These massive reactions to Russian coercion were purely negative in nature — rejections of what Russia was doing, rather than support for the West or for Ukrainian ethnonationalism. However, it was the “Western” camp that was able to seize the opportunity of these negative shocks to advance the positive substance of its agenda. This happened because of the profound class and political asymmetries between the “Western” and “Eastern” camps. The political capitalists of the “Eastern” camp did not develop their own civil society and Soviet Ukrainians remained too atomised to build their organic representation from below. Their plebeian “anti-maidans” were never a match for the maidan protests they were responding to. If Volodymyr Zelensky’s landslide victory over Petro Poroshenko in 2019 — after the incumbent ran on an aggressive nationalist programme — offered a last hope, this was dashed by the 2022 invasion.
As a result of the failure to develop and defend a pluralist nation-building project that would “organically” grow from the Soviet Ukraine, a large group of Ukrainians is now becoming the object of assimilation policies, squeezed between the “Western” nation-building projects of Ukrainian bourgeois civil society and Putin’s nostrum of “one and the same people”. In his notorious 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, Putin articulated the Ukrainian-Russian distinction as a difference of regional-cultural variety within the same “people” as a political unit. However, there is in fact less of a cultural difference between the population of the urbanised and mostly Russian-speaking south-eastern Ukraine and the Russians, and more of a political difference.
The urban culture of the late Soviet period, with its largely homogeneous cuisine throughout the USSR, typical references and jokes from literature and cinema, rituals and holidays, is far more relevant to them than the pre-modern ethnic traditions of Ukrainian and Russian villages. If some of the previously Russian-speaking Ukrainians switched to Ukrainian as a reaction to the invasion, it was clearly a political choice for them, not determined by their ethnic identity. The people feel more connected to the national imagined community of Ukraine, and less to Putin’s, even if they have a different vision of the nation than the speakers of the “Western” camp. In 2016, only 26% of Ukrainians agreed with the statement that Ukrainians and Russians are “one and the same people”, although 51% agreed that Ukrainians and Russians are different but “brotherly people”.1 Both figures are likely to have fallen dramatically after 2022.
For the “Western” camp, the weak cultural difference of some Ukrainians from Russians has always been a political threat. It was seen not only as legitimising Russian expansionism, but also as a threat to their elitist ersatz-modernisation project. Quite early after the Russian missiles hit Ukrainian soil and Russian troops crossed the border, the national-liberal intellectuals understood that this was not only a threat, but also an opportunity for “knife solutions” — a radical, uncompromising transformation of the whole country in their image and likeness on a scale that was impossible before: the war helps to silence the voices of discontent.2 The substance of “decolonisation” was not the building of a stronger sovereign state with a robust public sector — one that would contradict transnational capital, their crucial partner.
Rather, it was the eradication of anything related to Russia or the Soviet Union from the Ukrainian public sphere, including the removal of Russian-language books from libraries, the ban on teaching Russian in schools, even in predominantly Russian-speaking cities like Odessa, and even a ridiculously obscurantist attempt (which passed the first reading in the Ukrainian parliament) to ban the citation of Russian and Russian-language sources in science and education. Add to this the banning of political parties, including some of Ukraine’s oldest, such as the Socialist and Communist parties, which have represented the “Eastern” camp for decades, and further repression of popular opposition media and bloggers stigmatised as “pro-Russian”, even when they expressed no sympathy for the invasion. Ironically, the result is similar to the situation of Ukrainians in the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire: not so much discriminated against as individuals, but prohibited from expressing a distinct collective identity that would be seen as treasonous and repressed.
In Ukraine, we can’t be Soviet anymore. In Russia, it does not look like we can be Ukrainians. Soviet Ukrainians were the product of a social revolution; its degradation destroyed them as a political community. First, the late Soviet and post-Soviet leadership became seen as nothing more than a corrupt, self-serving elite. The atomised masses responded with frequent but poorly organised and amorphous protests that, when successful, only reproduced and intensified the underlying crisis. Unlike social revolutions, the maidans did not bring radical transformations in favour of the popular classes; they typically only increased social inequality. The maidan revolutions did not even build a stronger state but only destabilised the existing one, allowing domestic and transnational elite rivals to seize the opportunity to advance their interests and agendas. The post-Soviet elite responded only with more coercion, which eventually escalated into war (see how it worked out with the successful repression of the 2020 uprising in Belarus). This set the stage for the flourishing not of developmental national ideologies but of regressive neo-tribalist identities. There was no strong force from below to counteract this dynamic. The processes of the escalating crisis of hegemony are universal, but their manifestations in the post-Soviet space are of a rather unique magnitude.
“In Ukraine, we can’t be Soviet anymore. In Russia, it does not look like we can be Ukrainians.”
The decomposition of a political community is the ultimate endpoint of these crisis trends. Divided by frontlines and borders, some volunteering, some being mobilised by force, some collaborating, some fleeing abroad, some trying to maintain a normal life and work in their hometowns, some simply trying to survive, taking different positions on the war (who even cares what “Ukrainian voices” who speak from Donetsk or Sevastopol think?), lacking our political and public representatives, with limited space for expression, with broken ties and suppressed discussions — is there even a common name, a claimed identity for all of us now? It is easy to pretend that we have never even existed, at most a dead-end branch from the main line of Ukrainian nation-building. But one can be sure that without a new cycle of modernising development in Ukraine, Soviet Ukrainians will not be fully assimilated. The political communication required to define our common identity, interests and collective actions in relation to Ukraine, and the states where we will end up, may start again.
The revolutionary project initiated by the Bolsheviks a century ago is no longer embedded in the national communities where it once took root. For the contemporary Left, this should mean not a break with the project of progress, rationality and universal emancipation, but rather the search for a political (and perhaps no longer national) community in which our efforts could be more effectively applied. Any new social revolution would learn from the Soviet one as much as the Bolsheviks learned from the French Revolution of 1789 — understanding its limits and acknowledging its (sometimes unjustifiable) mistakes, but also registering and building on its achievements.
Could Ukraine again be a core part of a social-revolutionary movement? The extent of the ethnonationalist and anti-communist reformatting of the country’s politics, society and ideology may leave no hope for this in the foreseeable future. But consider how dramatically the memory of the Second World War has changed over time. Who could have imagined in 1945, after the Nazi war of extermination and enslavement on the Eastern Front, which murdered between one-sixth and one-quarter of the entire civilian population of Ukraine, that the descendants of the survivors would fight using German tanks against Russians on the very same battlefields where they had fought in the Red Army against German tanks, and would do so while demolishing the remaining monuments to their heroic ancestors? It is unlikely to be the final ironic twist of Ukrainian history.
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