nazi, sexist views or belief in any other chauvinist doctrine” from membership in the union and also distanced themselves from any political party, commercial enterprises and university administrations. Before the campaign against decree #796 in autumn 2010, the DA coorganized campaigns against the Labour Law reform, against police abuse, participated in various ideological leftist events and intervened into cases against the violation of students’ interests in several universities. Particularly important was a campaign in 2009, when the previous government (headed by Yulia Tymoshenko) issued a relatively similar decree with an even longer list of allowed paid services (including charging money to retake failed exams, which caused the most anger among students). The campaign was successful (the decree was retracted) and the campaign rally in Kiev in June 2009 gathered 150 people. Mykhailo Kameniev and Mykhailo Lebed – the primary links between the DA and FRI – actively participated in the campaign, and FRI helped to organize small actions for the same cause in some other Ukrainian cities, “a semblance of regional support” (interview with Mykhailo Lebed). It is significant that several student organizations joined the campaign: the Student Council of Kiev and the Ukrainian Association of Student Self-Governance uniting the student official self-governance bodies in the universities, the All-Ukrainian Student Council (a consulting body for the Cabinet of Ministers) and the Student Patrol of the Country. Their help was more or less limited to demonstrations of support in the media from the formal student self-government and “youth leaders” against paid services. However, as typical representatives of “weak civil society”, they could bring not more than a few people to the coalition’s actions. The major mobilizer in Kiev proved to be the DA, which organized meetings with students at the campuses of major Kiev universities and also brought sympathetic leftist activists to the protest campaign. As a result, the DA was able to impose their ideological framing criticizing the marketization of education, celebrating radical action, and connecting the issue with resonant leftist student struggles in France and Greece taking place at the time. The autumn 2010 campaign against decree #796 was much larger in scale. The campaign was organized as a “classic campaign for public lobbying” Ukrainian new left and student protests 221 (interview with Mykhailo Kameniev) starting with letters to the government, a petition, a round-table in a press agency and culminating with large rallies and demonstrations in many cities around Ukraine. Campaign organizers claimed that about 20,000 students protested in 14 cities on 12 October 2010. UPCD data contain reports about protest events in 13 cities with total participation of around 11,000, according to the media, which was still a very large number for Ukrainian protests (see Table 12.1). More than 1,000 students came to the rally in Kiev, more than 5,000 in Lviv, and more than 3,000 in Zhytomyr – an extreme success for the mainly Kiev-based new left. The organizers were the coalition of DA and FRI with the latter mostly responsible for regional support actions and the legal document analysis, while the former was responsible for “the street”, the student mobilization for the central action in Kiev (interview with Ivan Shmatko). The campaign was partly successful, and the Minister of Education, Dmytro Tabachnyk, rescinded the most outrageous of the paid services. It was even more successful for the DA, which drastically increased their visibility in the mass media and in the civic sector, doubled its membership and organized new union cells in universities. At that time, it was the largest event that the new left in Ukraine had been able to organize, lead and establish hegemony over. Why did the students mobilize on such a scale? The reason was not only about “cash in one’s own pocket.” The students mobilized in much smaller numbers just a year before against an even harsher decree. A further reason was the change of government in February 2010; the new Minister of Education, Dmytro Tabachnyk, had attracted extreme criticism and hatred from Ukrainian nationalists for his “Ukrainophobic” declarations and “vulgar” anti-nationalist public stance. Not long after his appointment, the far right “Svoboda” party started a long and unsuccessful campaign for his immediate resignation with some student participation. The 5,000 people protesting against decree #796 in Lviv – a city known for nationalist feelings – should be seen in this context as well (Interview with Ivan Shmatko; Sovsun 2011b). A far-right intervention attempt was made in Kiev when a small rightwing group joined the demonstration against paid services with banners depicting Tabachnyk in an anti-Semitic manner – but the organizers insisted on hiding them. One of the ideological achievements of the DA in this and the following campaigns was the de-personalization of the target of protest, avoiding the far right “anti-Tabachnyk” connotations and emphasizing structural, “systemic” roots of unsatisfactory education policies (Interviews with Bohdan Biletsky and with Andriy Movchan, another former informal leader of the DA). The left framed decree #796 within the context of the commercialization and marketization of education, linking Ukrainian struggles with student mobilizations against the Bologna reforms across Europe. Besides, on the eve of local elections across the whole country, scheduled for the end of October, the media were very efficiently spreading the campaigners’ points of criticism, even overstating the negative impacts of #796 on students (interview with Mykhailo Lebed). In Zhytomyr, the local elections and party 222 Volodymyr Ishchenko mobilization helped encourage large-scale protest participation. Crucially, in 2010, the DA was also able to appeal to the successful result of the previous year’s campaign against a similar decree (interview with Mykhailo Kameniev). But why, precisely, were the new left DA able to lead this mass student protest? The primacy effect Andriy Movchan mentioned “luck” in that the students, when founding “Direct Action”, “intuitively understood that youth is the audience capable of embracing such [radical] ideas. We guessed that youth can be a disruptive social group capable of street mobilization”. Ivan Shmatko added, “nobody was doing that and we just organized together with FRI. Nobody was even considering the question [of working with other organizations] … Almost no organization had any potential to mobilize anyone”. This is how the primacy effect worked. Not participatory but rather fundraising-oriented liberal or non-politicized civil society organizations appeared incapable of radical mobilization activism when this was objectively necessary. Each university had its student “parliament” or other self-organized body; there were also a number of “youth” NGOs. However, when a sudden grievance was imposed, the leftist student union was almost the only organization ready to campaign and able to mobilize the students directly against the government decree. At the same time, established student selfgovernment bodies and NGOs were siding with the government4 or discovering they had no potential to mobilize. They were institutionally recognized, attracting young careerists, formally representing large number of students in many universities, with sound names but in the same time with very little participatory activism. According to the UPCD dataset, between October 2009 and December 2010 this kind of organizations were reported in student protests only 5 times among 147 protest events with student participation totally. As mentioned before, in the 2009 campaign some of them helped with media representation of the campaign but mobilized only a few people to the protest actions. By 2010 they were not even relevant for the DA and FRI any more, even if they formally supported the campaign demands. The primacy effect also explains the successful transactional activism between the DA and FRI, through which the latter provided the regional network and their expertise for the DA in return for mass mobilization in Kiev for the central action. Lebed and Kameniev actually played the role of brokers between the left and the resourceful FRI. They knew from previous personal successful cooperation with the DA during the Labour Law reform campaign and the Ihor Indylo police abuse campaign, in particular, that the DA could provide the street mobilization, which no one else could do at that time. The specificity of the FRI itself and the personal views of the brokers helped, as well. The FRI, established in 2002 as a politicized liberal-nationalist youth organization in opposition to the incumbent president Leonid Ukrainian new left and student protests 223 Kuchma, was depoliticized after the successful Orange Revolution, opening doors to people with extremely varied positions. Even Mykhailo Lebed, one of the former members of FRI’s board, described in an interview that the organization’s contemporary position was “vague”, “for all the good, against all the bad”, aiming to make youth more active. Reading the official “About us” page (FRI, n.d.) does not add much to that description – one may call it a kind of moderate social liberal organization. One of FRI’s specific ideas was to keep “politics” and “policy” apart; while working with the latter, they were avoiding the former. Further, one of FRI’s official policies was not to pay wages to members, in this way distancing it from many typical post-Soviet “grant-eating” NGOs and opening it to more radical actions. Last but not least, the brokers’ personal political views can be described as leftreformist (in 2010, Kameniev even combined FRI membership with the DA). A tolerant political environment within FRI and openness to radicalism without being afraid to lose grants and wages helped them to combine FRI’s social and cultural resources with the DA’s radicalism and mobilization potential for the cause they actually believed in. With the help of the primacy effect a small new left student union was able to impose a leftist framing on a mass student protest. It allowed the DA to appear at the head of a nation-wide mobilization, chanting “Down with ministers! Down with capitalists!”. Despite it happened in the context of far right protests against the Minister of Education, the DA was able to emphasize the problems of commercialization and marketization in the higher education – instead of targeting Minister Tabachnyk’s personality, based on a nationalist agenda. The new left also formed the core of the central organizing committee of the campaign and made a crucial impact on strategic decision-making of the student campaign. The DA got disprortionate resource and symbolic benefits from the inflow of the new members and media publicity from the coalition’s success. At that moment the DA could claim representation of the general student interest better than formal student representation bodies. Summing up, the DA established political, intellectual and moral leadership in Ukraine’s student mobilizations of 2009–2010. Struggling for hegemony within broad coalitions For the new left, winning hegemony without competitors appeared to be much easier than retaining it when the student campaign became less participatory and more transactional. In 2011, the focus of the student campaigns was the bill “On higher education”, supported by the Ministry of Education, which would centralize and bureaucratize the over-formalized Ukrainian post-Soviet higher education system even more. A new player in the coalition between the DA and FRI was added – the civic movement “Vidsich” (“Rebuff”) – gradually challenged the DA’s hegemony in the student protests and replaced it as the central student mobilizing structure. 224 Volodymyr Ishchenko The bonuses from the primacy effect for the new left had reached their limits. The success of the preceding student campaigns attracted attention of other organizations appealing to the student interests. The far right has already attempted to intervene in the student protests in 2010, however, only sporadically and unsuccessfully. Unlike them, “Vidsich” was ideologically acceptable for the DA and FRI coalition. “Vidsich” was a non-violent, allegedly non-hierarchical, non-partisan protest initiative; however, it had a clear, if not overt, political orientation which could be described as nationaldemocratic or liberal-nationalist. The movement itself was established immediately after Viktor Yanukovych’s electoral victory in February 2010, drawing former participants from various opposition movements, including activists from the famous student hunger strike in 1990 for Ukrainian independence. “Vidsich” actively combined participation in anti-government social-economic and civic rights campaigns with an overt Ukrainian nationalist agenda (defending the superior official status of the Ukrainian language, an anticommunist politics of history, etc.), although never with a far-right flavour. In the same time, unlike “weak civil society” formal student organizations, “Vidsich” possessed participatory activist resources, which were important in the context of the campaign that shifted to less “the cash in one’s own pocket” issues attracting mass student participation previously. According to UPCD protest event dataset “Vidsich” protest activity in the period between October 2009 and November 2013 (before the start of [Euro]Maidan protests) was slightly higher (participation in 97 protest events) than of the DA (83 protest events). Contrary to FRI, “Vidsich” was not an ideologically indifferent coalition player, and it clashed with the DA on many issues. All interviewees recalled prolonged, exhausting, demotivating discussions between the DA and “Vidsich” about, for instance, the flags and slogans to be used during the joint actions. They settled on uneasy compromises, such as that “Vidsich” would not bring blue and yellow Ukrainian national flags, which anarchists from the DA did not feel comfortable with, as it was the flag of Ukrainian state. In turn, the DA would not chant “Down with the ministers! Down with the capitalists!” so as not to disturb the pro-market views of “Vidsich” activists. Generally the compromises meant that coalition participants would refrain from their ideological markers, instead agreeing on some “pragmatic” position. As Bohdan Biletsky put it, “the campaign was leftist in essence but not in framing.” Although the protest events in 2011 and 2012 never reached the scale of 2010, with the largest rallies gathering just several hundred students and activists, the pragmatic results of the campaign were significant. The Ministry of Education-supported bill was not passed, and, moreover, the Prime Minister invited the universities, students and protest coalition representatives to form a working group to create a better bill from scratch. The resulting new bill was later supported by the parliamentary opposition and was then the only alternative to the Ministry’s bill.5 However, as anarchists critical of state reformism, the DA participated in the working group only marginally. While they were Ukrainian new left and student protests 225 able to defend some student interests there (for example, the size of statesponsored student scholarships), later they criticized all alternative bills – including the working group’s – as paving the way for a neoliberal commercialization of higher education as well (interview with Bohdan Biletsky). The ideologically diverse transactional activism that worked on the pragmatic level depleted the leftist hegemony. While the campaign shifted into the parliamentary committee’s discussions, the new left lost their crucial influence on the strategic decision-making. “Vidsich” had roughly similar participatory activist resources to challenge the new left influence on the strategy and framing even of the street protests part of the campaign. On the other hand, the new left could hardly break up the uneasy transactional coalition with “Vidsich”, as the student mobilization around not-about-cash-in-one’s-own-pocket issues was declining. As Andriy Movchan put it, “starting from some point in time, the protests brought us neither new activists, nor internal motivation.” They were compromising ideology, refraining from anticapitalist slogans partially because they were afraid to lose the newcomers to the student union, who were not yet accustomed to leftist polemics. The new left was also in a disadvantaged position in the framing competition. “Vidsich” diagnostic and prognostic frames pointing to overwhelming corruption in Ukrainian higher education and complaining for the lack of “European” reforms were more familiar and resonated much better with the ideological convictions dominant amongst Ukrainian youth. On the other hand, the analysis of neoliberal processes not only in Ukraine but also in general was not developed enough and was often percepted as too “abstract” and out of touch with Ukrainian reality, many students were usually poorly aware about quite similar problems in the higher education of other countries. The “libertarian pedagogy” working on the local level in some exceptional schools or universities was hardly a good example of reforms on the national scale in post-Soviet country. In the same time, the DA itself was sliding into crisis, losing members and active cells. Losing hard-core anarchists who were disappointed with compromises and growing out of their student status, the older DA activists failed to organize a continuing systematic political education to introduce newcomers to left-libertarian theory and politics. Resource mobilization theorists have long observed that it is relatively difficult for new, non-established organizations to survive flows of growth and decline of mobilization (McCarthy and Zald 1977, p. 1233). The DA failed to institutionalize: it required a stronger organization to compensate for attrition through ideological compromises and to maintain continuity in order to survive the inevitable generational change and the retirement of older committed activists. Conclusions The primacy effect helped a small new left student union to lead large-scale student protests without any competition from typical “weak civil society” youth and student organizations, sometimes well-established and externally 226 Volodymyr Ishchenko supported but incapable of street mobilization. Moreover, it allowed the new left to establish important cooperation with a non-politicized NGO with a strong regional network, though it would have been much more difficult without left-sympathetic brokers easily agreeing to left-libertarian frames. However, the new left was not able to retain its hegemony in the student protests, as the initial success came to attract politicized liberal nationalists. The latter had enough resources and more resonant framing to challenge new left hegemony in the student movement. The new left was not able to sustain and reproduce its organization, which suffered from attrition because of ideological compromises and generation change. The research findings also expose the problems of transactional activism in post-Soviet weak civil societies. It can be efficient, but only for narrow pragmatic causes hardly allowing far-reaching anti-systemic ambitions, especially with very different ideological partners. The orthodox Gramscian suggestion that weak civil society in fact may help a radical movement seems to be true for the interaction between the new left and grass-roots movements. The weak and split post-Soviet civil society provided a structural opportunity to use the primacy effect to make the radical movement representative of a much wider cause and much broader social groups. However, as the case of the DA shows, the primacy effect may give a favourable starting position for new left hegemony, but sustaining it may require stronger organizations and more ideological work to adjust frames and educate newcomers. Quite similar factors, more precisely the weakness of moderate political competitors in weak civil society, helped another radical movement in Ukraine: the far right. The far right “Svoboda” party – coming from a neoNazi fringe background, with no more than 20,000 members according to the party leader’s very generous estimate, and not represented in the parliament until 2012 – was the most active social movement organization in small and dispersed protest events in Ukraine during the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych (Ishchenko 2016b). The moderate opposition parties, far more electorally popular but lacking ideologically committed activists, were more and more closely cooperating with “Svoboda”, legitimating the far right as part of “normal” politics. When (Euro)Maidan started, the far right appeared as the most active political agents in the most massive anti-government protest in recent Ukrainian history. They were able to make their slogans mainstream and played a crucial role in escalating mass violence and overthrowing Yanukovych’s rule. However, they later failed to consolidate their hegemony, losing electoral competition to moderate pro-Western electoral machines lacking networks of ideological activists but possessing money and media – more important resources for the elections. Even though they have not yet become hegemonic in the opposition protests against the new, post-Maidan government, the far right has penetrated law-enforcement and founded politically affiliated armed units, thus accumulating an amount, unprecedented for Ukraine, of coercive resources for future struggles. Ukrainian new left and student protests 227 What happened to the student new left? By the time the (Euro)Maidan protests erupted, the DA and the Ukrainian new left in general was already weaker, had lost its position in the student movement and had become divided because of sectarian splits. The strongest positions the DA and other left groups were able to gain within the Kiev (Euro)Maidan protests were in semiautonomous student mobilizations. The coalition between the new left and liberal-nationalist “Vidsich” was revived during student marches and rallies in late November 2013. It later continued in a failed occupation strike attempt in one of the elite universities, in the regular Student Assembly in a building in the Kiev city centre occupied by (Euro)Maidan protesters and ending in the occupation of the Ministry of Education. The latter occupation was the culmination of the new left’s impact on (Euro)Maidan in Kiev, when the student protesters forced the new minister of education, Serhiy Kvit, to discuss the terms for leaving the occupied building. However, even in this comfortable niche for leftist participation and without a direct threat from the far right, common in many other occasions during the (Euro)Maidan protests, they ultimately failed to achieve anything during the very familiar exhausting discussions with liberals and conservatives beyond the (neo)liberal agenda of university autonomy, fighting corruption and transparency (Slukvin 2015, pp. 150–152). The post-Maidan Ministry of Education is proceeding with neoliberal reforms and national-patriotic initiatives, revising even those few progressive elements contained in the new law on higher education (the focus of student struggles in 2011–2012) (Muliavka 2015) with only emerging resistance from the disoriented and demotivated new left at the time of writing.6 Notes 1 This is an exception proving the rule: in many state enterprises there are still Sovietstyle trade unions where one becomes a member as part of getting the job. They are usually very loyal to the administration and cannot be regarded as a collective action organization primarily working for the interests of waged workers. 2 Issues classification: Political – protests against or in support of concrete politicians/ political parties or government as a whole, together with electoral protests; Ideological – historical and ideological issues in the majority of cases were connected to the regional divide in Ukraine: Ukrainian and Russian nationalisms, anti-communism, issues related to the Second World War, the Russian Black Sea Fleet base in Sevastopol, conflicts around the split of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church etc.; Socio-economic – among the most frequent: urban development and construction projects, labour rights (particularly, wage arrears), environment, public services (public utilities, transportation, healthcare etc.), and many others; Civic rights –defence of civil liberties (particularly, freedom of speech), protests against police abuse, officials’ illegal actions and corruption. 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