Tuesday, October 20, 2026

 

Russia’s bloody shift from subimperialism to new old imperialism


By Simon Pirani
Published
Stand with Ukraine protest

Russia’s New Imperialism: Capital and Ideology
By Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev 
Stanford University Press, 2026

In October 2022, just before the Ukrainian army retook the southeastern city of Kherson, retreating Russian soldiers exhumed the remains of the 18th-century Prince, Grigory Potemkin, from St Catherine’s Cathedral.

Potemkin’s bones were removed to Russian-held territory on the left bank of the Dnieper river, along with statues to him, to Generalissimo Aleksandr Suvorov and Admiral Fyodor Ushakov, who, like Potemkin, served under Catherine the Great. Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-appointed governor of the occupied part of Kherson region, said: “These are sacred objects that I believe needed to be saved.”1

In the 1770s and ’80s, when the American and French revolutions lighted beacons of republican hope, the empire Potemkin fought for was growing into a reactionary monster. He was a key figure in the colonisation and attempted “Russification” of southeastern Ukraine; the founding of Yekaterinoslav (“to the Glory of Catherine”, now Dnipro); the annexation of Crimea in 1784; the crushing of the Zaporizhzhia cossacks; securing Black Sea ports; and war with the Ottoman empire, an important precondition for Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus in the 19th century.2

Now, Potemkin is in a pantheon of state functionaries venerated by Kremlin ideologists from Vladimir Putin downward, by the education system and by the media. For Putin, these heroes are direct predecessors to the Soviet army in World War II, the tinpot dictatorships established in Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014 and the Russian troops that invaded Ukraine in 2022. They were all defenders of his imagined “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” from one enemy after another: Poland, Austro-Hungary, Bolshevism and the “anti-Russia project” that led to the Soviet Union’s demise.3

Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev, in their Marxist analysis of 21st century Russian imperialism, interrogate the relationship between this ideology — strong enough for the officers commanding the Kherson retreat to risk lives for bones and statues — and the economic, political and social dynamics in which it is anchored.

Budraitskis and Matveev’s starting point is the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022. Not only have its consequences done untold damage, economically and geopolitically, to the Russian elite but, as they argue convincingly (p2, 81 & 121), much of this damage would have been done, even if the initial military objective of imposing a puppet government in Kyiv had been achieved.

An explanation must be found for such a self-defeating strategy. Why did a far-reaching action by the state, long seen by Marxists as the instrument of capital, cut across capital’s economic interests so dramatically? It was by no means the first time: citing David Harvey, Budraitskis and Matveev point to the Vietnam war and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, “examples of imperialist ventures that are not easily attributable to the requirements of capital accumulation” (p15).

But the Russian case must be explained on its own terms, and they start with the Putin regime’s ideology of imperial mythmaking and “civilisational” conflict with the West, showing how it grew on the soil of post-Soviet Russian capitalism and its discontents. They write in their Introduction (p7):

Russian imperialism since 2014 has been counterproductive, largely irrational, and rooted in the historical myths of empire. But it was the modern experience of primitive accumulation, as well as recent events such as the Arab Spring, that enabled the ideological consolidation of Putin’s regime.

Here I consider four themes through which this argument is developed: (1) the understanding of post-Soviet Russia as a subimperialist power; (2) the development of imperialist and nationalist ideologies in the Russian elite prior to 2014; (3) the threat posed by the Maidan uprising in Ukraine to the Kremlin, and how it reacted; and (4) the driving forces that took the Kremlin from its initial military intervention in Ukraine (2014) to all-out invasion (2022).

The subimperialist model

A first key theme in Russia’s New Imperialism is the “internationalisation of Russian capital” that began in earnest after the 1998 crisis, when a banking crash and four-fold ruble devaluation weakened the financial-industrial groups that grew rich on rent-seeking in the 1990s (p19-26). Productive investment flourished (oil prices rising steadily between 2000–08 helped), and “the two channels of integration into the global economy — namely, exports [primarily of oil, gas and metals] and borrowing — reinforced each other.”

Russian capital was exported, in the first place, to Ukraine and other post-Soviet states: foreign direct investment by Russian entities multiplied 20 times over between 1999–2007.

In these years, Putin remade the relationship between capital and the state. He centralised state control of the media and punished Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man. The economic elite lost its “direct, unmediated political power”; chunks of the energy sector were brought back into state ownership; and by 2007 seven of the top 20 companies, including the top three (Gazprom, Rosneft and Sberbank), were majority-owned by the state.

Putin’s relationship with the owners of Russia’s largest businesses “could aptly be described as ‘Bonapartist’,” Budraitskis and Matveev write, citing Karl Marx’s famous argument that “in order to save its purse [the bourgeoisie] must forfeit the crown, and the sword that is to safeguard it must at the same time be hung over its own head as a sword of Damocles.”4 Russian capitalists lacked social legitimacy and felt threatened by labour unrest: Putin “re-ordered state-business relations” and they benefited.

But it did not stop at that. Leadership of state companies was handed to Putin’s closest associates: this was a more direct fusion of state and capital. “The economic elites lack public legitimacy and independent sources of political power. They exercise power through the Kremlin, and only in this way” (p31).

To explain Russia’s integration into global capitalism, Budraitskis and Matveev look to dependency theory, developed by Ruy Mauro Marini to describe Brazil under the military dictatorship of the 1960s. Brazil then, and Russia in the 2000s, were “subimperialist” powers that exported raw materials and low-value-added goods to the rich countries and imported high-value-added products.5

Moreover, they assess the Kremlin’s geopolitical strategy up to 2014 as “antagonistic cooperation” with the US and its allies (which had, by the way, either ignored Putin’s genocidal wars on Chechnya, or claimed them as part of the “global war on terror”). Russia facilitated logistics and supplied aircraft for NATO’s operation in Afghanistan.

Notwithstanding Putin’s rhetoric against the “unipolar world order” at Munich in 2007, and even after the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, “the Kremlin sought pragmatic cooperation with the US in areas that corresponded to its own perceived interests” (p37).

The weakness of this “subimperialist” model — its dependence on volatile commodity and finance markets — was cruelly exposed by the 2008–09 financial crisis, Budraitskis and Matveev write (p23). The Kremlin responded to the slowdown that followed in 2012–13 with efforts to stimulate investment, but these failed “as they faced the limitations imposed by the very nature of Putin’s personalist dictatorship” (p26) — that is, the way he remade the relationship of state and capital.

The authors of Russia’s New Imperialism argue that these political and economic policy factors alone can not explain Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine in 2014, and the annexation of Crimea that burned many of its bridges with Western powers and capital markets. Rather, they present a more fundamental double shift — in the form of imperialism, from rational to irrational; and in foreign policy, from pragmatism to ideological decision-making.

The early 2000s formula [in foreign policy], placing interests above ideas, was replaced by the opposite belief that there is a global struggle of ideas, and national interest is determined by one’s place in this struggle6... Russia’s transition from its “rational” economic imperialism of the 2000s to the “irrational” ideologically motivated imperialism of 2014 and beyond is part of the same process (p39).

Budraitskis and Matveev offer a discussion of ideology understood broadly as “a set of core ideas about the world and human relations that serves as the basis for making political decisions.” These ideas are formed at a “first level” (“the collective life experience of certain social groups and dominant perceptions (‘common sense’) in society as a whole”, and then articulated by intellectuals as a world view, at a “second level” (p39-40).

They track the emergence in the 1990s of a “cynical” Russian elite ideology,7 grounded in what it perceived as “liberation” from Soviet strictures on the pursuit of private interest, and entwined with violence. An “attitude of permanent conflict”, echoing the street gang culture that security services officials of the 2020s lived through as young men, became the “unspoken rule of political life” (p50-54).

Ideology and military intervention in 2014

A second theme in Russia’s New Imperialism is the way that strands of articulated “second level” ideology, rooted in this “first level”, were drawn together in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Conservative and anti-democratic ideas, previously used pragmatically, were increasingly internalised by the elite. In this long-term, multi-layered process, Budraitskis and Matveev see Putin’s return to the presidency in 20128 as a turning point.

The rhetoric of his election campaign this time differed markedly from the depoliticised and technocratic style of the 2000s. He was no longer a manager whose main task was to ensure economic growth, but a patriotic leader of a great nation’s majority and the defender of the nation’s sovereignty against Western influence. (p60)

The philosophical component of this state ideology is influenced by Ivan Ilyin, an early 20th century conservative and anti-Communist, who saw the authoritarian state as morally right against its citizens, who must submit to it. In response to the “colour revolutions” in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004) and elsewhere, the Kremlin reimagined another idea from anti-Bolshevik émigres, Eurasianism, as the “Russian world”, understood as an alternative value system to Western liberal democracy.

Other key elements in Putinist ideology are the Russian Orthodox church and the special role of the security services, which, Budraitskis and Matveev argue, harks back to the oprichnina, a repressive institution that carried out mass terror under Ivan the Terrible.

Putin’s idea of the Russian state echoes 19th-century historians, who saw it as the “form” of the Russian people that mystically reproduces itself, and of their successors in the late Stalinist period who saw its centralisation and expansion as “historically progressive,” and anything that stands in its way as reactionary.

Putin’s narrative differs in one crucial respect, though: there is no forward progress, only a cyclical pattern. “The West is [eternally] trying to destroy the Russian state through military aggression, importing false ideas, and supporting radical opposition” (p65). The eternal need to resist this pattern produces the imperative for Putin’s gauleiters in Kherson to protect Potemkin’s sacred bones.

Budraitskis and Matveev emphasise that Putinist ideology came together untidily and patchily, emerging fully-formed only in the 2020s. In the months before Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Putin described himself alternately as “conservative” and “liberal”.

But in this jumble, the outlines of irreconcilable conflict were emerging. By 2013, “Ukraine’s choice between tightening relationships with the EU, and joining the [Russia-dominated] Eurasian Union was framed by the Kremlin as mutually exclusive, not only for political and economic reasons but also for ideological reasons” (p68).

In November 2013, then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych pulled out of talks on a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with the EU, opting instead for a range of energy and other subsidies from Russia. A student-led demonstration against this shift was subjected to a vicious attack by police. That brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets of Kyiv in anti-government protests, and became the Maidan uprising that brought down Yanukovych’s government in February 2014.

Maidan: The existential threat

This brings us to a third key theme in Russia’s New Imperialism: social control was a key element in the Kremlin’s decisions to go to war, in 2014 and 2022. The “personalist regime” consolidated by Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 was in large part a reaction to protests against rigged parliamentary elections in December 2011. Behind these protests, and the alarming sight of the Arab Spring pulling down regimes across the Middle East and North Africa, the Kremlin saw only the hand of the West and its existential threat to the “Russian world”.

Considerable progress made in 2009–10 in the Kremlin’s negotiations with the Barack Obama administration — for example, a nuclear arms limitation agreement, reversal of George Bush’s decision to deploy a missile defence shield in Eastern Europe, and joint positions on Iran — made no difference to this.

In the Kremlin’s view, the authentic sources of anti-Putin protests lay not in internal contradictions but in external ill will. Oppositionists were merely its conscious or unconscious agents. In this way, the confrontation became historical and cultural, not political (p78).

The Kremlin applied these same ideologised assumptions to social protest in Ukraine. Budraitskis and Matveev show the Russian elite was by no means united around Putin’s belief that the Maidan protesters were “pawns controlled by foreign hands” — but that view prevailed. Ukraine’s choice between closer economic ties with Europe or with Russia was perceived as “civilisational”. Yanukovych was the guarantor of “traditional values”. Ideology trumped economic policy, resulting in self-harming military intervention.

The imperatives of social control again forced the Kremlin’s hand in the run-up to the all-out invasion in 2022. Increasingly the perception of the West as a “historically unchanging source of existential threat to Russia as a state” determined both domestic and foreign policy decisions. “The refusal of the post-Maidan Ukrainian governments to return to Moscow’s orbit of influence was seen as part of the West’s large-scale project to ‘contain’ Russia, which was also expressed in the growth of oppositional sentiments across Russian society” (p113).

Putin viewed the heterogenous protests in Russia in 2018–19 and Aleksei Navalny’s anti-corruption campaign as the work of Western intelligence services; he compared them to Maidan and the Arab Spring. By mid 2021, both military preparations for what Putin assumed would be a very brief operation, and ideological preparations articulated in his July 2021 article on the “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”,9 were complete.

Budraitskis and Matveev set their explanations for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — ideological conviction, supercharged by fear of social protest — against other interpretations current in universities. The claim that Russia was pursuing its economic interests is easily dealt with. “If the Ukrainian market was so important to Russia, why would the Kremlin risk losing it by annexing Crimea and fomenting violent separatism in Donbas?” they ask (p81). And lose it Russia did: its exports to Ukraine in 2015 were less than half of the 2012 level.

A more significant target is the claim that Russia’s hand was forced by “geopolitical and security considerations”. In one crucial article, the “realist” scholar John Mearsheimer — no kind of Marxist, but heavily relied on by many would-be Marxists — wrote that it is “Geopolitics 101” that “great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory”. But was the threat real or perceived?

Mearsheimer says NATO took steps to “assuage Russian fears,” for example by never permanently stationing military forces in its new Eastern European member states — but that that matters little, because “it is the Russians, not the West, who ultimately get to decide what counts as a threat to them.”10 This gives the lie to the whole argument. “The subjective perception of threat replaces the objective correlation of forces as a key explanatory factor in Mearsheimer’s analysis” (p82).

And what a distorted perception it was. As Budraitskis and Matveev point out, “the security situation has actually improved for Russia during the period of NATO eastward expansion.” The number of US troops in Europe in 2010 was 30,000, one tenth of what it was during the Cold War; the number of US tanks in Germany fell from 5000 in 1991 to zero in 2014; the German army’s own tank fleet fell from 7000 in the Cold War to 244 in 2017, only 95 of which were fully operational. No wonder that one of Putin’s own military experts, Alexander Khramchikhin, wrote in November 2013 that the US “does not intend to fight a war in Europe — neither an aggressive nor a defensive one.”

In this reviewer’s experience, discussions about Ukraine in Western “left” political circles are replete with references to Mearsheimer’s shoddy logic, supported by myths such as “Western arms supplies to Ukraine rose sharply before 2021” (untrue) and “Ukraine was close to joining NATO” (untrue), allied to fantasies about “Ukraine’s ethnic cleansing in the Donbas”, and so on.11 Ideology can indeed be a powerful social force.

Budraitskis and Matveev also respond to interpretations of Russia’s actions that emphasise their provisional, unplanned character. While there is evidence of the Kremlin improvising its support for the Donbas “republics”, they stress Crimea is different. Its annexation “created an unprecedented situation” (p84). Putin must have known there would be “no way back” and that sanctions and diplomatic distancing were inevitable.

From annexation to invasion

However profound the shift of Kremlin policy in 2014, all-out war was still not predetermined. The authors of Russia’s New Imperialism do not consider the full-scale invasion an “inevitable continuation” of Tsarist or Soviet imperialist policies; rather, it was “largely determined by internal political dynamics that led to a transformation in the worldview of the Russian elites” (p75). A fourth key theme is how these dynamics played out between 2014–22.

The impact of the war on corporate Russia was overwhelmingly negative. Russian investments were increasingly shut out of Ukraine. Further west, sections of international capital pressed on with collaboration — European gas companies’ support for the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany being the emblematic example — but Russian corporates’ access to Western financial markets was severely restricted.

Budraitskis and Matveev compare Russia’s failure to recover from the 2015–16 global economic doldrums with Brazil’s rapid rebound. Investment turned inward: the arms industry, always enormous, was pumped up still further, and the state-controlled corporations that controlled it reached into other economic sectors.

Russia added “economies of plunder” to its repertoire, that is investments “linked to the violence of Russian military and paramilitary formations” (p99). The results were mixed. Occupied areas of eastern Ukraine have been a net drain on the Russian economy; the Donbas, with its broken supply chains and damaged industry, even more so than Crimea. In Africa, where paramilitaries’ seizure of resources “resemble early modern European imperialist modes of plunder” (p101), paramilitaries such as the Wagner group profited but it is doubtful that the Russian economy benefited overall.

Against this background, the ideology that had taken shape in the 2010s now began to dominate statecraft. The Donbas conflict was portrayed as one between “traditional values” and degenerate, “globalist” western forces. But this was not just a tool to create a new social coalition behind Putin; rather, Budraitskis and Matveev argue, moral values were seen by the Russian ruling class “as an integral part of the strategy to defend sovereignty” (p107).

Similarly, a “large scale infrastructure to implement state historical policy” (p108) went far beyond rewriting school textbooks: a view was being propagated that the Russian ruling elite rests not on democratic legitimacy or international law, but on “the imperial legacy of the past”, which is “inevitably linked to territorial expansion” (p112).

None of this ensured that the Russian ruling class — let alone the majority of the population — was united in support of Putin’s decision in 2022 to recognise the Donetsk and Luhansk “republics”, and then invade the rest of Ukraine.

But the “personalist regime” provided no opportunity even for factions in the Kremlin to influence the president’s strategic decisions (p124). Politicians and businessmen were actually compelled to rally to the cause: the “special military operation” was justified not only in foreign policy terms but as a means of strengthening the ideological homogeneity of the elite (p127).

The failure to defeat Ukraine within days again brought Russian imperialism to uncharted territory. Budraitskis and Matveev catalogue the regime’s relative success in redirecting the economy: Russia remains a major commodities exporter, has shifted its trade from Western powers to China, India and others, and centred its domestic economy on arms production and associated sectors. The military-industrial complex has siphoned off resources from civilian industries (p132).

This was not capital directing the state, but the state directing capital: Putin created “‘facts on the ground’ to which businesses had to adapt”, thus demonstrating “the extent to which his personalist dictatorship has expropriated the political power of the economic elite” (p134).

Like all good books, this one raises questions in the reader’s mind.

Broadly, I agree with Budraitskis and Matveev’s answers to the question, “what brought Russian imperialism to the point of the all-out invasion?” I think it is also useful to pose it counterfactually: why did Russia not move towards some sort of “normal” capitalism — such as Brazil, for example — instead of this fascist-like authoritarianism and war?

Working as a journalist and researcher of Russian businesses in the 2000s, I believed that there could be hard times ahead for the labour movement and opposition organisations, and that Russian bullying of its former colonies had not ended. But war, dictatorship and a new gulag? Not on this scale.12

One factor in my thinking was that the Russian economy and state were being seriously weakened, year after year. Russia had lost economic control of Azerbaijan in 1994, when it signed the “contract of the century” with Western oil majors; Russian company Lukoil hung on in a secondary role.

In central Asia, Russia ceded dominance: Chinese and Western oil companies acquired the biggest production assets in Kazakhstan; China, Japan and South Korea made the running in Uzbekistan; and the completion of the central Asian gas pipeline in 2009, switched control of Turkmenistan, the world’s fourth largest gas producer, from Russia to China at a stroke.

But empires in decline can become more violent, not less. The murderous Russian onslaughts on Chechnya in 1994–96 and 1999–2002 turned out to be a foretaste of the Donbas conflict. Russia’s economic weakness reinforced the Kremlin’s descent into the irrational, ideological decision-making that Budraitskis and Matveev so carefully describe.

A second, related, question concerns Russia’s relationship with international capital. I am entirely persuaded by Budraitskis and Matveev’s argument that Russia carved out a “subimperialist” role, which unravelled after 2014. Were there other ways out of it — alternatives to Putin’s way?

Towards the end of the 2000s, some sections of the elite voiced a strong desire to escape from this subordinate position, in discussions about the danger of “Dutch disease” — over-reliance on commodity exports — and the need to invest in technology and value-added sectors. These ideas did not cut across the “Russian world”; indeed some elite figures saw them as the best way to reinforce that world.

As I see it, these alternative routes out of the subordinate role in which Russia was being integrated into the world economy were, in part, closed off by factors outside the elite’s control: the 2008–09 economic crisis and its aftershocks; and the social movements that terrified the Kremlin, the Arab Spring at some distance, and Maidan uncomfortably close to home.

I do not want to say, though, that economic crisis or social protest left the Russian elite no choice. Of course it had a choice, and the ideological factors foregrounded by Budraitskis and Matveev are essential in explaining why it made the choices it did.

The attention paid in Russia’s New Imperialism to social processes and their impact on elite ideology helps it to stand out from mountains of superficial commentary about the causes of the war on Ukraine, whether from those who see it as an inevitable product of an incorrigible imperialist mindset or those who imagine, with the Kremlin, that Western powers were to blame.

A third question concerns what the single case of Russia tells us about 21st century capitalism more generally. In an Epilogue, Budraitskis and Matveev draw attention to Donald Trump’s reelection to the US presidency in 2024, his “clear affinity with Putin” and the similarity of the two governments’ ideological content and political style.

They discuss the extent to which the Putin regime might be defined as fascist. An argument “that the regime’s fascistisation is underway” can be based on “its effort to ideologise and reeducate Russian society in the spirit of militarism and imperialist nationalism”, they write.

But “analogies with fascism must not be applied singularly to portray Putin’s Russia as an anomaly but rather must seek to understand its place within a global trend.” To start with, the invasion of Ukraine has “increased antidemocratic and nationalist sentiment” across the EU, and contributed to the electoral success of far-right parties elsewhere (p170).

This should be the starting point for a great deal of collective thinking. For one thing, this advance of the right takes place against the background of extraordinary changes in world capitalism — the rapid rise of Chinese manufacturing power, the emergence of vastly powerful and infinitely rich US-based corporations, including those controlling new technologies, and all the changes in the character of labour that result.

Moreover, the advance of the right must be taken together with the constant explosions of progressive social protest — not in the forms we were inspired by in the late 20th century, and often only loosely connected to the organised labour movement — especially, but not only, in Global South countries.13

Can Russia’s new imperialism thrive in this world? What does it tell us about how elites elsewhere will react?

A last question that Russia’s New Imperialism brought to my mind concerns the fate of socialist thought in the 21st century. This book makes a real contribution. The authors start with the particular case, Russia, and proceed to examine the economic, political and social changes, in Russia itself and internationally, that conditioned the rise of Putinist authoritarianism.

They dissect the decisions to intervene in Ukraine, in 2014 and 2022, show how these cut across the material interests of Russian capital, and argue painstakingly that the elite’s ideology, not as a set of ideas but as a social force, is the driver here. From here they reflect on broader issues about contemporary imperialism generally.

This strikes a contrast with a great deal of “Marxist” writing on the war, not only by hardened post-Stalinists who deny that Russia is imperialist, but from others, who acknowledge that it is, but find ways to reinforce the illusion that “NATO expansion” caused the war, not the Russian elite.

For example, Alex Callinicos in a recent article starts from a general proposition — that a “developing global process of confrontation among the main imperialist powers” is underway — and, where the particular case of Russia’s war on Ukraine does not fit his preconceptions, distorts or omits realities.14

The danger is that Marxism becomes a way of moulding analysis to justify political dogma, instead of developing ideas that can inform struggles to defeat and supersede capital. Perhaps it will turn out that Budraitskis and Matveev’s most important contribution is that they eschew dogmatism, and so help point the way to developing Marx’s approach to capital, and the forces that oppose it, in the 21st century.

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‘People, not generals, win wars’: Independent student organising in Ukraine

By Dzvinka, Aistra & Florence Oppen
Published
Priama Diia

Priama Diia, meaning “Direct Action,” is an independent student union in Ukraine and a unique, vital example of grassroots working-class resistance. Refounded in February 2023 amid Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine, the union has consciously built a horizontal, anti-bureaucratic structure to fight what it sees as the “yellow” state-affiliated unions that dominate universities. Operating in the shadow of war, martial law and a government it criticises for neoliberal policies and authoritarian tendencies, Priama Diia argues that the fight for free, quality public education is inseparable from the struggle against Russian imperialism and the Ukrainian state’s pro-business agenda.

Their work is a powerful example of how to organise for social and economic justice in an extreme context — and the union is actively seeking international solidarity. To learn more about their grassroots model, Florence Oppen spoke with Priama Diia activists Dzvinka and Aistra (names changed), who explained how they function and organise on the ground.

You have described yourselves as fighting on a “double front” — against Russian imperialism and against the Ukrainian government’s neoliberal policies. Can you explain how the war has both enabled the government to push through policies such as university “optimisation” and cuts to social spending, while also creating a new space for organising and demanding a different future?

Dzvinka: The Ukrainian government has increasingly treated education, healthcare, housing, and other social expenses as costs to be reduced rather than public goods to be defended. Centralisation (mainly via mergers) and commercialisation (mainly through attacks on universal coverage in favour of user pays) were on the government’s agenda long before the war started. The Russian invasion acted as an accelerator; students, teachers and staff are expected to accept ever worse conditions and higher insecurity under patriotic motifs, while oligarchs receive further tax cuts.

In our view, however, collective self-defence realities reveal how vital education and democratic self-government are for people to protect themselves. We document problems, put collective pressure on authorities, volunteer to help our fighting comrades materially, and keep our eyes on the goal of universal high-quality public education and dignified and participatory conditions for students and staff.

Aistra: The war has revealed a series of paradoxes to Ukrainian society. The first of these is that people have come to feel the need for large-scale structures such as the army — even anarchists have joined the army, because at present it is the only possible form of direct resistance against such a powerful empire as Russia. Meanwhile, civilians, faced with a humanitarian crisis, have come to realise the need for consistent social policies. At the same time, the masses have come to understand their own strength, since economic and military activities rely precisely on them. It is not generals and leaders who win, but the people themselves, upon whose shoulders all these challenges have fallen.

The second paradox is that Ukrainian society must unite to become stronger, but the government often does not facilitate this by making decisions that favour the minority. These two factors have led people to increasingly unite around common demands and actions, either opposing or supporting large institutions. This inevitably means an escalation of these contradictions in the future, but right now we find ourselves in a precarious position, balancing between an external aggressor and internal problems. The task of our union and progressive forces is to turn this situation to the majority’s advantage.

In a war that has destroyed so much, you argue that free, accessible education is vital for survival and post-war reconstruction. What is the concrete vision you are fighting for? What are your immediate campaigns? Can you tell us about your efforts to force universities to carry out essential repairs in dormitories?

D: Let me reiterate some of our long-term goals. First, universities must be free, accessible and ecologically sustainable — education is the foundation of survival in the modern world, let alone any reconstruction and progress. Second, students, teachers and staff must all be allowed and encouraged to participate in democratic self-governance — anything about our material conditions must be decided upon from the bottom-up with our involvement. Third, scholarships must match the minimum wage, since our education is active full-time intellectual labour.

For our immediate campaign efforts, we begin by speaking with students who live in dormitories and documenting their problems and stories through photos and videos. We turn individual complaints into collective demands, identify which institution is responsible, and request concrete explanations and timetables for fixing the issues. If the administration keeps delaying the work or treating our demands like a favour for them to grant or reject, rather than a student right that is their job to administer, we escalate through demonstrations involving the press and viral social media publicity. Winning a repair is not by itself a radical transformation of the university, but it creates relationships, practical experience in collective action and a foundation for grassroots belief that we can achieve more together.

A: It may not be obvious, but sometimes a radical campaign can start with the most basic things. We simply drew attention to the fact that many Ukrainian universities lack a cafeteria and access to free drinking water. They used to exist, but they were removed or privatised in the name of “efficiency.” As a result, students have to make do and buy bottled water at a higher price. To speak out against this is to challenge the status quo by appealing to absolutely basic needs — needs that even our opponents usually understand.

Right now in Lviv, such simple considerations have led to plans to take over an old, unused university building and, together with the students, set up a cafeteria on their own — without the government or private capital. In my view, this is a truly revolutionary practice capable of serving as a bridge between a basic social demand and the university’s broader revolutionary path. Moreover, it would mean genuine student control over this process.

Another telling example is how, last year, we secured a major renovation of the dormitories, where conditions had been simply appalling. The administration did not respond to statements and appeals, but we helped students organise and form unions — and, thanks to two major protests, they achieved their goal. The struggle at this educational institution is still ongoing, and we remain actively involved. Of course, these are just a few examples, but in my view, they say a lot.

In July 2025, you joined mass anti-corruption protests that became known as the “cardboard revolution,” which forced the government to back down. You said this showed mass action is no longer “taboo”. How has this moment changed the political landscape for organising in Ukraine? Do you see it as a turning point for social movements or was it a unique moment that may not be repeated?

A: At the start of the war, we were practically the only group organising people for protests. We wrote educational materials explaining that this was legal and highlighted our successes, but we still faced scepticism. After the “cardboard protests,” protesting became the norm. It was a small “May ’68,” after which there was no turning back. The government got scared after that and has been trying to put a spoke in the wheel of mass movements, but in doing so, it faces even greater resistance. My prediction is positive in this regard.

D: Cardboard protests became a blueprint for simple and inexpensive political demonstrations all over the country, leading to high youth participation. However, they were organised and promoted by media personalities with a different agenda, and online communities dedicated to them are filled with right-wing libertarians and nationalists, even overt old-school boneheads, that are hostile to any declarations or symbols of social justice movements. In one case, the libertarians called the police on Priama Diia, trying to force us out.

Corporate social platforms also seem to have lowered the reach of cardboard protests that leftists organise, for example, against neoliberal reforms of public transit, with rising prices costing a lion’s share of student scholarship. Individual accounts trying to invite participation in relevant discussions about public transit repeatedly got shadow-banned or limited on Facebook and Instagram, though, curiously, not on TikTok.

Regarding the mainstream, neoliberal-led cardboard protests, most of us support NABU (National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine) and SAPO (Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office),1 because anti-corruption investigations help money allocated to social programs reach intended recipients. But we are split when it comes to supporting specific political figures, such as [First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo] Fedorov, given their technocratic, marketing-driven, anti-information security positions and their good terms with oligarchs such as Elon Musk (which would be impossible without a certain anti-social mindset). 

In general, we realise that while we can and should critically join the existing political movements when our demands at least partially match, we have to keep building our own mobilisation and organisation potential, as well as channels independent from corporate social media.

The government is introducing mandatory military training for university students. Priama Diia wants to “scrutinise and democratise oversight” over this process. What does that mean in practice? What are your main concerns about this training? How are you organising around it?

D: In anything compulsory, students must have a role in deciding how it should work and monitoring how it is actually done. This includes what is being taught, who selects people teaching it, and what institutions are responsible for fixing issues we bring up. Neither university administrators nor military institutions should dictate what we learn in university.

Students must not be seen as a generic reserve of humanpower units. Disabled students, working students and students already serving must be protected against discrimination and not be punished for raising concerns. Military preparation must not impose right-wing indoctrination or normalise authoritarian relations.

We will be collecting accounts from students, comparing how different universities implement the policy, and helping students understand their rights. We will consult veterans, enough of whom are among us now or were our members before graduating and remain on friendly terms. Resistance to imperialism must be based on empathy, participation and accountability.

You describe the official union structures in Ukrainian universities as “yellow unions” — organisations that formally represent students but are closely tied to university administrations. Many of these structures have roots in the Soviet-era system, where unions were integrated into state and workplace administrations rather than function as independent organisations. How do you counter this inherited model and convince students that independent, democratic self-organisation is possible and worth the risk — especially when the “yellow union” is presented as the normal or default form of student representation?

А: Yellow unions often have thousands of members; some students do not even know they are members. We recently handled a case where they tried to unlawfully expel a student. It turned out he was a member of such an organisation but the union tried to justify his expulsion and sided with the university! We were able to win that case thanks to a loophole in the law, since he was also a member of our union — though in our case by his own choice. Stories like this alone show others that such organisations are anti-social and cannot protect students’ rights in any way. But we can.

The problem is that there are very few unions like ours, so people are disillusioned with the labour movement as a whole, since their experience with unions is limited to this “yellow” model. The only way for us to combat this is through direct action.

D: An independent trade union relies on active participation of the majority of members. We implement protections against the possible usurpation of power by union leaders: our finances are transparent before the assembly, our positions are formulated collectively, and our local groups decide and act autonomously, using coordination chats only for coordination. Participation is voluntary, free of the coercion that is usual for yellow unions; when possible, we stand in solidarity with any student experiencing bad living conditions or inadequate administration responses, regardless of whether they are a dues-paying member.

Of course, we encourage them to join and suggest activities they can take part in to move us closer to our common goal. But we do not ask students to believe in abstract ideals; we show them that we are capable of changing our material conditions when we act together. Also, we do not hide the risks: hostility from the administrators or even the government is to be expected. However, whenever students choose to remain atomised or hope for protection from the yellow unions, they also risk remaining individually vulnerable to arbitrary decisions by the campus administration and government ministers. We encourage students, and we encourage each other, to actively participate in collective, democratic self-defence of their own rights.

Your union’s horizontal, anti-representative structure is central to your politics. You have coordinators for specific roles and a “Coordination Headquarters”. How do you choose them? How do you practically balance this commitment to non-hierarchical, ultra-democratic decision-making with the need for efficiency, especially as the union has grown to a hundred members?

D: We do not have central coordinators, but coordinators for working groups. They are elected at the Annual Assembly through a procedure similar to a two-winner Borda count [a ranked-choice voting system by order of preference designed to elect candidates with the broadest overall support among voters]. They are mainly responsible for reporting to the membership on what work is being led, documenting repeated procedures, and passing that knowledge to coordinators elected in their place the next year. It is a position of responsibility, not of power.

The roles are not set in stone; the assembly decides whether to give mandates, and to whom, based on annual proposals for the work to be done and how to do it. The person voicing the proposal is expected to develop a practical plan and help onboard volunteers who want to join their working group. Also, headquarters do not approve major expenditures and strategic decisions (that is, which initiatives to partner with and whether to do so); the entire membership votes on them. Headquarters exists to channel focused requests between working groups without overwhelming a hundred people with the requirement to participate in every chat and meeting, thereby reducing busywork.

A: An important principle of our work is the autonomy of local chapters and working groups. Priama Diia is often referred to as a labour union, but in my view, we should be talking about something more: depending on the type of work, we combine the characteristics of a federation of labour unions with those of a unified organisation with a single program. We encourage the formation of activist groups centred around universities — these are our primary units of action. And while we are united by shared principles and approaches, local strategies may vary — and the autonomy of each local chapter is extremely important to us. 

At the same time, we organise along regional lines, since some universities have switched to remote learning due to the war; meeting in person with people who live nearby can be much easier than with students from one’s own university. However, for national campaigns and in the fight against systemic attacks on the social and educational sectors, we present a united front, as we share a common ideology forged in the class struggle. This is also how we participate in mass protests.

Your union encompasses a broad political spectrum, from apolitical students to anarchists and Marxists. How do you maintain unity and a shared vision across these differences? How does this diversity shape your campaigns — for example, do you consciously choose “social” issues (such as dormitory conditions) that everyone can rally around, rather than more overtly political ones?

D: Unlike mainstream politicians who make their positions fuzzy and implicit to reach the widest but amorphous base (as first-past-the-post elections encourage), we formulate our values and demands openly and clearly, so that people know what they are joining and are motivated by it. Our program consists of suggestions from members that we have collectively discussed, developed and voted on during the yearly assembly.

Student fight for student rights is political, so I would say if someone participates in the union, they already are not apolitical. We focus on policy proposals, not affiliation labels, while we clearly stand against authoritarianism and imperialism. As our Manifesto puts it “knowledge is an effective tool of emancipatory struggle, our response to authoritarianism and imperialism.” It also situates student organising within a broader class struggle: “Students have always been, are, and will be part of something larger — the workers’ movement.”

Practical disagreements between people with different but closely linked explicitly progressive political affiliations are far less pronounced in activist groups than in meme channels, YouTube and Reddit threads, or wide-umbrella non-governmental organisations. One interesting approach we tried, to help people understand each other’s positions better during the assembly, was asking them to come up with arguments for somebody else’s proposal, as part of randomly assigned groups.

A: I would add that in a situation where progressive forces are in the minority, where we face attacks from the far right, Russian aggression and the government’s neoliberal policies, the only strategy for survival is unity and solidarity. Of course, in our union we have political discussions, some of which are deeply theoretical in nature. For us, theory complements practice — and vice versa. However, in the past four years, I cannot remember a single instance where someone’s political stance on a specific issue hindered our work. When we are working to support and organise students, we are all working toward a common goal.

Union members have been physically attacked by far-right groups, and you have faced surveillance from the Security Service (SBU) and threats of accusations of “treason”. How does this climate of repression shape your activism? What specific tactics and challenges do you face in organising protests and building a mass movement when any demand for change can be framed as destabilising national unity?

A: We are aware that we are under threat and speak openly about this with new members of our organisation. But it is important to provide some context: first, attitudes toward law enforcement agencies in Ukraine are quite negative, and it is no secret to most people that the police and the SBU are corrupt and exert pressure on independent activists and mass movements. We inherited this from the Soviet Union, when political persecution was part of the system.

Second, we are not the only ones facing state pressure. Our case is certainly unique, but because environmental, journalistic, and LGBTQ+ movements also face similar challenges, we receive their support by extension. Recently, independent human rights organisations have been paying special attention to repression in Ukraine, and we ourselves are actively involved in investigating the situation, countering it and covering it in the media. We have adopted a strategy of maximising unity among pro-democracy movements — and so far, it is working.

One recent case illustrates this pressure particularly clearly. Maksym Shumakov, a Marxist activist, former organiser with Priama Diia in Lviv, and member of the editorial team of the Ukrainian left-wing journal Commons, is currently facing prosecution under Ukraine’s law banning Communist and Nazi symbols. The case is based on social media posts from 2021–23 that included Marxist educational materials. Shumakov and his lawyer argue these materials fall under the law’s exemptions for educational and academic purposes. Shumakov sees the prosecution as politically motivated and connected to his years of student and left-wing activism. His case has prompted a campaign for the charges to be dropped and international solidarity from left-wing organisations.

However, this is not to say it has had no effect on us. It is very stressful. The security services came to see me personally to “talk.” I managed to get rid of them, but it takes a mental toll, and I am not the only one who has gone through this. But what I do fills me with energy and confidence. And, of course, my comrades support me.

D: In agitation, we prioritise policy proposals, clear demands and mutual aid over symbols and affiliation statements. Outside the established political subcultures, moderate and radical alike, people are not stupid; they realise they have been fed bogeyman images by propaganda machines once they meet actual demonstrators, talk to us, discover shared issues and backgrounds. 

Regarding a mass movement, the challenge I sadly see is people’s impulses being successfully channelled by media influencers into greatest-common-divisor protests for somebody else, for institutions and personalities, rather than for yourself, for improving your own economic and political position. That is a sprint not a marathon, and it burns people out very quickly. One other challenge without a clear answer is how to evolve from periodic protests and online reporting, which would more correctly be seen as mobilising tactics, into continuous organised effort with a realistic security culture — a powerful collective self-defence mechanism rooted in daily life at the university and workplace.

You draw inspiration from the idea of “students as workers”. How does this translate into your organising? What is your relationship with the wider Ukrainian and international labour movement? How do you build solidarity? What can international unions learn from your experience?

D: We do not just consume education as a service; we perform intellectual and creative labour through study, practice and research. Also, many of us have to work outside the university to pay for our education. Students share many issues with workers: housing, accessibility, payment (for internships), defence against harassment.

We try to integrate with independent trade unions around shared demands over public services and social rights. We participate in each other’s educational events, support each other’s media campaigns and exchange experience. We hope that participating in a student trade union helps activists enter new workplaces prepared with knowledge of the benefits of democratic control and the power of solidarity. Also, we expect student campaigns to become stronger once we figure out how to build bridges with workers who remain in the university after graduation — the teachers and staff.

From our experience, international labour unions can learn that students are not a separate body, a temporary population outside the working class, but also workers (future and current), and active participants in the production of knowledge and its practical application in our society.

A: When the government infringes on the interests of working people, it affects both workers and students alike. For example, when the Kyiv city council raised public transportation fares, students and nurses were hit the hardest, as the new prices proved to be a hardship for them. This naturally creates an opportunity for solidarity, and we stood together at the protests.

People who are no longer students and have left our union have also founded a new organisation called Workers’ Perspectives. They decided to pursue blue-collar careers together and study the working class from the bottom up, with the goal of building a new movement based on their experience as student activists. Of course, we would like to expand our cooperation with the working class; however, it is characteristic of Ukraine that independent workers’ organisations are in an even more dire situation than student organisations. The rise of our labour movement is still ahead of us — I truly hope that we will play a part in bringing it about.

Your union is a member of the International Labour Network of Solidarity and Struggles. What are the most effective ways for international supporters to show solidarity with your work beyond simple fundraising? What kind of support — material, political, or organisational — is most helpful to you right now?

A: Resistance against empires is usually successful when the people fighting are supported by mass movements around the world. The US defeat in Vietnam, France’s defeat in Algeria, and the Palestinian Intifada unfolding right now are examples of this. We need wider publicity of the Ukrainian situation and our struggle, first and foremost among progressive circles. We need supporters to participate in demonstrations in support of the Ukrainian resistance and condemning Russian and US imperialism, as well as those supporting other self-determination struggles in Palestine, Iran and elsewhere.

At the same time, we must spread the word about what is happening to our comrades in Ukraine — we know for certain that the Ukrainian government fears a negative perception of itself abroad, so public demonstrations outside the embassy can significantly influence its actions. This can translate into social victories here in Ukraine.

D: It is important not to understate the value of fundraising: with the cost of living in Ukraine skyrocketing, student scholarships remaining tiny and covering very few people, salaries stagnating, and many students migrating abroad, it is difficult to rely on dues and still cover legal assistance for our members under pressure from the university administration and the government, achieve moderately accessible conditions for the assembly, print and spread materials, maintain independent online presence, travel for intercity and international solidarity etc.

But money alone cannot build a union. So, please translate our materials (do not leave the burden on those of us who are more integrated with the European Union and speak languages of former empires — try also learning ours as we do yours!). Share our statements. Help us remain visible as organisers and self-defenders — in need of returning at least some resources that the centres keep extracting from the periphery — not as victims or objects of top-down reforms and the war.

When we protest, we organise solidarity demonstrations and communicate them through the media. The state puts considerable resources into ensuring that international audiences see its humane façade. Take, for example, the protests around Fedorov, a prominent government figure who became closely associated with its digitalisation and technology-driven modernisation agenda. When he was removed as defence minister in July 2026, a new wave of the cardboard protests demanded he be returned to the position. We support the democratic initiative and willingness of the public to criticise officials and make demands, but while some of our members critically participated in the mass movement with this motivation, in general we remember the lessons of Maidan and remind people that we must not let opportunistic politicians reap the fruits of our effort and make careers on the shoulders of the masses. 

Whatever one thinks of Fedorov, mobilisations centred on who occupies a government post do not in themselves require significant material concessions from the state or challenge its broader neoliberal economic agenda. By contrast, grassroots student initiatives making direct economic demands — for increased scholarships, affordable public transportation, better dormitory conditions or greater public investment in education — are different: meeting these demands requires resources and changes in policy. Such campaigns can only achieve comparable visibility and protect themselves against repression if they receive grassroots, global and independent support.

A: I would like to add that the Ukrainian revolutionary movement is still in a fairly early stage. We also need advice on how to build mass movements. Since the Ukrainian leftist tradition was cut short during the Soviet era, we are basically starting from scratch. Of course, we are constantly learning and improving based on our own experience, but it is always valuable to draw on the experience of other comrades. For example, we are actively studying the experiences of Polish and French student organisations, as we are in contact with them through the International Labour Network of Solidarity and Struggles. And we are open to new knowledge — simply sharing experiences can be helpful to us.

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    NABU (National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine) and SAPO (Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office) are Ukraine’s principal institutions for investigating and prosecuting high-level corruption. In July 2025, parliament passed legislation subordinating the agencies more closely to the prosecutor general, prompting large demonstrations in Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa and other cities. Following the protests, parliament restored their independence on July 31.

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