What was Ukraine?: On Volodymyr Ishchenko’s “Towards the Abyss”
Volodymyr Ishchenko | Towards the Abyss | Verso Books | February 2024 | 209 Pages
In a strange twist of fate, the publication of Michael C. Desch’s October 2023 essay for Harper’s, “The Tragedy of Volodymyr Zelensky,” coincided with the first month of Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip, an event that would come to divert public attention and foreign aid away from Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia. Like nearly all Western coverage of the Ukrainian president, Desch’s character study addresses the storybook quality of Volodymyr Zelensky’s life, charting his career pivot from daytime sitcom star to leader of an unstable but modern—almost European!—country. Unlike the majority of Western coverage, the piece does not compare Zelensky to Winston Churchill or David in his struggle against Goliath; instead, it advances a critical direction that had long been absent from mainstream discourse on today’s war. It was refreshing to read an American writer note Zelensky’s failure to fulfill a major campaign promise: a ceasefire in the Donbas. In doubling down on policies hostile to Russian diplomacy under pressure from far-right military leadership, Zelensky missed his chance to prevent 2022’s full-scale invasion. At worst, this is the work of a leader “lacking in moral courage.” At best, it’s the misstep of a shell-shocked political novice.
Desch’s Harper’s piece shares its sentiment with Towards the Abyss by Volodymyr Ishchenko, a new essay collection similarly critical of Zelensky’s capitulation to the right and equally skeptical of Ukraine’s accelerated ideological shift West. But where Desch’s focus is Zelensky’s personal naivete, Ishchenko’s focus is the broader naivete of Ukraine itself, a young country manipulated into rejecting the history that brought it into existence. Present-day Ukraine, he reminds us, is a recent invention; its current territorial boundaries were drawn by the Soviet Union as part of the early Bolshevik policy of “nativization” conceived to encourage native-language literacy and anti-imperial nationalism among the Russian Empire’s many ethnic minority groups. He also cautions us to recognize the brief existence of an independent Ukraine between 1918 and 1921 as part of a larger conflict between Red and White forces across the entire Russian Empire. The Bolshevik victory in Ukraine was not, as it’s widely understood now, an essentially Russian act of domination, but the outcome of a political strategy focused on land redistribution in a poorly governed pale. In Ishchenko’s own words, the USSR “did not lead a world revolution, but it built a modern nation-state in the vast space vacated by the Russian Empire.”
Ishchenko is not an apologist for the Russian Federation’s brutal invasion, nor does he believe that the Soviet project was flawlessly executed. Ishchenko’s mission, rather, is to challenge the presiding fantasy that Maidan and its aftermath have articulated the organic will of Ukraine’s people. Towards the Abyss contains material originally published in Jacobin, New Left Review, the Guardian, Left East, Al Jazeera, and elsewhere between January 2014 and March 2022. Ishchenko is the left’s preeminent authority on Ukrainian domestic politics, a voice of reason amid a catastrophe so snarled, and so over-explained, that its genesis no longer seems clear. As a sociologist, he cogently outlines the productive relations informing Ukraine’s unique class structure. Ishchenko’s word for “oligarchs” is “political capitalists,” a term he coined to designate the “fraction of the broader capitalist class whose major competitive advantage is access to selective benefits from the state.” This is the group that truly runs Ukraine, and its unchecked power derives from the insularity of Ukraine’s sclerotic post-Soviet economy: “they cannot survive in global competition.” Meanwhile, a small but influential middle class of educated, English-speaking professionals (or, in Ishchenko’s parlance, “comprador elites”) looks to Euro-Atlantic integration to line its own pockets. Prior to Maidan, the political capitalist class favored autocratic, Russian-aligned governance as personified by Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovych, while the professional middle classes sought alignment with the West. Maidan, then, is best understood as a bourgeois revolution—a conflict inconsiderate of Ukraine’s significant working-class and poor population.
Beyond its sharp analysis of the material forces driving public opinion in Ukraine, Towards the Abyss presents a moral argument against neoliberalism’s evisceration of the public realm as understood through the cautionary post-Soviet case. As such, Ishchenko necessarily finds himself critiquing the vapid Western commentary that whittles Ukraine’s present war with Russia—a country with which Ukraine, for better or worse, shares much of its identity—down to a simple battle between good and evil. He excels at dispelling poor historical methodology, especially when that methodology is funded by the European Commission. One of the strongest essays in this collection takes to task British historian and European security wonk Andrew Wilson, whose 2014 book on Maidan, Ukraine Crisis, Ishchenko confidently dismisses as “sloppily researched” “ideological boilerplate” misdiagnosing a complex geopolitical situation as the inevitable outcome of Vladimir Putin’s so-called “cult of personality.”
It’s this embittered fervor—the peculiar commentary of a Marxist academic committed to his science for whom the conflict in Ukraine is personally infuriating—that has distinguished Ishchenko’s writing on Russia’s invasion from day one. A sociologist from Kyiv-Mohyla University now based in Berlin’s Freie Universität, Ishchenko represents the compromised position in which socialists find themselves across Eastern Europe: confined to the university, often forced to move abroad. Yet throughout his book Ishchenko expresses a distrust of Western academic pedigree, which he argues exploits and devalues third world intellectual production; through this claim he extends his general conviction that it is the West, not Russia, that places Ukraine in a colonial relation. Ishchenko argues that the burden of the post-Soviet left is debatably its greatest asset: that people remember how it felt to be part of communism’s utopian project, and that before today’s war, a strong plurality of Ukrainians felt ambivalent about, not hostile to, its cause. The anthropologist Alexei Yurchak has a great line about this: “For many, ‘socialism’ as a set of human values and as an everyday reality of ‘normal life’ was not necessarily equivalent to the ‘state’ or ‘ideology’; indeed, living socialism to them often meant something quite different from the official interpretations provided by state rhetoric.” As such, Ishchenko takes great care in Towards the Abyss to express that the Ukrainian left’s marginalization owes less to the widespread abandonment of socialist values than it does to a state-led policy of decommunization—a policy strong-armed by a few connected players, and one that was never a historical inevitability.
Any meaningful future for Ukraine, Ishchenko cautions, can only come from sober engagement with its twentieth-century history. In the aftermath of February 2022 this has become an unpopular opinion, especially among those younger than thirty, who by and large endorse state-led efforts to purge all traces of communist or Russian influence from their cityscapes, media, and textbooks. Yet the irony of Ukraine’s ongoing anticommunist culture war is that has made the country more like Russia, where Soviet World War II memorials have lost their socialist significance to become quasi-religious icons of patriotic mythology. Ishchenko terms this transnational state of confusion the “post-Soviet condition,” a crisis of hegemony characterized by “contraction, demodernization and peripheralization” across former Soviet territories.
Towards the Abyss contains an October 2021 essay, “The Post-Soviet Vicious Circle,” which explains the post-Soviet culture of apoliticality using a Gramscian framework: be it under an authoritarian ruler like Putin or a state prone to frequent, chaotic transfers of power, missing is the “dense network of [cultural, social, and public] institutions that mobilized the active consent of the broad mass of Soviet citizens.” It’s telling of Ukraine’s situation, therefore, that the popular uptick in sovereigntist sentiment has led mass culture toward the destruction of forms that draw attention to the viewer’s place within a collective project: brutalist architecture, striking obelisks, secular holidays, well-made children’s cartoons, statues honoring the lives lost in Hitler’s occupation of the republic.
Ishchenko notes that anticommunism acquired a hysterical character in the aftermath of Maidan, as Soviet symbolism became associated with disgraced pro-Russia president Viktor Yanukovych, a billionaire unattached to any pro-labor cause. Yanukovych’s police state was certainly a threat to whatever small left contingents organized in Kyiv, and Ishchenko’s milieu showed up at early Maidan actions for this reason. But Maidan’s proposal for higher living standards envisioned a middle-class, European Ukraine, one that inevitably drew support from far-right contingents who delighted in its self-determinist message while rejecting the European principles of tolerance, diversity, and pluralism. In the end, both the liberals and the fascists got their way: the chocolate-industry tycoon Petro Poroshenko won the Ukrainian presidency in 2014 to advance a “nationalist agenda focused on historical memory, language, and religion.” He satisfied the professional middle class by amending Ukraine’s Constitution to state that its “‘strategic course’ was now full membership of NATO as well as the EU, overriding the country’s previous tradition of non-alignment.”
Around the same time, a string of anti-Maidan protests began to organize in predominantly Russian-speaking cities across Eastern and Southern Ukraine. Towards the Abyss offers a rare, if brief, account of these protests, which were occasionally attended by leftists who saw in them the illiberal class consciousness absent from Maidan. Ishchenko does not suggest that there was no foul play involved in the Russian-organized Crimean status referendum or in the emergence of separatist states, generally dismissed as Russian puppet states, in the Donbas. He does, however, remind us that for a time, the anti-Maidan protests were “even more grassroots” than Maidan itself:
The social base of the protest seems to be more plebeian, poorer and less educated than that of the Maidan; we see more workers and pensioners and not so many intellectuals and highly educated professionals who would help to formulate clear demands and defend them in the media. This is precisely why these protests can be so easily influenced from the outside. It is not difficult to intervene, provoke and manipulate a decentralized revolt of scared people to serve Russian interests.
With the same generosity he applies to working-class proponents of EU and NATO membership, Ishchenko reminds us that “in the eastern Ukrainian protests, ‘Russia’—with its higher wages and pensions—plays the same role of utopian aspiration as ‘Europe’ played for the Maidan protesters.” Though Western media barely talks about it, it’s widely understood in Ukraine that, regardless of one’s own hopes for territorial reunification in Crimea or the Donbas, the population of those regions long favored Russian alignment. Poroshenko’s campaign to retake Donetsk and Lugansk from Russia—the campaign Zelensky said he wouldn’t prolong—was, in fact, controversial.
Poroshenko’s Ukrainianization campaign was also controversial. Volodymyr Zelensky won the Ukrainian presidency in 2019, defeating an incumbent Poroshenko whose tenure in office had been marred by the exact sort of corruption for which Yanukovych had been reviled a few years prior. (Poroshenko himself made millions selling coal to separatist governments in the Donbas between 2014 and 2015.) As this obvious graft underscored the hollowness of Poroshenko’s cultural agenda, Zelensky campaigned in the negative as his opponent’s opposite: he barely spoke Ukrainian, he wasn’t fabulously wealthy, he wasn’t a churchgoing Orthodox Christian. Ishchenko characterizes disenchantment as the Zelensky voter’s foremost trait: fatigue from the politicization of language, memory, and mass media, from the banning of the ideologically neutral Russian and Soviet entertainment they’d been enjoying for their whole lives. Zelensky’s election proved that nationalism’s appeal was not universal, or at least that the nation it purported to represent was, to quote Benedict Anderson, “imagined.” The left considered Zelensky’s election a minor victory, as it threatened the “hegemony of Ukrainian national-liberals,” offering a “temporary moment of relief” from the accelerated course of a baseless history. Moreover, it encouraged the democratic participation of a group that had felt politically homeless since Maidan, “namely young people in the southeastern regions.” Today, it’s uncanny to read Ishchenko’s predictions for the future of Ukraine from early 2019. At the time, his doubts about Zelensky chiefly concerned the new president’s inability to direct economic policy, which he correctly predicted was “going to be decided by the balance of the oligarchs’ interests and IMF austerity requirements, just as it was under Poroshenko.”
Towards the Abyss is full of such anachronistic forecasts. The collection is valuable for its retrospective analysis, with Ishchenko’s clear-eyed insights coming at a time when few dare to examine the still-fresh wound that is recent Ukrainian history, or to think about anything but the next few months of fighting. A 2022 New Left Review interview, which closes out the book, reads as a postmortem for the Zelensky government Ishchenko had expressed tepid excitement about three years prior. What happened? Crucially, his homespun Servant of the People party never amassed the ideological or operational power it would need to follow through on its early work toward a ceasefire in the Donbas, a sign not only that “this populist leader never had a populist movement behind him, but that he didn’t even have a real team that was capable of proceeding with any consistent policies.” This won’t be the official narrative for some time, but one can imagine that history will remember Zelensky’s presidency for his cabinet’s high turnover rate. Without a strong party behind him, he cannot stand up to the “most powerful agents in Ukrainian politics: the oligarchic clans, the radical nationalists, liberal civil society and the Western governments, all pushing for their specific agendas.” And having now tasted real fame, who’s to say he wants to serve the people anymore?
What’s the left to do? One can only surrender to the present reality: that two years into a stalemating war, the anti-Russian fervor felt in what remains of Ukraine is no longer hysterical, but rational in nature. The abstract threats posed by decommunization to the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine pale in comparison to the threat of drone attacks; in yet another ironic twist of post-Soviet fate, Russia has done more to alienate its previous sympathizers across the border than any domestic politician ever could. In such a climate, it’s unlikely the left will seize power anytime soon. When it tries, its new burden will be more difficult than ever: to build new claims about what socialism might be, to emphasize its future in the region at the expense of its rich past. Most likely, those claims will be made in Ukrainian.