Volodymyr Ishchenko on the Post-Soviet Condition, Class Conflict in Ukraine, and Decolonization

Volodymyr, thank you very much for joining us. Within the first few pages of your book, Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War, you raise the notion of “de-modernization,” a concept you use to characterize the post-Soviet transformation in its economic, political, and cultural realms. What is de-modernization broadly speaking? But more specifically, what was Soviet modernity and how has Ukraine, and the entire post-Soviet space, been de-modernized since the fall of Communism?

There is obviously a big debate about the Soviet modernity. There is an argument that yes, the Soviet Union was built as an alternative modernity and many people argue it didn’t work. But it is important to remember that the response to this question of a Soviet modernity has already been reevaluated several times. It started to be discussed during the Soviet Union’s existence. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it started to look like this modernity had always been defective, if it existed at all. In the 2000s-2010s, Soviet modernity started to be reconsidered, and considered positively again, But then the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 gave a new push to this argument that the war is the continuation of the century-long collapse of Russian imperialism, which the Soviet Union had only unsuccessfully delayed. I think the question is going to be reevaluated many, many more times. And even now, we see that some of the achievements that were made during the Soviet period have become re-actualized in the public discourse, in the West, but also in the East. For instance, when we think about climate change and that perhaps we need a global, rationally planned, economy to contain those destructive phenomena.

To use a different example, there is a recent book by Kristen R. Ghodsee about advances in gender equality in the former “Eastern bloc” and how we can learn from it today. Or again, for decolonization, Rossen Djagalov’s recent book on how the Soviet Union contributed to anti-imperialist and decolonial movements in many parts of the world.

I would strongly argue that there was significant modernizing development in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union built a number of modern institutions in the realms of politics, in culture, in education, in welfare. Famously, Stephen Kotkin has documented this very well. After Stalin’s death, it required a bigger push toward democratization and some inside the Soviet leadership articulated a need for socialist democracy. Otto Kuusinen was perhaps one of the biggest proponents of such a push among the people who actually had some influence on the Party’s decision-making. But that did not happen. There was a growing gap between the modernized Soviet society and its ossified politics. The pluralism of interests in the former was not properly represented by the latter. Large number of Sovietized modern citizens (created precisely by the success of the Soviet modernity) were insufficiently incorporated into political decision-making. This catalyzed various processes of political alienation. Thereafter, Soviet modernity went into crisis, and that was a de-modernizing crisis.

The USSR collapsed and this can be a reason to question the success of this modernization project, but at the same time there was evident, even if contradictory, modernizing movement throughout the existence of the Soviet Union. After that, it was a movement backwards, a de-modernization trend. However, the path that was started in the Soviet Union may start anew in a different time or perhaps in a different place and on a different basis.

So, we have to ask—and this is the key question—did the post-Soviet transformations offer an alternative, stronger, modernity project? At the beginning of the 1990s, there were discussions about democratization, expectations that we will have a bright future ahead. Quite quickly, those expectations were quashed and replaced by theories of competitive authoritarianism, patronal politics, cycles of weak autocracies, and very weak revolutions that sometimes overthrew the regimes but did not actually build fundamentally different societies. We can add here the primitivization of the economy, i.e., the collapse of the most advanced parts of the Soviet economy, which could have been developed but were instead predatorily privatized or simply destroyed. We may also add de-modernizing tendencies in culture, such as the rise of ethnonationalism, the decline of education, public health and most of the other fundamental institutions that support modern life, all of which were not actually replaced by something better, at least insofar as we care about the majority of the post-Soviet population and not just elites and the narrow middle class.

These revolutions generate flashes of enthusiasm, euphoria, and the idea that maybe, finally, something is going to change. But then it very quickly starts to look like the expectations were not fulfilled and that another maidan is required, which will not necessarily be fundamentally transformative and will instead reproduce and even intensify the crisis tendencies once again.

So, the argument about de-modernization is precisely this: we are still in a continuous crisis. The crisis started even before the Soviet Union collapsed and has been escalating since then. Even now, it is not certain that any, more stable, alternatives have already emerged. And that is why perhaps, and specifically in the case of Ukraine, we have had such dynamic contentious politics. Three maidan revolutions in the life of just one generation, which is quite exceptional. That means that Ukrainian governments have been weak. These revolutions generate flashes of enthusiasm, euphoria, and the idea that maybe, finally, something is going to change. But then it very quickly starts to look like the expectations were not fulfilled and that another maidan is required, which will not necessarily be fundamentally transformative and will instead reproduce and even intensify the crisis tendencies once again.

How was the Soviet modernizing project connected to what you call Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Ukrainians. What do you mean by these terms? And how has this identity been progressively lost in the past thirty years?

That is an important question. It is also important for me personally in regard to how my family lived through the Soviet Union, progressing from workers and peasants, my great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, to my parents, who were working on the cutting edge of Soviet cybernetics and cosmonautics. That is an astonishing amount of vertical mobility in the life of just two generations. And then, in the life of just one generation after the Soviet Union collapsed, we lost most of those advances that our parents worked and our grandparents suffered for. Some of the darkest sides of the Soviet Union— Holodomor and the Great Terror—touched my family as well.

But the argument about Soviet Ukrainians is important, not only theoretically but also for explaining post-Soviet Ukrainian politics and its so-called “regional cleavage.” Looking at electoral maps, we can indeed see that a series of important elections were regionally polarized. But what explains that? Is there some kind of regionally determined cultural divide that is explainable by having historically been part of the Romanov Empire or the Habsburg Empire? Or is it a manifestation of a quasi-ethnic conflict between Russian-speaking Ukrainians and Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians? My argument about Soviet Ukrainians and Soviet Ukraine is a way to make an alternative argument against the tendency to essentialize this divide, while also taking it seriously. It does have history, but that history is rooted in the dynamics of Soviet modernity, the dynamics of class and dynamics of social revolution. It is not some mentality or civilizational conflict between essentialized “Russian speakers” and “Ukrainian speakers.”

A number of intellectuals were appalled with the Russian invasion and with Putin’s justification for it—basically, that Lenin and the Bolsheviks invented Ukraine—and so in response to that, tried to legitimize primordial nationalism, i.e., claims about some centuries-old existent Ukrainian identity. And while Ukrainian identity existed before the Bolsheviks, only a very narrow group of mostly intelligentsia embraced it in the Russian Empire. The majority of Ukrainians in the former Russian Empire were illiterate peasants and described themselves rather in pre-modern, non-national categories. It was indeed Bolsheviks who incorporated the majority of Ukrainians into modern nation-building institutions. So, it was Soviet schools that brought most Ukrainians to literacy, it was the Soviet press that explained to them that they belonged to a national Ukrainian community within the Soviet Union. Many of them felt those bonds in the Red Army.

Most Ukrainians were becoming Ukrainians, acquiring the proper national identity, at the same time as they were becoming Soviet, the citizens of the Soviet Union. Of course, those who lived in formerly Polish lands in Galicia and Volhynia, for instance, had a different history and were acquiring national identities of their own. The diaspora in North America and Western Europe also had a different history. But the majority of Ukrainians were coming to national identity through the Soviet experience.

The combination of “Soviet” and “Ukrainian” was not smooth. There was a concept of the “Soviet people,” of which there was uncertainty until the end of the Soviet Union: whether it was simply a union of all the peoples of the USSR, or whether it implied their eventual merger into one nation (that would be based primarily on the Russian-language culture but with important incorporations of elements of the national republics’ cultures). The latter interpretation could raise the question of revising the administrative structure of the USSR, touching on the interests of the local party elites in the national republics. However, the weakening of the “Soviet” was not the result of some internal defect in its identity, which simply gave way to a supposedly more “natural” Ukrainian identity, but was, of course, the result of the disintegration of the Soviet state. Of course, one can only speculate that if the USSR did not collapse, the “Soviet people” could have developed into a full-fledged civic nation, combined with a Ukrainian identity that would have become articulated more as an ethnocultural identity and less as a national one.

Nevertheless, post-Soviet Ukraine inherited an enormous material, institutional, and cultural heritage. The political project of continuing to develop on the inherited Soviet basis—albeit in an independent Ukrainian state—was possible but never developed, not even as a strong ideological project with mass support and institutionalization. “Soviet” lost its connection with the future and remained only as a past, one sometimes perceived as a better past than the post-Soviet realities. A great many Ukrainians believed this up until very recently. According to some surveys, over 30% of Ukrainians regretted the disintegration of the USSR even on the eve of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Those political elites and groups of the Ukrainian electorate that could have been attracted to such a project were not articulated as “pro-Russian.” In fact, post-Soviet Russia had only weak soft power. This was precisely at the root of the problem that Putin decided to solve with brute military force. The reaction to the invasion and the failure of its initial plan, which quickly became apparent, showed that there was no deep “pro-Russianness” even among the vast majority of those politicians and citizens who had been denigrated as such for decades by representatives of the “pro-Western” camp. This part of the Ukrainian elite was not too “pro-Russian,” but rather too opportunistic, and their voters too depoliticized.

Soviet identity was tied to a universal progressive project for the future. Now Ukraine finds itself in a situation where its prospects for survival, revival, for any development and further modernization, depend entirely on what the EU and the US can offer. And it is a big question what they will be able and willing to offer Ukraine, given the worsening of crisis trends in the West. Importantly, this desperate situation is not the automatic result of an unfavorable balance of military and/or economic resources. There are many cases of a smaller country defeating a much larger country, or stronger coalitions of foreign invaders, with no or significantly less foreign aid than Ukraine now receives—think of revolutionary France after 1789, Russia after 1917, Vietnam or Afghanistan. Rather, it is a sign of the fragility of comprador, peripheralizing nation-building, which in the post-Soviet period has been decoupled from social revolution and modernization—and even more explicitly aimed at the destruction and reversal of the Soviet social-revolutionary and modernizing achievements.

Building on this theme moves us toward our next set of questions on political economy and nationalism. A key piece of this de-modernization process is the creation of a new class antagonism in the post-Soviet world—where a bloc consisting of local middle-class professionals plus transnational capital is counterposed to a bloc of ‘oligarchs’ and the passive working classes. Talk to us about this class antagonism; how does it manifest politically and how did it contribute to both 2004’s Orange Revolution and 2014’s Euromaidan?

We need class analysis because, first of all, it can help explain some of the major puzzles of Ukrainian politics, particularly the puzzle of the politically asymmetrical regional cleavage. If you think about that question using some popular frameworks—Ukrainian speakers against Russian speakers, competing regional cultures—you have to ask yourself why only one of the camps has always been much better mobilized, could overthrow the governments in maidan revolutions, could develop a stronger civil society? Why do we see mostly passive citizens in the other camp, typically but misleadingly called “pro-Russian”? Is it something inherently Russian to not be civil enough? Indeed, another popular (especially now) framework—the “decolonial” one—simply reduces the social basis of this cleavage to the legacy of Russian domination, domination that can be overcome by the rising Ukrainian nation through a sequence of maidan revolutions and ultimately the ongoing war. As I mentioned, in essence, this is a typical teleological nation-building narrative with all its usual deficiencies.

I believe we can think about this puzzle much more productively through the lenses of class analysis and look at the very different class coalitions that stood behind what we could call for the sake of brevity the “Western” and “Eastern” camps in Ukrainian politics.

This class argument begins with an analysis of post-Soviet capitalism, which emerged from the disintegration of the Soviet economy and the predatory privatization of formerly state-owned properties, which were appropriated by those individuals that we now colloquially call “oligarchs.” They were able to acquire them because they had important connections to state officials. And for that, we have quite a useful term: political capitalists. It comes from Max Weber, but recently it has been developed by Branko Milanović, a famous economist, and by Iván Szelényi, the very famous Hungarian sociologist, specifically for the purpose of explaining developments in China and the postsocialist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Political capitalists are a specific fraction of the capitalist class that has a major competitive advantage: they acquire privileged, selective benefits from the state, which makes them different from those capitalists who rely more on technological innovation or on the exploitation of especially cheap labor force. While political capitalism is not unique to the states of the former Soviet Union, it is precisely because the Soviet Union accumulated such a great amount of capital as the property of the state that it forms the commanding heights of the economy that was predatorily appropriated. This is why the “oligarchs” became the dominant fraction of the ruling class.

The dynamics of political capitalism structure a number of zero-sum conflicts. First of all, within the group of political capitalists, there is a competition for the state’s selective benefits. That conflict is very poorly institutionalized and it necessitates moving capital investment outside of the country in order to protect it from changes in the ruling elite; for example, after the election of a new president. Otherwise, their property would be at high risk. One of the outcomes is domestic underinvestment.

A different conflict relates to transnational capital. This does not apply only to Western capital, but also those capitals within the post-Soviet countries which build their profit-making on transnational strategies. Post-Soviet political capitalists were interested in getting into the global elite, but for them it was more beneficial to get into the global elite as a collective bloc, not individually. And for that, they needed state sovereignty, and with it, monopoly control over the state. State sovereignty, which Putin and similar post-Soviet leaders emphasize so much, does have a political-economic basis. It is not an irrational obsession with a supposedly outdated concept. It is not simply an ideological footprint of national identity. It is not Putin’s personal resentment. State sovereignty is a political organization of the long-term collective interests of the post-Soviet ruling class.

Transnational capital is not interested in protectionism. Moreover, it is interested in transparency because this reduces the shadow costs of investment. This gets us to the professional middle-class, which can only exist because the elites are willing to use some of their surplus to pay certain sections of employees (or self-employed individuals) higher rewards. But if the dominant political capitalists underinvest at home, they can sustain support from only a very narrow section of the loyal middle class, and many people with middle-class aspirations feel excluded from the system. In post-Soviet countries, they connect the improvement of their professional, economic, and political status with the integration with the West, in dismantling the whole system of political capitalism. And so, these three zero-sum class conflicts typically coalesce in the post-Soviet countries into a single conflict, commonly articulated around the claims against “corruption” and for “democracy,” i.e., against the usurpation of state power by a narrow group of people that allows them illegitimate appropriation of public resources.

This is a very typical articulation of the major political conflict, not only in Ukraine during the Orange and EuroMaidan revolutions, but also in Russia, in the conflict between the so-called “two Russias”—that of the “oligarchs,” industrial workers, and pensioners who support Putin, and that of the oppositional pro-Western “creative classes.” Or in Belarus, in Armenia, or in Georgia most recently. And so, my hypothesis is that it is actually a central axis of conflict in the whole post-Soviet space, cutting across borders (perhaps, with the exception of the EU-integrated Baltic states). And it makes sense to think about this as a common conflict even for the diverging post-Soviet countries because they all emerged from the same Soviet society, economy and politics and saw the emergence of pretty similar classes in the process of their disintegration.

Finally, the working class does not have independent political representation or an ideological articulation in this conflict. It is typically divided, and Ukraine is a case in point. The workers who were voting for the Party of Regions in Ukraine and for Viktor Yanukovych were not simply from the supposedly “pro-Russian” Eastern regions. Rather, they were those who worked in the large industries that were the legacy of the Soviet Union, but which became, in the process of Soviet disintegration, organized in a patronal way. They were often mobilized to vote by their bosses, and they accepted that, because those bosses could offer them the stability of a job and reliable wages. In the same camp we could find the employees in the state-owned enterprises, who also cared about stability because, even if they were underpaid, their jobs were secure.

On the contrary, in the Western camp, we would find for example groups of workers who found the possibility to earn money in the European Union and so, very understandably, supported Ukraine’s integration into the West. Or, those working in the IT segment providing outsourced services for the transnational corporations.

The most important result of the asymmetry of the class coalitions that lie behind the “regional cleavage” in Ukrainian politics is the corresponding asymmetry in political capacity. This explains why, in particular, the Western camp had a stronger civil society, which was better able to universalize the particular class interests behind its camp and support their advance with sustained civic mobilization.

Building on this, we can say that today the universalism of Soviet Ukrainian identity carries little influence, and in the post-Maidan and especially post-2022 atmosphere, gone too is even the shallow pluralism of competing ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ political camps. It seems to me that your view is that what has replaced these dynamics is a new, totalizing, conception of Ukrainian identity. In the book, you frame this through the prisms of identity politics and decolonization. Can you walk us through that argument? What is this vision of Ukrainian national identity, what is its constituency and what repression does it entail? Which ‘Ukrainian voices’ are allowed to be heard and which are not?

Well, I am actually questioning the extent to which the identity articulated by the pro-Western political agenda has ever become truly hegemonic. This agenda has always been partly delusional and partly marginalizing for large sections of the Ukrainian subaltern classes. There are even more doubts now, due to the disappearance of the enthusiasm that accompanied the failure of the original Russian invasion plan, setbacks on the front for the Ukrainian armed forces, intensified conscription, the limits of Western aid, etc. These have all changed the mood in Ukrainian society.

But even more so, the question points to the debate I mentioned earlier, about the lack of a positive national development project for Ukraine. What exactly are we building in Ukraine? With the current debate around decolonization, there is, at least for me, a very apparent juxtaposition to how decolonization was debated in the 20th century, when the major European empires were disintegrating, and a number of new states were emerging in their wake.

In reality, Ukrainian “decolonization” is articulated in a very superficial way: it is simply about erasing the remnants of Russian and Soviet presence in the culture, in education, and the public sphere. This has undergone greater intensification since the full-scale invasion but even before, in the years after EuroMaidan, there was legislation to limit the use of the Russian language in the public sphere and education to a minimum, “decommunization,” etc.

The decommunization policies adopted in 2015 were ostensibly focused on the Soviet legacy but manifested in the dismantling of monuments and the replacement of symbols, in the renaming of streets and cities and so on. So, it was mainly changing symbols. And while that may appear superficial, it is not. It works like typical identity politics wherein one asserts that there is some group of people who are supposed to share the same experience. We are Ukrainians and we have always been oppressed by Russians and in the Soviet Union. On behalf of this supposedly unified, homogeneous, group some very specific people start to speak and to articulate the allegedly common interests. Those people are very typically from the privileged strata of this group, and not necessarily speaking on behalf of the interest of the majority. It turns out that Ukrainian “decolonization” is first of all an ethnonationalist identity politics deployed in the interest of (primarily) the professional middle class, who can claim that they have been underappreciated, underestimated, and undervalued for decades. Now they can claim their place at the table, primarily because of the identity they are supposedly representing.

In reality, Ukrainian “decolonization” is articulated in a very superficial way: it is simply about erasing the remnants of Russian and Soviet presence in the culture, in education, and the public sphere…It turns out that Ukrainian “decolonization” is first of all an ethnonationalist identity politics deployed in the interest of (primarily) the professional middle class.

At the same time, the Western elites have their own interest in this kind of tokenized integration and inclusion of the privileged voices of subaltern groups. By supporting “Ukrainian voices,” they can show that they are on the side of the noble fight, for “democracy” against “authoritarianism,” and for the “rules-based order.” These are crutches for their own legitimacy crisis. With Ukraine, it worked better until the war in the Middle East, now less so.  

Within Ukraine itself, there are many who dissent on key issues, that cross the “red lines” of the professional civil society, who may support negotiations with Russia because they are tired of the war, who do not like ethnonationalist policies, erasure of the Russian language or of Soviet legacy. To what extent can they articulate what they think and to what extent are they listened to? Or think of the draft dodgers, perhaps the biggest group mentioned here. I am astonished by how little this is discussed: the fact that the majority of Ukrainian men did not update their contact data for the military recruitment centers, which they were required to do by the middle of July, so they could be more effectively reached with draft notices. Now, they are getting relatively high fines, and it will make their everyday life and work much more complicated. But still, the majority of Ukrainian men decided not to update the data; among those men who were not within Ukraine, the figure of those who ignored this requirement is over 90%. Of those who did fulfill the requirement, a disproportionate amount were those who had a right for exemption from the draft. Many also entered fake addresses where they could not be reached. The brutal mobilization on the streets and in public spaces—so-called “bussification,” because the men are forcefully dragged into the military recruitment busses—goes on as before.

Regardless, my argument is actually not that we just need more of other Ukrainian voices, different Ukrainian voices, it is not simply about a multiplication of diversity. My argument is different: for all of us who are Ukrainian intellectuals, scholars, artists, we should do much better than simply claiming this symbolic capital because we are Ukrainian. Rather, let us raise universal issues instead of instrumentalizing our particularity. Let us start to think about what we can contribute to universal questions and to global problems, based on our Ukrainian experience and knowledge.

For example, revolutions like EuroMaidan happen in many parts of the world. For instance, the Arab Spring. Even the populist movements in Western Europe share many crucial similarities with Ukrainian maidans: loosely organized and vaguely articulated mobilizations which, even when they come to power, fail to enact the policies promised to their voters, reproducing and exacerbating the very political crisis to which those movements and revolutions were a response to in the first place. The victory of Zelenskyy, how is it similar to the victory of Donald Trump or Beppe Grillo in Italy? Think about the continuous political crisis in Great Britain. Every new prime minister becomes deeply unpopular in a matter of months. How can we think through this using the prism of post-Soviet Ukraine’s succession of weak governments?

My argument is actually not that we just need more of other Ukrainian voices, different Ukrainian voices…Let us start to apply our knowledge to the questions and problems that perhaps most of humanity cares about rather than carving out a niche for oneself in the public sphere with appeals to Ukraine’s unique and underestimated identity.

Let us start to apply our knowledge to the questions and problems that perhaps most of humanity cares about. This is a more interesting, worthy, and necessary task for Ukraine, for humanity, for the accumulation of universally-relevant knowledge than carving out a niche for oneself in the public sphere with appeals to Ukraine’s unique and underestimated identity. The word “crisis” is on the lips of millions of people around the world. There are intersecting and mutually amplifying crisis trends in economy, politics, culture, environment—the “polycrisis” as Adam Tooze called it. What if post-Soviet Ukraine, collapsing from a country with a modern space and aviation industry into the abyss of the most destructive war on the European continent in many decades, is a magnifying glass for some of the most important global trends? If France was the paradigmatic case for the “Age of Revolution” and Britain for the “Age of Empires,” what if Ukraine, and post-Soviet countries in general, is the paradigmatic case for the “Age of Crisis”?

Let us end with the question we ask all of our guests, about the concept associated with our program, i.e., illiberalism. As you alluded to before, there has been an increase in repression in Ukraine as of late, targeting media, individuals, parties, and more. This seems to suggest that a kind of illiberalism is brewing in Ukraine. However, despite this, the Zelenskyy government has been welcomed into the club of Western liberal democracies at a dizzying speed. What do you think? Is illiberalism a useful term generally, and specifically in the Ukrainian context? Or do you prefer another? 

I think it is a useful concept. It is useful in a quite general way, but Ukraine actually demonstrates the more specific ways in which it is useful. If you think about the post-Soviet changes as a continuous crisis, illiberalism is in fact the concept for the crisis period. Illiberalism makes us question liberalism, illuminate its problems and deficiencies. At the same time, illiberalism, at least I think so, remains mainly a negatively defined concept. And so, it is the concept for this period of crisis, characterized as it is by the “end of ideology.”

Previously, we had much better articulated alternatives to liberalism, namely communism and fascism. Now, we have the blooming of illiberalism in various forms, precisely when liberalism has become weakened but when stronger alternatives to liberalism have not yet emerged. And so, we use this negative, broad, term to describe various responses to the deficiencies of liberalism. And this connects us to the discussion about the continuous post-Soviet crisis.

More specifically, I think illiberalism is important in the Ukrainian context because it pushes us into thinking about how liberals are actually becoming illiberal. Ukraine’s liberal elites, but also Western liberal elites, are starting to legitimate ideologies and movements with very clear extreme-right affiliations and sympathies. To call them just “far right” is an understatement: in many cases, we are really talking about neo-Nazis; Totenkopf symbols have become quite popular among some military units in Ukraine, there was a recent story about Azov soldiers who ridiculed Auschwitz, etc. In comparison to the major far right forces in the West—National Rally in France, or AfD in Germany, or Trump in the US—Ukraine’s nominal “far right” are way more extreme in both ideology and strategy, and they look for alliances with the more extreme groups in the West too. But we are supposed to believe that they are not a problem, that everything is allowed during the war. Furthermore, the Western far right has suddenly been legitimized by centrist liberals, so long as they take a pro-Ukrainian stance—as if no other issue on their agenda matters. Think about Giorgia Meloni in Italy.

But legitimating the extreme right will not help defeat Russia. It is so often framed in a way that makes it seem as if we have no choice but to accept them. But this is not true. It is a choice made by the liberals, to accept and tolerate, and continue to defend these extreme-right tendencies. The politicized, extreme-right, units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are not that indispensable considering the country has mobilized over a million soldiers. They may project their “elite” status (in terms of fighting ability), but they are a drop in the ocean. It is not a strong argument to say that nothing could be done about them because, well, everything would collapse on the frontline. No, it looks like it may be the complete opposite case. If things do collapse, it will be the extreme right that will once again use the opportunity to become even stronger and even more popular, and the Ukrainian and Western elites, liberal intellectuals, media, and civil society who emboldened them will be complicit.

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Volodymyr Ishchenko was born in Hoshcha in western Ukraine in 1982. He grew up in Kiev, taught sociology at Kiev universities and was active in the Ukrainian new left. He is now a researcher at the Freie Universität in Berlin. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Al Jazeera, Jacobin and New Left Review.