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Volodymyr Ishchenko: Ukraine’s Maidan mythologies | Links International …

Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal has published various left viewpoints on the political situation in Ukraine. For more by Volodymyr Ishchenko.

July 9,
2015 — First published in the June 2015 New
Left Review, posted
at Links International Journal of Socialist
Renewal with permission — Andrew Wilson’s earlier publications on Ukraine
won him a reputation as a serious historian. [1] His first
books—notably Ukrainian Nationalism
in the 1990s (1997), The Ukrainians (2002) and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2005)—were
distinguished by three signal features.

First,
Wilson argued strongly that while Ukrainian nationalism was a force in the west
of the country—where, bred under Austrian and Polish rule, it had mostly
possessed a strong right-wing bent—it had only limited appeal in the country as
a whole, due to the existence of deep regional, linguistic and ethnic historical
divisions. Ukrainian “national identity”, Wilson insisted in The Ukrainians, was essentially a
product of the Soviet era.

Second, he
made no bones about the fact that since 1990, the country had had a sorry
economic and political record; the state was thoroughly colonised by oligarchy,
thuggery and corruption; civil society remained very weak. It was a myth,
Wilson argued, that Ukrainian political culture was more tolerant, democratic
and pluralist than Russia’s.

Third,
Wilson provided detailed analysis of the various oligarchic bosses and clans,
and of their rivalries. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution offered praise
for the protests of 2004 and was cautiously optimistic about the
Yushchenko–Timoshenko regime that emerged from them.

His latest
book, the ill-titled Ukraine Crisis,
constitutes a sharp break from this earlier work in direction, tone and genre.
This may in part be the product of the author’s transformation from historian
to foreign-policy agitator: Wilson is now a senior fellow of the European
Council on Foreign Relations, a lavishly funded think-tank modelled on its US
homonym, which has grown since its birth in 2007 to become a large octopus in
the EU aquarium. The position has allowed him a back-room role
in EU diplomacy—there is a casual reference to his presence at the
November 2013 Vilnius summit—and indeed Ukraine Crisis was part-funded by EU Commission
money. The book bears the marks of this shift.

Readers
should not expect to find in its pages a balanced assessment of contending
arguments or a systematic analysis of the available sources, followed by
well-grounded conclusions. For the most part, this is a one-sided, tendentious
account of Ukraine’s Maidan protests of 2013-14, the Russian intervention and
the civil war, heavily reliant on web-sourced information, anonymous interviews
and hectic prose, pieced together to bolster a very specific political agenda.
It is driven not by a desire to investigate what actually happened and why, but
rather to rebut critics—from all sides—of a Western neoliberal line. The nature
of Russian policy, the legitimacy of the Yanukovych government and the
character of the Maidan protests are all grist to this mill.

Not ‘an anti-Russian book’?

In his
introduction, Wilson insists that Ukraine
Crisis is not “an anti-Russian book”, before proceeding to deliver exactly
that. The anti-Putin message is expressed in the crudest of terms: “The key to
understanding modern Russia is to realise that it is run by some very weird
people.”

Wilson
asserts that Russia’s rulers believe their country has been “constantly humiliated”
since 1991; this externally imposed “humiliation” must now be avenged by
restoring its Great Power status. He denies that Russia is in any way “encircled
or threatened” by NATO’s expansion. His argument is that Russia was
brought down by its own oligarchs, the social layer who benefited most from the
fall of Communism through their capture of state power and property. Some of
the oligarchic groups were wealthier and luckier than others; “Putin’s friends”
and the siloviki were able
to monopolise power by removing dangerous competitors, marginalising opponents
and manipulating the population with a complex dramaturgy scripted by “political
technologists”. The latest example of this is the “conservative values” project
of 2014, an attempt to shore up a Putin majority after the opposition protests
of 2011-12. For Wilson, a similar monopolisation of power by Viktor Yanukovych
and his allies was blocked by the Maidan protests.

Wilson
devotes a good few pages to countering the argument—widely propounded by
Ukrainian opponents of the Maidan—that Yanukovych was a legitimately elected
president, overthrown by a violent “coup”. He argues that Yanukovych himself
was the first to break the formal rules of the game after beating Yulia
Tymoshenko in the 2010 presidential election. Reputedly by bribery or threat,
he secured the majority vote in parliament needed to remove Tymoshenko from the
prime minister’s office. Within a year of Yanukovych taking office, Ukraine’s
Constitutional Court revised the elite compromise agreed after the Orange
Revolution of 2004, restoring the old Ukrainian constitution of 1996 and
shifting the balance of power in favour of the president. The prosecution of
Tymoshenko for “abuse of office” began in May 2011.

Wilson is
right that this was a case of political persecution, when considered alongside
other steps to monopolise power. But from a strictly legal perspective, it is
questionable to brand Yanukovych an “illegitimate” ruler. His actions were
within the bounds of legal procedure, on the surface at any rate, and
Tymoshenko was not innocent of the charges brought against her. The fact that
her supporters called for the “decriminalisation” of the article under which
Tymoshenko was sentenced was a tacit acknowledgment that she had indeed broken
the law.

Yanukovych
went on to monopolise political power for his own benefit and that of his “Family”—in
Wilson’s telling, a Don Corleone-style clan of close relatives and
confidants—while gradually pushing other oligarchs away from the trough. The
author quotes a Ukrainian journalist explaining that the president “wanted to
be the richest man in Eastern Europe”, and devotes many pages to corruption and
extravagant lifestyles among the ruling clique. The sloppiness of his research
is evident in his treatment of the alleged figures. In the space of three
sentences, Wilson’s estimate of the depredations of the Family soars from $8-10
billion annually to $100 billion overall, the latter figure attributed to
post-Maidan Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Wilson doesn’t bother to investigate
the facts, but $100 billion is surely a wild exaggeration. Total state revenues
in 2014 were less than $40 billion; if this figure were accurate, the departure
of Yanukovych alone should have given a huge boost to the Ukrainian economy.
The fact that exactly the opposite happened should have given Wilson cause to
doubt Yatsenyuk’s claim—and the idea that Yanukovych’s corruption, though
obviously present, was the greatest problem facing Ukraine.

EU Association Agreement

In line
with this approach, Wilson suggests that there was nothing problematic for
Ukraine in the EU Association Agreement; the troubles lay with Yanukovych
and Russia. Ukraine Crisis argues
that Ukraine’s Mafioso elite was simply too greedy: instead of embracing “European
values” and the salvation of the EU’s structural reform, Kyiv switched
into “bribery mode”, trumping up claims about lost Russian trade. Wilson offers
no serious discussion of the economic consequences the Association Agreement
was (and is) likely to have for Ukraine.

The
either–or choice between a free-trade zone with the EU or a customs
union with Russia jeopardised the remnants of Ukraine’s high value-added
industries, which were mostly connected to ex-Soviet manufacturing chains and
stood little chance of surviving in direct competition with West European
firms. In 2013, more than half of Ukrainian exports to
the EU consisted of low value-added agricultural and metallurgical
products, with just 13 per cent coming from the machine-engineering
sector—against 30 per cent of exports to Russia and the other CIS states [Commonwealth
of Independent States].
When these costs were taken together with the austerity measures
accompanying IMF credit lines, the Ukrainian government had ample
grounds for seeking to extract more concessions in return for signing
the EU Agreement.

Although
Wilson’s analysis of contemporary Ukraine has involved detailed attention to
its rival clans, he never asks whether Yanukovych’s monopolisation of power and
“rule-breaking” on the division of assets could have given some of the
outmanoeuvred and frightened oligarchs a strong incentive to support and even
to radicalise the Maidan, in order to remove a serious threat to their own
power, wealth and property. Of course, a serious answer to this question would
require extensive research into the financial, infrastructural and media
support for the protests, as well as thorough investigation of a number of
suspicious episodes that involved seemingly irrational escalations of violence.
This question is particularly vital in the light of the Maidan’s political
outcome—when, despite strong popular mobilisation, anti-oligarchic rhetoric and
a widespread distrust of the established opposition parties, there was no
serious challenge to the top-down process of power reallocation after
Yanukovych’s flight.

Maidan ‘Uprising’

In
Wilson’s characterisation, the Maidan was an Uprising with a capital U: a
protest from below, with progressive demands and broad popular support across
the country, legitimately defending itself against police repression; the “revolution
of dignity”, as it is now almost officially called in Ukraine. In the
introduction to his book, Wilson strains to slot the Maidan into a larger “cycle
of global protest”, associating it with the Occupy movement, the Spanish indignados and Egypt’s Tahrir
Square protests, though he is obliged to note its differentia specifica—reverting to a “uniquely Ukrainian” and “old-fashioned”
world of projectile cobblestones, Molotov cocktails and violent confrontations
with the police, in implicit contrast to the peaceful and carnivalesque “Twitter
revolutions”.

Wilson
does not ask why the Maidan supporters borrowed only tactics from the global
Occupy wave, but were so radically different in their protest’s framing and
ideology. Why did Ukrainians wave EU flags when anti-austerity
protesters inside the EU were more likely to be burning them—and
without raising the banners of any exterior power? Why did the Maidan activists
not attempt to forge ties of solidarity with protest movements elsewhere? These
contrasts and omissions suggest that Maidan was really a mobilisation of a very
different kind, one that bore only a superficial resemblance to global
progressive movements: it had borrowed certain elements of their protest
repertoire because it faced similar tactical problems and options in clashes
with the police, but did not share—or at least, was not able to
articulate—similar goals and grievances. Wilson’s attempt to force a fundamentally
different form of mobilisation into the same category as Occupy,
the indignados and the Arab Spring is effectively a rhetorical move,
aimed at bestowing a left-liberal legitimacy upon the Maidan.

Ukraine Crisis’s two chapters on
the Maidan are essentially a polemic against its Russian critics. They avoid
any satisfactory discussion of the issues that might complicate Wilson’s
narrative: the significance of reactionary elements in the protest movement and
the limits of its popular support. Thus if all of Yanukovych’s irrational,
inconsistent and ultimately self-defeating repressive moves are explained by
his evil desire to retain unchecked power, then violent escalations and ugly
incidents on the protesters’ side can easily be ascribed to
government agents provocateurs, with no more evidence than a dubious
online source or an anonymous interview.

Far right

Wilson’s
discussion of the Maidan’s far-right current repeats the clichéd arguments that
the Maidan was a diverse and multi-ideological movement, in which activists
from the ultra-nationalist Svoboda party and the Right Sector constituted a
tiny minority. We are assured that the right-wingers who did participate were
not really “fascists” in the strict sense of the term, so there is no need to
be afraid of them; the fact that they were defeated in the 2014 elections
proves that the “fascist threat” was little more than a Russian propaganda
myth.

In any
case, Wilson insists, the far right was covertly supported by Yanukovych
himself, as a tame opposition, and had been used in “provocations” against
opposition protests before. There is very little corroborating evidence for
this claim—Wilson’s source is an article on a pro-Maidan website—though it is
widely asserted by Ukrainian liberals; conveniently, it helps to downplay
internal causes for the rise of the far right, including the responsibility of
anti-communist liberals.

Wilson
does not attempt to answer the obvious counter-arguments to his assertions
about the far right. First, well-organised radical minorities can play a
disproportionately significant role in protest movements, and the Maidan offers
a striking confirmation of this rule. Our work at the Kyiv Centre for Social
and Labour Research has shown that the far right were the most visible
collective agents in the protests, above all during episodes of violence.
Second, the label attached to the Ukrainian far right—“fascists” or “national
conservatives”—is less important than the need to combat its anti-democratic
and xenophobic ideas and practices. Third, whether or not Yanukovych succeeded
in exploiting the actions of the far right, they had their own agenda and would
only have acquired more space to pursue it. Finally, electoral support is just
one dimension of political influence. If the far right are now legitimated as
heroes of the “revolution” and the war—if they have secured top positions
within the security apparatus and have been allowed to establish armed military
units under their control—these are developments that cannot be downplayed or
even justified, in the name of patriotism, as many in Ukraine are willing to do
at present.

South and eastern Ukraine

Discussion
of the regional dimensions of the protests is astonishingly weak in Ukraine Crisis, which concentrates
disproportionately on Kyiv and devotes less than half a page to the “maidans”
in other regions. Systematic research conducted by the CSLR’s team has
shown that only 13 per cent of Maidan protests took place in Kyiv, with
two-thirds occurring in the western and central regions. A more extended
discussion of the regional aspect would have compelled Wilson to recognise that
Maidan did not have majority support in the southern and eastern regions, which
had predominantly voted for Yanukovych. The modest scale of many south-eastern
maidans was presumably one of the main reasons they were so easily repressed.

Moreover,
if Wilson had looked in more detail at the western maidans, he would have been
obliged to qualify his claim that Maidan was not an “armed revolution”. By February
20, 2014, when Wilson describes “barely armed’ Maidan protesters in Kyiv being
shot by (still unidentified) snipers, Yanukovych had effectively lost control
of the western regions, where his opponents had captured a large stock of
weaponry from police and military sources—usually without facing serious
resistance—and were bringing them to the capital. Wilson himself is told by
Oleksandr Danylyuk, leader of the far-right Common Cause, that his men opened
fire on the snipers, whose conversations they could intercept—Wilson doesn’t
ask how—using arms from “various sources”.

In other
words, the Maidan was indeed an armed uprising, responding to sporadic
government violence with a violence of its own, heavily skewed in regional
support, and with a significant far-right presence. It drew strength from mass
popular mobilisation but failed to articulate social grievances, allowing
itself to be represented politically by oligarchic opposition forces.
Ultimately it brought a neoliberal-nationalist government to power in Kyiv.
What sort of reaction was to be expected from the people of the south-eastern
regions, who had voted for Yanukovych and did not support
the EU Agreement or the protests? These people were frightened by the
Maidan’s violence and by the first moves of the Yatsenyuk government against
the status of the Russian language.

To be
sure, such fears were exacerbated by Moscow’s TV propaganda, but they
had a real basis nonetheless. For Wilson, the answer is simple: they should
simply have stayed at home and not protested at all. He effectively reduces the
whole “Eastern Imbroglio”—the heading of his chapter on events in eastern
Ukraine—to Russian military intervention and oligarchic manipulation, presenting
the Donbas region as a “criminal Mordor” that has now spawned a revolt of “lumpens
against Ukraine”.

Wilson’s
discussion of these crucial events relies on even shakier sources than his
preceding chapters, often drawing on the accounts of Western and Ukrainian
figures whose bias is patent. The whole section on Yanukovych’s possible
involvement in the Donbas uprising is based on information gleaned from an
(unnamed) Ukrainian security officer, anonymous pro-Kyiv “Donbas activists” and
the journalist Dmytro Tymchuk, whose unreliability is well known. Of 117
endnotes in the central chapter about the war in the east, just two cite
pro-Russian separatist sources.

A less
prejudiced view—and one less reliant on lazy stereotypes about the culture of
the Donbas—would recognise that the anti-Maidan movement in the east was the
mirror-image of the Maidans of the west. Both protests were driven by a mixture
of just causes and irrational fears, and both were ultimately channelled into a
confrontation between competing (and mutually reinforcing) imperialisms,
Western and Russian, and nationalisms, Russian and Ukrainian. While Crimea
undoubtedly saw a Russian special operation put into effect, it is wrong to
suggest that all those who participated in decentralised anti-Maidans in
Donetsk, Lugansk, Kharkiv, Odessa and many other cities were mindless puppets
of a similar project. Media and scholarly discussion alike have tended to focus
excessively on cultural issues, paying much less attention to the economic
basis of Ukrainian regionalism and the politics to which it gives rise.
Differing attitudes towards the EU Agreement or the customs union with
Russia, regionally differentiated geopolitical orientations and participation
in Maidans or anti-Maidans are not simply the product of history and cultural
identity: they are also rooted in conflicting material interests. Just as
someone living in western Ukraine with relatives working in Spain, Poland or
Italy might hope for deeper Euro-integration and the freedom to work without
visas, their counterpart in the east with a job in heavy industry would have a
stake in stable and peaceful relations with Russia. These divergent interests
are not antagonistic: we are not speaking of class conflict in the true sense;
but imperialist and nationalist competition may make
them appear mutually exclusive.

Elementary mistakes

The hectic
narrative of Ukraine Crisis is
spattered with elementary mistakes. Wilson’s errors in calculating the interval
between Eastern Orthodox and Western christmases (he has it as 11 days, not 13),
or in deciphering the acronyms of nationalist guerrillas of the 1940s and 1950s
(the Ukrainian Insurgent Army or UPA becomes the “Ukrainian People’s
Army”) are surprising for an author who has been studying the country for more
than two decades. Another basic howler is more serious. Wilson attempts to
calculate how long Crimea belonged to Russia and Ukraine respectively,
concluding that it was part of Russia for just 13 years more and dismissing
Russian claims for historical precedence on this basis. The argument is strange
enough on its own terms—when have such calculations had any real political
significance, other than to legitimate dubious and contested territorial
claims? But it is also based on a false premise: that the Crimean Autonomous
Soviet Socialist Republic was not part of Russia before 1945. In fact, it was
part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, with a status clearly
lower than that of the Ukrainian, Belarusian and other Soviet Socialist
Republics that were formally equally to Russia and could themselves incorporate
other autonomous republics within their borders. This is an elementary fact for
anyone familiar with the structure of the USSR.

In some
respects the most revealing sections of Ukraine Crisis are those on the international context. An
insufficiently martial, “postmodern” EU is in large part to blame for
the disaster. Following Robert Cooper, Wilson argues that “nineteenth-century
shibboleths” like state sovereignty and hard power have been largely replaced
by smart interaction, non-state actors and shared sovereignty—though he decides
in the end that the EU is “a mixture” of postmodern factors and old
nation-state traditions, the latter reinforced by the 2008 financial crisis.
Russia also mixes the traditional and the postmodern, but in a different way.
While travelling in the opposite direction—from multi-national union to traditional
nation-state—Russia has “leapfrogged” into a postmodern political culture of
ultra-cynical manipulation, where “everything is permissible and there is no
higher truth”.

This makes
the EU particularly vulnerable, Wilson claims, as the fiendish new
Russia inverts Western “soft power”, deploying Western values against the West
itself: cultivating its own fifth columns of pro-Russian NGOs, political
parties and other civil society structures in neighbouring countries, fighting
an “information war” via TV and the internet, imitating mass mobilisations,
insisting on tolerance for diversity, and so on.

Needless
to say, Wilson does not attempt a systematic comparison between European or US
soft power and the Russian alternative, although it would be safe to assume
that covert Russian influence is largely confined to its neighbourhood, unlike
Washington’s global reach. Ukraine
Crisis claims that Moscow’s support for sympathetic parties,
politicians and NGOs in Eastern Europe comes to $8 billion a year, which
would be striking if true: by comparison, Victoria Nuland gave a figure of just
$5 billion for US “democracy promotion” efforts in Ukraine during the
whole post-Soviet era. However, the only source for Wilson’s estimate is a
conversation with a Lithuanian defence minister.

Ukraine Crisis concludes with
an attack on EU passivity. Brussels, Wilson had explained in an
opening chapter, “cannot cope with the big stuff like Russia or old-fashioned
war at the edge of Europe”. Few EU member states are spending enough
on weaponry; they have to be literally dragged into combat.
Fortunately NATO had taken charge of bombing Yugoslavia in the 1990s,
“saving Europe from its embarrassing inaction”. Germany is a poor excuse for
an EU foreign-policy leader, since its post-war history [sic] rules
out the use of military force. As the fighting in the Donbas rumbled on, with
Kyiv’s “anti-terrorist operation” combating Moscow’s “deniable intervention”,
Berlin was guilty of “selective pacifism” in pressing Ukraine to “lay down its
arms”. Culpably, its first priority was that the fighting should stop, “regardless
of guilt”; it allowed Russia to negotiate from positions gained by subversion,
rather than pressing for the status quo ante. Worse still, Ukraine may not be
hurried into NATO as fast as Wilson would like.

This is
the context for Wilson’s appeals to “higher truths” and “European values”, to
the defence of “basic rights and freedoms we now take for granted in the West”.
In tandem with passages demonising the opposing power—Russia is predictably
compared to Nazi Germany—and stigmatising any opposition as “useful idiots”, Wilson’s
ideological boilerplate merely serves to legitimate imperialist interests and
pro-war mobilisation, in a time of sharpened inter-state rivalry.

Ukraine’s future?

What of
Ukraine’s future? Wilson’s best outcome is for Kyiv to recover complete
authority over the east. He has called for the EU to work “vigorously
and pro-actively” towards monitoring the Russian-Ukrainian border, and to
escalate sanctions if Russia does not remove all military hardware from the
separatist regions.

As a
second best option, a frozen conflict might still allow Ukraine to “move West”,
as he puts it; he can even contemplate Kyiv cutting the Donbas loose, which
might disconcert Moscow—though he quickly adds that the West would oppose it,
as would many in Ukraine. Nevertheless, a smaller Ukraine might be “more
manageable”, he writes in Ukraine
Crisis. There could be grounds for hoping its famously “overlapping or
hybrid national identity’ might be consolidated in a new “political nation”
which would know neither Jew nor Hellene. Totally dependent on the West for
financial help, without ambitions for an independent foreign policy, this
manageable Ukraine would then ideally implement radical neoliberal reforms in
the style of Georgia’s Saakashvili.

Regrettably,
Wilson admits, the type of “big bang” restructuring undergone by the Baltic
states in the 1990s must be ruled out for the time being, but he dismisses the
notion that “economic reform would lead to social explosion”—this was “the same
old hack thinking that had held Ukraine back since 1991”. On the contrary, he
suggests that the Poroshenko–Yatsenyuk government should see the eastern crisis
as an opportunity to press ahead with sweeping changes in the rest of the
country. The restraints on the new administration were largely political: after
the Maidan, “much of the old regime remained intact” and “the old oligarchy was
at least temporarily stronger”.

Wilson
sighs over Yatsenyuk’s decision to include the far-right Svoboda Party in his
government as “a proxy for the moral authority of the radical forces on the
Maidan”; but he is upbeat about the introduction of market prices for energy,
and cheers the passage of the EU Agreement. Under the policies he
recommends, utility bills have doubled, inflation was running at 60 per cent in
April 2015 and billion-dollar loans from the IMF are going straight
to Kyiv’s creditors. Patriotic exhortations may not be enough to cushion the
post-Maidan government from further discontent.

[Volodymyr Ishchenko is a
sociologist studying social protests in Ukraine. He is the deputy director of
the Center for Society Research (Kyiv), an editor of Commons: Journal for
Social Criticism and a lecturer at the Department of Sociology in the
Naitonal University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.]

Notes

[1] Andrew
Wilson, Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West, Yale
University Press: New Haven, CT and London 2014, 236 pp, 978 0 300 21159 7.