Interview: Ukraine, imperialism and the left

In this interview with Rob Ferguson, Ukrainian researcher and writer Volodymyr Ishchenko discusses the issues raised in his book Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War and other publications. Volodymyr is a well-known speaker on Ukraine in international academic and radical forums. His unique analysis of the trajectory of independent Ukraine, the Russian invasion and the post-Soviet states in general has won him both supporters and critics. Refusing to take a binary position on Ukraine, Volodymyr stands out as a voice critical of both Russia and NATO.

Although International Socialism may have some differences of analysis, we believe Volodymyr has made, and continues to make, an important contribution to the discussion on Ukraine and the wider understanding of class struggle and conflict in the post-Soviet states. Volodymyr Ishchenko taught sociology at Kiev universities and was active in the Ukrainian new left. He is now a researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin. His writing has been published by the Guardian, Al Jazeera, Jacobin and New Left Review.

Rob: It’s just over a decade since the Maidan protests, the fall of Viktor Yanukovych’s regime and the subsequent invasion by Russia. Your early articles from Towards the Abyss cover this period. They ran counter to the dominant narratives at the start of the war, both by Western liberals and by the majority of the Western left. In those articles you identify the relationship between imperialist rivalry, the interests of the Ukrainian oligarchs, and class and ethnic divisions in Ukraine. Could you outline how you saw these play out in the Maidan protests and their aftermath?

Volodymyr: You’re right, that intersection is important, but it’s also important to understand how exactly they intersect. One way to approach this intersection is just to draw up a list: the internal conflict in Ukraine and regional divisions, the Russian aggression, NATO expansion and, more broadly, the rivalry between the United States and China.

Susan Watkins makes this kind of argument in the New Left Review, that this war encompasses “five wars” at once.1 The problem is that people then say that at a specific moment, one particular conflict is much more important than others. However, that just brings the same problem through the back door—either we have to decide what is the most important dimension right now or we say that every dimension of the war is equally important. We just end up with an eclectic answer.

In those earlier articles of 2014, my analysis was developing. We need to see the central contradiction, manifested in different ways, and on different levels behind the complexity. This requires an analysis of the war as a development of a class conflict emerging from the degeneration of the Soviet Revolution in 1917, the disintegration of that project and the promise it held out to the people of the Soviet Union and beyond.

In that process, the post-Soviet ruling class emerged through acquiring former state property through privatisation. I refer to them as “political capitalists” whose interests came into conflict with the interests of transnational capital represented by, in particular, the European Union (EU), the International Monetary Fund and NATO.2

Other privileged groups, primarily the professional middle class, were betting on a kind of comprador peripheral integration of the post-Soviet states into the US-led order. Within that order, they hoped to acquire better positions, which contradicted the vision of the political capitalists who had acquired the commanding heights of the post-Soviet economy.3 The political capitalists were politically organised by what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci might have called Caesarist leaders, Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko being prominent examples.4

Before 2014, this class conflict of interests took mainly a non-violent form. Ukraine was a peaceful country compared to other post-Soviet states. The 1990s saw civil wars, separatist conflicts and war with Russia in countries such as Moldova and Georgia. We also saw the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and conflicts in Central Asia. In that context, Ukraine was peaceful for a very significant period—until 2014.

Yet, the violence around Euromaidan, between the opposition and the government of Yanukovych, developed before any direct Russian intervention.5 Even before Russia started the operation to annex Crimea in February 2014, there were dozens of protestors and police officers killed on the streets of Kiev. As for the question of NATO, this is a question not so much of Ukraine’s incorporation into NATO, but of Russia’s exclusion—a point Putin himself emphasises quite often.

This is apparent, for example, from recently de-classified transcripts of conversations between Putin and George W Bush in the 2000s. In a recent article in the Washington Quarterly, political scientist Deborah Boucoyannis marshals evidence that NATO’s eastward expansion was not driven by fear of a Russian military threat as Russia was widely seen as quite weak in the 1990s. Rather, she demonstrates that this expansion was about filling the “security vacuum” left in Eastern Europe after the Warsaw Pact dissolved. In addition, local elites looked to anchor themselves within the Western civilisation, fearing that their own plebeian classes, hit hard by post-socialist transition, might become politically receptive to Russia.6

For Russia to join the NATO alliance would, however, require a profound political-economic transformation—involving the removal of the political capitalists from control of their property and power. Peter Gowan, the late Marxist international relations scholar, made this point.7 If Western corporations had been allowed to acquire ownership of Russian oil and gas in the 1990s, Russia would have been an earlier member of NATO than Poland. But this didn’t happen. The integration of the Russian economy and political system into Euro-Atlantic structures would have required much more profound change than was the case in Eastern Europe, which took a different “transition” path after 1989, including opening themselves to transnational capital.

Rob: Yanukovych, like others before him, vacillated between signing an Association Agreement with the EU and joining a customs union with Russia. These economic and geopolitical regional agreements were
mutually exclusive.

In International Socialism, we have argued that the imperialist rivalry over Ukraine deepened the rivalries between different capitalist interests within Ukraine, between those locked into old Soviet bloc industries and markets and those who looked West—although many bridged both. These camps in turn played off regional, ethnic and class divisions within Ukraine that come to a head in 2014. The Ukrainian working class objectively shared a common interest in opposition to the entire Ukrainian ruling class, but also to the imperialist rivals—NATO and Russia. The Euromaidan protests against withdrawal from the Association Agreement with the EU were quite small scale to begin with. It was only after the regime sent in the Berkut, the Ukrainian armed riot police, that mass numbers turned out to oppose the regime. Even at this point, unity around class demands might have opened up the possibility of forging unity that cut across regional divisions. Instead, we saw a descent into civil war, with Russian proxies seizing control in centres in the east and Russia annexing Crimea. The Ukrainian government turned to NATO and the EU and launched its “Anti-Terrorist Operation” against the separatists in the east, which in turn fuelled further division.

Most of the Western left, from right-wing social democracy to sections of the radical left, have viewed Ukraine solely through the prism of Russian aggression. While woute stand in uncompromising opposition to Russian intervention in 2014 and its invasion of 2022, we have argued that the war in Ukraine has to be understood in the context of the rivalry between the imperialist powers and there is a responsibility on the left to oppose both rival camps.

To what extent do you yourself see imperialist rivalries as dominant? And how do you see these rivalries interlocking with divisions inside Ukraine and across class interests?

Volodymyr: That’s a fair description. However, formulated in this way, it brings different dimensions together in an eclectic way. So, I’ve been trying to develop a more coherent argument. My argument about political capitalism isn’t about internal predominance. I’m trying to point to the material interests lying behind this conflict, not just the interests of the Ukrainian oligarchs.

If you think about the political dimension in the post-Soviet countries, we have to ask who organises the interests of the political capitalists. They’re not organised in a liberal-democratic way. They are organised by figures such as Putin and Lukashenko. Ukraine had to choose between the EU or the Eurasian Union. This was about economic interests. The EU offered a free trade zone that disadvantages advanced Ukrainian industries as these are uncompetitive against the stronger European corporations.

It was just those industries that Putin aimed to re-integrate into a Eurasian bloc of ex-Soviet states—Belarus, Kazakhstan and, importantly, Ukraine—in order to form a stronger sovereign centre of capital accumulation in the post-Soviet region. Ukraine was a vital part of the former Soviet economy, particularly in machine-building, aviation, munitions, missiles and armaments. These were the most advanced components of the remaining Soviet industry in Ukraine.

So, an analysis of political capitalism is a way of identifying the central contradiction driving conflict on both the domestic and the international level.

Why was Ukraine so important for the EU? Why didn’t they allow Russia to keep Ukraine within its “sphere of influence”, in economic and political alignment with Russia? Did the Western powers want to prevent a stronger Russian-led reintegration of the post-Soviet states?

The problem with this framework of inter-imperialist rivalry is that it’s quite difficult to identify exactly where this conflict of interests lies. The classical theories of imperialism, by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, for example, were developed to address the clash between expanding rival capitals. But this isn’t true of the post-Soviet case. This was a case of the physical disintegration of capital, of contraction.

After the catastrophic decline in the 1990s, the post-Soviet economies were only beginning to grow—largely a restorative growth. The argument that Russia needed more markets and access to more resources is difficult to defend. Russia has quite considerable resources that it could develop without starting an expensive war, avoiding loss of markets, sanctions and so forth. This was pretty predictable, even if Russia had achieved the quick victory they hoped for.

So, I’m not sure that placing the conflict within this straitjacket of imperialist rivalry actually explains much. Unless we identify the material interests of the ruling classes, this framework isn’t very helpful. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it just requires a serious analysis of what was actually driving the fundamental material clash of class interests behind the conflict. And here comes my argument about political capitalism.

I understand political capitalists as a fraction of the capitalist class whose competitive advantage lies in the selective benefits they extract from the state. This analysis is compatible with Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley’s development of the concept of political capitalism, although they understand political capitalism as a stage, or phase of capitalism that comes after the end of the post-war boom.8 That was a period in which capitalists were pursuing productive capital investment. Now they argue, capitalists are more interested in political control of assets’ value. But my understanding of political capitalism comes most directly from heterodox economist Branko Milanović and sociologist Iván Szelényi.9 In the post-Soviet case, we see an especially predatory type of political capitalism that starts from stealing the state property inherited from the Soviet Union.

Obviously, this could not continue indefinitely and would have entailed the total disintegration of society. As a result, we see the rise of “Caesarist” regimes, in particular that of Putin, which impose order on this zero-sum game in the long-term collective interests of the ruling class through coercion, while at the same time balancing the interests of its different fractions. For large and electorally important sections of the working class, such regimes offer stability.

Putin then tries to reintegrate the ex-Soviet states, entering into a conflict with NATO. Political capitalists are fundamentally dependent on benefits from the state, their major competitive advantage. They therefore have a fundamental interest in state sovereignty, unlike those capitalists who rely mainly on technological innovation or super-exploitation of labour. Even when the latter groups receive state subsidies, they are not so dependent on specific people holding specific offices. These corruption schemes became a very important source of profit for post-Soviet political capitalists.

So, if the political capitalists of these regimes do not have sovereign control over their territory, they are in trouble. We see this for example in the fate of some of the Ukrainian oligarchs and in the current conflict involving Volodymyr Zelensky’s cronies in Ukraine and anti-corruption bodies. These bodies were established under very strong pressure by the EU and US, and the Ukrainian ruling class has tried to resist and sabotage them.

This conflict remains in place as it’s fundamentally a conflict between the interests of political capitalists and the interests of transnational capital, which benefits from so-called “transparency” and is inimical to protectionism.

So, my argument is that we should be more reflective about the concepts we are using and be more specific about the actual material conflict behind the war and what is fundamental to the ruling classes in this conflict.

Rob: I think there’s an interesting and important discussion around your argument and use of the concept of political capitalism which we might want to pursue beyond this interview.

I would like to turn to the current war and to start with the figure of Zelensky, the now wartime president of Ukraine. You have an article reprinted in Towards the Abyss, written around the time of Zelensky’s election in 2019. Zelensky’s victory came as a shock in 2019. His claim to fame was as a national star of a comedy series—a political satire called, ironically, Servant of the People. Yet, he received a massive 73 percent of the vote in 2019, spanning across regional and ethnic divisions. He gained a strong vote in the eastern and south-east Russian-speaking regions. He was seen as independent of widely despised oligarchs and posed as an anti-corruption candidate. He was also seen as a candidate who sought to de-escalate the confrontation with Moscow. And yet—here he is now.

The standard pro-Western, NATO explanation for Zelensky’s transition from compromise with Russia to wartime leader is that Russia gave him no option. Do you think the explanation is that straightforward?

Volodymyr: Obviously, it was not that simple. You are right that in 2019, when Zelensky was elected, peace with Russia was on his agenda, although he was extremely vague about his programme. But there were expectations that he would follow a different path to the previous president Petro Poroshenko. Opinion polls showed that peace in Donbass was among the highest expectations the Ukrainian public held of the new president.

There was also the issue of implementing the Minsk agreements; these presupposed the re-integration of the eastern regions, which had seceded in 2014, into Ukraine while allowing a degree of autonomy.10 However, this “special status” was perceived by Kiev as an obstacle to Ukraine’s further Western alignment, NATO membership, and integration into the EU, and it was seen as a block against further ethno-nationalist reforms in Ukraine.

In the asymmetric class conflict between political capitalists and the professional middle class, Ukraine’s pro-Western camp was able to mobilise more effectively to influence the political and public sphere, with the support of sections of the Western elites in the EU and the US.11 This camp saw the Minsk agreements as a “capitulation”.

We must ask capitulation relative to what? Looking at Minsk from the viewpoint of 2025, well, yes, Ukraine would not be in the EU or NATO. But Ukraine would not be destroyed. Formally at least, the Donbass would be re-integrated within Ukraine. Yes, Crimea would still be annexed by Russia, but Ukraine would be a much bigger territory than today. It’s only a very specific group of people that sees this as a capitulation compared to what we face now.

My co-author, Peter Korotaev, analysed one of the most important Ukrainian media—the strongly pro-Western, liberal establishment Ukrainska Pravda.12 From 2014, they have been publishing opinion pieces and articles arguing against implementation of the Minsk Accords, which they saw as a block to the Euro-Atlantic integration of Ukraine. They didn’t need the Ukrainians of the Donbass. “Capitulation” for them meant abandoning a very specific national project for Ukraine, set firmly on a path to “Western civilisation”.

The anti-capitulation protests opposed to Zelensky’s attempts at achieving peace in 2019 were not large and didn’t have the support of the majority of Ukrainians. However, there was a threat of insurgency in western Ukraine, where the protests did have support from the local authorities. Germany and France made no serious attempts to push Zelensky to implement the Minsk agreements. Under these conditions, Zelensky returned to the policies of the previous president, Poroshenko. Poroshenko himself had initially made moves towards implementing Minsk in 2015 but retreated in the face of violent demonstrations outside the Ukrainian parliament involving the Ukrainian far right.

The US agenda also changed with Joe Biden’s election as president in 2021. Zelensky started a crackdown on the so-called pro-Russian opposition, specifically Victor Medvedchuk, a leader of the most popular opposition party, “Opposition Platform—For Life”, and a friend of Putin. This was a final trigger leading Putin to resort to more coercive diplomacy and threat of invasion. From 2021, Putin saw no interest in negotiation on Zelensky’s part nor any possibility of a pro-Russian party coming to power or entering a coalition government. Putin decided to cut the Gordian Knot, to force a change in government in Kyiv and to force Ukraine to accept certain conditions: neutrality, demilitarisation and so-called de-nazification. This was the strategy behind the “special military operation”. It failed, and the special military operation turned into a long and devastating war of attrition.

Rob: This brings us to the question of national defence and national self-determination. The Ukrainian government, despite overwhelming opposition to the Russian invasion, isn’t able to mobilise or motivate
the population to sacrifice beyond a certain point for the war of
national defence.

As you have just described, this is a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of casualties, both Ukrainian and Russian, on a European battlefield. Defensive trench fortifications span 3,250 kilometres of terrain; artillery barrages of up to 30,000 shells a day. Today, Ukraine is the most heavily mined country globally, with mines and ordnance contaminating up to 30 percent of its territory. This is a war that combines the meatgrinder of trench warfare of 1914-8 with 21st century high-tech slaughter—the killer drones and satellite warfare that have claimed 70 percent of the casualties. A point I think that is too often missed is the inter-imperialist character of warfare itself. NATO is trying to put pressure on Zelensky to lower the age of conscription below the age of 25. Yet, there is active resistance to military snatch squads attempting to force young men to the front. It’s estimated that 650,000 Ukrainian men of fighting age have fled Ukraine, with perhaps 20,000 or more deserting every month; the Ukrainian government has launched 290,000 criminal cases for desertion. At the same time, majority opinion is obviously opposed to the invasion and opposed to concessions to Russia that would go beyond a certain point.

What do you see as the attitudes of Ukrainian workers to the war now? What are the views among the population on ending the war, and on what terms? And what is your view of the possible outcomes?

Volodymyr: Those figures you cited do tell a story. There is a class dimension, however. The burden of war is carried unequally; the stakes are different. The professional middle class and the Ukrainian elite have opposed concessions. However, from those who have suffered the most—the soldiers in the army, drawn mainly from poorer sections of society, and the populations of cities and towns close to the frontline—reactions are very different. The affluent can avoid conscription with bribes of thousands, even tens of thousands, of dollars, or by getting a fake medical certificate or bribing border guards.

This issue of class inequality is very important. There was a point in 2022 in which a moment of national unity seemed to prevail. It seemed Putin had failed, and Ukraine was united against external aggression. Even then, this was a very partial view that didn’t take account of Ukrainians in Crimea or the Donbass, who had suffered shelling from the Ukrainian army since 2014, or Ukrainians in Russia, who have moved there before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, or those who fled to Russia from Donbass.

There are also the Ukrainians who fled to the EU after 2022. Many have become increasingly disconnected from Ukrainian politics and from the reality of Ukraine, as they try to integrate into the countries that may become home. Initially, the overwhelming majority of them said they would return at the end of the war. Now that figure has fallen to under 50 percent; and even these polls are skewed by respondents’ tendency to say they will return out of a sense of patriotism, when in fact real decisions will depend on the situation in Ukraine, on families and economic opportunities in the countries they have moved to.

Is it true that fighting a long war against a stronger enemy necessarily leads to such a situation? There are prominent examples from history, when smaller nations were able to win against far stronger foes. Vietnam is just one example from the 20th century; Afghanistan is another. We can also make this point about revolutionary states—France after 1789 was able to defeat the strongest European powers for 25 years, until they were defeated in Russia. After the October Revolution of 1917, revolutionary Russia defeated the counter-revolutionary armies that invaded the Soviet Republic and then the Soviet Union defeated the even stronger Nazi threat in an existential struggle, not simply by terror or repression, but as a result of revolutionary modernisation of society.

This isn’t the case in Ukraine, and therefore, it’s very important to understand the character of the war. Parts of the left love to compare Ukraine to Vietnam or Cuba, or Palestine, or other national liberation struggles, but the war in Ukraine didn’t develop as a national liberation struggle.

In 2022, we were supposed to win quickly, but then Ukrainians realised how much suffering the war brings, and that we are not all together in death. In 2025, the government tried to offer higher payments to attract younger males aged 18-24 to the army and similar benefits to what Russia offers their contract soldiers. The government also promised a right to leave the country after one year’s service in the army. But none of this led to a significant increase in the number of volunteers.

Yet in Russia, they are recruiting something like 30,000 each month, even after three years. Of course, they have reached certain limits. Nevertheless, the Russian state has proved capable of attracting new recruits and sustaining the size of their army. The Ukrainian army is now contracting.

Ukrainians of course oppose the invasion, but the problem is whether you, personally, are going to sacrifice yourself for the state. This is a verdict on the Ukrainian post-Soviet state. Post-Soviet de-modernisation and neoliberal reforms created a gulf between the state and ordinary people—then suddenly, the state requires everyone to enlist and to fight for it. It just doesn’t work.

Rob: This does lead to the next question. What’s your view on the positions taken by the Ukrainian left on the war?

Volodymyr: When we speak about the left, we assume some relation to the working class. But the working class as a class is fragmented and has disintegrated politically. This was true even in the late Soviet period but is even more true of the post-Soviet collapse. People became impoverished and atomised. The unions were not real trade unions, the left parties didn’t really politically represent workers, even when they resisted the pro-capitalist, neoliberal reforms.

The Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) used to be the most popular party in the 1990s and was represented in parliament until 2014.13 It effectively allied to Yanukovych during Euromaidan and was made an easy scapegoat afterwards. In 2015, the party was suspended. In 2022, the CPU supported the Russian invasion as “anti-imperialist” and “anti-fascist.” In the occupied territories, they joined the Russian Communist Party and entered the local councils set up by the Russian authorities.

On the other side, there are much smaller groups of younger left-wing people, representing at most a thousand across the whole country, quite disorganised in small networks and small organisations. Many have joined the Ukrainian army, although they were incapable of organising any left-wing unit, unlike the far right, which has strengthened its position as a military and political force.

So now, liberal civil society tries to normalise the Azov leader, Andriy Biletsky.14 He has been whitewashed with the help of the Western press, which publish fawning interviews with him. In contrast, the pro-Ukrainian left in Ukraine cannot do much more than join the army as individuals, support small humanitarian initiatives or make some contact with small unions, which cannot do much under martial law. This then leads to a left-wing whitewashing on behalf of the pro-Western camp.

There are some attempts to organise those attempting to evade conscription and raise the issue of political repression and ethno-nationalist policies in Ukraine. However, the few who attempt to do so have yet to become an influential political force.

Rob: I take your point that it’s difficult and efforts so far have not really been met with anything concrete. But at least some are beginning to think in the right direction. The aim of a socialist should be to raise political questions about the nature of the war among those who are trying to evade its horror, to begin to try and lay down terrain for the future. You have to start where you are. Not to start at all, it seems to me, is the worst of all.

Volodymyr: I totally agree. In this situation, it’s important to play for the long haul, to understand that, at this moment, you cannot stop the war through your own individual efforts. But by organising, you can retain an independent political position on the war and further the agenda of saving as many lives as possible, even if it’s simply making small efforts to oppose punitive measures, the snatch squads and so forth.

Rob: I wanted to turn to the Western left, where there is a serious division. The majority position, from right-wing social democrats to much of the radical left, claim the war is solely characterised by the attempt of one imperialist power—Russia—to subjugate Ukraine. NATO’s expansion across Eastern Europe is, by this account, more or less irrelevant. It’s certainly not a causal factor. NATO’s arming of Ukraine is actively supported, or certainly not opposed.

This journal and the International Socialist Tendency has, from the outset, opposed the Russian invasion as an illegitimate act of an imperialist power. However, we have also insisted that NATO is waging, in effect, a proxy war with Russia over Ukraine. Therefore, the prime responsibility of the left and the anti-war movement here is to oppose our own warmongers. This is an analysis we can trace back to our analyse not only of Maidan and Ukraine itself but the wider clash between NATO and Russia since the end of the Cold War.

How do you view the response of the Western left to the Ukrainian crisis?

Volodymyr: Well, the divisions on the Western left are, I think, a reflection of the left’s weakness in putting forward an autonomous, counter-hegemonic politics, which is itself a manifestation of the weakness of independent working-class politics.

As a result, the left tends to take convenient positions. In Western Europe, it’s easy to align with the ruling class. Most social democratic, centrist or left-of-centre parties represent the interests of the political establishment rather than the interests of the working class.

It’s not the first time the left has been both so polarised and, in a way, so impotent. What should be done when, objectively, the political dimension of the working class is weak? Even if you take correct positions, it doesn’t have much real political influence.

In Ukraine, it’s impossible to identify any clearly progressive force that the left could unite behind. Therefore, the agenda has to be to reduce the harm and reduce suffering. This has been my red line from the beginning of the invasion, even from 2014. We now need to save as many lives as possible and as much of Ukrainian infrastructure as possible. That’s the most important thing. This isn’t a passive position. It requires collective action; it requires mobilisation, and it can unite broader groups on the left.

At this point, we can hardly do more. But even this would be much more than what is offered by the ruling classes. Saving lives doesn’t figure at all in their priorities. This is what the left could offer. It could be a potentially unifying strategy, both for the Western and the Eastern European left.

Rob: Finally, in your articles and essays, you discuss the failure of popular revolt to break through and transform relations of political and social power. You often use the Maidan revolt as a reference point. I’m never quite sure though to what extent you see the failure of popular revolt to break through as in some way predetermined by social, economic, and political structures and the conditions of post-Soviet collapse. Or to what extent you think that the potential for successful popular revolt has been undermined by political and organisational failure—for example, a failure to mobilise on a class basis and confront the state itself. So, do you see the failure of revolt to break through as determined by social, economic and political structures or by a subjective political and organisational failure?

Volodymyr: I do not see it just as a subjective failure. I understand this argument might sound almost deterministic. However, there are very systematic studies that show that contemporary revolutions, including Euromaidan, but also the Arab Spring, and more recently Nepal and other examples, do not lead to sustained democratisation.15

Typically, they lead to a temporary opening, which is then used by forces who are more privileged, better organised and, in many cases, not of the left. Democratic gains then give way to regimes that become more authoritarian and corrupt—less representative. This may in turn lead to another Maidan-type uprising, reproducing a vicious circle. There are structural problems behind this dynamic. Fundamentally, this points to the political disintegration of the working class, which has both an objective and subjective dimension.

Yes, it’s about how we on the left organise class interests into a political force. But it’s also about what we can objectively do here and now. Do we really become stronger as a result of the new Maidans?

The Ukrainian left has become profoundly weaker as a result. In the 1990s, left-wing parties were actually the most popular parties in the country; now, after the Orange Revolution of 2004, the Euromaidan of 2014 and the war, basically no political left exists of any relevance, and it doesn’t seem likely to emerge even after the war’s end.

Obviously, not every revolution is the same, but I believe Euromaidan presents a typical, if extreme, example. A disorganised revolt with a very weak counter-hegemonic character results in further crisis and fragmentation of the working class and of the nation.

This isn’t an argument just to do nothing. It’s an argument about how exactly the left is to become an autonomous, counter-hegemonic force capable of organising and uniting workers and raising class consciousness. Placing bets on destabilising Maidans may not be the right way.

Volodymyr Ishchenko is a researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin, with some of his work published in the Guardian, Al Jazeera, Jacobin and New Left Review.

Notes