In search of a new Ukrainian identity
Mike Phipps reviews Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War, by Volodymyr Ishchenko, published by Verso
This is a cautious, even-handed book – perhaps excessively so. Volodymyr Ishchenko has not been one to unconditionally take sides as Ukraine polarised in recent years. He rejects the artificial counter-position of the ‘new’ Ukraine – “young, metropolitan, cosmopolitan, fluent in English, stylish, mobile, liberal, well-educated, successful” to the old ‘Soviet’ or ‘Russian’ outlook – “old, conservative, provincial, rigid, clinging to dying industries, poorly or inadequately educated, in bad taste, losers.”
He sees both the Maidan and anti-Maidan protests as symmetrical: mirror images of themselves, each based on a combination of legitimate grievances and irrational fears. Even in late January 2022, “as Western countries escalated their rhetoric about an ‘imminent invasion’ by Russia, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi questioned this narrative at a press conference with foreign reporters.” Ishchenko says: “I felt proud and I think many other Ukrainians did, too.” Yet less than a month later, Russia did indeed invade.
Ishchenko retains a detached view after the Russian attack. He is highly critical of the Zelenskyi government’s decision to suspend eleven Ukrainian political parties for their pro- Russian links, suggesting that “moves such as these suspensions that alienate parts of the Ukrainian public – and make them question the intentions of their leaders – make the country weaker not stronger, and only serve the enemy.” Others, however, saw this step as pretty lenient, given that the MPs of one of the larger groups, the Platform for Life, were able to retain their parliamentary immunity.
As for Russia, where other commentators saw Putin’s imposition of military conscription as a purely coercive measure, Ishchenko argues that this is simplistic and a strong element of bribery is involved. Drafted soldiers receive five to six times the Russian median wage. The billions of dollars of redistribution required by this measure constitutes, in his view, a form of military Keynesianism and helps explain why the war continues to be popular in Russia, to the bemusement of some Western commentators. He contrasts this with “the Ukrainian government’s decision to stick to neoliberal dogmas of privatization, lowering taxes and extreme labour deregulation, despite the objective imperatives of the war economy.”
The author is uncertain about the importance of Ukraine’s potential NATO membership in Putin’s decision to invade. “Whatever role NATO expansion played in bringing about war, Ukrainians’ attitudes counted for little,” he opines. “The grim irony is not only that NATO was far from extending formal membership to Ukraine, but that there was not even evidence of a stable pro-NATO majority in the country.”
This is somewhat different to the analysis proffered by Tariq Ali just one week before the invasion, which derided Ukraine as “Natoland” and mocked the threat of a Russian invasion as “based on some aerial photos of tents in a field and other helpfully selected nuggets of US intelligence.”
Support in Ukraine for joining NATO plunged after the West’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. But equally, support for joining the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization plummeted in 2014 after its annexation of Crimea. These insights support his analysis that Ukrainians are not as ideologically polarised as politicians might wish.
But actually, we can be far clearer about the issue of NATO. The last significant group of eastern European countries to join the Alliance did so twenty years ago. Russia’s war on Ukraine had very little to do with a supposed ‘NATO threat’.
The war causes difficulties for Ishchenko’s analysis. His rejection of “reductive binary choices” between exclusionary nationalisms on both sides is undermined by the violent and protracted character of the Russian onslaught. Ishchenko attempts to explain the rationale for the war, rejecting Putin’s own explanations about Ukraine and Russia being one people and Russia’s fears of NATO expansion. Accepting this at face value “would mean that the Russian ruling class has either been taken hostage by a power hungry maniac and national chauvinist obsessed with a ‘historical mission’ of restoring Russian greatness, or suffers from an extreme form of false consciousness – sharing Putin’s ideas about the NATO threat and his denial of Ukrainian statehood, leading to policies that are objectively contrary to their interests.”
This is wrong, believes Ishchenko: the war does represent the collective interests of the Russian ruling class: expanding the sphere of influence in which oligarchic capitalism can operate and fending off the threat from the West, whose anti-corruption rhetoric resonates with a growing professional class. It’s a stance echoed by the elites – whose lack of legitimacy necessitates resorting to violence to shore up their power – in many post-Soviet states, including in the past Ukraine. Now, however, the latter is finding that state corruption and crony capitalism are undermining its war effort.
It’s the essence of Ishchenko’s thesis that beneath the nationalist disputes lies a profound class conflict. The East-West division in Ukraine is less about linguistic or cultural differences and more a clash between its professional middle classes whose pro-Western agenda “threatened most of the political capitalist ruling class and marginalized large segments of Ukraine’s workers.”
It’s good to foreground a class analysis, but the author goes further, suggesting that describing the Russian state’s actions as imperialist is simplistic. This is problematic – Ishchenko’s ‘a plague on both elites’ stance sidelines the critical point that Russia’s invasion threatens the very existence of Ukraine, whatever differences he and we may have with its government. As Vincent Présumey and Stefan Bekier put it on this site a year ago: “ In the outlook of Russian imperial nationalism, Ukrainians can only be Russians or dead.”
As Simon Pirani has explained, Russia’s imperialist attitude to Ukraine is rooted not only in its history but in the current military methods it is using. Its attempts to “subjugate an enemy population” are demonstrated both in its attacks on the civilian population – including massacres, rape, torture and forced deportation – and in its efforts to eradicate Ukrainian culture and with it Ukrainians’ collective identity.
Moreover, as Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval have argued, Putin’s regime embodies an “eminently political form of imperialism: it aims to spread a dictatorial and nationalist conception of power everywhere in which civil and political freedoms have no basis for existence. This is why the Putin model has so many supporters among the global right and extreme right.”
Ishchenko is fearful that the decolonisation of Ukraine is simply an anti-Russian reflex, to be replaced by the worship of all things Western. He’s dismissive of the “burst of mutual help and horizontal cooperation” that the war has unleashed and doesn’t foresee much of a role for the self-organized Ukrainian people after the war, even if the power of the oligarchs is fatally weakened. Of course, it’s hard to predict if he will be proven right – but in any case that’s no reason not to fight for the existence of an independent Ukraine, which in current conditions is definitely not an abstract issue of identity politics.
Rather than accept the Western narrative for Ukraine of liberal modernization, Ishchenko offers what he argues is a more positive conception of the country’s identity: “Instead, we need to recognize that we could be proud of having once been part of a universal movement. Ukraine was crucial to the greatest social revolution and modernization breakthrough in human history. Ukraine was where some of the most significant battles of World War II took place. Millions of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers in the Red Army contributed huge sacrifices to defeat Nazi Germany. Ukraine was a world-renowned centre of vanguardist art and culture. The mass murders and authoritarianism of the state-socialist regime are universally acknowledged; but to exploit them to depreciate the scale of Soviet achievements is to cast Ukrainian labour, blood and suffering as meaningless… We should claim our past in full to claim a better future.”
“Universally acknowledged” may be an overstatement here. A recognition of Stalin-era mass murder is certainly not in the Great-Russian outlook peddled by the Kremlin. Ishchenko’s search for the universal runs up against not only this ongoing colonial Russian mindset but its concrete and brutal expression under the Soviet regime.
Introducing his book, Ishchenko says, “ You should not read it looking for some objective Truth about the war in Ukraine.” He’s right about that – but we should still keep searching.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
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