Note from LeftEast editors: This review is simultaneously published on Jacobin.
Toward the Abyss is an important corrective to the predominantly ethnicity- and personality-centered analyses of Ukraine. Ishchenko advances a class analysis of both Putinism and Ukrainian society. Based on his sociological research, he points out that a class divide is more important in understanding the dynamics of the East/West cleavage in the country than ethnic dynamics. Since it provides a blow-by-blow account of the events since 2014, the book would be good for readers who haven’t been following the conflict closely and want to catch up on the details, or conversely, for those who want to refresh their memory regarding all the steps that led up to the invasion.
A single argument cuts across the essays, articles, and interviews Verso compiled for this volume: from the breakup of the Soviet Union until Putin’s invasion, neither the ruling oligarchs nor their opponents had an agenda or a worldview that could truly unite Ukraine. Even though the invasion offered a fleeting chance to build a uniting vision for the country, social balances and leadership structures have so far prevented a positive outcome.
The two camps in Ukraine, explains Ishchenko, consist of professionals allied with transnational capital and Western institutions who want a rules-based market order, and oligarchs who side with Russia and are reliant on state favors for their accumulation. Even though this divide structures most of the game, the heaviness of oligarchs in any ruling coalition, and the frustration of popular hopes by both sides, lead to a more dynamic picture, where neither side really represents Ukraine as a whole.
In contradistinction to both camps, Ishchenko explicitly writes from the standpoint of a “wrong Ukrainian,” or more precisely, a “Soviet Ukrainian.” This group of people strongly identified as Ukrainians (unlike some of the ethnic Russians in Ukraine), but were immersed in Russian language, literature, education, and culture in general, and shared egalitarian, universalist, pluralistic values. Unlike most of this cultural elite who shifted to a neoliberal and pro-Western version of nationalism during the post-Soviet transformation, Ishchenko remained invested in the Soviet project of uplifting the whole population, not only the transnationally-connected elites. This standpoint leads to not only analyses that will make a lot of readers uncomfortable, but also the exposition of some basic facts that will disorient them. For instance, arguing against liberal and nationalist accounts, the author provides ample evidence of the growing influence of the far right (including neo-Nazis) in Ukrainian society and state, but also insists (against pro-Russian propaganda) that they still represent a significant minority within the national movement.
Even when Ishchenko goes into the details of the events of the last ten years, his analysis is guided by this broad picture. Key to all this is understanding the demographic and class structure of the main divides in the country. Like other dominant classes in the post-Soviet world, Ukraine’s oligarchs were made through the acquisition of public companies “at fire-sale prices” in the early 1990s. Ever since, they have monopolized the state institutions and most formal politics has shaped up as a competition between them to secure more favors in their shady accumulation of capital. Political parties are differentiated from each other through their allegiance to clans of oligarchs, as much as (frequently more than) their visions for the country.
A growing Western-oriented professional class has protested this state of affairs for years under the vague banner of “anti-corruption.” This anti-corruption stance amounts to anti-politics, as this class doesn’t have a proper political party. It expects protests, civic pressure, alignment with Western powers, and transnational capital to resolve Ukraine’s difficulties. Instead of programmatic parties, these professionals are mostly comfortable with (neoliberal and nationalist) civil society organizations. This politically thin NGO sector has been open to penetration and manipulation by the far right, which they refuse to take seriously as a danger. Any extended talk of the far right is usually dismissed as Russian propaganda.
Most Ukrainian intellectuals have supported nationalism and framed it as a liberal, Western, and market-oriented project against authoritarian and allegedly non-Western Russia. Their neoliberal nationalism seemed to be the strong, self-affirming ideology of the middle class. However, oligarchical clans and their parties could also adapt these idioms as long as their business ties didn’t conflict with them. As a result, anti-Russianism became the common ground of the middle classes and many of the (less- or non-Russia-linked) oligarchical clans. Such a class coalition could hardly take the country in the liberal direction envisaged by the intellectuals and the professionals, since the oligarchs remained dependent on state favours.
One cost of the anti-political stance was never having a president the professional class could truly claim as its own. It could topple the pro-Russian Yanukovich through the Maidan protests. However, the Ukrainian nationalist Poroshenko who replaced the pro-Russian Yanukovich perpetuated the illiberal and “corrupt” rule of yet other clans. These protests, in other words, could only replace one set of clans with another. They could not end “corruption,” the primary obsession that had motivated them into action in the first place. Unsurprisingly, Poroshenko quickly became at least as unpopular as Yanukovich, opening the way for rule by another set of clans. There were certainly advances on the “corruption” front in the post-Maidan era. Oversight by both international institutions and local activists has restricted oligarchs’ ability to reap benefits. Yet, they have not ended them.
The working classes are not influential in either of these camps, which appear to be uninterested in their material progress, education, or health. Workers integrated into EU markets (primarily as migrant laborers) tend to side with the professionals, while the broader working masses usually prefer the stability of oligarchic rule. But rather than making themselves into a class, along with the provincial population, these working populations constitute “atomized masses,” argues Ishchenko. They are occasionally drawn into politics, but are unable to exert pressure that could push the oligarchs or the professional middle classes in a more popular direction. Not facing such pressure is not always a win for the dominant classes: These atomized masses, Ishchenko emphasizes, are a source of passive consent, not an active one. Consequently, there is no sustainable popular enthusiasm for any agenda, party, or authority figure. Even invasion and war have changed this only temporarily, as the latest numbers regarding Zelenskyi’s declining popularity (which became available after the publication of Ishchenko’s book) once again demonstrate.
Nevertheless, Ishchenko points out that the beginnings of the war created the possibility of a hegemonic resolution and, as he calls it, “an end to the post-Soviet condition” (i.e. the endless competition between oligarchs, which trigger repetitive anti-corruption revolts, which in turn replace one clan of oligarchs with another). His hope is that the broader post-Soviet crisis, now compounded by the Russia–Ukraine war, might push the Russian ruling class to go beyond a narrowly rent-seeking political capitalism and move in a more consolidated, hegemonic direction. This would give the Russian regime more mobilizational capacity, and therefore could hurt the opposition in the short run. But it could also create a more solid hegemonic alternative from below, which would replace the non-hegemonic and West-dependent mobilization of the middle classes in both Russia and in Russia’s periphery, including Ukraine.
This is a plausible scenario, but it overlooks another possibility. As Ishchenko himself points out, such a consolidated path would bring Russia closer to the Chinese model. However, despite the author’s application of the same concept – “political capitalism” – to both countries, the state capitalism in China has been much more developmental and less rent-seeking for decades. That developmentalism was made possible by the Chinese Communist Party’s steadfast control over both labor and capital—not simply repressing and exploiting them as in most popular accounts but harnessing and disciplining them for sustainable capital accumulation. In the absence of a similar ideological-political organization, it is dubious that the Russian ruling class can imitate Chinese dynamics. Even though at times useful, the concept “political capitalism” can blur the distinctions between crony capitalism and developmentally-heavy state capitalism, and thereby lead us to miss some of the most fundamental differences between post-Soviet Eastern Europe and China.
As importantly, the jury is still out on the desirability of a less rent-seeking and more mobilizational capitalism in the post-socialist world. While it is true that such a path led to high levels of labor mobilization from the 2000s to the mid-2010s, that mobilization never culminated in a hegemony from below. It ultimately fizzled out. It might be true, as Beverly Silver and her colleagues have stated, that “where capital goes, labor-capital conflict shortly follows.” But the Chinese case shows that the Left cannot rely on that dynamic alone.
It is here that looking more closely into Ukrainian (and more broadly, Eastern European and post-Soviet) dynamics could indeed prove helpful. Much of the Left has struggled to take a principled stance on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. With the advent of Israel’s Gaza campaign, the Russian invasion was further pushed out of the Left’s agenda. It seems that for now, the Left is not immediately encumbered to develop a position on whether to support a struggle led by neoliberal-nationalist forces, with serious (if still minority) support from the far right. However, the task of developing a defensible position on this invasion cannot be put on the backburner forever. Increasing inter-imperialist rivalry is bound to lead to more wars and invasions, and the Left needs a new vision that can lead to a principled stance on all of them. Ishchenko’s moral and passionate stance gives clues about how non-Ukrainian leftists should approach the Russian involvement in Ukraine, and how the global left should handle great power aggression against smaller states in general.
In response to the post-Maidan situation, with its unproductive shift to an oligarchic nationalism, Ischenko had stated in 2015:
A new left party should be embedded deeply in Ukrainian social movements and labor unions. It should be neither pro-Kiev nor pro-Moscow but bring together ordinary people in the west and east in a fight for their shared class interests against their common enemies in Kiev, Donetsk, Moscow, Brussels, and Washington.
No such party materialized. However, this should not have been a pretext for subjecting Ukraine to a proxy war, or for not consistently condemning Putinist aggression. In response to the invasion, Ishchenko forcefully proclaimed in March 2022: “Whatever problems post-Euromaidan had … these were all Ukrainian problems that Ukrainians should and could solve themselves in a political process, without Russian tanks and bombs.” The ongoing war clearly renders any such process impossible. If Ukrainians and their allies cannot honestly look at the West or Russia for inspiration, to where should they turn their gaze?
This question brings us to the opening gambit of the book: Ishchenko’s contrast of the current situation with Soviet-era Ukraine and its hegemonic makeup, seen especially from the standpoint of a “wrong” Ukrainian. Back then, Ukraine was part of a broader, universal movement, not merely a Russian colony. It “jumped from the European agrarian periphery to the cutting edge of space exploration and cybernetics,” was a core contributor to the defeat of fascism worldwide, and was a global center of art and culture. In the post-Soviet era, by contrast, it was forced to choose a far more peripheral role again, as a colony of either Russia or the West.
There is room for caution regarding Ishchenko’s account of Soviet-era Ukraine. The author upholds the post-Stalin era as the model we should aspire to, where relative political and social calm went hand in hand with social progress. However, we could instead look at the first ten years of the Bolshevik Revolution for a non-nostalgic reference point, with its many possibilities, experiments, and openings, along with many injustices and difficulties. It is true that Soviet citizens enjoyed more welfare and stability in the post-Stalin era. The first ten years of the revolution, by contrast, were tumultuous and ridden with famine and violence. However, they also witnessed “hegemony from below”: the exact kind of formula for rule that Ishchenko is looking for in today’s world. Even though Ishchenko points out that there were many hegemonic elements of rule during Stalin and in the early post-Stalin eras, these were mostly organized from above. For Ishchenko, Ukrainians benefited from the overall Soviet experience through improving life standards, better health and education, and participating in technological progress. But the 1920s promised much more than that. The horizon was not only partaking in the most egalitarian modernization project the world had ever witnessed until that point, but also a full merger of the goals of national and class liberation—goals that do not seem to vibe well in Ishchenko’s account.
Ishchenko might be right that the entire history of Soviet Ukraine is too rich to fit into a “decolonial” straightjacket, which flattens out the universalistic aspects of Ukraine’s participation in Soviet civilization. He therefore distances himself from readings of Soviet and post-Soviet history that put too much emphasis on a (mostly retrospectively constructed) “national question.” However, his reading risks going too far in the other direction. A closer look at early Bolshevism presents a counterpoint to both readings. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, Ukraine was engulfed in a social and national revolution. The most progressive factions of Ukrainian (and Russian) Bolsheviks embraced both, and had to combat their ruling classes, many Ukrainian Marxists’ rejection of Ukraine’s existence as a nation, and aggression from Russia[1]—an aggression which set a precedent for the much more systematic Great Russian chauvinism that would be revived under a “socialist” guise in the 1930s. In stark contrast to the forced unity of both the Stalin and post-Stalin years, early Bolshevism promised self-determination to Soviet Ukraine, and built its dream of voluntary unity on that (broken) pledge. Certainly, the repetition of neat formulas from this era cannot provide solutions to the much more complex issues of our age, especially in the absence of a revolutionary proletariat in Ukraine or elsewhere. Still, libertarian Bolsheviks’ upholding of national and class emancipation in a contradictory unity can serve as a point of inspiration.
[1] Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski. 1989. “For the Independence of Soviet Ukraine.” International Marxist Review 4/2: 85-106.
Cihan Tuğal is a Professor in the Sociology Department at UC Berkeley. He studies three interlocking dynamics: 1) capitalism’s generation and destruction of communities, livelihoods, and places; 2) the implosion of representative democracy; 3) the crisis of liberal ethics. His ongoing research focuses on global populism, the radical right, and neoliberalism. He has also initiated a team project to study the ecological crisis of capitalism, with special emphasis on the role of labor and community struggles in developing sustainable energy.