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Ferenc Laczó: You emphasize in your new collection that contemporary Ukraine should be interpreted in ways that contribute to our understanding of globally relevant processes. You thereby make a call for a more productive deprovincialization of discussions that would go beyond the current attempts to include Ukrainian voices in what are typically, if somewhat imprecisely, called ‘projects of decolonization’. What do you see as some of the shortcomings of mainstream international discussions of Ukraine these days, and how could the study and the interpretations of this country become more fruitful?
Volodymyr Ishchenko: Discussions on Ukraine, or post-Soviet countries, and perhaps even the whole of Eastern Europe, suffered from provincialism from the very beginning. It is not exactly a very recent development, it started from the way state socialism was discussed as an anomaly. Then state socialism collapsed, and the question emerged – with which countries does one compare Ukraine? Other post-Soviet countries, Eastern Europe, China, and Vietnam were almost the exclusive cases for a comparative analysis of Ukraine. Attempts to put Ukraine into different discussions which would include Latin America, Africa, other parts of Asia, and the Middle East were pretty rare.
The most typical way to globalize the discussion about the post-Soviet countries, Ukraine included, was the Fukuyama agenda – not in the sense that everyone believed in the end of history, but most of the people were answering the Fukuyama questions – Is this a road to democratization, to liberal democracy, or, if not, why exactly? The problem is not only that this was a shallow and very class-specific narrative and paradigm, but that when you start to answer the questions – for example, why is Ukraine a deficient democracy, or a democracy at all, or why is Russia not democratic – you are going into some very particular stories.
In the case of Ukraine, this would be the notorious division between the East and West. One way to answer the question of why Ukraine is more democratic than Russia would be to say that it is pluralistic by default. This is a quite well-known answer by political scientist Lucan Way. Or if the question is why is Ukraine not as democratic as Western Europe, we also refer to these internal divisions because they hinder the building of a modern nation-state with all the necessary liberal democratic institutions. But in any case, we are going into some particularistic details that do not allow us to actually elaborate and globalize this discussion.
Answers to these questions of the problems with democracy in Ukraine or in the larger post-Soviet region which would include, for example, concepts like neoliberalism, the concept of peripheralization from world system analysis, or the concept of dependency in dependency theories, are usually very rare.
This directly relates to what kind of people are studying Ukraine and with which political agenda they are doing so. It also relates to the state of civil society intellectuals in our part of the world. The people who are more left-leaning and more critical of neoliberalism, dependency, or neocolonialism, will study foremost Latin America or Africa. A different kind of people are studying Ukraine, both in the Western countries and also in Ukraine.
Then the war started and there is a huge global attention shift towards Ukraine. But the problem is that the exceptionalism in discussions about Ukraine has only escalated. It is not really solved, despite all of the efforts to put Ukraine in a prominent spot on the global agenda, and for good reason.
The way we are discussing Ukraine intensifies exceptionalism.
There are a few reasons for this. One is the war propaganda. For example, people are prone to argue that it is the exceptionally vibrant civil society, which is extraordinarily resilient, that stopped the Russian aggression. Or that Ukraine is, once again, exceptionally democratic in contrast to Belarus, Russia, and so on. There is also resistance to the purported relativization of what Russia is doing. This happens for example, when the wars in other parts of the world and their atrocities are brought into comparison. These are some of the most extreme examples.
Another problem is that some of the other comparisons, narratives, and paradigms that are actually important to understanding Ukraine and its history, specifically in the Soviet Union or even before the Soviet Union, have become inconvenient at the moment when a very specific nation-building narrative is so prominent. It became extremely uncomfortable to discuss that in the Soviet Union, Ukraine was actually a modernizing and developing country.
The concepts, agendas, and paradigms that could actually deprovincialize the Ukrainian story, add it to global discussions, or create a dialogue with Latin America or Africa, are becoming difficult for clear political reasons.
Here, enters “decolonization” in this context as purportedly a way to tell the Ukrainian story in a more global way. A large part of the world experienced decolonization. But then again, in what way are we discussing decolonization in relation to Ukraine? This is a very different kind of decolonization than, for example, what happened in most of the so-called third-world countries in the middle of the 20th century. These decolonization projects were immediately connected to the developmentalist agenda of building a robust state with a strong public sector and the development of those fields in the economy that were underdeveloped under colonial rule.
There is a completely different agenda in Ukraine right now with neoliberal improvisation and the whole discussion about decolonization goes into an exclusively symbolic field, remaining fundamentally only about identities. But that all goes to the question of, again, the specifics of Russian imperialism and to what extent we can discuss what happens in Ukraine right now as the manifestation of Russian imperialism. For quite obvious reasons, it does not fit the classical Leninist analysis of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. This does not mean that this is the only way to analyze imperialism, but we need to have better concepts to say that there is Russian imperialism and that it manifests itself in the war in Ukraine. Simply saying that ‘a big country attacked a small country, so this is imperialism’ is just a superficial tautological description, it is not a theoretical concept.
In order to solve this problem, people are turning into a very specific and contested interpretation of the history of Russia-Ukraine relations and of Ukrainian identity. The ‘listen to the voices’ argument is a fundamentally particularistic agenda. In Ukraine’s case, this is the agenda of Ukrainian nationalist identity politics.
There are other parts of Ukrainian history and Ukrainian contemporary politics which are much more interesting, much more relatable, and much more comprehensible for most of the humanity.
This relates also in part to Ukraine’s participation in the Bolshevik revolution, in the construction of the Soviet state, in the Second World War and fighting Nazi Germany, and in the breakthroughs in science and technologies in the post-Second World War period. But for political reasons, primarily of supporting a very specific nation-building project for Ukraine, this part of the story becomes silenced to the detriment of discussing Ukraine.
Also, there are rich theoretical concepts that can actually emerge from Ukraine. One of them is of the Maidan revolutions, referring to the problem of why the contemporary revolutions do not bring revolutionary changes. Or we could study contemporary populism in the case of Zelensky. Or we could study the neoliberal degradation of the highly developed public sector that remained after state socialism. These are not cheerleading stories. However, they could in fact be more relatable, better translatable for global audiences, and they could actually advance our understanding of global and universally relevant questions.
Lorena Drakula: In mainstream discussions on Ukraine, it is often mentioned that Euromaidan was transcending regional divides and heralding national unity. Your analysis tackles this portrayal and paints a more complicated picture. In your interpretation, the two major uprisings in early 21st century Ukraine provided “deficient solutions to very real problems of political representation.” Though these uprisings had revolutionary aspirations and repertoires of collective action, you argue that these were combined with vaguely articulated agendas, loose structures of mobilization, and weak and dispersed leadership. Among other things, you argue that the Euromaidan amounted to an armed uprising that responded to sporadic government violence with a violence of its own, that it was heavily skewed in terms of regional support, and that it had a significant presence of the far right. Could you explain what led to these deficient revolutions and what do you see as their main outcomes?
The question about the Ukrainian Maidan revolutions is one of the ways to tell a global story about Ukraine. Instead of going into the specifics of the Ukrainian regional structure, let us think about the fact that there were three revolutions during the life of just one generation – in 1990 the Revolution on Granite, in 2004 the so-called Orange Revolution, and in 2014, the final and the most massive and violent revolution of Euromaidan, which might not be the last one. These revolutions were responses to the crisis of political representation, or in more Gramscian terms – a hegemony crisis, which obviously does not exist only in Ukraine or in the post-Soviet countries.
There could be an extraordinarily deep crisis of political representation in Ukraine. But this is exceptionalism in terms of quantity, not quality. We can see quite similar tendencies even in the so-called consolidated liberal democracies of Western Europe, in Latin America, in Africa, and everywhere where the people are feeling less and less represented by elites and the dominant political parties. This connection between political representatives in the public sphere and their social base – the social groups that they are supposed to represent – became weaker and weaker.
There are different responses to the crisis of political representation. Some people have become uninterested in politics, they do not vote, and they trust the government and politicians less and less. Other people are joining populist movements, voting for anti-establishment parties—both left and right-wing—and for figures like Trump or for the Brexit. Some go to violence. The response to this global crisis could be different depending on concrete local circumstances and conditions. In countries like Ukraine, we have seen an escalation of revolutions in the recent decades, but Ukraine is obviously not an exception but a part of the trend. The Arab Spring is another prominent example, then the massive protests in Latin America, or the revolutions or coup d’etats in various African countries.
In the context of a political regime like Ukraine, which is somewhat pluralistic and has weak liberal democratic institutions but also weak candidates for authoritarian leaders, we see this escalation of revolutions as a specific response to a global problem.
But why do we have this escalation of revolutions? Because those revolutions are not solving the background crisis to which they are a response. The people are still not feeling represented by the political elite. They come to the streets, they start to protest, and they want a better life, more accountable governments, less corruption, and more equality; but typically those demands are only vaguely articulated. The only thing that typically unites the participants of these contemporary revolutions is getting rid of the leader or the ruling party. The protests are very loosely organized and have only weak organic leadership.
The revolutions are reproducing the very crisis to which they were a response. As a next step, this requires another Maidan revolution to solve the same problem.
This revolutionary situation creates opportunities for specific groups with particular agendas to exploit them to an extent that was not possible before. The radical nationalists who participated in the Euromaidan revolution, who were indeed a small minority of the participants, managed to mainstream the slogans that in post-Soviet years were used only in the right-wing subculture before the Euromaidan. Nowadays, they are official greetings. Neoliberal NGOs, typically dependent on the Western donors, and who represent a narrow middle-class group, get opportunities to speak on behalf of the so-called “Ukrainian civil society” and by extension on behalf of Ukrainian society at large. This is despite their agenda and the neoliberal reforms they propose and push onto the government, which are quite often not supported by the majority of the population. If you look at the public opinion surveys, the same also applies to some of the nationalist reforms that happened after the Euromaidan revolution.
So, we have this disjunction between the agendas and interests that are getting more prominence after the revolution and the expectations of the majority who were participating not simply in a protest campaigns, not simply in some tent camp, but who believed that they were participating in a revolution. They did have some vague expectations about a radical change for the better which did not come. We see these dynamics not only in Ukraine.
Ukraine may show some extreme version—three revolutions in just 25 years—but this is a major global process. We have more and more revolutions which are less and less revolutionary.
What happened with the contemporary revolutions? Why are they not bringing revolutionary transformations? Where have the social revolutions, which brought rapid and fundamental transformations of class and state structures, gone? These questions are on the agenda of very prominent social scientists like Mark Beissinger, who was also on the Review of Democracy podcast. His book, ‘Revolutionary Cities’, was a major and methodologically rigorous contribution to understanding what is wrong with contemporary revolutions. Another very recent, and more journalistic book, ‘If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution’ by Vincent Bevins, publishes reports from a dozen countries across the world related to a decade of failed uprisings and revolutions that did not bring changes for the better, but primarily reproduced and maybe even intensified the crises that they were responding to.
So, Ukraine is a very important case. It is a paradigmatic case of contemporary deficient revolutions. But it might not sound convenient for those people who are very much invested in the war-related agendas.
Ferenc Laczó: You also state in the volume that to understand Ukrainian political cleavages, we should think about the dynamics of class and social revolution. In connection with that, you assert that what lies behind this often-remarked regional cleavage between Eastern and Western Ukraine is actually a class conflict with deeply asymmetrical political camps. How would you compare the two—or maybe even more—political camps active in Ukraine, and how would you describe the evolution of their relationship?
This is another great opportunity to discuss Ukraine in a much more deprovincialized manner. One way to approach this question is analyzing the regional cleavages as originating from an ethnolinguistic conflict between Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians; or originating from divergent regional cultures that came from different histories of Ukrainian territories that were earlier controlled by the Habsburg Empire or the Romanov Empire. Another approach would be to claim that there is no social conflict behind the political cleavages in Ukraine. The very notion of “two Ukraines” is an elite manipulation for electoral purposes and the legacy of Russian rule, which covers a much more fluid and diverse social reality of “twenty-two Ukraines” (how a prominent Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak put it). Instead of these two typical, and quite particularistic ways to discuss it, you could look at this division as a story of uneven modernization – the perspective that can embed the cleavage into global processes.
Going back to the Russian and the Habsburg empires at the beginning of the 20th century: by the start of the First World War, the majority of the Ukrainian population in Galicia, which was controlled by the Habsburg Empire, was literate and children were going to school. Schooling is a very important mechanism, if not the most important, through which peasants acquire a national identity, how they acquire a belief that they belong not simply to their village or their locality, but to the Ukrainian nation which has a very long history of living on a territory with specific and very often contested boundaries and distinct from the neighboring nations. In contrast, in the Russian Empire, a large majority of Ukrainians remained illiterate around that time. This is the reason why that identity of ‘Little Russians’, Malorosi, as a branch of the Russian people together with “Great Russians” and “White Russians” (Belarusians), remained just a historical relic and did not take deep roots among Ukrainians. It remained a relevant identity only for a very small minority of the people who lived in Ukraine at that time. Political scientist Keith Darden analysed in details the crucial role of the uneven mass schooling process in the old European empires for the divides in contemporary politics of Ukraine and of a larger Eastern European region.
These differences in literacy resulted from the unevenness of modernization. The Habsburg Empire was modernizing quicker than the Russian Empire. This changed in the Soviet Union, but the Soviet concept of Ukrainians was a very different one. Ukrainians were seen not as a branch of the larger Russian people, but as a separate nation, even if it was one that had fraternal relations with the Russians. Ukraine immensely modernized during the Soviet time, and this created a basis for an inclusive understanding of Ukrainian identity. However, the Soviet modernizing drive started to slow down and degrade well before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and here we see the sources and the intensification of the political representation crisis when the communist bureaucracy started to be seen among the masses of Soviet citizens as caring only about their corporate interests and as manipulating the communist ideology.
In the post-Soviet years, this political crisis was not resolved but only escalated. The post-Soviet ruling class did not have any source of legitimacy – either traditional, or ideological, or religious – for the rapid large-scale privatization of property. It was widely seen—and is even now seen—as basically a “mafia” who steals from the people. At the same time, when the Communist hegemonic apparatus degraded, most of the ordinary post-Soviet citizens were atomized and disorganized. The mass labour strikes have subsided since the early 1990s. Here are the roots of Ukraine’s cleavage.
The cleavage between the “Western” and “Eastern” camps looked like it was symmetrical on electoral maps, but it was immensely asymmetrical in the class coalitions that stood behind the two camps and in their political capacity.
Ukraine’s “regional” cleavage was fundamentally a nationally-specific manifestation of the class conflict cutting across most of the post-Soviet countries in the context of hegemonic crisis. The same conflict structured the politics, not only of countries like Belarus or Moldova with somewhat similar ethnolinguistic dimension, but also monoethnic countries like Armenia, and crucially, Russia itself.
On the one side of this cleavage in Ukraine, there was a so-called “pro-Russian,” or, I would simply call them the “Eastern” camp of Ukrainian politics, which reflected primarily the interests of the post-Soviet ruling class which are typically called ‘oligarchs’, though ‘political capitalists’ is a proper theoretical concept for them which was specifically developed in relation to post-socialism by, for example, Ivan Szelenyi and Branko Milanović. The political capitalists could rely exclusively on the passive support of sections of the working class, mostly those who worked in the public sector or in heavy industry. They have been typically called “pro-Russian”; however, they could not offer any “pro-Russian” development for Ukraine. The soft power of anything that Russia could offer was much weaker than the soft power of Western Euro-Atlantic integration, which also had very big problems, but still, the so-called pro-Russian camp was basically a “pro-stability” camp, meaning a perpetuation of crisis and stagnation. We are not speaking about the stability of Switzerland, but the ‘stability’ of a stagnating post-Soviet degrading state, where there was a need for development and change.
The pro-Western camp had a very different class coalition behind it. The professional middle classes were way more represented in that camp, and they were allied with transnational capital and with some of the more opportunistic and dissenting representatives of the political capitalist elite. They relied on other groups of workers who were more integrated into the Western markets, such as the migrant workers in the EU or IT employees. Even though European integration remained delusional and unachievable for a very long time and, as we can see now, those discussions about European membership for Ukraine are still very uncertain, there was still a projection of some development, a way to move forward. This was the case even though this way was actually peripheralizing for quite a large section of the Ukrainian working class who were sticking to “stability” without much enthusiasm.
Because of the different class coalitions, the camps had different political capacities to universalize their particular interests and agendas, to present the particular interests of a class, or a faction within it, as representing the national interests of Ukraine.
The Eastern camp practically did not have its own civil society in the sense of think tanks, intellectuals, magazines, or universities which would be capable of universalizing the interests of political capitalists and supporting it with sustained civic mobilization. In the context of post-Soviet atomization, fragmentation and disintegration of labour, and the slow degradation of the Communist-successor left, it was the more resourceful groups – foremost, the Western-looking professional middle class or the political groups that benefited from a legacy of the political tradition of Ukrainian radical nationalism preserved, in particular, in Ukrainian diaspora – who were gradually becoming more and more prominent in the public sphere and in extra-parliamentary politics. That crucial class and political asymmetry was reproduced during the post-Soviet years in Ukraine, and the Maidan revolutions were only amplifying this asymmetry. During the Maidan revolutions, the Western camp, even when it was not necessarily representing the majority in the society, was getting important opportunities to push forward its own very specific agendas. Those agendas were obviously based on anti-Soviet and anti-Russian identity for Ukraine.
Lorena Drakula: Throughout the book, you mention the authoritarian tendencies that developed in Ukraine, and especially that, with the post-Maidan government, there were many political changes that, as you say, would have previously been considered radical. You mention here decommunization, restrictions on Russian cultural products, the banning of political parties, and sanctioning of actors connected to the communist left or Russia in general, which all became part of this national liberal agenda. What do you see as the driving force behind these authoritarian tendencies and how grave was their impact on Ukrainian politics in your assessment?
The Euromaidan revolution of 2014, reproducing and escalating the hegemonic crisis, was an important factor in the development of these tendencies. Why do you need more coercion? Because with your agendas, with your interests, you cannot mobilize active consent from the majority of the population. This is why you are relying on the mobilization of threat and fear, and also on coercion, repression, on violence in the streets – because their political capacity to actually convince and lead the people is not sufficient. The post-Euromaidan political situation created opportunities for this.
As the neoliberal-nationalist civil society became more prominent, it acquired more resources to push forward its agenda.
In the case of the radical nationalists, it was actually the weapons that they have been receiving since 2014, and the possibility for them to form their semi-autonomous armed units (Azov became the most prominent example), and also expand their street mobilization capacity, that made them a factor in Ukrainian politics.
Besides the weak arguments about the low electoral representation of the Ukrainian far right, some people argue that the Ukrainian far right is like ‘a dog which barks but does not bite’. Well, they did bite – they played an important role in the failure of the Minsk Accords. They played an important role in the electoral campaign of 2018/2019. This became a reason for a joint public letter of G7 ambassadors to Ukraine, appealing to the Ukrainian minister of internal affairs—who was widely seen as a patron of Azov—about the threat of the Ukrainian far right. The Western ambassadors understood that the Azov movement could become a destabilizing factor during the 2019 elections. Indeed, they led a number of events discrediting Poroshenko because of the corruption of his business partners.
If Zelensky did not decide to enter the ballot in 2019, there would be a close call between Petro Poroshenko and Yulia Tymoshenko or Yurii Boiko, which is what the polls predicted at the end of 2018. Then, the far right were feared to play a major destabilizing role in the elections. However, when Zelensky suddenly decided to campaign and the polls forecasted his victory, there was a remarkable meeting of the G7 ambassadors with Zelensky and they asked him: ‘Okay, you are saying you are going to negotiate with Putin about Donbass because you are ready to negotiate even with the devil. But what are you going to do with the nationalists?’. Zelensky did not have an answer at that point.
The structure of the political regime in Ukraine was based on “oligarchic pluralism” as it was typically called, which is different from Russia, where Putin’s patrimonial pyramid dominates the political regime.
Ukraine had competing political capitalist factions, but none was capable, at least before the invasion, of becoming really dominant. In their competition, they could use the agendas coming from the active groups within civil society to compensate the lack of changes related to the expectations of the majority of the population.
The people who participated in the Maidan revolutions had some expectations about improved living standards. Instead, they got a nationalist agenda, because it is much easier to change the names of the streets, remove the communist monuments, limit the use of Russian language, and show some kind of symbolic change, than for example, making some real progress on improving the living standards. Importantly, the nationalist radicalization tendencies cannot be simply explained away by the war. In no way do they help to win against Russia, and they may be only damaging for domestic unity.
In the intellectual public sphere, there is also another dynamic where there is so much investment in the narrative that Ukraine has united, has consolidated, has built up a new inclusive civic nation, that when some diverging voices appear who say something different, they become a danger in themselves.
It does not even matter how prominent they are, whether they even have a big audience, or whether they present any real political threat. Their sheer existence is proof that the Ukrainian situation is more complicated than it is represented. This becomes a tool for legitimizing the silencing, ostracizing, and attacking of the people who are trying to discuss the issues that are inconvenient for the very specific nation-building agenda.
But I am not sure that Ukraine is exceptional in the development of these tendencies. We also need to look at them from the perspective of the global hegemonic crisis. We are living in a period when the democratic political superstructure of capitalism is eroding in many other places in the world. Ukraine is not an exception to this trend. It may be a mirror to the future of many parts of the world – a place where some of the global developments went a bit further. At this moment, we see how certain viewpoints are becoming very difficult to voice in the public sphere. The protestors in France may protest for years without success, and they meet very harsh responses from the police. The level of police violence in the United States is a very well-known problem. The problems with authoritarian tendencies in Hungary are also very well known. Some repressive trends are specific for Ukraine and its war-time situation; however, some could be a local manifestation of a global trend.
The text was edited for length and clarity.
In collaboration with Rohit Sarma. Wiebe Kiestra credit for the photo.
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