Towards the abyss: An interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko
D. L. Jacobs
Platypus Review 169 | September 2024
On December 29, 2023, Platypus Affiliated Society member D. L. Jacobs interviewed Volodymyr Ishchenko, a researcher at the Freie UniversitÀt in Berlin and the author of Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War (2024).[1] An edited transcript follows.
D. L. Jacobs: How did you get involved in the Left?
Volodymyr Ishchenko: The first thing was becoming political. I was politicized in high school. I described this experience in the preface of Towards the Abyss. I was born in 1982, and was socialized in a Soviet, then post-Soviet technical intelligentsia family with their typical reading circles. In particular, I was interested in the Soviet science fiction that raised perspectives about the communist future and asked very serious ethical and social questions. During the collapse of the Soviet Union, I felt the drastic divergence between my prospective life chances, possible career and the future I expected.
I entered the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, because I wanted to study the things that were of interest to me, in particular a possibility of a revolution. This was a relatively young university established in 1992. The idea was to create a kind of Western liberal arts institution, in particular with an up-to-date education in contemporary social sciences and humanities. The Soviet social sciences had been perceived as dominated by dogmatism and provincialism. At the same time, the Kyiv-Mohyla was a peculiar higher-education institution in Ukraine that was created to produce a nationally conscious elite and initially received funds from the Ukrainian nationalist diaspora, particularly from Northern America. As a result, the university had a politicized milieu with a national-liberal orientation, standing out from typical post-Soviet, depoliticized students.
DLJ: Was this around the time the ânew Leftâ was emerging in Ukraine?
VI: Even before that. The first wave of the new left appeared during perestroika,[2] typically outside of the Communist Party, but they marginalized in the 1990s. I participated in the second wave of the new Left, which appeared mostly in response to the disappointment with the Orange Revolution in 2004, the second revolution in Ukraine.[3] As a reminder: the Orange Revolution (2004) was against an attempt to steal the elections by Viktor Yanukovych who was competing with Viktor Yushchenko. Yushchenko was the pro-Western and pro-nationalist candidate, and he won the election in 2004. Just two years after the Orange Revolution, Yushchenko invited Yanukovych to lead the cabinet to become the Prime Minister. And five years after the Orange Revolution, in 2010, Yanukovych fairly wins the presidential election.
Many people asked the question, what has actually changed after the revolution? The main parties of the pro-Western bloc were seriously discussing creating a âbig coalitionâ with the Party of Regions,[4] the party which was supporting Viktor Yanukovych.
Clearly, the ruling class in the country did not change. The institutions did not change. What happened? One of the responses was the radicalization of nationalists who started to believe that, if nothing changed after a peaceful revolution, the next revolution should be violent. Perhaps with spilling blood, Ukraine would have some real change and could get rid of what the nationalists perceived as the âinternal occupationâ regime in Ukraine. Basically, they didnât believe that post-Soviet Ukraine was properly Ukrainian. They thought, rather, that everything in the country was still being controlled by a post-Communist elite that impeded building the Ukrainian nation defined through anti-Russian and anti-Communist identity â a very specific ethno-nationalist project that started to be realized since 2014 and even more so since 2022.
Another response was from the West via expansion of democracy-promotion programs and pouring money into pro-Western NGO sector. And finally, a different, and far less consequential response came about from the people who didnât see much of a substantial difference between the two major political camps in Ukraine, and thus believed that Ukraine needed a different force, one that would appeal to the majority of the population across the regional and ethno-linguistic divides, and to appeal to the issues that were uniting the country, not dividing the country. That sounded great, but it didnât work. So the new Left remained marginal. There were some positive dynamics happening before the Euromaidan Revolution (2013â14). The biggest successes were in the student movement. There was a significant anarchist, Left-libertarian-leaning student union, which was capable of leading a couple large campaigns.
DLJ: This was a strike in 2009?
VI: Yes, and in 2010. There were a couple of years of some substantial student mobilizations. But the problem was that the leadership was shallow, and the Left-wing politicization of the student mobilization proved to be weak. Thatâs what weâve seen in the Euromaidan Revolution, when the students were not even capable of articulating their specific student grievances and just went after the shallow oppositional slogans. The only thing that united the people during the Euromaidan was getting rid of Yanukovych. Thatâs a peculiar thing about contemporary revolutions: they are united by shallow, vague common denominators, and do not grow from the material interests of the social groups.
DLJ: What was the new Left in Ukraine? Youâve written about the new Left as reacting to what was seen as an old, post-Soviet Left â like with the Communist Party of Ukraine that you have a whole chapter on[5] â and the sense that we needed to break from that. In the post-Soviet situation, there were migrant workers in West Ukraine who wanted to be integrated more into Europe, but then there was also the South-East Ukrainian situation. You have written about how the âpolitical capitalistsâ in the Donbas region were able to stabilize the effects of post-Soviet Union deindustrialization. Can you talk about how that situation framed the political question at times as regional cleavages, or affected how the Left thought of itself in Ukraine?
VI: That requires discussing the regional cleavage in Ukraine. Some believe that this is an ethnic conflict between Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers. They see something like symmetrical camps on both sides of this divide. However, another side of the discussion believed that this whole regional cleavage was fake, simply manipulation by elite factions who were instrumentalizing those questions without reflecting social reality. Those critics would say that there are actually no regions in Ukraine with the exception of Galicia and, perhaps, Donbass, but all the other regions of Ukraine in between have weak regional cultures, or any history behind those regions.
DLJ: 22 Ukraines?[6]
VI: Thatâs a phrase used. This leaves a question, why are those 22 Ukraines on the ground translated into just two political camps? They donât have an answer to that. And typically, this argument about 22 Ukraines collapses into the argument about just one Ukraine that is pro-Western, pro-nationalist Ukraine, overcoming the legacies of Russian domination. That view then sees the Eastern part of Ukraine, or basically all the political representatives of those regions, as a post-colonial legacy, which didnât have any roots in the Ukrainian reality. This turns into a simplistic, nation-building narrative. Thatâs not an explanation but a construction of reality. And it turns dangerously close to the argument about âinternal occupationâ promoted by the far Right before 2014.
My argument is that there was a real social conflict behind that political cleavage. This was an asymmetrical class conflict. Behind the supposedly pro-Western and supposedly pro-Russian camps stood different class coalitions that were asymmetrical in their political capacity. Thatâs why the pro-Western camp is dominating right now: it was the camp of professional middle classes allied with transnational capital joined by opportunistic groups of elites.
On the other side, there were political capitalists â theyâre usually called âoligarchsâ in the discussion of post-Soviet politics. Political capitalism is a more precise term for the fraction of the capitalist class whose main competitive advantage are the selective state benefits, which makes them different from the other fractions of the capitalist class who rely on technological innovation or the super-exploitation of the labor force. The working-class interests in this class conflict didnât have autonomous articulation and representation. The workers at the large post-Soviet factories were working primarily for the former Soviet markets. Workers in heavy industry were typically following the so-called pro-Russian camp, but usually only as passive voters, not activists.
The pro-Western camp had much more of civil society aligned with it, not just TV pundits, but most intellectuals, independent media, even universities such as Kyiv-Mohyla. Many were supported from the West, which funded the NGOs, the think tanks, advocacy organizations, and media that were creating the space for political discussion (in a âpro-Westernâ discursive framework) and civic mobilization. And they could offer some vision of pro-Western development for Ukraine, even if partially delusional and marginalizing for a large segment of Ukrainian population
The European integration of Ukraine is problematic because there was no real offer until recently. Even now, the integration of Ukraine into the European Union is uncertain. The discussion only started after the Russians invaded. At the same time, the path to EU and NATO integration was damaging to a significant part of the Ukrainian working class. The deep and comprehensive free-trade zone with the EU was damaging for Ukraineâs most advanced industries. There are quantitative studies that show that there is a significant correlation between the number of people who work in heavy industry and the intensity of violence during the Donbass War in 2014â15. But still, the promise of Europe was forward-looking, even if itâs just a carrot in front of a donkey.
The problem was that there was no project of development in the supposedly âpro-Russianâ camp, unlike the Western camp. In fact, the âpro-Russianâ camp stood for post-Soviet stagnation, which is another dimension of their political deficiency. They also didnât have the capacity for sustained civic mobilization and they couldnât counter with anything comparably Anti-Maidan against the stronger âpro-Westernâ mobilizations, even though these mobilizations did not reflect the moods of the majority. The Eastern camp could win electoral majorities, but they couldnât mobilize the people to defend them (which was needed in 2014, for example). On the other hand, even though the Western camp often did not have popular support for nationalist and neoliberal reforms, they could push forward their agenda and a better capacity to legitimize their particular class interests as national, in particular, in front of the Western publics. After 2022, weâve seen this phenomenon as âUkrainian voicesâ â a narrow group of people, mostly from the middle class, supposedly speaking on behalf of the whole nation.
This explanation of the political cleavage leads to an understanding of what was the issue with the ânew Leftâ and the âold Left.â The âold Leftâ here refers to the successor parties of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, primarily to the Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU).[7] In the 1990s, the KPU was the most popular party in post-Soviet Ukraine, together with other Communist-successor, Left-wing parties. They were capable of controlling the majorities in the parliament, to block some of the initiatives of the Right-wing governments. The KPU could claim over 100,000 card-holding members â they kept rigorous notes about that. Even on the eve of the Euromaidan, they won 13% of the national vote in 2012. After the Euromaidan, they were first to be banned. They couldnât participate in the elections since 2015 because of the decommunization laws. The symbols and the major elements of the ideologies were also banned. The Party declined to change and adapt, but it was also not capable of fighting for itself. They lost the most militant organizations, for example, in Donbass and Crimea because of the war and the annexation of Crimea by Russia (2014). More younger members, with less commitment to the Party, left the organization than the older members, who had joined during the Soviet Union. These older members had spent almost all of their lives in the Party and affiliated organizations â starting from school, from the Komsomol.[8]
There is also the ânew Leftâ that has come about. Basically, they merged with the pretty small, Left-liberal wing of pro-Western, middle-class civil society. They were interested in culturally progressive topics or some mildly redistributionist policies that EU integration could bring to Ukraine, e.g., more progressive taxation. But that milieu has not had strong interest in anti-capitalist topics and the question of social revolution. Basically, that old Left / new Left divide reproduced this class conflict standing behind the so-called regional cleavage in Ukraine.
DLJ: In your article, âLeft Divergence, Right Convergence,â you talk about how the Left appeared on both sides of the Euromaidan. In Platypus, we are interested in how the Left justifies itself through the history of the Left, e.g., through anti-imperialism or the right of self-determination. During the Euromaidan, some people reached for anarchism and others reached for Marxism-Leninism. Can you talk about how the different parts of the Left ideologically justified themselves during that period?
VI: The KPU was at first sympathetic to the Euromaidan. They said that people came to the Maidan Square because of real, social problems, but the oligarchic clans and the West instrumentalized the popular protest. That was the KPUâs rhetoric in the first weeks of Euromaidan. What changed was the activity of the far-Right groups in Euromaidan, who took more and more initiative in the protest. The trigger for the Communists was the dismantling of Leninâs monument in Kyiv by Euromaidan protesters. That was led by far-Right militants, and it became evident that the movement was starting to take a clearly anti-communist dimension. Even before that there were Russophobic slogans during the Euromaidan. The main greeting, âGlory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes,â which became mainstream in Ukraine, came from the far-Right subculture, which directly took it from the greetings of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.[9] This organization was close to the fascist family of movements and parties in the 1930s. This symbolism, which was pushed forward by a far-Right minority, was accepted by the majority, but was obviously repulsive to the communists. There were also violent attacks even on the Leftists who were trying to join the protests. When the government decided to pass a series of laws that significantly limited the protest activity â they were called âdictatorship laws,â although they were still pretty far from a dictatorship â this was a sign that the government was trying to repress the movement. The Communists voted for those laws with the ruling party. When Maidan won and overthrew Yanukovych, the Communists perceived it as fascist, anti-communist, pro-imperialist coup.
In the spring of 2014, the KPU harshly criticized the Euromaidan and the new government as a fascist junta. But they did not act against this government as the communists were supposed to act against a fascist junta. There was a huge gap between the words and the deeds of the Communist leadership. The KPU has had the same leader since 1993, Petro Symonenko. The leader has become integrated into the political elite, and behaved opportunistically. Symonenko was thinking primarily of keeping his position and his property. The reaction of some of the local organizations, especially in Donbass or in Crimea, were different. Many actively supported the Anti-Maidan protests. Some supported pro-Russian separatists and established the Donestsk and Lugansk Peopleâs Republics. But the KPU leadership expelled those organizations that acted against the Ukraine government. There was a crazy divergence between what the Communist leadership was claiming and what they were doing, because it was not leading to any serious strategy.
The organizations which were younger and involved some of the former communists, tried to build themselves as a radical alternative to the KPU, in the same political niche. This was the case of the Borotba (âStruggleâ) organization. During the Euromaidan, some of their activists even tried to come to the protesters to have labor-union agitations. They were beaten by the far-Right activists among the Euromaidan protesters. Borotba originally took a kind of non-campist position. Not supporting the Euromaidan but also not supporting the government. That was their difference with the KPU. Borotba condemned the KPU for voting for the âdictatorship laws.â Borotba also said that the country might get into civil war, because of the Euromaidan. When the Euromaidan won, Borotba started to support the Donbass separatist revolt. The organization in most of Ukraine stopped its public activity because some activists emigrated, or some went underground. Some personally joined the Donbass separatists. Some eventually joined the pro-Ukrainian Left.
Then there was the pro-Euromaidan part of the Left that was more anarchist and Left-liberal. There were not so many Marxists in that milieu, mainly of the post-Trotskyist type. This was an amorphous milieu of pretty small groups, informal networks than organizations. Why did they support the Euromaidan? Not many people among them supported it for some positive agenda, because the positive agenda of Euromaidan was vague. Like in many of the contemporary revolutions, it was a protest against the incumbent leader of the country, not for any clear positive agenda. Beyond that, you saw a huge variety and diversity of views about what a revolution is supposed to be. Thatâs a big difference compared with the revolutions of the past, which had more articulated programs behind them, or at least had organizations that could articulate that program and that would mobilize and organize the masses. The pro-Maidan new Left was trying to bring into the protest their interpretation that Europe is not just neoliberal, but also about human rights, gender equality, and progressive taxation. That was the initial articulation in the very first days of the protest when it was still peaceful.
With the radicalization of the protest, the far Right was becoming increasingly prominent. The pro-Maidan Left was radicalizing together with the protesters against the police violence and authoritarian tendencies, despite the growing visibility of the far Right. The other part of the Left which didnât support the Euromaidan, felt that the protest was becoming even more explicitly anti-communist and nationalist, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the country. That divergence of the Left was mostly because of the difference in the perception of the threats, depending on the camp in the Ukrainian politics they felt aligned to: the âWesternâ or the âEastern.â The following events demonstrated that the way Euromaidan events unfolded presented an existential threat to the former, the latter, and also to the respective Left.
DLJ: How did the phrases âanti-imperialismâ and âanti-fascismâ show up in the Euromaidan and since then? It seems like they were used by both sides. Would both sides say they were fighting fascism and imperialism? Is it Russian imperialism or is it NATO / Western imperialism?
VI: Empirically, the anti-imperialist and anti-fascist rhetorical frames were stronger on the anti-Maidan side. They were anti-imperialist because they believed that the Euromaidan was promoting imperialist, Western interests. They were anti-fascist because they were concerned with the threat from the far-Right that became stronger in Euromaidan. The pro-Euromaidan Left at that moment, when Russia annexed Crimea and were supporting the Donbass separatists, began to speak about âRussian imperialism,â although that analysis of imperialism remained weak and underdeveloped. Same for the use of âfascismâ in relation to contemporary Russia.
What exactly do we call imperialism? Is it simply another way to say that Russia is an aggressor, that Russia is attacking a smaller neighbor, or is there an actual conceptual depth in that notion of imperialism? At least for Marxism, imperialism is not simply the way to describe all the wrong that a bigger state conducts against a smaller state. Why and how is it connected to the capitalist dynamics and the interests of the ruling classes? That analysis has been missing on that part of the Left.
DLJ: You have an article in Jacobin from October 2022, where you say that people just jump on these terms, e.g., âself-determinationâ and âcivilizational choice.â[10] This goes back to the question of the Left here, and the absence of a program, which is that historically the theory of fascism and the theory of imperialism were about how to overcome the problem, whereas now they seem to be ways of justifying supporting one side or the other, or framing things in a certain way.
You wrote an article in The Guardian in February 2014 about the need to break from the Right.[11] How have your thoughts about the situation changed over the last decade? How has the analysis of the situation changed?
VI: During the first days of the Euromaidan, I had the feeling that everything was developing from bad to worse. The protests started immediately raising divisive issues. Then the government repressed the mobilization on November 30, 2013. I remember waking up to it â it was a Saturday. Nothing like this had happened in post-Soviet Ukraine before. Thatâs an important thing to recall because Ukraine is now the site of the biggest war in Europe since WWII, certainly the biggest war of the 21st century so far. Before 2014, Ukraine was a peaceful country. In countries, for example, like the U.S. or France, where significant violence typically happens during the mass protests, you have a history of riots, violent mobilizations, and brutal repression. Thatâs a part of the repertoire of popular protest and of the coercive apparatus. In Ukraine, there have been no events of significant mass violence since perhaps the 1950s, when the last remnants of the nationalist underground were finally repressed by the Soviet KGB. We had the peaceful revolutions in 1990 and 2004 without any major violence. From the contemporary situation, there were marginal events of violence in between that now would not be of concern, e.g., a 2001 protest I participated in, which was one of the anti-government protests against president Leonid Kuchma. That escalated into riots where a few hundred people were injured. But that was one event in a couple of decades. Many people felt the November 2013 camp was going to disappear by itself because it just didnât have any prospect, but then the government did this stupid thing and escalated it to become much bigger, radicalizing the protests. Laws limited the protest activity, and the far-Right responded with an escalation of street fights in the center of Kyiv. Firearms were used, and the first people died. Dozens of people were killed in the last days of Euromaidan. Then there was the annexation of Crimea, the Donbass war, and now the full-scale war.
This has been an unraveling radicalization spiral. In February 2014, there were already enough reasons to feel that something dangerous was happening. At the same time, there was a hope that it might stop if the people in the Euromaidan with the people in the anti-Euromaidan camp could be connected â specifically the pro-Maidan Left and the anti-Maidan Left, precisely because they were actively cooperating before the Euromaidan. They were part of the same broad milieu, going to the same rallies, and attending each otherâs birthday parties. At some moment, some of them started shooting at each other. I believed that the catastrophic escalation could be stopped. Later, I supported the Minsk Accords, because that was a real chance to find some solution to the war. I supported anything that I thought could prevent the war. It didnât work. There wasnât anything flawed in supporting the initiatives that could become an alternative and show some exit from this escalation.
DLJ: I was at Occupy, and I was an American Leftist. From the American perspective, one sees the Euromaidan and chooses sides for something that you donât know about. If you are a more Left-leaning liberal, you decide you are on the side of the pro-Euromaidan; or if youâre more of Marxist-Leninist, you decide that youâre on the side of the Donbass Peopleâs Republics. Everything is framed for you in a certain way. Do you feel that the international Left let down the Ukrainian Left?
VI: Itâs much more complicated because there are pro-Ukrainian Trotskyists. The European mainstream social democratic parties are pro-Ukraine. The Greens are pro-Ukraine. We donât think of them as the radical Left, but they can be assigned to the broader Left. Even the orthodox communist parties are divided. One part of them supports the Russian Communist Party.[12] The KPU supported the 2022 invasion as an anti-fascist operation. But the other part of the orthodox communists, including such significant parties as the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), the Communist Party of Turkey, and the Communist Party of Spain did not support the invasion and took a line against both sides. There was nothing automatic in how those positions were taken. âKnee-jerk reactionsâ is a misleading way to primitivize the actual debate on the Left. Some anarchist groups are skeptical about Ukraine because of the prominence of the far-Right and because of their skepticism towards any kind of nationalism. These anarchists lean towards a neutral position. It does not exactly go along the traditional lines of a divide within the Left, and thatâs an interesting question to investigate â how the Left chooses sides in this conflict. Ideology might not be the most important factor, because in the case of the big Left parties, it has more to do with their involvement in Realpolitik and in coalition governments. Consider the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).[13] There is also a significant divergence within those big parties, between the leadership and between the local organizations. Olaf Scholz[14] could be rhetorically pro-Ukrainian, but the local Social Democrats could be more skeptical about full support for sending arms to Ukraine.
DLJ: Of course, ideology probably matters for the groups that donât have any power. Itâs how they justify themselves. Itâs kind of a joke: half of the Q&A at any Left event is, âdo you support this or that group?â Thatâs how people decide what organization to join, at least in the U.S.
You mentioned three revolutions: the Revolution on Granite (1990), the Orange Revolution (2004), and the Euromaidan (2013â14). Could you talk about how you feel like the question of revolution was used by bureaucrats and oligarchs to consolidate rule? Youâve mentioned Mark Beissinger in some of your writings. Maybe you can talk about how these revolutions have been resources for passing certain reforms and transparency â in wartime situations, it becomes a justification for all sorts of suppression. How have these revolutions been used to restructure capital and the political sphere?
VI: There is an emerging field of study â contemporary revolutions â because of the increasing understanding that contemporary revolutions are very different from the classical social revolutions. Mark Beissinger, a great American political scientist, has recently published the important book The Revolutionary City (2022), in which he did rigorous statistical analysis of all revolutions since the start of the 20th century, and he shows how they changed over time. The last social revolution â understood as rapid radical transformation of state and class structures according to the classical definition of Theda Skocpol â happened in 1979. It was either the Nicaraguan Revolution or the Iranian Revolution. Since then, there have been attempts at social revolution, but none have led to social revolutionary outcomes. Beissinger shows that when we say that these upheavals are not revolutionary, it doesnât mean that nothing changes. In fact, they do have tangible outcomes, although they are not the same as what was expected by the people who participated in the revolution or who inspired it. Beissinger, for example, writes that contemporary revolutions weaken the government and the capacity of post-revolutionary states, unlike the social revolutions, which built stronger states. Contemporary revolutions have a negative impact on economic growth. Theyâre not as disastrous as social revolutions in the short term, but still there is a decline. Importantly, this post-revolutionary decline is not followed by rapid modernization, as was the case with the social revolutions. Contemporary revolutions do have some impact on democratization, but that impact is short-term, and in the long-term, there is a typical authoritarian backslide. The only positive impact of contemporary revolutions, and the most tangible one, is the expansion of expressive liberties and the political opportunities for middle-class civil society. This doesnât mean that itâs not important, but the question is who is capable of using these moments of expansion of political opportunity.
In this capacity, the different social groups and classes are highly unequal. Like in Ukraine, you had a weakly organized working class with weak trade unions and weak Leftist parties. Therefore, other groups took the opportunities in the revolutions. In the Ukrainian case, this was done by opportunistic oligarchs like Petro Poroshenko, who became the president of Ukraine, even though he was actually one of the ministers in the Yanukovych government and was one of the founders of the Party of Regions in the 1990s. He was a veteran of Ukrainian politics and one of the richest people in Ukraine. The Euromaidan was supposedly an anti-oligarchic revolution against the old elites, but it brought an oligarch to power. Itâs not because the people were allegedly so stupid. No, thereâs something structural about this kind of revolution: they are structurally vulnerable to being hijacked. Other groups that took advantage were the far-Right nationalists, who received arms and opportunities to infiltrate the military and police. The third group was made up of the neoliberal NGOs, who received a huge flow of Western money and the opportunity to influence the political agenda of the post-Euromaidan government via so-called âsandwich models,â i.e., via the pressure on the Ukrainian government by the West, upon which Ukraine became so dependent, in particular because of the war.
DLJ: Marx and Engels famously go through a revolution in 1848 that Marx later calls farcical. Itâs a democratic revolution, a popular revolution. However, the idea that came out of this is that going into the next revolution, there would need to be a political articulation such as the organization of a party. You mentioned earlier that there was both an absence of political articulation from the working class in Ukraine, but yet, there were parties. They may not have seemed like parties but rather parts of the oligarchical structure. These revolutions have raised the question of revolution per se, but who is going to take political leadership of the revolutions?
VI: Thatâs a bigger question. Itâs not simply about the party. Iâm working on integrating this idea about contemporary revolutions into a Gramscian framework â the question of hegemony and counter-hegemony â and why contemporary revolutions reproduce the crisis of hegemony. Bessingerâs explanation is robust. He points to the fact that contemporary revolutions happen much quicker than social revolutions. The social revolutions in the 20th century were partisan, guerrilla wars in the countryside, especially in third-world countries. Those guerrilla wars developed over decades. The people who led the revolutions built their whole life careers as revolutionaries. They worked on the revolutionary cause for decades, building organizations, connecting with the working class and peasant masses in the countryside. They developed groups of intellectuals, the means of propaganda and agitation. They socialized the masses into the revolutionary cause, creating the structures of alternative power, especially if they were successful in creating the autonomous zones that could exist for years.
You mentioned the SPD. The SPD was a working-class party in an urban environment. The Party created a massive social infrastructure for the class, and they worked on that for decades. Contemporary revolutions happen in mere days. The Euromaidan Revolution lasted for about three months â unusually long. The 2011 Egyptian Revolution happened in the course of weeks. The whole idea was to bring as many people as possible to the central square, to the centers of power. This is the power of the contemporary revolutions: as quickly as possible, as many as possible, as diverse as possible. Thatâs why things like the brutal attack on the Euromaidan camp attack could happen, because the government did not understand what was going on and did not have the time to properly assess the situation and its consequences. Some things may happen as stupid mistakes, not as conspiracies or well-thought plans. But during the days of the Euromaidan, there was not enough time to build that scale of social infrastructure, to develop ideology, or even a clear program of post-revolutionary changes that would be shared by the masses. The leadership of contemporary revolutions do not even think of themselves as revolutionaries before the revolution starts. This is a huge difference in comparison to the leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, or Che Guevara.
But why do contemporary revolutions not have that counter-hegemonic infrastructure before the political crisis developed? We need to understand the weakness of hegemony and counter-hegemony in the current period. The ideologies are weak; the intellectuals are weak; the labor unions are weak. This is a much bigger problem than the absence of a vanguard party.
DLJ: Thereâs a weaker civil society.
VI: Yes, but when the revolution happens, it only reproduces this disconnection between the society and its supposed political representatives. This is the reproduction of the crisis of political representation. Contemporary revolutions are a response to the crisis of political representation. Thatâs why the people go to the streets, and call on the incumbent leader to leave, because often it is a president who has served for two, three, four terms. Think about the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, who is serving a sixth term right now, which the failed uprising in 2020 tried to prevent. People do not see their true representatives in politics. The revolution happens and reproduces this gap, because the groups in politics and civil society who exploit the political opportunity to push forward their interests and agendas, do not represent the majority of the population or even of the majority of those who participate in the revolution. Consider the neoliberal reforms pushed forward by the Ukrainian NGOs; or the nationalist agenda pushed forward by the far Right minority who participated in the Euromaidan; or the oligarchic interests and how Poroshenko acquired more wealth after the Euromaidan. Thatâs why these contemporary revolutions reproduce the very crisis responsible for them. They may even intensify the crisis because they inflate the post-revolutionary expectations, while weakening the state in order to meet them.
DLJ: What accounts for this ideological weakness? You said that the new Left emerged from the outcome of the Orange Revolution, and then again, a very similar situation happened in the Euromaidan with Poroshenko; from one oligarch to another. Things happen, and people reach for something out of the history of the Left to try to explain whatâs happening, and the problem is reproduced again.
VI: Many claim that we are living in the period of the end of ideology. Big narratives donât work anymore. But itâs not the end of ideology, because we do have ideologists. The question is primarily about their connection with the masses, their capacity to link their ideological constructions with some significant groups of people. This is explained not simply by the weakness of their theoretical lines, but on the social level, about how contemporary civil society is changing. Why are people more triggered by identities? Thatâs why we are talking about identity politics. about who you are and not which society you stand for exactly. There is some social structural factor that stands behind this disconnection between intellectuals with their theories, programs, and projects and the classes, whose interests they are supposed to represent. |P
[1] (New York: Verso, 2024).
[2] [Russian] Restructuring. This term was used in a political reform movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
[3] Here ânew Leftâ should not be confused with the New Left of the mid-20th century. The lowercase ânewâ will be used to differentiate it. See Volodymyr Ishchenko, âLeft divergence, Right convergence: Anarchists, Marxists, and nationalist polarization in the Ukrainian conflict, 2013â2014,â Globalizations 17, no. 5 (2020): 820â39, <https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/volodymyr-ishchenko-left-divergence-right-convergence>.
[4] The Party of Regions (Partiia rehioniv) was formed in 1997 and was banned in 2023 by the Eighth Administrative Court of Appeal. It has not competed in elections since 2014.
[5] Volodymyr Ishchenko, âUkraine,â in The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Left Parties in Europe, eds., Fabien Escalona, et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 665â92.
[6] See Volodymyr Ishchenko, âClass or regional cleavage? The Russian invasion and Ukraineâs âEast/Westâ divide,â European Societies (November 6, 2023): 1â26, <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375423575_Class_or_regional_cleavage_The_Russian_invasion_and_Ukraine's_'EastWest'_divide>. On â22 Ukraines,â Ishchenko cites Yaroslav Hrytsak, âDvadtsiat dvi Ukrainy,â Krytyka 54 (2002): 3â6.
[7] The Soviet-era Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU (USSR)) was banned in 1991. The more recent Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU) was founded in 1993, claiming to be the successor of the KPU (USSR), when it split from the Socialist Party of Ukraine, which had been founded in 1991. In 2015, the KPU was suspended, in part due to laws banning Soviet communist symbols. The KPU was permanently banned in 2022 together with over a dozen supposedly âpro-Russianâ Ukrainian parties.
[8] Youth organization of the USSR, also known as the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League. The Komsomol was the final stage (ages 14â28) of the youth organization; the preceding stages being the Young Pioneers (ages 8â15) and the Little Octobrists (ages 7â9).
[9] Orhanizatsiia ukrainskykh natsionalistiv, founded in 1929 in Vienna.
[10] Volodymyr Ishchenko, âBehind Russiaâs War Is Thirty Years of Post-Soviet Class Conflict,â Jacobin, October 3, 2022, <https://jacobin.com/2022/10/russia-ukraine-war-explanation-class-conflict>.
[11] Volodymyr Ishchenko, âUkrainian protesters must make a decisive break with the far right,â The Guardian, February 7, 2014, <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/07/ukrainian-protesters-break-with-far-right>.
[12] Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Rossiyskoy Federatsii, founded in 1993.
[13] Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands.
[14] Current Chancellor of Germany and member of the SPD.
